Why Policymakers Make Mistakes

Just before Christmas, Lucy Rycroft-Smith and JL Dutaut published the excellent Flip The System UK: A Teachers’ Manifesto. This is a collection of essays from a very wide and varied range of contributors from the education world, setting out views on how we got where we are, and how we might travel to somewhere better. I heartily recommend it. My own chapter caused the editors much grief, because my usual long-winded blathering was at least twice as long as they’d asked for, and rather heavy on the polemical and light on the evidential. The end result is thus a testament to their skills.

However, for those who like a wordy polemic, and I know there’s at least a couple of those out there, then the original draft is set out below. The basic argument is that many of the more recent mistakes in education policymaking derive from the shrinking of the policy-making process to exclude institutions and individuals who might offer a worldview which is different to a very narrow group of like-minded individuals who are overwhelmingly middle-class, academic high-achievers with right-wing philosophies of life. You can draw your own conclusions as to why I might have decided to publish this on the day when a right-wing Tory Government appointed another well-connected right-wing fool to a position of great influence in the education world.

The bits which didn’t make it into the book are in the latter half of this lengthy piece. If you don’t like this, there are still thirty-six better chapters in the book, so buy it anyway.

 

How Policy-Makers Make Mistakes

 

For a scholarly, and entertaining, account of why Ministers make mistakes, one can do no better than to read the masterly study by Crewe and King, “The Blunders of Our Governments” (Oneworld, 2013). Indeed, so vital and comprehensive is this discussion of the failings of modern Government, that it would be pointlessly arrogant of me to suggest a fundamentally deeper insight, so I will use their broad categories of blunder-causation in this essay, as I seek to explain the particular failures, mistakes and cock-ups of education policy.

Gove demonstrating his usual sure-footedness

 

 
Structural causes (1):  The Deficit of Deliberation

 
Compared to most modern western democracies, UK Government Ministers are remarkable unconstrained. No written constitution stands in their way, and as the executive is drawn from the legislature, it’s comparatively rare that they must indulge in the sort of horse-trading and consensus-building required in systems which include rather more checks and balances on political power. So one of the ways in which education policy has suffered a loss of deliberation over the last two decades, is broadly applicable across Government: the reduction in the Civil Service’s deliberative function. However, there is also one development which is more specific to education: the removal of local government influence in education policy.

 

In terms of reducing deliberation in central government, Peter Hennessy has written that the present-day Civil Service is less willing to stand up to Ministers than it used to be. The response from many politicians to that development will surely involve cheers and bunting. However, as political scientists have long noted: the Civil Service, in the absence of any other checks on executive power in the British political system, traditionally performed a key function of providing Ministers with non-ideological expertise, a moderating influence, and an intellectual challenge. Ideas which seem neat and obvious in the office of a shadow Minister, or in a think-tank populated by ex-management consultants, can often be thoroughly impractical when it comes into contact with the real, complex world of a national public service. In addition, the Civil Service developed close links with the key organisations and individuals in their field, allowing those organisations and individuals a way to input their own expertise and views into policy-making. By the 1990s, the Civil Service’s role had, in some ways, evolved to become a crucial expert check on political power which was desperately needed by a political system which had adopted the universal suffrage of a democracy, but retained the executive prerogatives of a monarchy.

As a junior official, I joined the DFE during the tail-end of this period. When advice was submitted to Ministers, it was designed to be contemplative, judicious, and comprehensive. Ministerial ideas were chewed over, considered with professional groups, kicked around a bit more, and then presented back to Ministers with a full pro-and-con analysis. Civil servants saw it as an important part of their professional role to act as a sounding board, a devil’s advocate and, if not an expert themselves, at least to be able to produce the actual experts at the appropriate time. Despite the knowing comedy of “Yes, Minister”, none of this was done to pursue a separate Civil Service agenda, or to frustrate the Minister for the sake of it. It was done to provide the deliberative function which is so crucial to policy-making. Ministers might well still overrule the Civil Service advice, but they would do so having received at least a well-informed analysis of, and occasional challenge to, their views. I would argue that this role remained the core of DFE’s activity until 1997. Then New Labour introduced a fundamental change in how the Civil Service, and the DFE in particular, performed its role. A change which was then embraced and further enforced by the post-2010 administrations.

 
When David Blunkett entered Sanctuary Buildings, DFE civil servants lined the atrium and cheered. This wasn’t due to all civil servants being Labour supporters. Far from it. But the Major Government had felt like a zombie administration for some years, and the new Government promised optimism, energy and direction. The DFE was looking forward to playing its part in a government which had put “Education, Education, Education” at the heart of its manifesto. Very quickly, however, it became clear that the new administration did not reciprocate that enthusiasm for collaborative working. Two key changes were introduced which significantly reduced the quality of deliberation in policy-making.

 
The first was simply that Ministers made it clear they were uninterested in the traditional “pros and cons” type of advice the DFE would provide. They did not see the DFE’s role as offering expertise and deliberation, but instead demanded that it solely focus on unquestioning “delivery” of largely pre-cooked ideas. Those civil servants who still saw their role as helping to create better policy through questioning, challenging and deliberation, soon discovered the hard way what the new approach meant.

