Life Lessons by Melissa Benn book review – clarion call to hearten the weariest teacher
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Loading... - Nancy Williams
- 04 Sep 2021
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Melissa Benn has a rallying cry. “It is time for boldness,” she writes, “for the setting out of agendas that will bring real change.” She wants a new education act and offers a 15-point outline, in the form of an extract from a Queen’s Speech drafted by a future government, presumably Labour. It would form the basis of a National Education Service which, she hopes, would take the same place in public affections as the NHS.
One can hear weary sighs in the staffrooms. Since 1979, we’ve had 21 education acts introducing changes that significantly affected schools, or universities, or both.
Over the previous 100 years, governments made do with just 11 such acts. Many educational professionals might be tempted to vote for the Tories if they pledged to keep the present education secretary, Damian Hinds, in office: he has promised teachers he’ll do nothing much except make their jobs easier and award them sabbaticals. Since recruiting teachers is the biggest single problem facing schools at present, this seems a wise move.
Benn’s education act, however, unlike others in the recent past, would restore teachers’ professional autonomy and, to some degree, ease pressures on them. She calls for the abolition of national tests in years 2 and 6 in favour of teacher assessment and random sampling of children’s performance. She favours the abolition of Ofsted and the creation of more informal local inspection regimes. She proposes an independent body of professionals, free from political interference, to oversee a less prescriptive national curriculum. She wants an end to the “excellence” frameworks for university research and teaching.
Expect an outcry from the usual quarters about how such proposals would lower standards and threaten the alleged gains of the past 40 years. But all the paraphernalia of testing, inspection, academisation, league tables and competition have led to no discernible improvement in overall pupil achievement or narrowing of the attainment gap between social classes.
Many teachers and parents would welcome the re-integration of academies and free schools into a public education system that is locally accountable. Anything is preferable to the bewilderingly fragmented system created by the Tories’ mania for “markets”.
Aware of the need to stay on what she calls “the unforgiving playground of contemporary political debate”, Benn prudently tiptoes around some of the more difficult issues. Would she require re-invigorated local authorities to strive for a “balanced intake” – a fair share of advantaged and disadvantaged, able and less able children – in every school? If this were achieved it would wipe out “failing schools” overnight. But can it work without restricting parental choice?
Benn may plead that parents don’t have choice of schools; instead, schools choose them. That’s true, but the chosen parents (and those who expect to be chosen) would form a troublingly vociferous lobby against change.
Would Benn abolish GCSEs and A-levels? She says not, arguing instead for putting them and other existing qualifications into a “national baccalaureate” framework that would allow pupils to gather credits for a variety of subjects, academic, technical, vocational and artistic. School leavers would get “a transcript” giving “an enriched picture of the nature and scope of their achievements and, one hopes, their very personhood”.
This sounds suspiciously like the “records of achievement” tried out in the 1990s. They failed because teachers resented the extra paperwork and universities and employers ignored them. Benn says that “ultimately” we may move to “lighter-touch, less expensive, and less stressful forms of assessment at 16”. But ultimately, as Keynes observed, we are all dead – and attempts to reform A-levels have so often failed that even the present generation of children may be dead before there is change on that front.
Benn is, though, splendidly clear on fee-charging schools. Outright abolition, she rightly argues, would raise “an unproductive public outcry”. She would deprive them – and, equally important, their parent customers – of the tax breaks that derive from charitable status and, as Jeremy Corbyn proposed in 2017, slap VAT on the fees. Labour has been promising action on private education since 1964. Now is surely the time to deliver.
Hinds’s move towards a more relaxed regime in schools suggests that Benn’s proposals could surf a political tide that is running in the right direction, allowing a future Labour government to make some changes, such as in the treatment of fee-charging schools, that a Tory minister would never countenance. But to keep teachers completely happy, perhaps her Queen’s Speech draft needs a 16th point: no further education legislation would be introduced in the lifetime of the parliament.
