John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
May 6th, 2010, promised so much. After 13 years of social engineering, fiddling and dumbing down, we had an Education Department again, and an energetic ministerial team. When Michael Gove resigned, after four years, I sent him a message congratulating him on returning schools to their proper purpose – the promotion of teaching and learning – and enabling the wonderful example of Michaela to take place.
Katharine Birbalsingh has never been a Conservative – she rightly insists on a small “c”. But without Government support, her opponents would have prevented her school from opening, and so deprived us of the most significant educational achievement of the comprehensive era. Birbalsingh and her colleagues have shown that all children, including those from disadvantaged and disturbed backgrounds, can succeed in their school work and become happy and useful citizens. They have built on the work of the late Sir Rhodes Boyson and Sir Michael Wilshaw by adapting teaching more closely to the needs of children of all abilities, and shown the error of the progressive agenda to which Labour has been committed since the end of World War Two.
The next major achievement is the orientation of initial reading teaching towards phonics, rather than the guesswork theories of the reading wars and Labour’s failed literacy strategy. The phonics check, improved by the addition of cartoon characters so that children would know that it was only the information from letters that was being asked of them, was an important step in identifying who was succeeding and who needed further help. It has been joined by a test of multiplication tables to improve on the situation we inherited from Labour’s maths strategy, which was producing materials to teach the 2x table to 11-year-olds, who should have known this four years earlier. Changes in primary maths were perhaps the most important achievement of Elizabeth Truss. The phonics success story also needs qualification. Positive research evidence is focused on the early stages, and much more work is needed to improve the later teaching of reading and to explain why English spelling does not always reflect the sounds of modern English. This is the main reason why improvements in test performance have not reduced the incidence of reading difficulties.
Examination and testing reform has rid us of the expensive, stressful and unnecessary AS examination at the end of the first sixth form year. AS left children with three successive years of high-stakes examinations, and an additional burden in the final year if they had low grades in AS. Getting rid of it was as important as ditching Labour’s “vocational” qualifications. These were introduced post-2005 and claimed to be the equivalent of 4 GCSEs for work that was often not even worth one, a fallacy compounded by fake coursework, some of which was completed by teachers under pressure from authoritarian management. Gove’s tenure also saw the destruction of a large number of quangos – language teaching had four or five with overlapping functions and six-figure salaries, sometimes to people who had never taught at all. A pity that the good of this was undone by spending more money yet on the equally ineffective Education Endowment Foundation.
Nicky Morgan’s brief tenure was brightened by the establishment of the Chartered College of Teaching, supported by the late Duke of Edinburgh, and funded by its members rather than the government. This is the only educational foundation with teaching rather than ideology at its heart, and I am pleased to be a Fellow. Charlotte Leslie, who launched the idea, has made what may be the most important contribution ever from a back-bench MP. The Mandarin Excellence Programme, designed to improve our ability to communicate with China on an equal basis, is an outstanding success and has helped develop a practical and effective approach to a language that had previously been accessible to a tiny minority.
Most recently, we have the expansion of apprenticeships, including degree apprenticeships, through the work of Gillian Keegan and Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow and all too briefly a minister. Excellent work. Though, alas, too little and almost certainly too late.
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Author: John Bald
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