One, a senior civil servant in charge of curriculum and assessment division, attended a meeting with David Blunkett early in the new government. Blunkett wanted an announcement that struggling schools would be able to disapply the national curriculum in order to help them improve. The senior civil servant pointed out some might argue that, if the national curriculum was hindering those schools’ performance, then surely there was a case for disapplying it everywhere. Similarly, there may be criticisms of a policy which removed the entitlement of some children to a broad and balanced education. This was classic Civil Service advice, seeking to test policy against possible challenges, so as to either prepare for those challenges, or to shape better policy. Blunkett was furious. In his view, this was his policy, and the job of the DFE was not to second-guess it, but to simply do it. That civil servant was subsequently visited by an even more senior civil servant, and told that the Minister found him “obstructive”, and he was to find another berth in a different department as quickly as possible. He ended up on an airbase somewhere in the home counties.

It didn’t take many such examples before the DFE officials began to censor themselves. Policy submissions became childishly enthusiastic about even the crassest idiocy. Obvious flaws were not just unaddressed in deliberations, but were often not even acknowledged. As a result, uncomfortable, complex, nuanced reality began to seep out of deliberation, to be replaced by the certainties of the journalistic editorial and ideological “think-tank”.

You thought civil servants were the bad guys?

The second major change was the arrival of the new breed of Special Advisors, or ‘SPADs’. Special advisor roles had always existed, but there had been, right until the end of the Major government, a clear delineation between SPAD territory (constituency and Party work), and Civil Service territory (professional policy advice and government work). As a party politician, the Minister was supported by SPADs, but as a Minister of State she or he was supported by the professional Civil Service. That distinction vanished within days of the 1997 Election, with the arrival of a new breed of special advisors who saw themselves as being the key players in policy deliberation, rather than the political aides of the politician. SPADs became intimately involved not only in considering how best to spin policy to serve their Minister’s political interests, but in the actual formulation itself. In effect, SPADs became de facto junior Ministers.

Pre-1997, civil servants would present their advice to Ministers, and Ministers would discuss it as they saw fit with their SPADs. Post-1997, the SPAD became the gatekeeper. Policy advice which did not obtain SPAD approval wouldn’t even reach Ministers. Some might argue that this was a change for the better, giving Ministers a firmly committed ally against the devious civil servants. However, SPADs necessarily tend to come from the same ideological space as Ministers, and also tend to be primarily focused not on the actual policy, but often on how the policy could be presented. I recall one meeting with Conor Ryan, Blunkett’s hugely influential SPAD, in which he listened to the deliberations of the civil servants trying to gain his approval for a policy to put to Ministers, and then asked, bluntly, “Yes, but how will it play in the Daily Mail?”.

There is little doubt that the decline in the quality of the deliberation process noted by Crewe and King was already underway in the DFE some twenty years ago. My understanding from ex-colleagues who remained at the Department after my departure is that this process accelerated, rather than reversed. When the education profession looks with incredulity at an obviously flawed policy proposal emerging from DFE, we often assume that there are reasons why the flaws have been accepted. However, in many cases, it’s simply that the process of deliberation which used to take place pre-announcement, is now taking place post-announcement. Unchallenged policy, originating with detached ideologues, and unquestioningly accepted by frightened officials without being exposed to expertise, is bad policy.

This utter clown, who also was Liar-In-Chief for the Brexit campaign, was Gove’s Special Advisor. ‘Nuff said, really.

 

 

The second way in which the deliberative function in education specifically has been undermined, is the effective removal of local government from education management, and its replacement with a national command-and-control structure whereby most secondary schools, and many primary schools, are effectively run directly by the DFE, often via sub-contracted private companies, or “Multi-Academy Trusts”. The century-old role of the LEA as the democratically accountable, locally responsive intermediate tier in the education system has effectively been destroyed. This is often seen solely through the prism of service provision, but there is another, deliberative role, which has disappeared alongside that reduction in local accountability.

The DFE has long had LEAs in its sights. In my earliest days in the Civil Service in the early nineties, many senior civil servants agreed with Ministers of both Parties that LEAs were a weakness in the education system. This seemed to stem more from the classic central government superiority complex than any real evidence. While there may well have been some dysfunctional LEAs, it is also true that there were some excellent ones, and that there was never any evidence that the DFE in Whitehall could run 20,000 schools any better than LEAs could run them. Although there were occasional efforts to intervene in LEAs seen as particularly weak, the view which grudgingly persisted until as late as 2010 was that LEAs were the system’s equivalent of Bismarck’s Austria-Hungary: if they didn’t exist, we would have had to invent them.

After all, by 2010, the DFE had considerable experience of trying to run schools without LEA assistance, and it was far from successful. Grant-Maintained schools policy had led to a burgeoning bureaucracy at the DFE which performed many of the same functions for GM schools which LEAs previously provided rather more cheaply and efficiently. Education Action Zones had ‘freed’ schools from ‘LEA control’ (one sees echoes of the misleading terminology which would later be used to push mass academization) only to give rise to a new breed of “EAZ Directors” who were too often overpaid, under-accountable and frankly underwhelming, while similarly requiring a growing army of DFE civil servants to perform the LEA support role the “Directors” were incapable of providing.

