Stupidity or spite? What is the explanation for Labour’s attack on the Academy system?
10 January 2025, 10:03
The spectacularly misnamed Children’s Wellbeing Bill currently being debated in parliament includes a huge U-turn on the education reforms brought in by the Tories 15 years ago.
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Those reforms gave academies a range of freedoms, like setting their own pay and conditions for staff and allowing them to teach their own curriculum as they saw fit rather than being bound to the national curriculum. It was radical in that it treated headteachers as grown-ups who could run their own ship rather than overgrown children who needed to be spoon-fed the latest socialist diktat from Whitehall.
The changes the Conservatives made were based on two simple observations. One: those who run a school know best how to organise their staffing and the subjects they teach.
Two: When you trust professionals to get on with the job they trained to do rather than breathing down their necks, they tend to deliver.
And guess what? The academy reforms did deliver. Don’t take my word for it. Take the international data on it, which shows England soaring up the rankings in reading, maths and science over recent years.
The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests compares educational data from 81 countries around the world. Between 2009 and 2022 England went from 21st to 7th in the PISA league table on maths, 19th to 9th for reading and 11th to 9th for science.
Meanwhile in Scotland and Wales – where politicians opted for the kind of centralised control that Labour want to return to – things were a little different. Between 2009 and 2022, Wales slumped from 21st to 29th in maths and stayed 28th in reading. Scotland collapsed from 15th to 25th on maths and from 11th to 26th on science.
These aren’t just numbers on some global quango’s spreadsheet; they are the evidence of a genuine difference made to the lives of countless children – for better or worse.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, goes the saying, but when it comes to academies it doesn’t suffice. “If it’s firing on all cylinders, don’t wreck it” seems more appropriate – and yet that is what Labour seem determined to do.
Fresh from trashing the independent schools sector, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson now has her sights set on state schools. Where heads have decided to incentivise and reward good teachers with decent pay packages, she wants to tie their hands. Where teachers have found a way to engage pupils in English, maths or modern languages which isn’t on the national curriculum, she wants to slap them down and make them follow orders.
What baffles me is why she would dismantle these perfectly fine reforms while there is so much else in her in-tray which is infinitely more deserving of her attention. Could she, for a start, do something about the national scandal of special needs education, which is leaving thousands of children out of school or languishing in inappropriate places?
Or perhaps she could do something about the plague of mobile phones in schools, which is distracting children from learning – and driving teachers to distraction, too?
I get that incoming governments like to put their stamp on things. But why stamp on a policy that is so evidently working? The government may think they’ve scored a victory over the Tories by dismantling these flagship education reforms but, ultimately, it will be England’s children who lose.
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