Disability History Month Launch and How Labour Should Fight on Education
Blog 14 November 2023 We celebrate the Disability History Month launch and James Whiting looks at how state education has deteriorated under the Tories, and how Labour could reverse it .
Disability equality is often ignored in education planning and provision. Richard Rieser, UK Disability Month Co-ordinator sets out the issues and the history of discrimination
Disabled children (aged 8-17) are clear about what they want for a better world: as they told the Children’s Commissioner in England in March 2023 (a representative sample of 3,593)
o To be understood, seen and heard;
o To benefit from a fantastic, ambitious education in mainstream school where possible and support at school when they need it;
o For all activities and services to be accessible;
o To receive high-quality care locally and quickly;
o To be free from harassment and discrimination;
o For transitions to be smooth and prepare them for adulthood;
o For services to see them as part of a family, and to take a whole family approach.
After many years of cuts, austerity and failure to effectively implement the Equality Act, in the UK today voices of disabled young people are still marginalised, there is increasing segregation in schools, a lack of access and support in the community and failure to provide families of disabled children with the support they need. Their aspirations are not being met.
Taking a longer historical view, the cruelty, isolation, segregation of the workhouse, institution, asylums and residential schools of the 200 years to 1980 has largely been banished. But the ideas of otherness, prejudicial thinking, under valuing remains. Gains in medicine and welfare have banished or minimised many of the childhood impairments that dominated the C19th and first part of C20th. Only to be replaced by a new range of impairing conditions, such as learning difficulties, neuro-diversity and mental health issues that can lead to just as damaging disabling barriers, discriminations and practices.
Efforts of the Disabled People’s Movement in the UK in the last 50 years has led to the state increasingly accepting a ‘social model’ approach to disability, putting the focus on the barriers in environment, attitudes and culture, communication, access and organisation that people with a multitude of impairments face, resulting in their disablement. In doing this they challenge the individualistic /medical approach to disability that in various forms does still dominate the life of disabled people.
Since 2006, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has broadened the ‘social model’ perspective into enforceable human rights. Although ratified in the UK (though not incorporated into British Law) and in most countries of the world, the implementation of this rights’ based approach remains a dream, yet to be fulfilled. For disabled people economic, social and cultural disadvantage, isolation, harassment and exclusion remain far too common in post austerity, post Covid UK.
The UNCRPD Committee heavily criticised the UK Government seven years ago in 2016 finding grave and systematic violations of their treaty obligations. This disregard seems to be continuing as at a special session of the Committee in August 2023 to see how things had improved, the UK Government decided not to attend.
In the UK children and young people born with or acquiring various long-term conditions or impairments are still predominantly viewed through the lens of their medical diagnosis/label, as in ‘deficit’ compared to ‘normal’ non-disabled children and young people. The concept of Special Educational Needs (SEN), rather than the Disability Right to Inclusion predominates. SEN and related medical assessments determine the resources provided to the disabled child or young person in an increasingly dysfunctional and inefficient and oppressive Education System. SEN resources are increasingly the sticking plaster of a failing system.
You can read more about the history of how disabled children have been treated here
The Myth of Tory Success in Education Policy
The Tories and their friends in the media think they have transformed education for the better. But where is the evidence? James Whiting looks at the claims.
From the recent bellicose remarks on X (1) about Labour by Gillian Keegan it appears the Tories will feature education as an area where they can score points from Labour in the coming election. Bagehot in the Economist (2) recently claimed education in schools to be the government’s only success. How far is this true? Across the system we expose most of the Tories’ record as a carefully confected myth.
Funding
The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ most recent analysis (3) states the funding boost of £2.3 billion announced last year will only return school spending to 2010 levels – when the Conservatives came into power – by 2024-25. Prior to that, the IFS said school spending per pupil ‘declined by about 9% in real terms in the decade up to 2020’
Teacher Pay
The government reneged on properly funding the new pay deal. For starting teachers, this deal represents a small cut in real terms since 2010 (IFS 2023)(4) because the government focused rises on new teachers. For serving teachers the cut ranges from 4 to 12 percent in real terms;- those with most experience have suffered the biggest shortfall..
