What happens when there are no policies to fight over

When Labour was relieved of all its ideological baggage, more than ten years ago now, part of the plan was that it would now be united. Since the Party for nothing, there would be nothing to cause splits. What now splits Labour is the visceral loathing between Brownites and Blairites. Whichever of these two are in charge, the policies that will be pursuied are the same, but the viciousness of the tribal war between them is as great, perhaps greater, as when the Party has policies to fight over.

The simple fact is that the "Brown must go" agitation really is a Blairite ramp, and they don't give a bigger if they put Cameron in charge of the country, so long as they defeat the hated Brownites. They want this, not because it will change anything in the real world, not because it will change the lives of a single person in Britain, but because they want their tribe to triumph and the other tribe to be humiliated.

SATA - New Labour's education failure in microcosm

If you are looking for the reason why New Labour has spent more on education yet failed to improve it, look no further that the present entirely predictable crisis over SATS – Standard Assessment Tests. All the three notions that are wrong, and foolish, and muddled about government education policy are there:

First, the notion that if you hand anything at all over to the private sector, it will magically improve. Second, that if you want to make teachers and schools perform better, you set them arbitrary targets, and kick them if the targets aren’t met. And third, that everything in education can be measured in crude tick-box forms, which can be completed by anyone who can read, because no sophisticated judgements are required.

How else could we have got to a situation where schools have to revolve round the demands of simplistic little tests on their pupils; where those tests can be marked by people who have no qualifications or experience in education; and these people can be employed at a pittance by an American company to do work which could be done far better and with much greater understanding by experienced and qualified people whom the British taxpayer already employs?

And that is not the worst of it. Our government not only insists on finding someone – anyone – from the private sector to do work which the public sector could do better and cheaper; it then gives them a contract which means they can foul up as badly as they like, and still not be fired without a golden goodbye of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

SATs are the tests taken at ages five, 11 and 14, to chart the progress of both schools and their pupils. They have always been unpopular with teachers, pupils and parents, but popular with politicians, for whom they provide a source of meaningless statistics which can be deployed to prove more or less anything. The administration of these tests has been outsourced to an enormous multinational company called ETS, or Educational Testing Services. ETS have been given a five year contract which is apparently binding no matter how badly they foul up. Nice work if you can get it.

As schools break up for summer, almost one in five primary schools still does not have a full set of marks, and many of the results for 14-year-olds are likely to be delayed, perhaps until September. The results we have are clearly flawed, and teams of ETS employees are searching for thousands of test papers which have apparently been lost. We know of incomplete marking, of pupils wrongly marked as absent, of pupils’ work being left to moulder in the schools, and much more. Any school putting in this sort of performance would be in special measures, and rightly so.

We hear calls for the resignation of the education secretary, Ed Balls, but that will change nothing. What we need is what I fear we’re not going to get – a change of policy.

Can Gordon unleash the radical within?

Making Labour once again a Party that cares about the poor and the underdog is no longer just the right thing to do; it's also the only way Labour politicians stand a chance of saving their Party and their hold on power.

Gordon Brown could do this. Somewhere inside him still lurks a radical reformer who cares about poverty and inequality. But Gordon kept him firmly locked up for 13 years, from 1994 to 2007, and now he's forgotten what he did with the key.

The reformer made a few tentative bids for freedom in Gordon's first weeks as Prime Minister. Remember early messages about limits to the privatisation of health and education, affordable housing, civil liberty, the cancellation of the Manchester supercasino?

Of course he was attacked by the Guardians of the Blairite flame, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn. But the polls went the Prime Minister's way.

And then, when he cancelled the general election, he withdrew inside his shell and - we are told - says now to his advisers: what is there for him to do but follow the Blairite agenda?

He is Prime Minister because the nation is sick of the Blairite agenda. Iraq, privatisation of public assets, attacks on civil liberties and the rest were not what the people wanted, and Labour knew Blair had to go.

The message of Thursday's elections couldn't be clearer. Ken Livingstone's vote was far better than that of most Labour candidate precisely because people think he has an Old Labour agenda. (The miracle isn't that Livingstone lost, but that he came so close to winning despite his Party.) In Barrow-in-Furness, four councillors were elected on the single platform of opposing academies. The messages couldn't be clearer. Everywhere where Labour candidates were identified with Labour's agenda of thre past decade, they were routed, because Labour's natural supporters - the radicals, the poor, the dispossessed - won't vote Labour any more.

Anthony Seldon and the academy scam

Anthony Seldon’s call today for fee-charging schools to get involved with state education has nothing at all to do with helping children from poor homes. It’s got everything to do with fee-charging schools like his hanging onto the perks and tax breaks which the schools for the wealthiest have become dependent upon.

He advises them to sponsor academies, and when they wake up and realise what’s going on, they’ll rush to do so, for this is a wonderful scam, giving them a huge political and public relations boost and costing them little or nothing. Dulwich College in South London worked this out ages ago. It’s sponsoring some of Kent’s academies, and has reaped a considerable local public relations advantage from doing so.