As a result, LEAs survived to provide a vital counterweight to DFE. This counterweight became more important as the quality of deliberation within DFE was declining. This is not to say that LEAs had a veto over bad policy. While it has suited governments since 2010 to refer to schools escaping the clutches of “LEA control”, the fact is that LEAs had little real “control” over most school activities since the introduction of Local Management of Schools in 1988. The DFE had long taken direct control of curriculum and pedagogical issues through the use of compliant quangos such as QCA and Ofsted. Nevertheless, LEAs were significant cross-party players in the education system, with a closer, and better, view of the reality of school life than Ministers, SPADs and DFE officials could ever have. Certainly as late as 2003, when I left the civil service, the voice of LEAs still weighed heavily – albeit to the occasional frustration of Ministers – in policy deliberation, and some positive changes to generally well-received policies such as Excellence in Cities can be traced to LEA involvement.

Since 2010, however, the DFE has been pursuing a policy of eradicating all but the most residual LEA presence from education. Ironically, the policy of “if they didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them” remains intact. However, the local tier which the DFE is now seeking to invent is not a publicly accountable LEA with the sort of historic and democratic legitimacy which allows it to challenge central government. Rather it is a compliant private company, entirely dependent upon the DFE for funding, and controlled by businessmen who see their role as sub-contractors to central government.

No better example can be found of the net loss of deliberation in the system than May’s announcement of the return of grammar schools. Increasingly powerless LEAs decried the policy – correctly – as a ridiculous, unevidenced throwback to darker days, and vowed to oppose it with all their diminished might. This was the sound of a voice which felt it had a mandate from, and a responsibility to, a constituency which was not the DFE. The large Multi-Academy Trusts, with which the DFE is replacing LEAs, were much more muted. A few mumbled that they would rather not have any grammars, but admitted they may be compelled to do so. None would go on the record to criticise or oppose the decision openly. They are a captive, compliant group, who dare not challenge policy for fear of losing their income stream. It bodes ill for the quality of future policy.

Spot the difference between the LEA supporters and the multi-academy trust executive?

Structural causes (2):  The Deficit of Accountability

Crewe and King note that in the British political system, Ministers like to talk about accountability, but rarely feel themselves accountable. The last British Minister to resign as a result of something going wrong under his watch was, famously, Lord Carrington in 1982. Apparently, in the last thirty-four years, nothing has gone wrong in British Government of sufficient gravity to justify a resignation.

 
Not all of this is the result of increasingly dishonourable Ministers refusing to shoulder responsibility for their Department. Much is about the ephemeral nature of Ministerial appointments. Often, blunders don’t become apparent until the instigator has moved to a different post, and the Minister’s successor doesn’t feel bound to resign for her predecessor’s mistakes. This is perhaps particularly true in education, where policies often have extremely long periods between implementation and impact. For example, Michael Gove began the process of changing history GCSEs in 2011, but the first cohort to complete those new GCSEs will sit their exams in Summer 2018, long after his departure from the DFE. Similarly, every story of a Free School’s self-serving administration or corrupt practices begins with Michael Gove, yet it is his successor’s successor who has to face the shocking headlines and the grillings from the toothless Parliamentary Committees.

 
This lack of long-term accountability means Ministers tend to be attracted to the short-term announcement of policy, rather than the long-term implementation of it. In some ways, the announcement becomes the policy. It also incentivizes Ministers to look for policies which have short-term impacts. Free Schools and academization fit this bill nicely, as Ministers can point to rising numbers on a relatively frequent basis. The fact that academization has been shown to have no discernible impact on outcomes is neither here nor there. It was the ability to announce academization which was the driver for Ministers, not the long-term impacts which they knew they would not be around to see. The advantage of opening a free school is that the Minister can smile on the photo with the new Head, safe in the knowledge that the first set of measurable outcomes are years in the future, and by the time the Head is convicted of fraud, the Minister will hold a different portfolio.

 

This was Time Magazine’s cover in the most recent year a British Government Minister resigned over an issue of accountability. Seriously.

 
Behavioural causes (1): Ministerial Hyper-activism

Ivor Crewe wrote:

“These structural features of the policy-making system have also created a culture of ‘ministerial hyper-activism’. In public life, ambition and drive are important ingredients for success, but absence of individual accountability and of countervailing checks and balances generates misplaced confidence that easily leads to blunders. In the case of almost every blunder the ministers responsible were confident that the policy could be made to work if only the officials got on with the job of delivering it. They believed that all problems, however complex, had a solution and that it was the responsibility of government to find and implement it. They assumed that officials who pointed out snags were being obstructive and should be replaced, and that professionals who were sceptical were self-interested and should be ignored. Benign neglect – the option of doing nothing – is alien to the modern culture of Whitehall.”

 

I could not put it better myself.