Teacher Retention
‘It is … true that teacher numbers have increased in England since 2010. ….This is an increase of 6.6 per cent. But, using the actual number of teachers is misleading. This is because the number of pupils in England has increased by around 12 per cent in the same time period, which actually means there are way fewer teachers per-pupil than in 2010.In 2010, there were roughly 18 pupils to every one teacher. Now there are more than 19 ’ (Schools Week 2023)(5)
‘The overwhelming issue for teachers is workload, chosen by 73% of those intending to leave in two years and 72% of those intending to go in five years. When re-weighted as a comparison with last year’s survey, which covered England teachers only, this is an increase from around two-thirds. Worryingly, some 90% of 20-29-year-olds cite workload as a reason behind their planning to leave within five years.’ (NEU) (6)
Teacher Recruitment
Recruitment is currently 48% below target. Only half of the required number of trainee secondary school teachers in England have been recruited as the academic year gets under way, analysis shows. The figures, obtained by the National Education Union (NEU) and the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), show ministers are on course to miss their recruitment targets by 48%. (Guardian Sept 2023) (7)
Teaching Reading
We await a full analysis of the latest PISA results. Gibb et al are boasting about 10 year old pupils reading in England performing 4th out of 43 education systems in ‘PIRLS’ (8). The top 3 are Singapore, Hong Kong and Russia. The results for England are from 2021 and standards have not significantly increased since 2016. Rather the international median has declined over that period. (9) Spielman in her 2022 blog still complained about the 17500 year 7 pupils who were below their chronological age in reading on entering secondary school. (10) The Tories can claim pupils have improved in synthetic phonics tests as teachers have been more skilled in delivering the programme. The jury is still out as to whether excluding all other teaching methods apart from synthetic phonics, is improving reading standards overall. A report by Dominic Wyse et al from the UCL questions the efficacy of this approach. ‘The researchers’ analysis of systematic reviews, the 55 experimental trials, and data from international assessment tests such as PISA*, suggests that teaching reading in England has been less successful since the adoption of the synthetic phonics approach. The most rigorous experimental trials have tested children’s reading some years after the interventions finished. Studies from Canada and Norway, for example, clearly showed that effective teaching of phonics teaching and reading was delivered by class teachers who combined phonics with teaching of whole texts in phonics/reading lessons. As a result, the gains for children were statistically significant resulting in them making better progress’ UCL news 2022.(11)
OFSTED inspection results
The Tories like to claim that 88% of schools under them are rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ . This is misleading because ‘outstanding’ schools were exempted from inspection between 2012 and 2020 leaving a considerable 20% of schools not being reinspected. Now inspections have been brought back for ‘outstanding’ schools 80% of those recently inspected have been downgraded, (Independent Nov 2022) (12) suggesting, if you go along with OFSTED as a reliable judge as the DFE do, that the quality of education is declining rather than increasing.
Narrowing the attainment gap
‘The attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers has shrunk by 7% since 2011 at KS4 and 9.3% at KS2’ claims Nick Gibb 2017 (13)
This appears no longer to be a claim Keegan et all want to promote. Evidence points to the contrary conclusion. An IFS /Nuffield report from 2022 (14) states there has been no improvement in the gap over the past 20 years. The latest DFE report on 2023 performance data states at Key stage 2 (15) ‘‘The disadvantage gap in 2023 is similar across subjects, ranging from 18 percentage points in reading and science to 20 percentage points in maths.’ And ‘The KS4 (16) disadvantage gap index has widened compared to 2021/22, from 3.84 to 3.95. It is now at its highest level since 2011. Before the pandemic, the gap index had widened going from 3.66 to 3.70 between 2017 and 2019, before narrowing slightly in 2020 to 3.66 when centre assessed grades were used’
Raising standards in Technical and Vocational Education.
The Tories have abjectly failed in their attempt to implement a new ‘rigorous’ technical qualification, T levels, to match A level. The OFSTED report (17) into its introduction is damning showing high drop-out rates, assessment failures and irrelevant work experience. Yet still they insist on defunding well regarded qualifications such as BTEC
Rolling out apprenticeships
A Progressive Britain Article, ‘The Tory Apprenticeship Failures’ (18) states ‘Public spending on apprenticeships has generally been significantly over-budgeted and mismanaged. In 2019/20, the funding was set to rise to over £2.5 billion. In 2020/21, it was set to hit £4.1 billion. This year, £2 billion of the underspent levy was returned to the Treasury. In 2019/20, only 45% achieved the required standards. In 2020/21 the figure improved to 58%. Last summer, Skills Minister Alex Burghart announced a set of new packages to improve the achievement target to 67% by 2025, but with no clear strategy on how to improve the starts of apprenticeships or achieve the targets’
Investing in Infrastructure
Warwick Mansell found in his article for the Guardian (19) ‘Between 2011 and 2018, £1.7bn was spent on site acquisition and construction for 221 free schools. On average over this period, that is £959,000 per free school, per year. By comparison, a National Audit Office (NAO) report published in June revealed that, from 2016 to 2023, annual spending across the remainder of England’s 21,600 state-funded schools on “major rebuilding and refurbishment” equated to just £26,070 per school, per year’. The Tories have prioritised their ideological project above school safety for all. This is a major cause of the RACC crisis affecting 150 schools. The introduction of Regional Schools Directors to oversee the academies sector has created an additional 500 civil servants at a cost of more than £30 million a year.