So is it coughing up £2 million – which academy sponsors are supposed to do? No, actually, not precisely two million. No one in Kent wanted to tell me exactly how much, but I do now have the figure, as a result of a Freedom of Information request from Kent Messenger political editor Paul Francis. The actual sum of money this school is giving to the academies as its sponsorship is, er, nothing at all. Not a penny.

Nor is it handing over expensive equipment. It’s offering advice. Expertise. Chaps from Dulwich College, with years of experience of teaching the children from the wealthiest families in London, will trot languidly off to the poorest bits of Kent and tell state school teachers how it ought to be done.

This is a wonderful bargain. No one but the saintly-sounding Dr Seldon could make this sort of initiative look like anything but a cynical exercise in public relations, designed to divert proposals to change the ludicrous situation where fee-charging schools, which educate the children of the wealthiest, count as charities.

I suppose we will now see legions of private school teachers lording it round state schools, where the classes are twice as big as they are used to and the facilities half as good. The resentment this will cause in state schools will be enormous – especially as these bringers of wisdom to the poor are paid quite a lot more than their state school colleagues.

That, of course, is one thing the government could put right quite quickly. It’s far easier to teach in fee-charging schools, and it pays far better. The government could have put that right in the latest teachers’ pay settlement, announced yesterday. It could pay for the salary hike by simply diverting some of the money it’s wasting on the academy programme. This, of course, hasn’t happened. So as well as being considered better than their state school colleagues, and able to tell them how to do their job, fee-charging school teachers will continue to be far less stressed and far better paid. Who says we’ve got a government that gives a damn about state education?

Sir Cyril's long goodbye

Two great salesmen boarded a train from London to Darlington in December 1996, and one of them exerted all his skills on the other. By the time they arrived, Sir Cyril Taylor had a convert in the man who was by then almost certain to be the next Prime Minister. Tony Blair got off the train certain that specialist schools were the answer, and Sir Cyril was the man to deliver them.

In the same month as his momentous train journey with Sir Cyril, December 1996, Blair saw an article in the Observer headlined "Let Blair be his own education chief". It began: "Tony Blair should take two posts in the next Labour government: prime minister and education secretary." If he did not want to take the title, Blair should at least control the policy. He could find a cipher to implement his policy: “Enter David Blunkett.” Blunkett was Labour’s education spokesman. Blair appointed the clever young journalist who wrote it – Andrew Adonis – as his education adviser.

So in that month, the team was brought together which, for the ten years of Blair’s premiership, dictated what happened in the British education system. Now Sir Cyril has been fired. It’s a seminal moment, arguably even more significant than if Adonis had been fired.

For 20 years, Sir Cyril had the absolute confidence of three Prime Ministers – Thatcher, Major and Blair. He was therefore listened to closely by all their education secretaries, from Kenneth Baker in 1987 all the war through to Alan Johnson in 2007. All these education secretaries made him their adviser on specialist schools, and he had the ear of all of them whenever he required it.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in the summer, he was the first occupant on Number Ten for two decades not to have listened to Sir Cyril before taking any education decisions. He appointed Ed Balls as his schools secretary, and Balls became the first minister responsible for schools to decline to make Sir Cyril his adviser. Sir Cyril was bullish – he always is – but he knew the writing was on the wall.

And this week he has been fired as chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. The deed wasn’t formally done by the government, of course. Theoretically the SSAT is independent of government and the deed was done by its 12-strong board of trustees. But it’s inconceivable that the Trust could have done this when Tony Blair was PM.

The idea that the SSAT was independent was fostered by Taylor, who boasted that he raised a considerable portion of its income from the city. Actually, he didn’t. The private sector money going into it – just like the private sector money going into Sir Cyril’s pet project, academies – was mostly smoke and mirrors. If you look closely at the figures, you find that the taxpayer – that is, the schools budget - coughed up £36 million out of a total SSAT income of £39 million last year.

So what does it mean, this startling dismissal of a man thought to be invulnerable? Here’s what I hope it means.

It means that we are going to stop the foolish pretence that benevolent companies are going to pay for our education system voluntarily, without the need to tax them. It means a slow but sure death to the Blairite policy of creating a few showpiece well-funded schools in each area for the lucky or clever few. It means an eventual end to the idea of specialist schools: as Alan Smithers, director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University, put it, “Cyril Taylor is a superb salesman and has been selling this essentially daft idea of specialist schools to secretary of state after secretary of state.”

It means an end to the idea of state schools being independent, as academies are, with boards of governors on which the sponsor has an inbuilt absolute majority, and parents and teachers are squeezed out. It means the state and the community once again making themselves responsible for what is its responsibility: the education of our children.

If this is what it means, a good start has been made. The state has made itself responsible for who runs the SSAT, and spends £36 million out of our education budget.

