The Changing Government of Education

Stewart Ranson, John Tomlinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351040761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1986. As the keystone of public policy-making and social reform in the post-war period, education has been expected to fuel economic growth, facilitate equality of opportunity, and afford social justice to the deprived. But its vision and objectives are now being questioned in ways which have enormous implications for the management of the service - the traditional balances of autonomy, power and accountability are being redefined.

The contributors to this book discuss the effects that this changing environment has had upon a variety of practitioners, and analyse problems and initiatives that are developing within key policy sectors in curriculum and assessment, in the professionalism of teachers, in planning, and in finance. Three major alternative strategies for resolving current dilemmas in the government of education are then reviewed: a further concentration of power at the centre; a community service which would decentralize decision-taking to schools and their local communities; a strengthening of the powers of the local authority. Finally, the editors evaluate these alternatives before proposing their own reconstruction of the government of education.

PART ONE

Strains among the Education Partners

1

Parliament

CHRIS PRICE

Partnerships are easy on a growth curve; indeed they are probably necessary. The only way successfully to spend money is to have plenty of others to help one do so. The concept in the Education Act 1944 of a central service locally administered was a markedly successful one as long as there was a rising birth rate and, therefore, rising budgets to go with it. It was the combination of the recession and the fall in the birth rate which did more than anything else to erode in the 1980s the concept of partnership in education.

Quite apart from the external pressures however, each of the partners – the local education authorities (LEAs), the teachers, the Department of Education and Science (DES) and the churches – had been coming under internal strains for some time. It was upon this scene that the reorganized Select Committee for Education, Science and the Arts arrived. Of course for the past eleven years parliamentary committees on education had existed; there had been a subcommittee of the Expenditure Committee which exercised some supervision over the DES between 1970 and 1979. But it had suffered under a whole range of disadvantages compared with its successor: first, its powers were limited – it was intended to look primarily at expenditure rather than policy or administration; secondly, it existed on mere annual leases of life at the behest of the whips – if it annoyed the government, its membership or responsibilities could be altered; and thirdly, it was not autonomous – its decisions were subject to the whims of the Expenditure Committee as a whole, where the whips could mount an exercise, if they wished, to bring its recommendations into line. This is not to say that it did not actually inquire into policy or that it did not do good work; but its work was patchy and it was incapable of stamping its mark on the education landscape anywhere near the point where it could reasonably be regarded as a ‘partner’ in the system. Like the short-lived Crossman Select Committee on Education of the late 1960s, it pointed the way without really arriving at a consistent raison d’être.

Moreover, during the 1960s and 1970s the need for a parliamentary element in the education partnership was not so stark. The old partnership of the 1944 Act was still in some sort of shape, if becoming increasingly ramshackle. It is necessary to analyse this breakdown in the confidence and effectiveness of the old partners to understand the increased parliamentary interest in education and the advent of the new Select Committee in 1979. The key to the local authority partnership in education was the Association of Education Committees, effectively run for nearly fifty years by two men, Sir Percival Sharp and Sir William Alexander. That lobby was broken by local government reform of the early 1970s and the determination of both the chief executives and the politicians (of both parties) to curb an educational empire they perceived as having become too powerful. In some authorities education was eating up nearly 70 per cent of the expenditure – but it never commanded 70 per cent of the votes on the local education authority (LEA). The creation of the Local Authority Consultative Committee by Tony Crosland in 1974 did something to bring the education lobby in local government back into partnership. But now that it was irretrievably split between the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (AMA) and the Association of County Councils (ACC), the government could divide and rule far more effectively than ever in the past. Had education been given as a responsibility to the new metropolitan councils in 1974, the story would have been different – a more united front on education and probably the survival of the metropolitan counties in 1984. But during the 1970s the local education lobby lacked an effective central bureaucracy to confront the DES; certainly lacked unity and frequently lacked leadership; was constantly harassed by cuts from central government and treasurer’s departments; and lacked too support from the local authorities’ political leaders, who were more interested in other subjects. The result was to hand over to the DES much of the control and initiative gained during the 1950s and 1960s, and to divert to parliamentary action matters which often before had been settled locally. By the time the government decided first to control and then to destroy local government in the 1980s, the educational lobby at any rate was too weak to fight back. Moreover, in terms of policy, by such action, the government had rendered the whole idea of partnership nugatory. Once again pressure through Parliament tended to fill the gap.