How Labour should oppose the Tories on education.
Labour can’t just tinker with the unfolding disaster which is the current education service, it has to expose Tory failure and set out alternatives
Funding
The Tories are open to attack on funding, teachers’ pay recruitment and retention but Labour are nervous about committing public spending to address these. We would argue this is partly about priorities and returning education to its position where 5.8 of GDP was spent on it is the right way to go. Education is an investment for the future too both in terms of the economy and the wellbeing of citizens. The catalogue of failure above can only be addressed with significant additional funding.
Academisation
A second area is the chaos, waste of public funds and lack of accountability caused by free schools and academisation. Again Labour has been reluctant to take this on. The National Policy forum document sets out a policy area entitled ‘Schools rooted in their local communities’ but misses the point entirely and risks further complicating the already fragmented system further by demanding ‘collaboration and cooperation in the best interests of children’. Schools belonging to MATS are currently not, apart from for inspection purposes, individual entities under the law but merely outlets for that MAT in the same way. that individual supermarket branches are not independent businesses. It is not clear with whom schools in the area are supposed to collaborate – supposedly local authorities who have no powers to force them. Labour could argue for starting the process of dismantling these unaccountable behemoths and bringing back stand-alone academies to local authority control. If it dare not go that far then why not adopt the proposals John Bolt puts forward on the SEA blog? (21) Why not stop the pretence that politicians know what is best for schools (e.g.the latest back of the envelope proposals on primary maths, actually numeracy) and give teachers, parents, the community and pupils a voice in the running of their schools?
Another group of schools which cream off pupils from a wide area and therefore have a weak relationship with the community in which they are situated, is grammar schools. The Slough Grammars recruit from West London and the trains coming back into Central London in the afternoon from Sutton and Kingston carry pupils returning to their communities from the elite grammars. Time for Labour to take this on.
Ironically, it is Nick Gibb who knows how important structures are to an education project:-
‘My position (on structures) changed in that period [of 2010 to 2012]. I always thought, ‘Structures, well, fine - but it’s [standards] we have to sort out.’ Then I realised that if you have schools under the control of local authorities, and they are not permitted or advised to teach phonics or multiplication tables, then it is very difficult for my agenda to be successful. So, the academies movement was crucial in liberating the profession from that control.’ Interview with TES (22)
It is difficult to explain the refusal of Labour to take on those who have benefitted so much from the Tory project. The MATS CEOs are the new blob who now advise on the curriculum, control OFQUAL and OFSTED and are in the process of taking over teacher education. Are they too nervous of the reaction from right wing media etc or do they accept their agenda and want to work with them? It is clear that no radical change which reaches the whole system can work unless they are replaced.
Also this is a resources issue. The funds made available from taxing private school fees which we support, is supposed to be funding extra teachers, mental health workers, careers advisers and breakfast clubs. Abolishing regional commissioners, and capping MATS CEO salaries could direct much needed funds to the front line in the classroom.
Infrastructure
Surprisingly, Labour has not yet committed to ending further academisation and more free schools though this is implied by the NPF document which points to LAs controlling admissions and place planning. Labour has been rightly critical of the government’s record on school buildings and the RACC crisis. It should now commit to funding safety work in RACC affected schools funded by ending the free schools programme and, when capital becomes available, reviving a similar programme to Building Schools for the Future.
Curriculum, Assessment, Pedagogy and ITT
Nick Gibb et al has been successful in transforming the curriculum and assessment now delivered in our schools in line with his project based on the thinking of E.D. Hirsch. Whilst outwardly successful on its own terms, we believe it is a major factor in the failure to recruit and retain teachers. The Initial Teacher Training coup, under cover of a market review, is in the process of imposing a pedological style across the system. Teachers are no longer exposed to a range of strategies and techniques which they can critically scrutinise and select from. Gove insisted on all teachers holding at least a 2.1 degree. This has fallen by the wayside but it is hard to imagine graduates used to thinking critically in their subjects just accepting teaching methodologies imposed from on high without being able to scrutinise them. Instead, teachers are expected to conform to lesson frameworks often imposed from the top, based on the new core content framework, and often involving micro-scripts. Nick Gibb, a politician with no training in teaching is quite comfortable telling teachers which pedological style works best. ‘The most effective, teacher-led practices should be twinned with a knowledge-rich curriculum’ Nick Gibb 2017 (23). We have no time to debunk his applying one study in one subject, Science, to the whole of pedagogy and no time to point out that pitting direct instruction against enquiry-based approaches is a false dichotomy as most teachers would use both.
