BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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world leader. Barber also came up with the phrase that was so often to be
repeated in the early days, ‘standards matter more than structures’,8 at a
select gathering including Miliband, Blunkett and Ryan, in Blair’s office
in the Commons in January 1995.
Barber was appointed special adviser to the DfEE immediately after the
1997 election victory and soon afterwards he became the first head of the
SEU. Its focus on delivery and outcomes, particularly through the literacy
and numeracy targets and strategies, was counted a great success and Blair
sought to extend the approach across departments. In 2001 Barber moved
to No. 10 (later relocated to the Treasury in the spirit of bridge building)
as head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit. Originally it was intended
to monitor progress on seventeen priorities, but these were whittled down
to eight key objectives, including secondary school performance.9 Each
objective became the focus of a high-level meeting in the cabinet room
every six weeks or so, chaired by Blair and attended by the secretary of
state whose responsibility it was, with Barber – ‘Mr Targets’10 – making
the initial presentation. Although remaining close to Blair, Barber left
government service in 2005, rewarded with a knighthood.
Adonis, a don, journalist and social democrat, came to Blair’s notice, it
is said, when in the run-up to the 1997 election he wrote an article in The
Observer 11 urging Blair to become his own Secretary of State for
Education. He was recruited to become education adviser and rapidly
became so important that articles began to appear suggesting that he, not
Blunkett, was de facto Education Secretary.12 They clashed notably over
Chris Woodhead, the edgy Chief Inspector of Schools, whom Blunkett
did not want to re-appoint, although instructed to do so by Blair via
Adonis. Adonis replaced Miliband as Blair’s policy chief for the second
term, and at the beginning of the third term he was elevated to the House
18 Anthony Seldon, Blair (London: The Free Press, 2005), p. 243.
19 Peter Hyman, 1 out of 10: From Downing Street Vision to Classroom Reality (London:
Vintage, 2005), pp. 175–6. The other seven main objectives were NHS waiting times;
cancer/coronary heart disease; the patient experience; railway reliability; the tube; crime,
especially street robbery; and asylum.
10 Andrew Grice, ‘ “Mr Targets” on a Mission to Reform Whitehall’, The Independent, 6
January 2003; and Michael Barber, Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, the Public Services and
the Challenge of Delivery (London: Politico’s, 2007).
11 Andrew Adonis, ‘Let Blair Be His Own Education Chief ’, The Observer, 15 December 1996.
12 Francis Beckett, ‘Which of These Two Men is the Real Education Secretary? (Not the One
You Think)’, New Statesman, 16 October 2000.
of Lords so that he could become an education minister. There, as in his
other roles, he shaped and drove forward Blair’s plans, but with even
more clout, and it could be argued that his influence has been more profound than that of anyone in education since 1945. Adonis was succeeded
as Blair’s education adviser at No. 10 by Conor Ryan, who had been David
Blunkett’s right-hand man.
Perhaps the most surprising of the major influences on Blair’s education policies was Cyril Taylor, who in the memorable words of Peter
Wilby, ‘has surfed, without apparently pausing for breath, from the high
tide of Thatcherism to the uplands of New Labour’.13 Not a member of
Blair’s inner team, Taylor has done perhaps more than anyone to flesh out
Blair’s vision of diversity in secondary education. A former Conservative
parliamentary candidate for Keighley and member of the Greater
London Council, he was asked by Margaret Thatcher to organise a conference for industrialists at the Festival Hall on youth unemployment.
They persuaded her that the solution to the twin problems of low educational performance in the inner cities and the shortage of scientists and
engineers was to set up city technology colleges (CTCs) in partnership
with business. When business did not play its part – only fifteen CTCs
eventually got off the ground mainly at the taxpayers’ expense – Taylor hit
on the idea of enabling existing schools to achieve specialist technology
status through additional funding.
Taylor met Blunkett in 1995 in relation to the controversy over grantmaintained schools, which at first were the only ones eligible to bid for
this extra money, and converted him to the cause. A little later he travelled with Blair up to Darlington to open a specialist school and evidently
sold him the idea also. When Blair came to power, instead of winding up
the scheme as he might well have done, specialist status became the cornerstone of his secondary education policy. Taylor became a close ally of
Adonis and together they pushed through the diversity agenda. By the
end of Blair’s premiership, a trust set up by Taylor and partly funded by
the government had over four-fifths of English secondary schools
affiliated to it. Taylor, knighted in 1989 for education services by
Margaret Thatcher, received a second knighthood in 2004 from Labour.
