by Tom Bower
Blair was a beneficiary of that privilege. Fettes, his Scottish private school, and St John’s College in Oxford had provided enviable advantages. By improving state schools, he wanted to remove the social inequalities suffered by children from poor backgrounds. Such children, he argued, deserved the same opportunities as those born to the wealthiest. Realising his ambition, he believed, depended on confronting an educational establishment filled not with Tories but with left-wing academics – Marxist schoolteachers and ideological trade unionists.
The Left’s anger had been particularly roused in 1994 by Chris Woodhead, the head of Ofsted, the regulator established by the Tories to inspect schools and report on their performance. On the basis of his staff’s reports, Woodhead, a leading evangelist for the depoliticisation of education, had denounced 30 per cent of teachers as unsatisfactory. In a headline-capturing declaration, he demanded that no fewer than ‘15,000 incompetent teachers’ should be instantly dismissed, especially the champions of ‘progressive education’. Blair sympathised with the sentiment, although he did not appreciate the history behind the headlines.
After the publication of a report in 1967 by Bridget Plowden, an amateur educationalist, describing primary schooling, Britain’s education system had become an ideological battleground. Masked by a scattering of platitudes about improving schools, Plowden recommended the destruction of traditional education. Children, she wrote, should no longer sit in rows of desks but instead gather in groups around tables to encourage self-learning. She also recommended that the eleven-plus examination, a three-part test (English, maths and intelligence) taken in one day that irrevocably determined a child’s educational fate – either to blossom in a grammar school or be consigned to failure in a secondary modern school – should be abandoned. Grammar schools should be replaced by non-selective comprehensives that mixed children of all standards. With cross-party support, successive Labour and Conservative governments implemented her recommendations.
Within ten years, educationalists had become divided over the consequences of Plowden’s changes. For left-wing academics, schools were ideal locations for engineering the removal of class distinctions. In the Left’s ideology, all children start as equals, regardless of genetics or social background. If parental choice, testing and selection were prevented, middle-class children would beneficially influence those in the classroom whose home life was blighted by crime, drug addiction and deprivation. The Left had also welcomed Harold Wilson’s decision to centralise teacher training in universities. Like-minded academics could persuade their student teachers to use education for social engineering. Self-learning became the mantra; teachers would no longer be required to guide the learning process. ‘Phonics’ was abolished as a way to teach reading, and traditional basic textbooks were discarded. Instead, children discovered how to read by themselves using books sanitised of unwelcome stereotypes.
By the 1990s, Blair understood the consequences. Amid a notable decline in educational standards, the closure of grammar schools and indiscipline in classrooms, over 30 per cent of children were leaving school illiterate or innumerate. Yet, while aspiring parents became disillusioned with comprehensives, Labour’s support for non-selective schools remained solid.
The dilemma for Blair was whether poor education was the fault of schools and their teachers or whether those on the left of his party were correct to blame poverty and a child’s social background. The ideological battle between the left-wing educational establishment and the Tories centred on whether poverty could be overcome by a school’s culture. Did elitism, excellence and discipline – based on choice and selection in state schools – give deprived children the chance of a good education? Or, as argued by the Left, did choice and selection prevent the majority of disadvantaged children receiving a good education so that a few could benefit at grammar schools?
In 1994, Blair had hesitated about engaging in that battle. Labour’s educational establishment, he knew, denied outright that any schools were failing. ‘There’s no such thing as a bad teacher,’ they proclaimed in unison. They opposed selection at any stage in the educational process and wanted to limit parent power because in both cases the middle class would be favoured. They wanted the middle class to use the ailing schools that the Blairs were resisting for their own children in Islington. Such prejudice excused the Left from questioning why literacy and numeracy were successfully taught in private schools. Blair spoke publicly about the importance of discipline in the classroom but rarely mentioned the curriculum. Amid Tory ridicule that Labour lacked any education policy, he needed to resolve his dilemma between what he wanted and what he believed, and in particular whether he would challenge Labour’s opposition to Thatcher’s 1988 Education Reform Act.
The Tories had become alarmed by the capture of education since the 1960s by the ‘progressives’, especially in the Institute for Education in London and in the Department for Education in Westminster. The Left’s pursuit of equality, in their opinion, was harming children. The abandonment of traditional teaching methods had effectively consigned the 30 per cent of teenagers who were innumerate or illiterate to lifelong failure. In Thatcher’s opinion, as the demand for manual labour declined, those children would become permanently unemployed.
The 1988 Act imposed on schools a national curriculum with a ‘basic syllabus’ of the ‘Three Rs’ plus testing. The important innovation was the publication of schools’ results in league tables. Their performance would be monitored by Ofsted, a new regulator. With that information, parents were empowered to choose the best schools. Those with poor academic results that failed to attract children would be forced to improve or close.