Brigid Phillipson recently remarked in response to a question in an interview that it is teachers who argue about whether knowledge or skills is more important implying such discussion is beneath her. She is wrong or perhaps she wants to dodge the debate. It is the Tory imposed ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum based on the ideas of the American educationalist E.D. Hirsch which is preventing teachers even having that conversation. What has changed beyond recognition in the service now is the marginalisation of alternative viewpoints from trade unions, subject associations and academics. Right wing politicians personified in the main by Nick Gibb, the DFE, OFSTED, the main MATS leaders, the new Institute of Teaching are united in seeing education through the Hirsch lens. In spite of the fact, this ideology only really operates in the US in some schools, and is not the guiding principle in the other three UK countries, it is accepted in England as orthodoxy. Such is the transformation. Labour appear uncertain as to how to tackle it or even talk about it.
Labour has been making positive noises about curriculum change. More oracy, more emphasis on skills and a bigger role for the Arts have all been mentioned.
No proposals though have emerged on GCSE or even the EBAC. Nothing has been said either on a broader post 16 curriculum or how to improve the status of vocational qualifications. Nothing has been said either on a diploma/baccalaureate qualification at 18 which even the Tories are starting to think about. In spite of the massive opinion poll leads, Labour appears to lack the confidence in its own vision for education fearful of being accused of being soft on ‘standards’.
To find an attack line on this Labour has to dig deeper. There is one comment which Bridget Phillipson has made which if expanded on could strengthen Labours vision and distinguish it more clearly from the Tories. We all accept that teaching knowledge is essential, however our vision in the SEA is much broader than that. Who decides on the knowledge to be taught and why? How does it relate to skills? Does knowledge always have to be teacher taught? Shouldn’t we recognise that regardless of what a pupil learns in school, they will also learn on line?
Nick Gibb is very clear about why the knowledge rich curriculum should be fundamental. ‘First, a strong education system is the foundation of a strong economy and a strong society’ Note there is nothing in this deceptively simple definition about the child or even the future. For Gibb a strong society is ‘cohesive’. (24) Those of us on the left would see debate, struggle and conflicting ideas as a strength. They are the way in which positive change is forged, be it through union action or single-issue campaigns. campaigns. We would go further and suggest that Gibbs thinking is rooted in the Black Papers of the seventies where a cohesive society is one in which everyone knows their place and has to accept failure in education if that is the outcome of an exam. (25)
‘In reality, our reforms were based on a desire to see social justice through equalising the unfair distribution of intellectual capital in British society. Unlike so many other inequalities, this is one that schools – if performing their function properly – have the power to address.’(Gibb Policy Exchange 26) Here lies the deception. The intellectual capital designed for the tiny minority of state school students who will get into Russell group universities will not just be taught to all students, it will be used to sort them into sheep and goats. The EBAC will ensure that most of a student’s curriculum in secondary school will be made up of these subjects and failure at GCSE then ‘permits’ a student to follow a more vocational/technical curriculum having learnt their place. The sorting though is hugely unfair. State school pupils have to compete with learners already imbued in the cultural capital required from their families, and who are then sent to private schools that specialise in this kind of education and spend twice as much on their learners as state schools. Gibb’s whole project is based on the fabrication, born out by report after report, that state schools can equalise the gap between ‘disadvantaged’ pupils and others. In reality, the system selects a few successful state school students to join the elite.
Labour has come up with two catch phrases to apply to its education policy. ‘Breaking down Barriers to Opportunity’ and ‘Breaking through the Class Ceiling’. In our manifesto we make clear that education cannot achieve these objectives without a strategy to tackle child poverty in which education would play a part. The EPI in its latest annual report calls for the same thing. The question arises as to what role the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment should play in this strategy and how to sell that to the electorate.
Bridget Phillipson said this:- ‘Our curriculum needs to change to ensure we are arming our children with both the knowledge and skills not merely to face their futures, but to shape them’. We would want to ‘collectivise’ the statement in the socialist tradition so it would read ‘ not merely to face their future but to shape it’. The last four words are the key distinction from which such a lot of other ideas and principles could flow. Children will be active participants in their own learning not simply receptacles performing endless quizzes and tests.
