Depending on when you’re reading this, the tectonic plates of the UK’s electoral system will either be in the process of shifting or will have shifted. Either way: a new political landscape lies ahead.
From where I write – looking out at the last few days of political spats and clashing soundbites – it’s felt like an election campaign that, for education at least, has lacked a sense of vision and optimism.
And if we can’t be optimistic about education then something is miserably amiss.
Instead, each political party has served up a hasty smorgasbord of ideas and wishes. For this, we can’t perhaps criticise them too much. Two months ago, who was to know that an election would be called so soon after the last one by a party which had said it was committed to fixed-term Parliaments?
So, there has been an inevitable feeling of notes hastily scrawled on the back of a fag packet about this electoral season’s manifesto promises. And that perhaps tells us something significant about the lack of a clear political vision for our education system.
It’s something, in fact, that ASCL members continually tell me. When we were putting together the five priorities for our own manifesto principles, we sent a rapid response email request to our 18,500 primary, secondary, post-16 and business leaders.
They called on all the political parties to commit to developing a long-term, shared vision for education.
We have probably too easily come to assume that the norm of UK politics is that education policy changes with the incoming administration, or even when a new minister takes over.
History is likely to look back and think this has been damaging, because of constant swerves in policy, and costly because of the way resources have been applied to a sequence of scattered short-term projects.
So, the next government needs to put an end to piecemeal change and work with the profession to develop that vision. And it must ensure that the education system has the strong foundations which are vital to long-term success.
That means three broad priorities. First, schools and colleges must be funded properly. Schools have had to cut their budgets by £1.1 billion this year and this will rise to £3 billion by 2020. It isn’t only those working in the education sector who are concerned. The funding crisis has become the subject of huge public attention as parents see the impact of increases in class sizes, the culling of certain courses, and the shedding of staff.
A society that talks of the value of education needs to put its money where its mouth is.
The other big issue is the training and retention of teachers. Put bluntly, we need more good graduates to see teaching as their number one career choice and then we need more of them to stay in the profession.
The fact that we have one of the youngest education workforces in the developed world isn’t a badge of honour. It’s a source of deep concern. Because it means that too many teachers quickly seek to leave a career that promised the joy of motivating the next generation of global citizens, but feels too often joyless and bureaucratic.
It’s up to all of us to develop a career strategy for teaching; to reject some of the distracting practices of accountability and monitoring, and instead to trust more in the quality of our teaching teams.
Finally, we need an act of trust from government. If system leadership is to mean anything in practice, we need a moratorium on further reforms to curriculum or qualifications for the duration of the next Parliament. And we need an accountability system of proportionate inspection and constructive performance tables.
Schools must be able to concentrate on the things that really matter – recruiting teachers, giving them space to enjoy their teaching, focusing on deep rather than shallow learning, and using school-to-school support to show that any complacency and inconsistency in the system is something we will address through our own professionalism. In this way, we have a chance to make our education system great. And that should surely be cause for optimism.
- Geoff Barton is the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. Visit www.ascl.org.uk