Education in a Federal UK

John Furlong, Ingrid Lunt, John Furlong, Ingrid Lunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351244053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Britain's two recent referenda - on Brexit (2016) and on Scottish independence (2014) - have raised in the public mind fundamental questions about the future of the UK. It seems that for the first time, the public, the media and the political elite have woken up to the fact that in different parts of the UK, there are different histories, different aspirations and different imagined futures in relation to a whole range of vitally important political issues. But what the public debate often fails to recognise is that in many areas of public life – perhaps especially education – the UK is already a federal state and in key respects has been so for many years.

The aim of this volume is therefore to take stock: to try and capture what the current state of educational policy and practice is across the whole of the UK. This has been achieved by commissioning two different papers from each of the four countries – Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. The first is an overview, exploring the distinctive history, principles and current policies of each country. The second paper has been specifically chosen as a case study of a key policy that highlights the distinctiveness of each country – the Foundation Phase for Wales, assessment policy in Scotland, 'shared education' initiatives in Northern Ireland and higher education policy in England. Taken together these eight papers give an important insight into the complexities of educational policy and practice across the whole of the UK today. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Oxford Review of Education.

Education and nationalism in Scotland: governing a ‘learning nation’

Margaret Arnott and Jenny Ozga

ABSTRACT
Nationalism is a key resource for the political work of governing Scotland, and education offers the Scottish National Party (SNP) government a policy space in which political nationalism (self determination) along with social and cultural forms of civic nationalism can be formed and propagated, through referencing ‘inwards’ to established myths and traditions that stress the ‘public’ nature of schooling/education/universities and their role in construction of ‘community’; and referencing ‘outwards’, especially to selected Nordic comparators, but also to major transnational actors such as OECD, to education’s role in economic recovery and progress. The SNP government has been very active in the education policy field, and a significant element of its activity lies in promoting a discourse of collective learning in which a ‘learning government’ is enabled to lead a ‘learning nation’ towards the goal of independence. This paper draws on recent research to explore recent and current developments in SNP government education policy, drawing on discourse analysis to highlight the political work that such policy developments seek to do, against the backdrop of continuing constitutional tensions across the UK.

Introduction

In this paper, we locate education policy within the framework of recent and current debates about the future governance of Scotland, and, indeed, of the UK. We first summarise developments in the governing relationship of Scotland to the UK, which set a complex and contested context for this discussion, before reviewing aspects of the Scottish National Party’s education policy since 2007, with an emphasis on the ways in which that policy mobilises some of the resources of nationalist sentiment, while also pursuing modernising, economy-focused goals. The SNP government seeks to combine often-competing agendas in education through discursive framing of its policy as combining supposedly national characteristics with intelligent responses to current economic challenges: this is a demanding strategy, and we highlight the significance of discursive resources in sustaining it. It is not our purpose to assess the merit or otherwise of the SNP policy, rather we wish to illustrate the ways in which SNP policy in education works to mobilise a narrative of a ‘journey to independence’ drawing on historically-embedded themes and myths about fairness, while also referencing particular societies (i.e. the Nordic states). In so doing, we are emphasising the importance of education to the work of governing, against the backdrop of continuing uncertainty about Scotland’s place in the UK.

Federalism?

Throughout the 20th century the governance of the UK and the relationship between Scotland and the UK were recurring subjects of political and constitutional debate (Mitchell, 2014; UK Government, 2014a, 2015). These debates intensified following the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 and the election of a Conservative UK government in May 2015. The September 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and subsequent events signally failed to settle the issue of Scotland’s future and that of the UK—a failure illustrated in the election of 56 Scottish National Party (SNP) MPs to the UK Parliament in the UK General Election of May 2015. The idea of a federal redesign of the UK state had emerged in discussion as the 2014 Scottish Referendum approached: Unionist politicians in the ‘Better Together’ campaign alluded to the potential for the UK to move towards federalism. Gordon Brown, former Labour Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, argued in the weeks leading up to the referendum that if a No vote was secured the UK would be a ‘federal state within two years’ with each territory and region across the UK having equal status and a UK federal government remaining responsible for defence and foreign affairs (Brown, 2014; Whitaker, 2014). The day after the Scottish Referendum, David Cameron spoke about the need to progress with plans for further devolution in Scotland, setting up the Smith Commission on further devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament, which reported in November 2014 (Smith Commission, 2014).