Six years later, improvement was patchy, with the Tories blaming the educational establishment for sabotaging their policies. To overcome that obstruction, in 1996 they introduced compulsory literacy and numeracy hours for all primary schools. Blair’s predicament was that Labour’s educationalists condemned the innovation, and much more besides. Rather than join the Tories in pulling aside the lack of disclosure that protected inadequate teachers and struggling schools, Labour was committed to denying parents any information about a school’s performance, abolishing Ofsted and ending all choice. ‘Ghettoisation’, as the Left described parental selection, would be replaced by an entirely comprehensive system.
Blair disagreed with that ideology, and after his election as party leader he signalled his sympathy towards the aspiring middle classes by removing Ann Taylor as shadow education minister for being too favourable to teachers. Taylor’s replacement by Blunkett would be hailed as a milestone.
Blair next declared war on the educational establishment. ‘We should build on what’s good from the Tories,’ he declared. Britain’s children, he said in a dramatic speech in 1995, were being betrayed by the system. Labour, he added, would keep the Tories’ tests, league tables and streaming, and even enhance Ofsted’s powers. Oxbridge’s prejudice in favour of excellence would not be challenged.
Blunkett was encouraged by Blair to intensify the assault at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers in 1995. ‘There is a culture of complacency and lack of ambition in some schools,’ the new shadow minister told the outraged delegates. Comprehensive schools were failing the majority of children. Many teachers, he believed, were lazy, poorly trained and had low expectations. ‘We have a crap teaching profession,’ he would later say, referring to the anarchy in some schools.
There were, however, important aspects of the 1988 Act that Blair opposed. To escape the control of the local education authorities (LEAs), the Tories had given some of the money from their budgets directly to schools. This could then be used by the 1,198 grant-maintained schools to fund extra classes – for example, in music – or to amend their curriculum.
Five years later, Tony and Cherie Blair enrolled their eldest children at the Oratory, a grant-maintained Catholic school in Fulham. There was uproar. Both Left and Right accused Blair of hypocrisy, with the forme
r infuriated by their leader’s endorsement of the divisions created by the Conservatives. To persuade the Left that Labour was ideologically different to the Conservatives, Blair promised to end the privileges of the grant-maintained schools and to terminate the assisted-places scheme that paid for 38,000 poor children to attend private schools. That decision revealed his confusion. He refused to close the last 164 grammar schools and protected the new city technology colleges (CTCs), despite their dependence on selection and private finance. He also adopted the Tories’ plan for 200 specialist schools that selected 10 per cent of their intake.
Compounding the confusion, Blunkett solemnly promised his party conference: ‘Read my lips. No selection by examination or interview.’ To further pacify the Left, he agreed that disruptive pupils would not be expelled. Inclusivity would rule and ‘special needs’ schools would be closed.
By cherry-picking and promising the Left half of a golden age, Blair hoped to create a coalition to reform education. ‘Some things the Conservatives got right,’ he inserted into Labour’s 1997 manifesto. ‘We will not change them.’ The manifesto partly focused on class sizes and laptops, and to assuage the Left’s passion for uniformity it omitted mentioning the standard of teaching in classrooms. Blair himself said nothing about Harriet Harman, the shadow minister for welfare, sending her children to private schools.
Blair’s ideological confusion was disguised by adopting ideas suggested by Michael Barber, a key ally of Blunkett. Barber, a former official in the National Union of Teachers, somersaulted in 1995 and attacked what he called ‘the dark side of the moon’ among his former allies. Teachers, he said, echoing Blair, should cease tolerating failure in poor communities. They should abandon their conviction that only money could change education, and they should be accountable. But there was an awkward outcome to his conversion.
Unlike the Tories, Barber believed that all children share the same abilities and, regardless of their social background, can, with the right education, be successful. In the policies that he and Blunkett presented to Blair, they stressed that every child would benefit from an ‘accessible and personalised’ education. By default, they denigrated special technical colleges that trained plumbers, carpenters and electricians.
Barber tempted Blair with an additional hymn. Education, he said, should be driven by measurement. Targets would change the culture of schools. As an instinctive dogmatist, Blair was persuaded that improvement could be achieved by setting what they variously called strategies, standards, benchmarks, performance indicators and measurements by examinations. He also echoed another of Barber’s gospels: ‘It’s standards, not structures.’ By that, Blair and Barber meant that Labour would focus on what happened in the classroom. To their critics, that was tokenism. To avoid a conflict within the party, they both refused to challenge the local education authorities. The LEAs’ officials controlled the teachers in the classroom. Nothing could change without removing their doctrinaire influence.
Blair now directed his speeches at his left-wing critics. ‘To those who say where is Labour’s passion for social justice,’ he proclaimed, ‘I say education is social justice. Education is liberty. Education is opportunity.’ As so often, he also urged ‘modernisation’. On one theme he remained consistent: the changes in schools would be imposed from Whitehall. Control over education was to be centralised. London would micro-manage all the LEAs. To effect that change, he empowered Blunkett, Bichard and Barber to execute a radical plan across the Department for Education. Presentation was Blair’s driver of change. To convince the electorate of action, he expected regular announcements of Green Papers, White Papers, legislation and the creation of new schools.
