It seems like another era, but at the start of the pandemic one particular radio debate, between a progressive lefty economist and a right-of-centre former Tory chancellor, lodged in my mind.
The discussion centred on whether the coronavirus provided an opportunity to reopen the economy in a different way. The ex-chancellor Tory was dismissive: the priority would be to fire up the market as quickly as possible and ignore any social benefits from a fresh approach.
These are familiar arguments, and similar thinking has been taking place about schools, but will it be any different this time? I have spent some of the lockdown re-reading the history of English education. For all the progress made, it is shocking how little has changed down the years, which doesn’t augur well.
There we were in the latter half of the 19th century, arguing over how to widen access to education while maintaining the position of the elite private schools and “grading” the rest by class and income so only a handful of poor children could climb the ladder. Students of our current prime minister will recognise this philosophy, as in his 2013 Margaret Thatcher lecture, where he talked about people being “very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth”. “The harder you shake the pack,” said Boris Johnson, “the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.”
Fast forward to the 20th century, and the convulsive shock of the second world war laid bare the need for free compulsory education for all – but without losing sight of the cornflake pack. So, a selective system was introduced in which children were sifted into different institutions according to ability and class.
In the past 75 years, rather than dismantling that we replaced it with a “quasi schools’ market” so that, under the veneer of more equality, a similar hierarchy could comfortably allow the better-off to dominate the towering heights of education and society.
Now here we are in 2020, emerging from another violent global shock, and what do we find? I laughed out loud when I heard the government plans to launch a big drive on skills, since we are still arguing, as the Victorians did, over what constitutes a suitable curriculum to prepare young people for work and future life.
Meanwhile, a new type of education underclass has emerged through the virus, albeit one many headteachers have never forgotten. These are children who live in poverty, possibly unsafely, with nowhere to work at home, without access to broadband, let alone the sorts of devices on which private school children have been enjoying streamed lessons for the past three months.
The 11-plus exam, which relies heavily on months of preparation and already discriminates cruelly between rich and poor children, is apparently going ahead – at a time when many applicants will have missed months of education. In my local area a private school headteacher is nobly doing a charitable run to fund laptops for children in the state sector.
Fraught rows over whether schools should open last week, this week or in three months’ time have inevitably focused on safety and risk. Coming soon will be an outcry over the integrity of inspections and the results of exams that didn’t take place and are probably well past their sell-by date.
Scrutiny of these important dilemmas obscures the much bigger scandal staring us in the face: the painstaking gains made to equality in education are about to be swept away. Ministers like to talk about the fragility of public health but what about the fragility of public education?
For all the Gove/Cummings sorcery over the past 10 years, the goading of “the blob” and tumultuous reforms, the education system is nowhere near robust or equitable enough to withstand a shock like this, in spite of heroic work taking place in schools up and down the country.
Johnson and his pals love their short-order soundbites: Take Back Control, Get Brexit Done, Whatever it Takes and the latest, Time to Move on (nothing to see here).
Sadly, there will be damage to see here, possibly for years to come, because the foundations of our school system, especially if you are poor, are fundamentally weak, poorly resourced and unfair, as they always have been. Just moving on and reverting to the status quo yet again without addressing the need for more profound change is, in three simple words: Not Good Enough.