Doing marginally less harm to schools

This is going to hurt. I’m already shivering in anticipation..

I am, after all, a Labour tribesman. Tony Blair threw everything at he that he could in order to get me out of the Party, and I remained, rooted to the spot, until at last he was forced to achieve his objective by the desperate stratagem of invading Iraq.

But, painful though I know it’s going to be, it has to be done, and I might as well get it over with. Here goes.

Congratulations on your speech about education, Mr Cameron.

Not – I rush to say – that you’ve produced a good or even a workable education policy, because you haven’t. You haven’t because it’s based on the same grubby little lie that underpins New Labour education policies: the lie that governments can deliver a choice of schools to parents.

They can’t, and in your heart you know they can’t. The Policy Exchange report on which you based your policy calls for an end to “barriers to supply-side reform” as though state school places were a commodity, like pre-prepared meals in supermarkets, and you can put one back on the shelf if another looks more appealing.

School places don’t work like that. All you will achieve by your policy of planting a new school in an area which already has enough school places is the decline and death of one school or the other, and the destruction of the life chances of all those pupils unfortunate enough already to be in it – for once a school is doomed, it turns into a failing school, if it was not one already.

Governments can’t deliver choice, and most parents don’t want them to. They want a good school in their area, where their children will be safe and well taught. It’s not much to ask, and, as you say, Mr C, it’s a scandal that after a decade in power and a huge amount of extra investment, Labour hasn’t achieved it.

Still, there are two good reasons for congratulating the Conservative leader.

While his proposal sounds like simply an expansion of academies, it actually removes some of the most harmful features of Lord Adonis’s model, by changing the role of sponsors.

Lord Adonis’s model was based on sponsors putting in £2 million to capital costs, and in return for this having total ownership and control of the school in perpetuity, with an inbuilt majority on the governing body.

This was because Lord Adonis peddled another grubby little lie: that philanthropic businesses were willing to put money into state education, and expect no return. Of course, most sponsors don’t put in anything like that, and business sponsors can divert their money into their own enterprises. Take, for example, car dealer and evangelical Christian Peter Vardy, who sponsors, owns and controls five academies in the north east.

His schools have paid £111,554 for "support services such as marketing and recruitment" to his car dealer firm, Reg Vardy Plc. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, set up by the world-famous American preacher, was paid £14,039 as reimbursement for time on academy business spent by Sir Peter's brother David. None of this work was put out to tender, which is a legal requirement in state schools.

The Tory leader at least seems to want to bring parents back into decision-making, with a powerful voice on governing bodies, and to end the dominant role of sponsors. And that makes his model marginally less damaging than Lord Adonis’s model. One and a half cheers for Mr C.

Ditch the dogmas, Ed

So children’s secretary Ed Balls wants to know why, despite putting unprecedented amounts of money into education, we still have failing schools and children who have been failed by our system.

I can tell him. And I can tell him what to do about it.

The government put in enough money. It could have solved the problem if spent wisely. But instead, the government tacked on a set of outdated political dogmas, requiring schools to jump through doctrinal hoops. The money still did some good, but not as much as it could have done.

So the trick is to uncouple the money from the dogmas, to retain the former, and throw the latter on the fire. Here are the three crucial dogmas that did the damage.

First, the dogma that ultimate control of schools must be wrested away from the parents, teachers and local council representatives who used to run governing bodies, and handed over to a company, church, or other external body, usually with no particular relationship to the area. Trust schools changed the balance on governing bodies to the detriment of local people, and academies went the whole hog, providing the sponsor with an inbuilt majority on every governing body (as shown in my book The Great City Academy Fraud.)

Now, it is simply not true that the local people who use the school are less able to make a success of it than a body like the United Learning Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Church of England which is the biggest academy sponsor, or Sir Peter Vardy, the evangelical Christian car dealer who is in the top few academy sponsors. And the proof is in the result. Despite absorbing many times as much public money as other schools, academies do not do particularly well, often no better than the cash-starved schools they replace.

Second, the dogma – especially close to Lord Andrew Adonis – that we need to separate out brainy kids from thick ones at an early age. This is why many areas, like Kent, still have the eleven plus exam, and why trust schools and academies were given the power to select ten per cent of their intake.

This dogma is only sustained by a lordly disregard of the facts. We know that those who fail the eleven plus are overwhelmingly those from poor households, and that the schools they go to are known locally as schools for failures. And therefore, we know that selection embeds failure and makes it hereditary.

And third, the dogma that there is nothing the public sector can do which the private sector cannot do better. Therefore if we have a school in a poor area – say, for example, the Isle of Sheppey – then the way to improve it is to get a very expensive private school – Dulwich College, to pick an example at random - to come in and show them how it’s done. The fact that no one at Dulwich College has ever seen a class like the ones you get on the Isle of Sheppey has not previously occurred to policymakers.

Get rid of the dogmas, Ed, and watch things get better.