by Tom Bower
In a speech to an academies conference, Blair praised his own success: ‘English ten-year-olds are now ranked third in the world for literacy … and 96,000 more children can do basic mathematics than in 1997 … We have achieved the best-ever GCSE and A-level results.’
Research suggested the opposite. Blair was caught between propaganda and the truth. The Department of Education’s senior official confirmed that exam scores were indeed being manipulated. ‘It’s the perverse effect of focusing on targets,’ David Miliband was told by Normington. To satisfy Barber’s target of five GCSEs and a rise in the GCSE pass rate to 76 per cent, many head teachers had directed pupils to take easy courses in subjects such as media, beauty and cooking. Coursework, which counted for up to 60 per cent of a pupil’s GCSE score, was manipulated by some teachers to gain better marks. Hence, 21.7 per cent of pupils who managed to obtain what counted in the revised system as five good GCSEs did so without having demonstrated a reasonable knowledge of maths or English. Only 48 per cent of sixteen-year-olds passed GCSEs in those two subjects, and candidates could get a C grade in maths with a mark of just 16 per cent. In 2005, AQA, one of the country’s largest examining boards, awarded an A* in business studies for marks of 47 per cent. That, reported the academics, was typical of grade inflation.
Studies conducted at Cambridge, Buckingham, York and Durham universities showed that examination standards had fallen since 1997, while schools could not produce evidence confirming any real improvements. Durham had tested 5,000 children in 120 schools every year since 1997 and had found no improvement in literacy.
The children faced a new problem: after they had been taught to pass the tests set in order to achieve Barber’s targets, their cognitive and oral skills were harmed. Eleven-year-olds were entering secondary school damaged by Whitehall’s pressure on local authorities and schools to ‘teach to the test’. Although Blair emphasised ‘the key to education today is to personalise learning … reflected in a distinctive approach also to every school’, the opposite had happened.
Some research would report that teachers had not only lost their self-confidence, but also their honesty. Results were further boosted by allowing candidates to retake AS exams until they scored top grades. The statistical conclusions were controversial but there was no disputing the fact that Blair’s target for 85 per cent of sixteen-year-olds to be literate and numerate had not been attained. Most surveys agreed that about 30 per cent of children were leaving school without those basic skills.
International surveys confirmed the failure. UNICEF reported that British children ranked at the bottom of twenty-one rich countries across a range of skills. The reading skills of ten-year-olds, according to the respected Progress in International Reading Literacy Study carried out in 2007, placed British children nineteenth, compared to third in 2001. The government blamed parents.
The studies could be challenged, but no one questioned the credibility of Professor Margaret Brown’s conclusion that numeracy had also deteriorated. She blamed the government for spending too much time ‘trying to change the wrong thing’. Regardless of whether a school was specialist, independent or an academy, she wrote, or whether the class was equipped with computers and interactive whiteboards, many teachers were not properly trained to explain the fundamentals of mathematics, and understanding basic maths was the foundation of all education, especially, to the surprise of many, literacy. Setting targets had failed to improve education and had undermined Blair’s pledge to give the poor the opportunity of a successful life.
All that research was irrelevant to the Labour MPs opposed to Blair’s education bill. In the debates, none of them mentioned falling standards or the misery of poorly educated sixteen-year-olds. They cared about political control of education and, more importantly, Blair’s departure.
To enact his bill, Blair could rely on the Tories for support, but first, to reduce the rebellion, he half surrendered, withdrawing most of the freedoms he had originally granted to schools. In a quip favoured by City slickers, he chose his moment to ‘amend and pretend’. ‘He would rather sacrifice his leadership than back down,’ noted Powell. The media was unrelenting, glorifying Labour MPs for deserting their prime minister.