 
As seen from Whitehall, education policy announcements are nice neat pyramids: at the apex, a handful of Ministers and SPADs cook up with policy with some ideologically sympathetic think-tankers; a few dozen civil servants produce the delivery plan (without ever challenging the policy); a few hundred Multi-Academy Trusts and remnant LEAs instruct their Headteachers; twenty thousand Headteachers instruct hundreds of thousands of teachers; and finally hundreds of thousands of teachers deliver that policy to millions of children. At least, that’s how it works in theory. In practice, there is a very long distance between those millions of children and those Ministers.

What Ministers want to happen, and what actually happens, are not the same thing. Yet as Ministers have tried to gather more and more control to themselves through abolishing other power centres, eliminating dissent, and ensuring compliant quangos, schools have found themselves buffeted by initiatives. Desperate to respond to a system in which accountability flows downwards rather than upwards, they have bounced from one half-understood policy to another as announcements spewed out of Sanctuary Buildings.

 
In education, this culture of hyperactivism is deeply harmful. As a Head of Department, I experienced the frustration of having to teach three separate History GCSE courses in three years, as Gove first demanded an interim, immediate change to the course from 2014, to suit his own prejudices about how history should be studied, and then set in train a further, more substantial change from 2016. The impact of that on just one department in a school was significant in terms of wasted hours and resources.

In my decade at the chalkface, I had my subject in Key Stage 3 absorbed into “Integrated Humanities” for two years, then liberated again. The National Curriculum for history changed, twice. I started as an NQT being required to plan for “Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic Learners”, and went to external training on how to mark less, and finished having seen VAK roundly rubbished and abandoned, while undergoing internal training on how to mark more (much more). My school rushed into Applied Subjects under a new Head, and saw the number of students in those subjects rise (with a corresponding jump in our league table position). Then Applied Subjects were declared untouchable, and the Ebacc became king, leading to a crash in the number of applied students, and the waste of under-used, over-equipped classrooms.

Now multiply that sort of hyper-active meddling with all the other “initiatives” which Governments have imposed in the last ten years, and one begins to see why the top of nearly every Head’s wishlist is a period of no further change. Such policy hyperactivity is wasteful of resources, exhausting for staff, and confusing for students. One aspect of education policy upon which nearly all teachers and educationalists agree, from all sides of the political divide, is that consistency is an essential part of how all schools treat their students. Policy-makers would do well to learn that lesson.

Oh good, another DFE initiative

 

 

Behavioural causes (2): Cultural Disconnect

 
Perhaps no observation of Crewe and King is more apparent in education policy than their identification of the problem of ‘cultural disconnect’. They observe that policy-makers often struggle to understand that people have different attitudes, values and views. Or, to put it bluntly, they lack genuine empathy. As a result, they design policy for the people they imagine exist, who tend to be rather similar to themselves and their immediate social and professional groups, rather than for the people who actually do exist.

 

Again, much of this problem can be traced to the removal of effective deliberation. The Civil Service used to be a conduit for the views of various expert groups – subject associations, SEN groups, teacher unions, academics, Heads etc – and the much broader understanding of the various stakeholders in the education system would be thrown into the policy mix. The effective denial of access to these groups – or indeed their dismissal as a self-interested “blob” in the most egregious case of cultural disconnect – has served to throw policy-making back onto a very small, homogenous group of people. It is, in effect, an echo chamber. The question is, what voices are echoing around in there?

 
Ministers, their SPADs, and the think-tanks which feed and reflect their views, come from a remarkably narrow background. Disproportionately privately or grammar-school educated. Disproportionately white. Disproportionately middle-class. Disproportionately academically able. And, since 2010, disproportionately right-wing. Under New Labour, while much of that personal homogeneity persisted, the political spectrum was fairly broad. Blunkett could on the one hand tolerate Chris Woodhead as HMCI (albeit under sufferance as a direct instruction from No 10), and had as a key advisor Michael Barber, one of the leading lights of what has come to be known as the pro-market Global Education Reform Movement, while on the other hand, funding Ken Robinson’s Creative and Cultural Education Committee, and finding time for advice from Tim Brighouse. Since 2010, the political spectrum represented in DFE policy-making has shrivelled to a monocultural right-wing rump.

 
The implications of that ideological narrowness will be explored later, but if one seeks evidence of the cultural disconnect prevalent in education policy-making circles, one need look no further than the near-absence from policy of provision for all but the most academically able children:

• Gove was famously challenged by Nick Clegg when he made his short-lived announcement about his proposed return of O-Levels, to explain how the majority of children badly served by O-Levels would be treated. He had no answer, as he had not considered them.
• May’s Grammar school announcement had many fans in the right-wing education policy firmament, all of whom are silent on the impact of such a policy on less able children.
• Gove announced he wanted exams to be more difficult, and any questions as to how this would serve those already struggling with existing exams were dismissed as suffering from “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.

Where less academically able children are acknowledged, it is usually only in the context of a vacuous exhortation to them and their teachers to ‘work harder’, ‘show grit’ and ‘close the gap’. Those voices with an input in policy were themselves academically able. Their peer groups were academically able. Overwhelmingly, their children are academically able. The cultural disconnect means that most seem incapable of even acknowledging the concept that many children, through no fault of their own, are not similarly academically able.

