Rendering Michael Gove speechless - Melissa Benn on the fight for Britain's schools
Teachers in London are gearing up to strike next week over pensions and teachers in Newcastle will walk out on Thursday over planned changes to school term times. It is clear that many people working in the education system feel under attack due to huge cuts and changes being implemented by the Coalition government. Among the host of new measure, perhaps the most controversial is the introduction of so-called 'free schools' which can be run by parents, charities, religious groups and, most worryingly, private businesses.
This week, Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg argued that the government should be funding places in primary schools, rather than free schools, arguing that the equivalent of 2,000 primary schools' worth of children - some 450,000 - need to be found places in England's schools by 2015. He accuses the government of ignoring the growing problem and claims that much of the money promised for new places has been already ear-marked for free schools - the majority of which are secondaries where pupil numbers are falling.
The battle for the future of Britian's education system seems to be reaching fever pitch. It is in this context that Melissa Benn, author of School Wars: the Battle for Britain's Education, has written a diary for the New Statesman of her own struggles to defend comprehensive education and the democratically elected local organisations that facilitate it, by bringing her argument to a wider public. She writes about meeting concerned parents and teachers all over the country, being personally denounced by Michael Gove, and how to continue the fight for fair education.
August 2011 Back from holiday, geared up for the usual trials of publication, and then some. Such is the polarised landscape around education that a book defending the gains of the comprehensive movement and arguing for more resources and less selection is bound to make a large part of the nation - and the media - see red, particularly as the first batch of free schools is about to open. The C-word has become a dirty word over the past decades; class anxiety and ambition still strongly shape our school system. Yet the top-performing systems around the world - those of Finland and South Korea, for example - are non-selective.
I am a little surprised to find the Guardian's education editor, Jeevan Vasagar, take to Twitter to denounce an article I have written, in his own paper, on the continuing inequalities in our education system as "incoherent and despairing". The civil servant Sam Freedman, policy adviser to Michael Gove, jumps in to agree with him. Aren't civil servants supposed to retain a degree of political impartiality?
September 2011 Gove defends free schools in the London Evening Standard, describing the "principal opponents" of the policy as "Tony Benn's daughter, the Hon Melissa Benn, and Alastair Campbell's partner, Fiona Millar . . . well-connected media types from London's most privileged circles". This is a bit rich. What two middle-aged men, with years of political, journalistic and campaigning experience between them, would be described solely in relation to their mothers and wives? As for Gove, an intimate ally of Rupert Murdoch, claiming that it is his critics who are part of the privileged media establishment, well, that's laughable.
As the first free schools open, most newspapers follow the government line that they are an important, socially just innovation. I wonder. How much are they a conscience-salve for the many editors and columnists who have educated their children privately and are now glad to support pseudo-private institutions such as Toby Young's West London Free School, with its Latin mottos and teachers in flowing black gowns? Free schools hand over precious funding at a time of austerity to an unproven and suspiciously inegalitarian social experiment.
Over the months, I engage in reasonably good-tempered debates with everyone from Robert McCartney QC, chairman of the National Grammar Schools Association, to Anthony Seldon, 13th Master of Wellington College. Odd, then, that a cosy-sounding lunchtime "seminar" at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in the City of London turns out to be my most difficult meeting yet. Under its chief executive, Matthew Taylor, a former adviser to Tony Blair at No 10, the genteel arts organisation sponsors a number of academies. The RSA has invited me to debate my case publicly with Lucy Heller, managing director of Ark, one of the more successful academy chains and a charitable schools provider set up by hedge-fund millionaires.
Heller is an interesting character, committed to the comprehensive cause, if under the academies rubric. I lay out my concerns about the lack of democratic accountability in the academy and free school movements, including the whopping sums earned by some at the top of the new chains, such as the former schools commissioner Bruce Liddington, who was reputed to earn £280,000-plus as the head of the schools chain E-Act. I express concern at the emerging "two-tier" local ecology of schools, similar to the charter school movement in the US, which has been so damaging to the public (state) school system there.
Heller argues that academies are the best way to improve poorer children's results and then rather strangely uses the (rapidly improving) results at my daughters' community school to construct her anti-comprehensive case. Francis Beckett, education writer and New Statesman contributor, cancels his RSA subscription later that afternoon in protest at the personal tenor of the attacks on me from both Heller and the audience. It is certainly an odd experience to be barracked by Tory Westminster councillors implying that they are the true guardians of educational quality. Anyone remember the shocking state of our schools in the 1980s and early to mid-1990s?
Visit the New Statesman to read Melissa Benn's diary in full.