On the night, to opposition taunts that ‘This is a Tory bill’, fifty-two Labour MPs voted against the government, but with the Tories’ support Blair won with a majority of 343. The circle was complete, and he had restored the grant-maintained schools abolished in 1997. His success appeared to be trumped by Brown’s snap promise to match the funding of state schools with the high income that supported private ones. Enquiries revealed that no money had been set aside for that expensive pledge, which was quickly relabelled by the Treasury as an ‘aspiration’. A month later, Kelly silently resigned from the education department and became the new minister for equalities.
In 2007, the Rowntree Foundation reported that the opportunities for the poorest children – the targets of Labour’s ambitions – had worsened. A paper by Robert Cassen blamed teachers in deprived areas for ignoring discipline and excellence. Other researchers recorded that the attainment of disadvantaged pupils had fallen because they were being supervised by unqualified assistants and ignored by the full-time teachers.
Despite the huge expenditure, some inequalities, while not worsening, barely changed. Forty-six per cent of school-leavers were going to university, nearly matching Blair’s ambition of 50 per cent, but since 1997 the number of working-class students had risen by just 3 per cent. The number of state-school pupils going to the Russell Group universities, the best in the land, had not changed. Although Blair would say that ‘primary schools in the poorest areas have improved at double the rate of schools in the more affluent areas’, the gap between rich and poor had widened. ‘The bad news’, admitted David Miliband, the schools minister, ‘is that when it comes to the link between educational achievement and social class, Britain is at the bottom of the league for industrialised countries.’ The only children whose standards had improved were those educated in private schools.
Blair clung to academies as his lifebelt. ‘You are the true change-makers in our country today,’ he told the leaders of the thirty existing academies in 2006. ‘You are lifting the sights of our young people, teaching them better, educating them more profoundly and to a higher standard than ever before.’
As so often, a series of reports, especially those by the National Audit Office, contradicted him. The exam results of academy pupils, reported the NAO, were below average and some academies were wasteful, weak and financially irresponsible. Blair would ignore such findings. In praising his own achievements, he would use inaccurate 2005 statistics, passing over poorer results published in later years.
In spring 2006, he promised to build 200 academies by 2010. Later that year, he upped his target to 400. In 2007, there were would be forty-six academies, costing on average £24 million each and educating less than 3 per cent of all secondary pupils. One had cost £40.4 million to build. The bill for refurbishing a normal secondary school was about £14 million.
Bringing the curtain down on a decade pledged to revolutionising education was the appointment of Christine Gilbert as head of Ofsted. The former director of education at Tower Hamlets believed in ‘personalised learning’. She advocated that pupils should determine their own curriculum, mark their own work and rate their teachers, while traditional exam grades should be replaced by ‘feedback’. From Woodhead to Gilbert, Blair had been defeated on his chosen battlefield.
FORTY-THREE
Cash and Consequences
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On 26 April 2006, while enjoying the cheers of thousands of Hindus during a visit to a temple in north-west London, Blair was told about a new immigration crisis: the Home Office had failed to consider 1,023 foreign prisoners for deportation after their imprisonment. As a result, criminals convicted of violent and sexual offences had been released to continue living in Britain.
Charles Clarke was the vuln
erable minister. In September 2005, he had discovered that 10,000 prisoners – one-eighth of Britain’s prison population – were foreign nationals. He started discussions on how the number could be reduced. Two months later, he learned that John Gieve, the permanent secretary, did not know how many asylum-seekers had been released from prison without being deported. Relying on Gieve, Clarke had told a parliamentary committee that none of those allowed to stay in Britain was guilty of serious offences. But, as Gieve would admit, he had briefed the minister without knowing all the facts. The civil servants’ excuse for the disaster was that they had followed the government’s policy of being soft on immigration. In December, Clarke removed Gieve from the Home Office and told Blair that a number of foreign prisoners were being released without being considered for deportation. He reminded Blair of his earlier warning that clearing up the Home Office would take five years.