In all he had served ten secretaries of state.
Blunkett held the education brief for seven years, but following his
short-lived promotion to the Home Office, secretaries of state came and
went, with four at the helm from 2001 to 2007 – Estelle Morris, Charles
13 Peter Wilby, ‘A Different Sort of Missionary’, The Guardian, 18 July 2006.
Clarke, Ruth Kelly and Alan Johnson. They had to play themselves in and
brought their own personalities and priorities to the role (Charles Clarke,
for example, disbanded the SEU). During the second term, not surprisingly, education policy began to drift and, impatient to see his education
project embedded before he left office, Blair made Adonis a minister in an
attempt to secure its future.
The rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was a recurring
theme of New Labour, but as far as education policy was concerned their
spheres of interest were different. Brown directed his attention to skills
and employment, and his main impact on schools was as their paymaster.
Brown shared Blair’s enthusiasm for targets and began making public
service agreements with the spending departments in which they would
agree certain outputs for the money received. In the case of the
Department for Education and Skills (DfES, as it became in 2001) this
was for a 2% a year improvement in the proportion of young people
achieving five good GCSEs.
Targets and delivery
The thing about Labour’s targets is that they provide clear benchmarks.
At first, ministers and officials thought they had every reason to be confident. The percentage of pupils reaching the expected levels for elevenyear-olds rose by 12 percentage points in English and 10 percentage
points in maths from 1997 to 2000, and they seemed well on course to
meet the targets of 80% in English and 75% in maths by 2002. Figure 17.1
shows that the numeracy and literacy scores of eleve
n-year-olds went up
year by year. Barber was encouraged to the point that he boasted to an
American audience that ‘large scale reform is not only possible but can be
achieved quickly’.14
A closer look at the data, however, raises doubts about whether it was
the targets that were making the difference. Scores in fact rose more
rapidly in the final years of the Conservative government when no targets
were set, and science without a national target followed the same trajectory as English and maths. Even the meaning of the rising scores has been
questioned. An analysis by Peter Tymms, a professor of education at the
University of Durham,15 suggested that the increases were specific to the
14 Michael Barber, ‘Large-scale Reform is Possible’, Education Week, 15 November 2000.
15 Peter Tymms, ‘Are Standards Rising in English Primary Schools?’ British Educational
Research Journal, 30, 2004: 477–94.
100
90
80
70
60
50
Per Cent
40
30
20
10
0
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
Year
English
Maths
Science
Figure 17.1. Percentage of eleven-year-olds achieving level 4 or higher
Source: DfES, National Curriculum Assessments at Key Stage 2 in England (Provisional,
2006), National Statistics First Release SFR 31/2006 (London: DfES, August 2006),
table 1.
tests used and did not show up to the same extent in more general measures. He was supported by the Statistics Commission which concluded
that ‘the improvement in KS2 test scores between 1995 and 2000 substantially overstates the improvement in standards in English primary schools
over that period’.16 This was hotly disputed by the DfES which demanded
the Commission ‘revisit your conclusions on the Peter Tymms article and
set the record straight’.17 The DfES argued that the school test results were
borne out by international studies, but that too is open to doubt.18
16 Statistics Commission, Measuring Standards in English Primary Schools: Report by the
Statistics Commission on an Article by Peter Tymms (London: Statistics Commission, 2005).
17 David Normington, Measuring Standards in English Primary Schools: Report by the Statistics
Commission on an Article by Peter Tymms, 21/02/05 (London: DfES, 3 March 2005).
18 Alan Smithers, Blair’s Education: An International Perspective (London: The Sutton Trust,
2007).
70
60
50
40
Per Cent
30
20
10
0
1979
1982
1985
1988
1991
1994
1997
2000
2003
2006
Year
O-level
GCSEs
Equiv
Figure 17.2. Percentage of five good GCSEs or equivalent
Sources: Alan Smithers ‘Do Better Results Mean Worse Exams?’ Managing Schools
Today, 22–27 September/October 2005, and BBC News ‘Five Good GCSEs Obtained
by 59%’, 19 October 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6065436.stm.