However, Cameron stated that these plans for further devolution would be developed in tandem with reform in the Westminster Parliament aimed at ensuring English votes for English laws (BBC, 2014; UK Government, 2014b). For Cameron, further devolution for Scotland was linked to solving the problem presented by demands for ‘English votes for English laws’ (EVEL) in order, their supporters claimed, to give MPs in English constitutencies rights to consider and vote on legislation only applying in England, in the same way as the Scottish parliament could debate and legislate on matters only relating to Scotland. This problem was pressing because it was an issue that UKIP (the Unitied Kingdom Independence Party) was likely to exploit in the May 2015 UK General Election, at the cost of Conservative votes. So the interest in EVEL was driven by the need for a quick political fix rather than conscious commitment to steps towards development of a federal UK state.

Following the referendum vote on 18 September 2014, Alex Salmond announced that he planned to resign from the posts of SNP party leader and First Minister of Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister in the Scottish Parliament and putative successor to both of these posts, noted:

In the few days before the referendum the language being used was the language of substantial radical change—devo max, something close to federalism, home rule. That is the expectation that has been generated […]. Unless we end up with a package that is substantial, the backlash against the Westminster parties is going to be severe. (BBC, 2014)

We can see, then, that increasingly heterogeneous political projects have developed and are developing within the increasingly fragile UK polity; it is also apparent that the idea of federalism has been invoked as a resource that can be mobilised against the independence agenda, but without much attention to what federalism might mean for the redesign of UK governance. In any event, tension between the SNP governing ‘project’ of independence and the UK government’s attempts to preserve the union exists not only on the fundamental issues of independence versus unionism and the UK’s relationship with the EU, but in relation to a range of social and public policy directions, including deficit reduction, where the SNP government in Scotland opposes austerity. Further key areas where the SNP favours policies at odds with the UK government’s position include implementing progressive personal taxation, ending the UK’s Trident nuclear deterrent, using public funds to address poverty, including in mitigation of costs incurred by individuals as a consequence of the so-called bedroom tax, free state education including support grants for school, further and higher education students, opposition to privatisation of education or health provision, and increased pay and employment protection for public sector workers (SNP, 2015; Sturgeon, 2013). Post-September 2014 proposals for enhanced devolution set out in the Smith Commission Report and also the UK Coalition government’s Command Paper Scotland in the UK: the enduring union further politicised debates about increasing interdependencies between devolved policy areas in Scotland and the UK government. The 2015 UK General Election campaign raised issues about the constitutional future of the UK. These issues drew attention to the inter-connectedness and inter-relationships within the asymmetrically devolved UK. Such issues included future devolved powers to Scotland including over welfare reform, fiscal powers, the respective voting powers of MPs from Scottish constituencies and MPs from English constituencies. Following the Smith Commission and the Scotland Bill 2015, interdependencies between devolved and reserved powers including education became more visible. Moreover, the introduction of ‘English votes for English laws’, which excludes MPs representing Scottish constituencies from votes on matters that are judged to be restricted to England, is seen by some Unionist politicians and commentators as inevitably contributing to the eventual demise of the Union (Brown, 2015; Mason & Brookes, 2015). Developments in education policy in Scotland in recent years and currently need to be placed in the context of this tense and unsettled relationship.

Education, nationalism and the devolution ‘settlement’

Historically, the relationship between education and the nation has been established as one in which education (more properly schooling) was well understood by governments as a significant contributor to their capacity to govern, through its creation of a common space of meaning, around identification with the nation. As Novoa puts it: ‘education is, by definition, the space for the construction of national identity’ (2000, p. 46).