The bungle was forgotten about until April 2006, when, informed by hostile IND officials, David Davis, the Tory shadow home secretary, asked in the Commons for statistics about foreign prisoners. Clarke could not provide them. To some, he appeared evasive and incompetent. There was uproar, but Blair hoped that Clarke could survive. In a meeting at the end of April, Clarke offered Blair his resignation, adding, ‘Don’t accept it, because my departure won’t solve anything.’ Blair agreed. Believing they were ‘sticking together’, Clarke revealed his exchange with Blair in a radio interview the next morning. He overestimated Blair’s support because he misjudged the prime minister’s own vulnerability.
Believing that he could still embed the reform programme before his resignation – planned, as he would later write, for summer 2008 – Blair was engaged in daily combat against Gordon Brown and his supporters, particularly Ed Balls and Ed Miliband. ‘I was cornered,’ he admitted, ‘so it was either go down or fight … and I would not go unless Brown continued the reform programme.’
‘What is to be gained by you staying on for another six months?’ Miliband asked. His insults were encouraged by Brown, who would regularly walk past Blair’s staff at 8 a.m., enter the prime minister’s study and start screaming.
The battle reached a new climax on Wednesday 15 March 2006. Brown was due to meet Blair and Adair Turner to discuss pension reforms. For some days, newspapers, after receiving accurate information from a civil servant, had been reporting that eleven businessmen had been nominated for peerages, but four had been rejected by Dennis Stevenson’s committee on the grounds that their financial activities while managing their businesses would bring the House of Lords into disrepute. Subsequently, however, the Sunday Times had interviewed one candidate, Sir David Garrard, a property developer, who admitted that he had loaned the Labour Party £2 million. Others would not deny their own loans. On 12 March, the same newspaper’s front page led with a report about Chai Patel, who by then was attracting controversy over the deaths of residents at his old people’s homes. Patel had earlier admitted to having made a donation of just £100,000. Now, he explained that Michael Levy had asked him to convert a donation of £1.5 million into a loan, which could be changed back into a donation in the future. Patel’s loan had coincided with his nomination for a peerage. Levy vehemently denied Patel’s version of events.
The ‘loans for peerages’ storm erupted just as Tessa Jowell, Blair’s closest supporter and the leader of a campaign to build super-casinos, was cleared by the prime minister of breaching the ministerial code. She had failed to reveal a ‘gift’ of £350,000 to her husband from his client Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, money which was used to pay off their joint mortgage. Jowell claimed that, while signing the legal documents, she was unaware of the source of the money. To save her political career, she announced her separation from her husband. (Within months they would be seen together at Covent Garden.) Her exoneration attracted headlines about ‘sleaze’.
Cash for peerages brought the same headlines. Levy had been asked by Jonathan Powell and Blair’s special adviser Ruth Turner about those who had loaned the party over £1 million. Without knowing about the loans, Dennis Stevenson had decided that several of the donors were unsuitable for the Lords, despite their nomination by Blair. The revelation that the party had received £14 million from those same controversial businessmen aroused new suspicions. ‘There were very good reasons for all of them being on the list,’ Blair would write. Supporting the party with cash, he believed, qualified the donor to become a peer. He criticised the media for nurturing a scandal and refusing to debate government policies.
The day after the newspapers’ revelations, John Hutton, the pensions minister, was waiting in No. 10 when he saw Brown enter Blair’s office, ostensibly to discuss the proposed pension reforms. Ninety minutes later, Hutton was still outside, as Brown screamed that Turner’s plan should be shelved and Blair should resign. ‘You haven’t heard the last about those peerages,’ shouted the chancellor as he stormed off. Brown had threatened that the party’s national executive would enquire into the loans. Since they had all been legally transferred to the party’s treasurer, Blair was shell-shocked. ‘For the first time, I’m scared,’ he told Sally Morgan, his political adviser. ‘He’s going to bring me down.’ Later, he told Gus O’Donnell, ‘Gordon is going to do something very unconstitutional.’
