The school system is, if you look at Ofsted judgments, analyse the data or, indeed, ask most parents, actually pretty good.
Results in many key metrics – attendance and teacher retention notwithstanding – have been on an upward (if occasionally bumpy) trajectory for many years.
There are obviously things that are worryingly wrong. Inclusion is not what it should be by any stretch. Off-rolling is still too common. Accountability and its perverse incentives are too prevalent. The curriculum is too narrow, with co-curricular offers verging on non-existent in too many places. Behaviour is getting worse.
But at its core, as a system that educates the majority of kids to a decent standard, it really isn’t bad. It’s certainly not an international embarrassment. On things like reading and maths, there are even countries that now look to England for inspiration.
This has not always been the case. For a long time through the seventies, eighties and early nineties, this status of “surprisingly okay for a mid-ranked, post-industrial country with profound levels of socioeconomic inequality” would have been hard to imagine.
And yet, today, we are pretty good. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Bridget Phillipson and her team have been so brave over the last handful of years in resisting the more radical fringes of the Labour family and its calls to rip apart the education system.
How has our system reached a point in which only a Telegraph columnist would really argue that it’s a basket case?
There are, of course many reasons. Anything as complicated as a system with circa 25,000 schools, roughly 750,000 teachers and something in the region of 7 million students will be hard to pin down.
I can hear very loud echoes of the way Sir Tim Brighouse approached both his work
We could, for example, spend a year of evenings in the pub debating the value of Nick Gibbs’ phonics check or many other direct government interventions. But it would probably get us nowhere.
To my mind, however, there are two big school improvement policies which taken together have played a big part in driving the improvements of the past quarter of a century: the London Challenge under Tony Blair and the evolution of the multi-academy trust model of governance under David Cameron.
Call me an edu-centrist dad, but I think it’s very hard to argue with the fact that both have had tangible, long-term benefits.
All of which is a very long-winded way of bringing me to the big education policy announcements of yesterday: the DfE revealing the details of its new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams.
There are lots and lots of details missing, and there are understandable concerns about blurred lines of accountability which will need clarification at the very least.
However, I believe the best way for the sector to see these new plans is that they represent an exciting opportunity to bring together the best elements of the London Challenge and the best elements of the MAT system.
There is a chance, of course, that I’m being overly optimistic, but I can’t be the only person who can hear in the language of the RISE policies very loud echoes of the way Sir Tim Brighouse approached both his work in Birmingham and then in the capital.
We see the emphasis on the use of data to identify commonalities, the importance of co-curation of intervention, of collaboration between schools in similar circumstances.
But we also see the important emphasis placed on school-led and sector-led improvement in formal families of schools that has been so key to the way the best leaders of the MAT movement have delivered their transformative work.
Finally, we also see the in the emphasis on place, which brings together the Confederation of School Trusts and Leora Cruddas’s work encouraging local civic leadership in MATs with the all-too-obvious emphasis on place that was found in the London Challenge and its successors in the Black Country and Manchester.
It is very possible that I’m being overly ambitious, but I cannot help but be excited by the best MATs supporting the development of a London Challenge 2.0 on a national canvas. What’s not to like about that?
