Education

Michael Gove is giving a speech tonight reaffirming the Tory plans for radical education reform. In it Gove deploys a battery of statistics to show just how comprehensively the current system has failed. The one that stood out most dramatically to me was this one: “Out of 75,000 children eligible for free school meals only 5,000 were even entered for A level. Of that 189, only 75 were boys.  Yet in the same year Eton had 175 boys who got 3As at A level.  One school with almost two and a half times as many boys getting 3As as the entire population of our poorest boys on benefit.” If this doesn’t persuade you of the urgent need for education reform, then I don’t know what will.

Politics in this country lacks a proper ideas infrastructure. One of the major reasons for this is that the universities play so little part in policy making and the broader policy debate. Vernon Bogdanor has an important piece on the reasons for this in this week’s New Statesman. His argument is that the bureaucratisation of the education system and the emphasis that the research assessment exercise puts on the rapid production of research has led to an emphasis on an intellectually uninteresting scholasticism in the social sciences. Bogdanor believes that the way to get the universities contributing usefully to policy debates is to free them up from government control, to let them become more independent and therefore intellectually creative.

On matters of mechanics, I take my mechanic’s advice; there would be little point in paying him if I turned around and thought: ‘Who needs brake pads, what does he know’. The government labours under the misapprehension that it is omniscient: the final extension of ‘nanny knows best’. But 12 years of Labour government has increased the gulf between rich and poor and educational standards have regressed. Advice that suggests an alternative path from that which was pre-ordained is dismissed, as if it were an unwanted cappuccino. Today sees the publication of a report into primary school education.

The level of educational inequality in this country is appalling. I have heard the numbers that Michael Gove listed off in his speech several times before but they never fail to shock. One wonders what future there can be for the half of the children who left comprehensives last year without five good GCSEs. The worst schools in the country are in the poorest areas. The Tory plan, to put parents in charge of the £5,000 per year that the state spends on a child’s education, with pupils from deprived backgrounds receiving additional funding, would end the monopoly on state education provision that has failed the poorest. In its place it would put a system that offers choice to all parents, not just the few who can afford to go private, through the emergence of new schools.

Given their position in the polls, and the challenges that face the next government, it's understandable that the Tories are turning their minds to the post-election period.  They've been meeting with high-ranking civil servants for months now, and have been hammering out the details and design of a cuts agenda.  But one of the most striking examples of the Tories' preparedness is outlined in today's Guardian: Michael Gove's team has called in the lawyers to help draft their first education bill. From the details the Guardian gives, the prospective bill is much as you'd imagine.

James Purnell has just spoken at The Spectator’s Paths to Prosperity conference, with sideburns bushier than ever after the summer. He was doing an on-stage interview with Andrew Neil and was quite firm on the release of al-Megrahi. "He should have died in jail” said Purnell. “I would have left him in jail." I suspect the freedom to say such things is one of the reasons that Purnell quit government. He later took questions (quite often rude ones) from the floor. Sir Richard Sykes had been on earlier, talking about the dismal state of British education, and Purnell was asked why he couldn’t just agree that schools had gone downhill too. He drew the line at trashing Labour’s record on education. But I think we can see Purnell set off into his own orbit.

Isn't it funny how things work out?  I imagine the government once thought they'd get credit for the ever-improving GCSE and A-level pass rates, but now results day just rekindles the debate about slipping standards - and rightly so.  Ed Balls may have tried to divert attention on to the Tories this morning, but he can't really escape the verdict of this ComRes poll commissioned by Newsnight.  Here are the main results: 67 percent of respondents said Labour hasn't lived up to Tony Blair's "education, education, education" vow. 52 percent said Labour hasn't improved the overall quality of education.  41 percent said they have. 47 percent said the standard of state education has deteriorated since 1997.  43 percent said it hasn't.

If you can divert your attention away from the Ashes for a second, then I'd recommend you read John Rentoul's fascinating interview with Michael Gove in today's Independent on Sunday.  The two most eye-catching passages concern Gove's "ultra-Blarism" and his thoughts on foreign policy.  The Blairism first: "And when I ask if it is wise to paint himself as a Blairite, given the former prime minister's latter unpopularity, he says: 'He's not as popular as he deserves to be, and he's emphatically not as popular within Labour as he deserves to be – amazing ingratitude on their part.