That night, Jack Dromey, a trade union leader and the party’s treasurer, toured the TV studios. Pleading that he had been unaware of the loans, he criticised the ability of the rich to buy peerages. ‘No. 10’, he said accusingly, ‘must have known about the loans.’ That, Michael Levy knew, was true. Not only did Blair know but, Levy believed, Dromey must have read the accounts (Dromey denied having done any such thing). However, Stevenson’s committee, which had been responsible for vetting the nominations for the peerages, had not known about the loans, which had been arranged to protect the secret transfer of money by men who were simultaneously nominated. ‘Cash for peerages’ also generated acres of newsprint for Blair’s earlier dodgy financial dealings, starting with Bernie Ecclestone’s £1 million donation for changing the tobacco sponsorship law.
Dromey’s posturing, complained Blair, reflected Brown’s ‘mafia-style politics’. The grim trade unionist was the husband of Harriet Harman, who had shifted allegiance to Brown in anticipation of his leadership. Dromey’s accusations were a gift to the Scottish Nationalists. To boost their campaign against a corrupt Scottish Labour Party, Alex Salmond asked one of his MPs to lodge a complaint with Scotland Yard. The impression seeping out of Westminster portrayed Blair as hanging on.
FORTY-FOUR
Targets vs Markets (Take 8)
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Big Ken Anderson gave it to Blair straight. ‘There’s been a lot of pushback by the civil service,’ he said during a dinner at Chequers in 2006. ‘Ultimately, however you measure it, it’s all been a failure.’
Blair flashed silent dismay. Hearing the truth was unpleasant. With Elton John, another guest, seated near by, there was no opportunity for a proper discussion, but Anderson’s views on the NHS were no secret. Blair’s reforms were grinding to a halt.
Blair had taken his eye off the ball after the success of the private contract to treat cataracts in 2004. Ever since the Nigel Crisp debacle, he knew that his opportunity to limit Whitehall’s control and empower patients was evaporating. ‘We need to entrench the reforms to make it hard to reverse,’ he told Patricia Hewitt.
Signs of lethargy in the reform programme were noticeable during the search for Crisp’s successor. Blair, Hewitt and Anderson knew that there was no credible candidate among the NHS’s board of executives. All those employed in Richmond House ‘thought like Crisp’. Indeed, most were temporary appointments while headhunters searched for replacements. For the same reason, the chief executives of the strategic health authorities were unsuitable.
‘It’s a nightmare,’ said Hewitt.
‘We need an outsider,’ agreed Blair. Headhunters produced two well-qualified Americans, but both were squeezed out by Whitehall
’s customary machinations against outsiders. Four months into the search, Blair failed to persuade Ian Carruthers, the temporary chief executive, to stay. Then, David Nicholson, the executive supervising the Mid-Staffs hospital, contacted Anderson.
Previously, Nicholson, a former member of the Communist Party, had been deemed unsuitable because, like Crisp, he opposed change. Nevertheless, over a drink, he sold himself as a reformer. ‘He begged on his knees,’ recalled Anderson, who finally recommended his appointment to Blair. ‘Boy, do I regret that,’ he would later say. ‘He pushed the NHS further back.’
Eight months after her appointment, Hewitt had more reason to doubt her prime minister rather than the untested Nicholson. She finally understood Blair’s irreconcilable ideologies: targets versus the market. He liked headline-grabbing targets to drive change from Downing Street; the downside was that such goals had never produced an efficient Russian economy under Stalin, and nor did they work for the NHS. Blair liked ‘choice’ but cautioned Hewitt not to mention ‘markets’, which he feared suggested to alarmed voters that his destination was America’s system of payment for health. To avoid the problem of presentation, she was encouraged to say that ‘The government is moving towards a self-improving NHS responding to patients’ needs.’ The snag, as she herself observed, was that ‘He’s been saying the same since 2000.’ The prime minister’s predicament was not that he couldn’t raise his game but that he couldn’t change it. Reassured by Matthew Taylor that the strategy developed since 2000 was ‘in theory’ right, he only half understood that in practice his ideas were malfunctioning.