 

This leads to such appalling outcomes as one of the government’s favoured academy chains publicly humiliating its less able students by posting their comparative results on school walls for their peers to laugh at, as if their position at the bottom of the pile is somehow deserved, and worthy of contempt. Those of us with personal experience of children who work extremely hard, and show far more grit than any Minister has ever had to, can despair at the crass, reality-denying, sociopathic cruelty of such an approach.

 

No better recent example of this cultural disconnect can be found than the Ebacc. The Ebacc is essentially a group of academic subjects which the academically successful members of the echo chamber personally value, and which they believe helped them to achieve the positions they have achieved. They self-identify as successful, and thus assume that if the definition of success is staring them in the mirror, then they best help the nation’s students by forcing them to become more like, well, themselves.

 

It is incredible to them that people with different cultural backgrounds might value other subjects more. They do not consider the fact that less academically able children may find such a group of subjects inaccessible, because they themselves cannot imagine being academically weak, or having academically weak children of their own. They do not consider applied subjects a more valid option for those students who may wish to pursue jobs with a more practical bent, because they themselves cannot imagine aspiring to be a cabin attendant, a mechanic, or a careworker. Their values, of an academically able, professionally ambitious mind-worker, are the only values they recognise. Hence the often incredulous reaction of such voices when their assertion that the Ebacc subjects have some sort of superior intrinsic value is challenged by those with different experience, values or understanding. They are culturally disconnected from large parts of both the teaching workforce, and the students in the classrooms. A failure of empathy which would be laughable, were it not for the serious consequences for a failure of policy.

 

I’m putting this cartoon in because I know it REALLY annoys those who hate to acknowledge that some children might be different from how they were when they were young

 

 

Behavioural causes (3): operational disconnect

 
“Time and again those who designed a policy failed to involve those who, further down the line, would find themselves having to implement whatever the new policy turned out to be.” wrote Crewe.

He noted scathingly that fewer and fewer Ministers and their close policy-advisors had experience outside politics, or closely associated professions like journalism (he tellingly named Michael Gove as a prime example of this phenomenon). The result of this disconnect is that Ministers often take office without any real understanding of how their finely-polished theories would be implemented in practice. Indeed, often Ministers are genuinely surprised to see how their beautiful announcements become ugly reality. Surely there have been few better examples of this operational disconnect in action than education policy. I would offer two examples to reinforce the point.

 

Ministers since 1997 have often made policy announcements which suggest they will find ways of leveraging private funding into state schools. These are often clouded with references to partnerships, business expertise helping schools, generous philanthropy and so on. One such policy under New Labour was specialist schools. Education Action Zones was another. Ministers confidently predicted a flood of private money into schools, and genuinely believed that it would be so, because they had, after all, repeatedly announced that it would.

I recall a conversation with the then head of the Specialist Schools team, who was bemoaning the impossibility of her job. She complained bitterly that Ministers would speak to audiences from the private sector about the initiative, and receive many pledges of money from businessmen keen to curry favour with the Government. My colleague’s job was to follow up these contacts, only to discover that in nearly all cases the cash would not be forthcoming. Instead, offers of “in kind” assistance would be grudgingly offered, often meaning a few desultory lectures on management and leadership by executives of the private company, delivered to bemused teachers, charged at tens of thousands of pounds per day.

I found something similar when I managed the Education Action Zone policy, and discovered that many of the “donations” required to gain influence in the Zones came in the form of obsolete IT equipment which had no value to the donor firm, or yet more management training courses. The consequences were that private individuals and companies were gaining significant power over local schools, without the quid pro quo of providing real additional resources.

 

Yet Ministers were unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge that the reality of hard-nosed businessmen might differ from their imagined group of would-be philanthropists. As an aside, it was at this time that the word “sponsor” began to change its meaning in education policy, from the traditionally understood meaning of “donates money to a cause”, to the current use of “takes money from a public service”, as it is applied to most academy “sponsors” today.

The second, more obvious example of operational disconnect, is the impact of league tables on the way schools focus resources on students. This is not an new issue, but the familiarity of the critique shouldn’t blind us to the central importance of league tales even now in shaping school behaviours in a way Ministers claim to dislike. Take the issue of C/D ‘borderline’ students.

Recently, some education organizations, notably PiXL, came under criticism for offering training and resources for schools which explicitly help them “game” the league table system. These organizations train schools how to target additional resources not on the students who might benefit from them most, but on the students whose results might benefit the school the most. Hence a student who might achieve a B rather than a C has no value in this approach, compared to a student who might turn a D into a C. Similarly, a student who might turn a D into a C, but is only likely to get three C grades in total, has no value to the school, whereas one with four relatively safe C grades already has great value. I personally attended a PiXL training course in which a very senior representative of PiXL told the assembled teachers to “forget about [the students who were not 5A*-C c/d borderline cases], as they don’t matter”. Like many in the room, I was appalled, and indeed told him I felt it was an immoral approach. Yet it was an entirely rational consequence of the imposition of a high-stakes accountability system for schools centred around a 5 A*-C benchmark.