The examinations at the end of secondary schooling were also subject
to targets. On the face of it, they could be claimed to be driving up performance. Figure 17.2 shows that, in 2006, 59.0% of pupils obtained five
good GCSEs or equivalent against 45.1% when Labour came to power. It
is not quite the rate of increase specified in the Treasury’s public service
agreement with the DfES, but nevertheless encouraging. But what part
have targets played? Taking a longer view, figure 17.2 also shows that the
percentage achieving five good grades has increased every year since 1988
when the GCSE came on stream. In so far as it is possible to detect an
effect of Blair’s policies, it is that schools have been increasingly turning
to GCSE equivalents to boost their results. When belatedly the government included English and maths in the GCSE performance measure, it
came as quite a shock to discover that the percentage achieving five good
passes dropped sharply, falling to only 45.8% in 2006.
The complexities in interpreting the results of the key stage tests and
examinations suggest that it was unwise for the government to stake its
reputation on them. Not only can it become embarrassing, as when
Estelle Morris, Blunkett’s successor, felt she had to resign, but it also tends
to distort education as schools strive to make the numbers come right
irrespective of whether what they are doing is educationally sound.19 It
also became hard for the government to look at the results dispassionately. As was once perceptively remarked, ‘those who have so committed
themselves in advance to the efficacy of the reform . . . cannot afford
honest evaluation’.20 When I come to summing up Blair’s tenure I shall be
arguing that attempting to improve education through target-setting was
misguided.
School organisation
I shall also be arguing that there is a fundamental flaw in the other
main arm of Blair’s schools policy: diversity. When Blair came to power,
among all the other school types, there were fifteen city technology colleges and 245 specialist schools (mainly in technology, but also in
foreign languages, sports and performing arts), the fruits of two not
very successful Conservative policies. Blair had a choice: to abandon
them or to adopt them. Urged on by figures apparently showing that
they boosted results, which Sir Cyril Taylor21 kept producing, he
decided to stay with them, tentatively at first, with, in 1997, the aim of
450 more specialist schools by the end of the parliament. But by the
second term they had become central to Blair’s secondary education
policy. The target was raised first to 1,500, then 2,000, and eventually it
was envisaged that all secondary schools would have a distinctive ethos.
The range of possible specialisms was progressively extended and in
2003 Taylor’s Technology Schools Trust became the Specialist Schools
Trust.
But it is not altogether clear in what sense they are specialist. The
science schools, for example, were not even able to select 10% of their
pupils, generally did not have better-qualified staff or facilities in science,
and their science results were often less good than those of schools with
19 Warwick Mansell, Education by Numbers: The Tyranny of Testing (London: Politico’s
Publishing, 2007).
20 Donald Campbell, ‘Reforms as Experiments’, American Psychologist, 24, 1969: 409–29.
21 Cyril Taylor and Conor Ryan, Excellence in Education: The Making of Great Schools
(London: David Fulton Publishers, 2005), pp. 77–9.
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other specialisms.22 Schools were keen to become specialist because
it meant extra money – a 1,000-pupil school could expect to receive
£616,000 over four years. To be accepted as such they had to raise £50,000
of private sector sponsorship and then submit a bid to the Secretary of
State detailing how they would raise their performance overall, increase
achievement in their specialism, and work with at least six partner
schools. The DfES tended to see this as a very good process for schools to
go through and thought of it more as a general school improvement programme than setting up schools with distinctive curricula. But it left
parents faced with a confusing, incomplete, and in practice meaningless
array of specialisms, apparently requiring them to think what subjects
(including business and enterprise) would be best for their child from the
age of eleven.
Some schools were failing so badly that it was thought that there was
nothing for it but to start again. The city technology college concept
became adapted to this purpose, re-branded by Adonis first as ‘city
academy’ and then just ‘academy’. Academies were set up as independent
schools funded directly by the government. In return for about 10% of
the capital funding (which could be reduced on negotiation) a sponsor is
given control of the board of governors and ownership of the land and
buildings (which revert to the local authority if the academy closes), and
the school employs its own staff and sets its own admission arrangements. Academies emerged in 2000 from the Fresh Start initiative in
which schools with less than 15% of the pupils achieving five A*–C
grades at GCSE three years in succession would be considered for closure
or replacement. But it is evident that they became increasingly prominent
in Blair’s thinking. By the time he left office he had set a target of 400,
when there was nowhere near that number of schools so bad they had to
be closed. Blair had come to see academies as desirable in their own right,
influenced in part by the success and popularity of state-funded independent schools in other countries, notably the Netherlands.23 Academy
status was opened up to encompass some private schools, and local
authorities were encouraged to become sponsors. Manchester found it
cost-effective to open eight. In 2005, Taylor’s Trust was handed the academies and once more it changed its name, this time to the Specialist