The story of the teachers is not so different from that of the local authorities. In the 1950s and 1960s, partly because of a lack of expertise in the DES and its predecessor, the Ministry of Education, and partly because of a tradition of leadership from the National Union of Teachers in an undefined but nevertheless quite powerful alliance with the Joint Four, there was a genuine partnership, in which the government had to take account of the teachers’ wishes over a wide area and accord to them a very substantial majority shareholding within the school curriculum. But the teachers’ lobby also became fatally weakened during the 1970s. The crowding up of teachers’ training to cope with the bulge, coupled with the subsequent erosion of teachers’ salaries in the Barber boom, all coming in the aftermath of the student revolt of 1968, left a trail of accusations that teachers were no longer delivering the goods to the community as they had in the past. ‘Teachers couldn’t teach’ was the accusation, and in some cases it was correct. During the years of overcrowding they had been trained too feebly and too fast, and then all of a sudden they were paid well under the market rate for the job. Some urban authorities were scouring the streets at home and abroad for teachers. Inevitably a minority were drawn into the schools who could not cope, but could not be removed either. Suddenly teachers, who for decades had earned a very high place in the sympathies of the public, found themselves demoted in public esteem. Their unions were perceived as interested in financial rewards rather than professional competence; a small number of the profession left to found the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT). The war between the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the National Association of Schoolmasters (NAS) went on; and the question began to be asked by politicians why should the teachers be allowed to maintain their exclusive control of the curriculum? Politicians of both the main parties tended to answer the question in the affirmative. Teachers remained partners in the system, but at a very much reduced level. The events of 1968, which eroded respect for the value of education as a whole, had lost them that ‘clinical status’ which they had built up over the decades and which most of the other professions managed to hang on to. By 1979, like the LEAs, they were a weakened force within the education system and parliamentary lobbying tended to fill the gap.

The churches (which effectively meant the Church of England and the Roman Catholics) were also no longer the power in the land which once they had been. The 1944 Act gave them the responsibility for finding half the capital expenditure they needed in exchange for being installed as formal partners within the new system. The 1944 settlement which enjoined that every child in the realm should daily sing a hymn and say a prayer and receive weekly instruction in religion was also meant to give meaning and force to this partnership. But then two things happened. First, their 50 per cent capital grant inexorably rose to 85 per cent because they – and in particular the fertile Catholics – could not possibly find the money out of their own resources to cope with the birth rate bulge; and simultaneously, the other religious provisions of the 1944 settlement fell little by little into desuetude. Morning assembly either became secular or disappeared altogether and religious education – the only statutory subject on the curriculum – became the worst taught. So the churches became beleaguered and increasingly junior partners. By 1980 they were in no position to shore up a genuine pluralist educational partnership either.

In this situation, with the traditional partners weakened, dismembered, or split, one might have expected the secretary of state and the DES to have expanded proportionately in power and influence. But in fact nothing of the kind took place. The DES was subject to many of the same pressures under which the local authorities laboured, with the Treasury fixing the budget and then the Department of the Environment, in effect, doing so all over again; and since under the 1944 Act it could not fund local authorities directly, it had to watch helplessly as the Departments of Employment and Industry did so and took over what should have been the education budget. The DES suffered from the additional handicap that it became, almost by tradition, a ministerial dustbin. It became a recipient of a succession of weak Cabinet ministers (and junior ones) who gained office because of what they were expected not to achieve rather than the reverse. Weak ministers assisted the Treasury in holding down public expenditure. (Edward Boyle used a different image; he advised me on one occasion to get out of the specialism because it was the ‘graveyard’ of politics.) True, from the mid-1970s onwards there was an increasingly successful attempt by the DES to move into the curricular gap left by the teachers. But it was a messy affair which disturbed the partnership to its core, and at first caused more trouble than it was worth.

So by the early 1980s the old partnership was crumbling. One reason why it was in worse shape than it might have been was the lack of any mediating educational forum, where the partners could sort out their complaints. The 1944 Act had made provision for this in section 2 with the words: ‘There shall be a central Advisory Committee.’ But Labour, under pressure from the civil servants, had decided in the late 1960s that the committee was a nuisance and closed it down after the Plowden Report; and the (illegal) aftermath was continued by all subsequent governments. So the vacuum was complete by the time the Conservatives won the 1979 general election – weak partners and no mediating body in the middle.