They will spend time enquiring, creating, devising and communicating not because these are necessarily better ways of learning knowledge but because they have value in themselves. The SEA have written their own inclusive curriculum document (28) which focusses on how children can start to shape their future and all stakeholders local and national should be able to contribute.
Labour should hand back professional autonomy to teachers and attack the Tories for political interference in the education system. Labour should attack with more vigour the Gradgrind curriculum, the joyless learning and the carbon copy lessons. They should promote the excitement of the arts, the new digital ways of working, inclusion, the green agenda, the creative side of our economy which the Tories have been stifling, modern literature from a range of cultures alongside the classics. The way forward is to paint the Tories as being in the dark ages and Labour as the party to bring our education system into the light.
SEA manifesto here
1. See this thread on X https://x.com/GillianKeegan/status/1690630308918444032?s=20
2. ‘The strange success of the Tories' schools policy’ Bagehot Economist 13/7/23
3. See IFS Report on Schools Funding 2023 https://ifs.org.uk/education-spending/schools
4. See IFS Report on Teachers Pay Offer https://ifs.org.uk/articles/how-big-teacher-pay-offer-england Fig. 2
5. Fact Check: Is Keegan right about Labour Plans and Tory success? Schools Week August 2023
6. NEU Survey Report ‘State of Education: Recruitment and Retention’ https://neu.org.uk/latest/press-releases/state-education-recruitment-and-retention
7. Guardian article Sept 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/sep/12/only-half-of-required-number-of-trainee-secondary-teachers-in-england-recruited
8. Gov News may 2023
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/england-moves-to-fourth-in-international-rankings-for-reading
1. PIRLS 2021 national report for England Gov. UK p37 Reading performance overall in England slightly declining since 2016, but International median declining much faster , hence England’s rise up the table.
2. https://educationinspection.blog.gov.uk/2022/09/05/thousands-of-year-7s-struggle-with-reading/
3. UCL News Jan 2022 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jan/governments-approach-teaching-reading-uninformed-and-failing-children
4. Independent November 2022 from OFSTED press release
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/ofsted-outstanding-schools-downgraded-b2230260.html
5. Nick Gibb in speech to Policy Exchange
6. IFS/Nuffield report summary
7. Gov Uk Education statistics Key stage 2 attainment, Academic year 2022/23
8. Gov Uk Education statistics Key Stage 4 attainment, Academic year 2022/23
9. T Level Thematic Review OFSTED.
10. The Tory Apprenticeship Failures by Dr Jamal Uddin Jan 2023 Progressive Britain
https://www.progressivebritain.org/tory-apprenticeship-failure/
11. Guardian article by Warwick Mansell Sept 2023
12.
https://www.campaignforstateeducation.org.uk/
Report ‘Systems Matter: the Cost to Classrooms of the Academies Programme
13. Education Politics Blog 12 ‘Schools at the Heart of their Community’ by John Bolt
https://educationpolitics.substack.com/p/how-a-labour-government-can-make
14. TES 9th Dec 2022 Interview Nick Gibb: ‘We had to blow up concrete’
www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/nick-gibb-interview-we-had-to-blow-up-concrete
15. The Schools Minister talks to the Education World Forum about teacher-led education. Jan 2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nick-gibb-the-evidence-in-favour-of-teacher-led-instruction#:~:text=The%20most%20effective%2C%20teacher%2Dled,into%20policy%2C%20action%20and%20change.
16. A speech by Nick Gibb to Policy Exchange. October 2017 https://policyexchange.org.uk/events/a-speech-by-rt-hon-nick-gibb-mp-through-testing-times-a-review-of-the-educational-reform-project-and-its-future/#:~:text=First%2C%20a%20strong%20education%20system,economic%20strength%20is%20well%20known.
17. All life depends upon passing exams. If you fail at football, they drop you to the reserves. If you fail in business, you go bankrupt. If you fail in politics, you are forced to resign (or, in some countries, get shot). Exams measure people against standards distilled from human traditions and achievements, not against inclinations spun lazily out of the ‘self’. To create an education system without examinations is to fail to prepare children and students for the realities of adult life. C.B Cox First Black Papers
18. ‘ How E.D. Hirsch Came To Shape Government Policy’ by Nick Gibb in ‘Knowledge and the Curriculum’ Policy Exchange 2015
19. Bridget Phillipson on Labour's plans for education July 2023 TES
20. SEA Curriculum Document https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2ddytd4gswbe0k6n3pmmq/SEA-Curriculum-Document.docx?rlkey=qglkryo2xgymq5irbo8pf2ndp&dl=0
SEA Manifesto https://www.dropbox.com/s/vy0z0u91h9ipvqx/SEA-Manifesto.pdf?dl=0