Similarly the rise and fall of apparently random “equivalent” qualifications such as the ECDL stem from the same source. “Progress 8” should in theory go some way to ameliorate this sort of gaming, although the fact that it has taken decades to act upon this issue is a clear demonstration of the operational disconnect at play between what Ministers think a policy will do, and how it is implemented on the ground. Moreover, before policy-makers become too self congratulatory about the new performance measures, it is worth noting that it will do nothing to prevent similar “useful student” targeting, based on the new measures, taking root in schools within a very short time.

The exclusion of experts and deliverers from the policy formation process is not new, but certainly in education such expert-exclusion has been an increasingly notable feature since 1997. During the first years of my time at DFE, civil servants were not just encouraged to listen to the experts, where those experts existed, but it was a requirement of doing a professional job. When I was the young DFE official tasked with producing the first major SEN Code of Practice. I didn’t simply sit down and write whatever I thought Ministers wanted. I was part of extensive consultations with the actual experts: SEN teachers, LEA SEN officers, child psychologists, academics in the field and SEN charities. These were genuine consultations, as opposed to more recent DFE ‘consultations’, which generally involve giving appalled groups of helpless experts prior notice of what the DFE is going to do irrespective of feedback. Those people influenced heavily what was in the Code. In many places, they actually made the policy. I merely did the drafting.

The purpose of this sort of consultation was to help Ministers make better policy.
Contrast that approach with the input of experts into education policy today. A good example would be the Government-created crisis in teacher-training. Those politicians and their entourage of SPADs and think-tankers on the New Right have long argued that university-led teacher training departments are a dangerous hotbed of left-wing activism, “trendy” teaching methods, and thus the root cause of educational failure. This bizarre belief is precisely the sort of article of faith which is dangerously reinforced when not exposed to alternative views (or reality) during a thorough deliberation process.

There is no clear record of the precise origins of the policy of slashing university-based initial teacher training and replacing it with schools-based training, preferably in schools controlled by ideologically sympathetic private chains. It emerged from the disconnected clique of shadowy right-wing think-tanks, SPADs, and Ministers. Civil servants, teacher unions, academics and education experts knew that the policy would cause teacher shortages, and the latter groups protested loudly, but there is no longer any way in the policy-making process for such expertise to shape policy. Instead, the DFE slipped into its now-expected “delivery” mode. Experts were dismissed as part of a self-interested “blob”. The policy was pushed through. University ITT was slashed. Schools-based ITT didn’t pick up the slack. A major trainee teacher shortage ensued.

Mistakes such as these could be avoided by listening to those who will be in the position of trying to implement the policy. However, as we have seen, Ministers have been reluctant to listen to voices from outside their own personal ideological echo chamber for some time in education policy. While Gove’s dismissal of “the Blob”, and description of teachers who disagreed with him as “bad teachers”, may represent a particularly cloth-eared low point, it was not new.

John Bangs similarly noted in his book “Reinventing Schools” that under New Labour, Minister of State Stephen Byers wrote to Robin Alexander expressing his welcome for the co-operation of academics, but only to the extent to which they supported Government policies. Education policy is a field where, perhaps more than any other, amateur politicians with no expertise in the field, have dismissed those with expertise out of hand, in pursuit of their own ideas. Why this should be the case is the subject of my final section, in which I propose that two problems particularly prevalent in education policy are a misplaced belief in policy-makers’ “expertise”, and a subsequent reliance on a faith-based, rather than evidence-based set of guiding principles for all education policy.

Note the backdrop. Possibly the most influential education policy-makers of the last seven years. That’s not a good thing unless you’re Rupert Murdoch.

 

 

The Ignorant Experts

 

Before I joined the Civil Service, I imagined “government” as if I was watching a James Bond film: lots of very clever, competent people, who knew everything, working in efficient ways to a sensible end. It was an image which ascribed to Ministers and their advisors an almost omniscient wisdom. It was also an image which survived about a month inside the DFE.

 
I met one Minister who wouldn’t accept meetings on Mondays because he liked to hunt foxes in a distant county on a Sunday and couldn’t possibly travel down on Sunday evening. Another deliberately changed the pictures in his office to depictions of American military hardware, and sent his private secretary out to buy a stars and stripes tie, in preparation for a potentially lucrative visit by a Chinese education delegation, just to annoy them. A third Minister’s office tried hard to avoid scheduling any meetings after lunch, and on one unfortunate occasion when I watched him literally crawl around the floor in front of an appalled delegation from a subject association, I realized why. And I served a Secretary of State who ordered the blameless civil servant who headed up the sex-education team to be moved from his post because he was gay, because he believed a gay man shouldn’t have anything to do with sex education.

 
Ministers are people. They are often rather flawed people, with some characteristics which are advantageous in politics, but not particularly conducive to good policy-making. Civil servants are also people, of course. However, the Civil Service was vast, and had both very high entry requirements and a multi-layered hierarchy in which experience and judgement were crucial to advancement. As a result, the people at the top were, overwhelmingly in my experience, very clever, capable people. Perhaps a little too academic for the post-1997 world; perhaps a little too thoughtful, or cautious, or non-ideological. But their collective intellectual weight tended to temper and mitigate the potential failings of Ministers. British government history is littered with drunks, fools and charlatans who have passed through the great offices of state without any lasting damage being caused, in no small part due to the Civil Service’s counterweight.