Blunkett was his ideal ally, spreading New Labour’s message immediately after election day. In a frenzy of diktats, he announced a succession of White Papers, including ‘Excellence in Schools’, ‘Excellence in the Cities’, ‘Pupil Learning Credits’ and ‘Education Action Zones’ (EAZs). He also proclaimed the creation of more specialist schools (1,000 to be opened by 2002), more faith schools, a Leadership Incentive Grant and a programme of Leading Edge Partnerships. With every publication, the most important task was to guarantee coverage by the media. Then, forgetting what Blair had said before the election, he promised to devolve power to local people and give schools more freedom from the LEAs and the national curriculum, as well as the right to receive extra money from business.
Ever since the original criticism of teachers and comprehensive schools, Blair and Blunkett had hardened their dislike of the Left’s ideology that all children are born with the same ability, while excellence is merely destructive elitism. To neutralise the Left, Blair engaged in a battle of slogans about equality. He spoke about children benefiting from ‘equality of outcome’ and ‘equality of opportunity’. His weapons were targets and tests.
On 13 May 1997, English teachers were told by Blunkett to achieve ‘a dramatic improvement’ by raising standards for eleven-year-olds. By 2002, they were ordered, 80 per cent of this age group should be able to reach level four or the average mark of the Standard Assessment Test (SAT) examinations. Under the Tories in 1996, only 57 per cent of children had reached that level. Secondary schools were told that children at sixteen would be expected to achieve five ‘good’ A*–C passes at GCSE, well above what was achieved during the Tory era. To enforce the changes, Barber established a standards and effectiveness unit to name and shame failing schools. Blunkett said he would resign if the targets were not met. Tory pragmatism had been replaced by Stalinist five-year plans.
Blair approved the ruthlessness. Schools that failed the Ofsted test were given two years to improve or would be closed. Eighteen were ‘named and shamed’ during the first flood of announcements, initiatives and laws. They were to be reopened under the ‘Fresh Start’ programme, another initiative to transform run-down schools with new staff, refurbished buildings and a revised curriculum to match the children’s needs. In parallel, Blunkett announced the construction of new schools and the recruitment of 35,000 teachers. Pertinently, there was no mention of retraining or dismissing any of the existing 400,000 teachers, or of reforming the curriculum. For both Blair and Blunkett, confronting the teachers amounted to no more than boycotting their annual conference and giving head teachers the power to reward performance with special payments. Nearly every teacher in England, it later emerged, was rewarded with a payment.
Blair still worried about his pet concern. ‘Why are the schools in my constituency so awful?’ he asked Chris Woodhead during their first meeting soon after the election, with Blunkett in attendance. The director of Ofsted was the media star whom Blair could neither ignore nor dismiss.
‘Give me 2,000 inspectors and I can solve a lot,’ Woodhead replied. ‘Schools need to be held to account.’ Inspection, he continued, would reveal faults in a school, but his task force was not permitted to tell teachers how to improve. Something more prescriptive was required. ‘Ofsted should be used in a constructive way, but the improvements must be forced upon schools by the department.’
‘Yes,’ said Blair, appearing to agree.
‘Teacher training’, explained Woodhead, ‘is the heart of the problem. We must change it.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Blair. ‘Let’s do that.’
‘Bad teachers and inadequate head teachers unable to control anarchy in classrooms are to blame. Bad discipline leads to academic decline.’
Blair nodded. ‘What’s the cure?’ he asked.
‘It’s bottom up,’ explained Woodhead. ‘Dismiss every bad teacher and head teacher. We’ve got to tackle the problem in each school, root out the enemy in every classroom. And then we’ll get rid of the malign influence of the LEAs. The LEAs are failing schools.’
‘You can’t inspect your way to success,’ interrupted Blunkett.
The exchange revealed an irreconcilable disagreement between Woodhead and Barber, Blunkett and Bichard. Woodhead, like the Tories, focused on the quality of every teac
her and advocated that schools should be set free from the dead-hand control of local authority officials. Blair’s team disagreed.
Woodhead was puzzled. Did Blair not understand that his proposed improvements required a drastic change to the organisation and management of the educational system? ‘They want change and think they know how to do it,’ he thought, ‘but they have no real understanding how change happens.’ He did not conceal his irritation. Blair, he considered, was ‘being taken in by Blunkett’s and Barber’s whacky initiatives’.
At the meeting, Blair simply applauded Blunkett’s fanfare. In his desire for faster change, the details evoked little interest. In the days that followed, he never summoned experts to consider the quality of Labour’s literacy and numeracy strategy. Many applauded his ‘quick grasp of detail’; they did not realise that his gift for headlines ignored the problem.
That autumn, Blunkett ordered primary schools to devote one hour every day to English and another to maths. The hours were hailed as New Labour triumphs. In reality, they had been first announced in 1995. However, the Tory programme was different from Michael Barber’s. The Tories had told teachers what to teach; Blair ordered schools how. The detailed maths curriculum instructed teachers on how to use every minute in an ‘interactive style’ for ‘whole class teaching’. The best and the worst pupils would be taught together.