It was into this vacuum that the Select Committee effectively stepped. The origin of the new comprehensive system of Select Committees set up in 1979 was a curious and tortuous one. Michael Foot had set up a Procedure Committee in 1976 (when he was Leader of the House) hoping to smother the idea, but it was this committee, supposedly packed to kill the idea, which eventually recommended it. Meanwhile the Conservatives were looking for some policy to balance their contention that under Labour Britain was in danger of becoming a corporate state run by the trade unions. (Never in fact a serious possibility.) So they advocated the Select Committee system in their 1977 manifesto, declaring that: ‘Parliament and no other body should stand at the centre of the nation’s affairs.’ Few members of the new Conservative government were enthusiastic; but Norman St John-Stevas was and used his position as Leader of the House to set up the system before any of his colleagues could sabotage it. Then the Conservatives opted for the chairmanships they wanted, leaving to the Opposition ‘unimportant’ ones like Education, Health, Housing and Transport. Thus it was that by the end of 1979 I found myself chairman of the Education Select Committee, a body with the potential to command substantial authority within and over the traditional education partnership and to play an important part in helping to establish a new English education consensus.

It started with advantages over the old Central Advisory Council. Its members had security of tenure for the full five years of the Parliament. It had an independent body of clerks who were employed by, and responsible to, not the DES but the House of Commons. It had powers to supplement the clerks, in theory to an unlimited extent, by calling on whatever educational expertise there was in the country which it wished to employ. So though it never became an education system ‘partner’ in the traditional sense, it had the potential to re-create some of the old partnership and to reassure the old partners that there was an institution in being that could prevent the power of government becoming absolute.

It is probably too early to pronounce definitively on the committee’s influence; but it is important to understand the role of the committee not so much in terms of its formal powers, but rather in terms of the aims and objectives which I, at any rate, set myself and with which I suspect most of my colleagues also sympathized.

The primary role of the committee was simply to be there, ready to ask searching questions in public, as soon as the right moment came. No minister or civil servant could take any action, without pausing first to think how that action might shape up under scrutiny from the committee. Almost its most important role was, as the lawyers say, ‘in terrorem’.

Secondly, it was a positive boost for the DES civil servants and inspectors. Sinking morale is the most serious infectious disease from which departments of state can suffer – and the DES was suffering seriously in 1979. There were occasional complaints from ministers that we were putting an unwarrantable burden of work upon the DES. I knew the reverse to be the truth. The fact that their actions were being discussed and talked about in the highest forum in the land was a positive incentive to them for more effective work – even if it did mean that from time to time they had to be scrutinized in public about that work.

Thirdly, it was a boost to the partners as a whole – the teachers, the local authorities and the churches. Though each of them kept their traditional direct access to the minister, if that failed, they could always brief the Select Committee and see whether the power of scrutiny, publicity and persuasion in Parliament would work better results.

Fourthly, we became an extremely important extra conduit of educational information and news for the press. In the 1960s almost every daily paper had an education correspondent, often two of them. By 1980 the number was falling; I believe that it might have dropped still further had it not been for the public sessions we held, the briefings which I and others gave in advance of them and the general interest aroused by the regular scrutiny to which ministers and civil servants were subjected.

Finally, through our public sessions, the recommendations in our reports and private contacts (of which there were many) we were able to present to ministers a menu of sensible, ‘non-party’ courses of action for them to follow. To a greater or lesser degree the creation of the National Advisory Body, legislation for local authority direct funding, the publication of HM Inspectorate annual reports and the shift from norm- to criterion-referencing in examinations all have the influence of the Select Committee behind them. So did the quite marked change in the DES towards openness about their activities at all levels.

The above is a list of the positive influences of the committee. But we also stopped the government making serious mistakes through regular and sometimes aggressive scrutiny of prospective policies. Had there not been a Select Committee, both students’ loans (instead of grants) and school vouchers might well have got off the ground and then collapsed in ignominious failure. With the prospect of Select Committee scrutiny at every point, it simply was not worth the candle.

