A strange thing happened recently. I turned on the radio and heard the education secretary speaking. It took a while to work out her identity; her voice was unfamiliar and she was talking about her subsidiary portfolio, women’s issues.
The fact that she was unrecognisable was revealing. The policy of becalming the education world in the run-up to the general election is clearly working. It could be argued (and is self-evidently the view inside government) that a period of quiet contemplation, implementation and remoralisation is still necessary after all those relentless reforms and gimmicky initiatives.
Although the latter can have a comical flip side. Whoever dreamed up Labour’s policy of a Hippocratic oath for teachers clearly hadn’t remembered the power of citizen journalists and social media to instantly disable ill-thought-through ideas.
But Tory silence, or Labour’s “job done if we get on the six o’clock news” approach, isn’t good enough. Two weeks ago Estelle Morris rightly wrote about the muddled thinking of the past four years. But dealing with the legacy of botched ideas is only half the story.
It’s not that I miss Michael Gove’s foghorn communication with the outside world (although it did give us lots to write about), but he did at least have a narrative based on deeply held, if misguided, views. As the election nears, we need a different but equally passionate vision, not just for schools but for children and their place in society.
Last week I gave a lecture at St Hilda’s college in Oxford, based on the historian RH Tawney’s suggestion that: “What a wise parent should wish for their children, the state should wish for all its children.” Re-reading much of the evidence about the multiple influences that determine whether children thrive personally as well as academically was instructive.
What becomes blindingly obvious, and is hardly new, is that we must stop obsessing on school type, focus on the quality of teachers and heads and take a more holistic approach to children.
Gove’s decision to remove the words “children” and “families” from the name of his department looks increasingly flawed.
There is a 19-month gap in cognitive skills between children eligible for free school meals and those who are not when they start school. So rather than aspiring to recreate the characteristics of the secondary schools our pale, male politicians went to, we should be prioritising high-quality early years education and care, family support and parenting and parent education.
Of course literacy, numeracy and robust qualifications matter, but so do character, creativity, resilience, self-esteem, perseverance and confidence. As England fixates on what can be measured and examined, talks down its teachers, and even more bizarrely argues about whether they should be qualified at all, our competitors around the world are investing relentlessly in their teaching workforce and exploring new ways of valuing personal, social and emotional development alongside academic work.
In Singapore, a new curriculum for character and citizenship education has just been introduced. At its heart are core values of care, respect, resilience and harmony, leading to core competencies: self-awareness, management of relationships, responsible decision-making.
And no, this is not coming from the lips of a wishy-washy progressive teacher spawned by Gove’s “blob”, but is an integral part of the national development of a country right at the top of those international league tables we aspire to emulate.
Policy proposals about the content of the Ofsted framework, the battle of the middle tiers (commissioners versus local authorities versus independent directors), and (yawn) more competition only matter in relation to how they further these wider aims of good teaching, a broad curriculum and better support for children and their families.
I would even suggest the creation of a minister with responsibility for children across government, to undertake the role Nicky Morgan appears to be rather blandly pursuing on behalf of women, and to stand up to wider social policies, like the housing benefit cap, which have led one mother to the supreme court, after she was forced to put her children into foster care so they could continue their education while she moved 55 miles away to live in temporary accommodation.
The government defends this particular horror on the grounds that it will make the country more prosperous and fair. Prosperous and fair are good, evocative words and they should be part of a bigger vision. But they will never be truly reflective of this country until we have proper polices for children that include but also go beyond schools.