In Europe, most national education and training systems developed in the 19th and 20th centuries as negotiated settlements between nation-building states and organised labour, more or less advancing agendas driven by enlightenment commitments to individual equality and collective progress. These agendas were framed by nation-building activities to which systems of schooling contributed through strengthening national economies, addressing social problems and influencing the distribution of individual life chances. Education systems also sought to ‘define, replicate and ensure the national distinctiveness’ of nation states (Dale, 2006, p. 373), a role that varied depending on the political history of the nation-state in question. In the UK, it was and is a key factor in sustaining the identity of the ‘stateless nation’ of Scotland (McCrone, 1992).

Indeed a distinctive narrative of education provision (Arnott, 2005, 2008) has distinguished education provision in Scotland from that of its larger, more powerful neighbour, despite Scotland’s membership of the United Kingdom from the Union of the Parliaments in 1707. In the absence of a Scottish state, the key Scottish institutions (the law, the church and education) maintained a Scottish identity: education/schooling in Scotland was an element in the assertion of continued distinctiveness from England, supported by established and embedded myths and traditions that continued and continue to reference the public nature of schooling in Scotland and promote its contemporary role in both the construction of community and in driving progress.

The historically-embedded themes of 20th-century Scottish education—especially strong in the period of post-1945 social democracy (McPherson & Raab, 1988)—are reflected in the relative uniformity of school provision (through a comprehensive school system), greater social mobility, meritocracy, especially the recognition of talent and its fostering regardless of social class, a broad curriculum uniting sciences, arts and humanities and public support for teachers and for education more generally. These elements together are said to construct the ‘Democratic Intellect’ (Davie, 1961)—a combination of academic excellence and social openness that enables a career open to talents, or in the Scottish idiom, enables the career of the ‘lad and lass o’pairts’. These themes can certainly be interrogated empirically: the point we are making here is that they create a mythology of Scottish education that offers powerful resources for the construction of a nationalist narrative. People in Scotland are offered the opportunity to identify as inheritors of a tradition that values fairness and inclusivity, while also achieving academic excellence, combined, since the introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence, with a judicious dose of personal and practical development.

In the immediate period following political devolution in 1999 these embedded references were somewhat muted by pressure for convergence in policy across the UK, because in that period the Labour Party was in power in both Holyrood and in Westminster, and as a consequence there were common themes in education policy in both Scotland and England—themes such as choice, privatisation and standards (Croxford & Raffe, 2007). These tended to be actively promoted by the Westminster UK government and reflected in policy in Scotland. However, even with this close relationship there were divergences: policy in Scotland sometimes conveyed an uneasy blending of rather contradictory approaches: for example in the field of education the ‘Ambitious Excellent Schools’ programme (Scottish Executive, 2004) echoed English based reforms in its apparent support for the introduction of more diversity in provision but within a framework that stressed the centrality of the principle of comprehensive provision. In fact, comprehensive provision remains the norm in Scotland, and the various forms of diversity in provision such as academies and Free Schools that characterise provision in England have not developed.

In the wider political arena, tensions emerged throughout the period from 2000 to 2007 about whether political devolution was to be understood as a ‘settlement’ or as a ‘process’. Perhaps the key point is that the UK government understood devolution to the Assemblies/Parliaments in the non-English UK as, indeed, a settlement, that would satisfy demands for greater autonomy and reduce support for nationalist political parties, including, especially, the SNP; but the asymmetrical nature of devolution (Arnott, 2015) and the untidiness of some of the arrangements resulted in continuous debate about areas of overlap and uncertainty. For example, among the areas of policy-making ‘reserved’ to the UK government are pensions, benefits, employment law, immigration and defence. Debates over, for exampl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Education in a Federal UK
• 1. Education and nationalism in Scotland: governing a ‘learning nation’
• 2. The meaning of curriculum-related examination standards in Scotland and England: a home–international comparison
• 3. The politics of education and the misrecognition of Wales
• 4. Implementing curriculum reform in Wales: the case of the Foundation Phase
• 5. Education in England – a testbed for network governance?
• 6. The Coalition’s higher education reforms in England
• 7. Education in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement: Kabuki theatre meets danse macabre
• 8. Shared education in Northern Ireland: school collaboration in divided societies
• Index