 
Why do we have such consistent policy blunders in education? At one level it is as simple as this: Ministers tend to be very confident people. Very confident people are not always given to introspection. This unjustified over-confidence is particularly exacerbated when they believe that they have experience of the policy in question. And, unfortunately for education policy in particular, everyone went to school once.

 
It is, as anyone arguing with an grammar-school-supporting anecdote-provider can testify, typically human to confuse one’s own perceived experience with genuine expertise:

• “This is what I liked to learn” thus becomes “This is what everyone should learn”.
• “This is how I liked to be taught” thus becomes “This is how everyone should be taught”
• “This is what I was able to do” thus becomes “Everyone should be able to do this”

This remarkably simplistic, self-centred worldview is common – not just amongst politicians. It is, of course, a nonsense. But we have already noted the cultural disconnect which afflicts policy-making when the policy-makers are drawn from a narrow homogenous group. Indeed, at times, Gove’s announcements about his preferred curriculum, his preferred approach to discipline, pedagogy, and even the way teachers and students dressed, suggested that his entire education policy was an attempt to recreate his Scottish private school in the early 1980s. After all, it worked for him…

 
Experts recognise that schools are complex organisms. Each one is unique precisely because its students and teachers are unique. Each lesson is, in fact, a single, unique experience based around the relationship of the students and teacher, the subject matter at hand, the time of day, the interests, age, gender and aptitudes of the students, even the weather. Education is an intensely human process, which defies simplistic theories and the imposition of one politician’s personal preferences on very different people. However, such a nuanced understanding leads inexorably to the conclusion that decisions about practice are best devolved as close to the classroom as possible. This is the very opposite of the policy direction of the last two decades, which has seen hyper-active Ministers seeking to impose greater uniformity and control from the centre, to fit the model their own ignorance tells them is the “right” one. That ignorant “expertise” has enormously damaging effects on education policy, in the absence of any informed counterweight.

 

Needs no caption, really

 

 

Faith-based policy

 
Perhaps nowhere in Government has the small group of disconnected policy-makers been so dismissive of genuine experts, practitioners, or indeed those whose views differ from their own. I have no doubt that some readers of this essay will criticise my generalisations about the relatively tiny group of policy-makers. Yet as early as 1995, Woodhead announced to the media, without any evidence at all, that 15,000 teachers were incompetent and should be sacked. By 2010, Blunkett was offering the view to the Parliamentary Select Committee that “We had a crap teaching profession”. Michael Gove’s insults towards the teaching profession and educational establishment are legendary, from “the Blob” to “Marxist Enemies of Promise”. By the time of his defenestration in 2014 by a Conservative Party panicking about his incredible unpopularity with teachers and the general public, he simply claimed on a Newsnight interview that those who disagreed with his policies were “bad teachers”. As sweeping, inaccurate generalisations go, I feel mine are rather harmless.

 
It is in this contempt which politicians and their close policy-making allies feel for teachers, that we can find much of the underlying dismissal of deliberation and expertise which contributes to the blunders in education policy. For the last twenty years, with just one or two honourable exceptions, Education Secretaries have subscribed – at least publicly – to a view of state education which has no basis in fact, but is based instead on a kind of faith. Tenets of this faith, which is political, rather than religious, have been subscribed to, to one extent or another, by nearly all Education Secretaries since 1997. While not all adherents of this faith would identify as being on the political right, it is nevertheless a faith which stems from the same market-based New Right movement which began its rise to dominance in the Anglo-Saxon world from the late 1970s.

 
To understand education policy since 1997, and particularly since 2010, it is important to understand that it is widely accepted amongst the New Right that the education system is always failing, particularly comprehensive schools. There is some disagreement about the best way of tackling this, with a split between traditionalists who would re-adopt selection, and modernists who prefer to “improve” comprehensives. But the language both camps use is telling.

 

Ministerial announcements and policies over the last twenty years have consistently justified any and all policies with the need to “improve” schools. English education is always portrayed as “falling behind” either other countries, or some misty historical precedent. Schools always require “strong leadership” to save them from “inadequate” teachers. “Failing” schools full of “weak” teachers are a permanent feature of announcements, aided and abetted by an inspection regime which laughably categorises schools into four spurious groups, two of which are deemed inadequate in name, three of which are treated as inadequate in announcements (“that school fell from an ‘outstanding’ to a ‘good'”). Even supposedly positive or congratulatory announcements are always made in the context of the object of celebration standing out because it is unlike the rest of the system. A praised school is successful because it is not standard, which is key, because standard is failure.

 

The language of education Ministers and their small group of acolytes is consistently that of the saviour coming to rescue failing children from a failing system of failing schools employing failing teachers. Only those favoured by Ministerial whim – the private chain and its Party donor owners; the academy with the fellow-traveller headteacher, the self-promoting free-school founder – are exempt from the need to constantly “improve”. There does not have to be any evidence that these favoured few are achieving better outcomes. Their success is that they are no longer part of an education system which, in the worldview of the ignorant experts, is irredeemably flawed. It is their difference from the existing system which makes them successful, because the existing system must be failing until the heroic Minister’s intervention to save them from “mediocre failure“. As May’s grammar school proposals illustrate so clearly, education policy on the Right is faith-based, and like all faiths, it brooks no challenge, and is unreceptive to contradictory evidence.