During the period of four years while the committee was in operation the education budget suffered regular annual cuts. There was little that we as a Select Committee could do about these – except try to make explicit what was happening and how it was affecting standards in the schools. But though we could not stop the cuts, we made it easier through publicity at our sessions and the publication of the HMI reports for others to mitigate their effects. The fact that a national argument developed about the connection between education standards and education expenditure was almost entirely due to the efforts of the Select Committee. So the Select Committee fell into the national role of a consensus-producing body – in touch with government, the media and all the pressure groups and able, on a number of occasions, to work out formulae, which government was not willing to and the pressure groups, individually, were not able to. We had the additional advantage that we could stray over the departmental boundaries of ‘education’, for example, summoning to give evidence David Young and officials of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) to explain how the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) and the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) fitted in to education policy. Through their four-year existence all the Select Committees developed ‘trading’ relations of this kind throughout their four years of existence, each allowing others to invade their territory when it seemed sensible. The Education Committee inquired into the MSC, the Home Office Committee looked at multi-ethnic education, the Health Committee looked at higher education for medical manpower, and so on. We were far less proprietorial about departmental ‘territory’ than were government departments. Sir Keith Joseph’s new enthusiasm for the ‘practical curriculum’ had much of its origins in the all-party recommendations of the Select Committee.

So the Education Select Committee is not the only House of Commons body with something to say about education; nor have the new Select Committees a monopoly of scrutiny powers. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is the most senior of all the Commons committees and has a very specific role – to ensure that public money is spent on what it is meant to be spent on and accounted for properly. Moreover, the comptroller and auditor-general has powers which the staff of other Select Committees do not have: he can go into government departments and look at the books. For this reason all departments tend to take the PAC more seriously than the other committees; they tend to react to its reports rather more rapidly. But because it is fundamentally interested in money rather than policy, from time to time it gets its lines tangled with departmental Select Committees. We recommended an increase in the ‘home fee’ element of financing higher education because we felt it was one way of identifying institutions which could actually recruit students; the PAC recommended a decrease to discourage them from recruiting over the unenforceable University Grants Committee (UGC) norm. The DES took no notice of us, but succumbed to the Public Accounts Committee. So although the advent of the Education Select Committee has added a new dimension to partnership, it only represents part of ‘Parliament’s’ point of view – if indeed that phrase can be held to mean anything at all. It is seldom that the report of a Select Committee is actually debated on the floor of the House of Commons. There are, from time to time, little flashes of resentment that the nine MPs (now eleven) can represent a ’parliamentary’ view. I have never accepted this. However small the sample, the arguments within the Select Committee were almost always a microcosm of the sort of arguments which would have taken place within a larger sample of MPs. With all its inadequacies, the Select Committee was the first forum in which any sort of dialogue between Parliament and the world of education became possible.

So far we have mainly discussed the changing role of Parliament, brought about by the introduction of the Select Committee, and the extent to which we thus influenced ministerial decisions. But the attitude of ministers has always been subject to a range of other influences – some ideological but most of them economic. The past five years have been unprecedentedly contradictory ones for Secretaries of State for Education. Their duties under the law to ensure the provision of a decent education system have constantly clashed with duties to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, denying local authorities th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedications
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction by Stewart Ranson and John Tomlinson
• Part One Strains Among the Education Partners
• 1 Parliament by Chris Price
• 2 The Department of Education and Science by Edward Simpson
• 3 The Local Authority Associations by Jack Springett
• 4 The County LEA by Geoffrey Mortis
• 5 The Metropolitan LEA by William Stubbs
• 6 The Teachers by John Sayer
• 7 The Inspectors by Norman Thomas
• 8 The Listening School: Parents and the Public by Joan Sallis
• 9 The MSC by Geoffrey Holland
• Part Two Analysing Developments in Policy Sectors
• 10 Curriculum and Assessment by Denis Lawton
• 11 Teacher Professionalism and Professionalization by John Eggleston
• 12 Managing Contraction by Kieron Walsh
• 13 Finance of Education by Tony Travers
• Part Three Scenarios for the Government of Education
• 14 A National Service: Strengthening the Centre I by Maurice Feston
• 15 A National Service: Strengthening the Centre II by Barry Taylor
• 16 A Community Service: Strengthening the Institution I by David Hargreaves
• 17 A Community Service: Strengthening the Institution II by Tim Brighouse
• 18 A Local Service: Strengthening the LEA by John Stewart
• Part Four Conclusions
• 19 An Alternative View of Education and Society by Stewart Ranson and John Tomlinson
• 20 Government for a Learning Society by Stewart Ranson
• 21 The Education System Restructured by John Tomlinson
• Index