 
It is little wonder, therefore, that we have now reached in education a situation of apparent national cognitive dissonance. Parents report incredibly high levels of satisfaction with their child’s school, all over the country, across all types of school. Yet those same parents are often convinced that the education system as a whole is failing, or getting worse. This is a direct result of the consistent and inaccurate portrayal by Ministers of a failing system.

 
By limiting their policy-making advice to only those ideological fellow-travellers, Ministers then compound this error by assuming that the confirmation of common experiences from a similarly unrepresentative, self-selecting group somehow multiplies their individual anecdotes into “evidence”. Yet it is merely an echo chamber of the ignorant, proclaiming their own expertise. One can see this in policy-makers’ attitude to “evidence”.

When evidence is evidently not evidence
What some might call the Global Education Reform Movement, and others might term the New Right, or Neo-Traditionalists, grew in the New Labour era, and has been dominant since 2010. This movement is intensely ideological, promoting market-based policies both at the macro school organisation level, and at the micro teacher and student level. It often claims to stem from, and be guided by, evidence. Yet even a cursory glance at that claim leads to its summary dismissal.

 

We’ve already noted Stephen Byers’ caveat over what evidence he was willing to hear. Similarly, under Blunkett, Michael Barber headed up a Schools Improvement Unit which claimed to be solely interested in “what works”, yet pushed policies which had little evidence base. Under Gove, “evidence” became such a flexible term that the word itself was debased. There was no evidence supporting Performance Related Pay, but market ideology demanded it. There was, and still is, no evidence that academization has any significant impact on outcomes, yet it remains the key Government policy to push it forward. There is no evidence that the Ebacc subjects have any greater or lesser value than other subjects, yet it was imposed anyway. Gove himself was criticised by PISA for misusing PISA evidence, although he repeated his false claims nevertheless.

 
In seeking to tackle the perceived permanent crisis of failure in education which the New Right identifies, policy-makers have sought to produce policy solutions consistent with their wider political beliefs. As a result, much like a faith, certain philosophical beliefs have become central to education policy, because they suit the broader market-based philosophy which the unrepresentative echo-chamber of New Right politicians, SPADs and think-tankers subscribe to. These include principles such as:

 

• The main impact on a student’s educational outcomes is that of the teacher.
• All students can, with sufficient “grit” and effort from student and teacher, achieve top grades.
• Competition between students within a cohort drives up student performance
• Competition between teachers within a school drives up teacher performance
• Competition between schools within an area drives up school performance
• All students learn at the same rate, whatever their starting point
• Teacher and school “quality” can be measured solely through student results.
• Privately-owned and operated schools will always be more successful than state-owned and operated schools

 
There is no evidence for any of these assumptions, in the sense that most of use the word “evidence”. Indeed, some are demonstrable nonsense. Yet they are the core principles of education policy, and have been for at least the last decade.

 
It is illuminating, perhaps, to recount a conversation I had with Michael Barber who, along with Andrew Adonis, was one of the key architects of the policy continuum which has operated for the last two decades. He was preparing for the roll-out of the government’s primary literacy and numeracy strategies, and I questioned him on how he could be so certain that this was the right thing to impose on the entire education system, when there was no real evidence for it. He smiled, and replied “Sometimes, you just have to make a leap of faith”.

 
There, in a nutshell, is the root cause of bad education policy-making. In common with policy-making across all departments, Education policy suffers from the generic problems identified by Crewe and King. Yet in education those policies are compounded by the inability, or unwillingness, of policy-makers to differentiate between their overly-simplistic market ideology, and the reality of the intensely human nature of education. Even if the deliberative process remained intact, and even if policy-makers did not suffer from cultural and operational disconnect, the denial of the messy and nuanced reality of education which is encompassed in those simplistic ideological beliefs, would render any sensible policy-making somewhat difficult.

Not until we restore the deliberative function in education policy-making, can we evade these errors. We need voices which disagree with the government of the day, with the democratic mandate to challenge – and obstruct, if necessary – central government diktat. This is the single greatest argument for the strengthening of LEAs, in my view. We need to restore the professional advisory role of the civil service in policy-making, and end the ridiculous pretence that they perform a ‘delivery’ function which they transparently do not. We need to abandon, quickly, the far-right ideology which sees private as better than public in any and all instances. And we need to restore experts to the centre of policy-making: Experts who have walked the classroom walk for years, rather than talked the talk for a couple of terms before heading off to a comfortable right-wing policy-wonk job; Experts who do not owe their salaries and positions to DFE patronage; Experts who are not employed by private companies with a vested interest in more profitable practices; and, crucially, experts who disagree with Government, and with each other. Because it is only through challenge, diversity of view and compromise that we will avoid the catastrophic failures we have seen in an education policy development process which excludes all but ideological nodding dogs and cynical profiteers.