Sunday thoughts: Where do the party conferences leave education policy, one year out from the election?
Party conferences are finished (if you ignore the SNP). Public First staff are walking around London like zombies, exhausted from one, let alone two. A vast amount of money has been spent. Major speeches have been given, policies have been announced. The polls are…..unchanged.
Still, what can we take away, as far as education goes, in the last year (most likely) before the election?
1. Labour have said more than people think, but are also not going to say anything more.
As I’ve been saying for some time, it’s simply not true to say that Labour don’t have any policies. If you read the Opportunity Mission document, there’s tens and tens of them. A more reasoned critique is a lot of them are very micro, some of them are incredibly radical but technical (redefining the way in which we measure income and educational inequality in this country), too few of them have got much cut through, and there remain some gaps.
Given the (semi) democratic way in which Labour make policy, this conference was probably the last chance to roll out a big announcement pre-election. And we had….David Bell leading an early years review, and a tweak to the way in which we teach primary maths. Now I like David Bell hugely. And I like primary maths hugely. But this is hardly revolutionary stuff.
We all know the reason why, and that’s money. Labour’s total planned expenditure in the Opportunity Mission doc is a shade over £1bn, which is not coincidentally the planned tax take from changing the rules around tax on independent schools. When schools funding this September is close to £60bn a year on its own, and the mess up from the Department on quite how many LAs and schools we have in this country leaves a £370m miscalculation, £1bn is a not a lot.
For better or worse, this is mostly it for education. There will be no big new announcements – with the only caveat being if the Tories make a tax change in the Spring, which “frees up” money (in the weird way of politics), which Labour could spend on education. But they probably won’t. This means no HE review (more on this below). It means no big shift on teachers, or RAAC. The bigger question now – as it has been in truth for 6 months or more – is the first 100 days plan, and a possible midterm change of focus if the economy grows.
2. It’s skills, skills, skills….
I was genuinely surprised how many fringes, at both main parties, were skills focused. And how much the rhetoric around FE has changed, from both parties. The Prime Minister said that the way in which we’d run skills policy for 30 years was a mistake, which is quite a claim, and promised to fix it. Most of the extra ABS reforms are really technical education reforms (more on this below). Labour made a small announcement about recategorising colleges, and have a much bigger existing suite of announcements around rejuvenating the Apprenticeship Levy, and creating a new Skills England quango. They also announced further devolution to Combined Authorities of skills funding, though it isn’t clear yet how significant that is.
It's been a long time since both parties, at both Leader level and Secretary of State level, have been so passionately committed to the skills and FE agenda.
3. Which means less room for HE.
Look, it wasn’t last year, in which Andrew Jenkyns banged on about Harry Potter courses and Muggle studies. But the Prime Minister told people that: “Labour pursued the false dream of 50 per cent of children going to university and abandoned apprenticeships. This assumption that the only route to success was the university route was one of the great mistakes of the last 30 years. It led to thousands of young people being ripped off by degrees that did nothing to increase their employability or earnings potential. So, we are stopping universities from enrolling students on courses that do nothing for their life chances. Under us, no more rip off degrees”. The policy isn’t new – and nor really is the narrative – but it remains incredible that a party who made one of the bravest changes to sustain universities in 2010 by increasing fees, and saw record number of children from lower socio economic backgrounds go to university, and mostly do very well out if it, seem determined to dismiss the power of higher education.
Alongside that, Michelle Donelan told us that she was removing the wokery from science. Again, the policy itself isn’t that new (and relates, as far as I can see, to a small change to the way the next REF is calculated), but the optics are entirely theirs to choose, and they chose that.
And despite there being a record number of Vice-Chancellors descending on Liverpool, they wouldn’t have heard much that they liked. Matt Western said sadly that HE financing keeps him awake at night, and studiously avoided saying if he had any plans to fix that. Keir Starmer gave a ringing endorsement of universities when he said “you know, I never thought I would hear a modern Conservative Prime Minister say that 50% of our children going to university was a “false dream”. My Dad felt the disrespect of vocational skills all his life. But the solution is not and never will be levelling-down the working class aspiration to go to university” – seriously, it gave me slight chills when I heard it and I banged the table – but warm words butter no parsnips (or fund no labs).
The other Kremlinology in the race for HE influence relates to the positioning of the different mission groups. Million Plus got the genuine honour and first prize for a private dinner with not just Matt Western but Bridget Phillipson too. As far as I can see, no one else got anything – and the Russell Group appeared fairly anonymous. The ABS roundtable convened by the Prime Minister and Secretary of State alongside the Labour conference had one (1) HE representative, and it was from University Alliance. The tectonic plates, they are a shifting.
4. Schools will play a role for Labour, and for the Tories, its personal
Schools are one of Labour’s five priorities, and as such, Bridget Phillipson is one of a small number of Shadow Cabinet Ministers who gets extra billing and extra time at conferences. Despite her speech itself being fairly thin, it’s clear that they want to make both policy and political headway with schools policy and early years policy in particular. Slightly oddly, other Shadow Cabinet Ministers talked more about the breakfast club policy than the Shadow Education Secretary, but this fits into a wider narrative which clearly hints at wanting to move to a more rounded and comprehensive early years and childcare programme right to the end of primary school, when money allows. And once again, independent schools found themselves the target of political messaging from Labour (as well as being the only source of extra funds).
On the face of it, being told that the Prime Minister’s central announcement in one of his biggest speeches of the year was an education one, would indicate a real drive towards making this the centrepiece of the Tory agenda too. But the ABS – while undoubtedly big in ambition and more thought through than some people had worried - (fair play to the very small number of people who are able to work on a conference announcement beforehand, publishing a 50 page doc immediately after the speech which says what you want to do shows some planning, and it’s held up better than the “we’ll put trains where they already go, and maybe some new ones in some places but maybe not” Northern Rail doc released at the same time) - suffers at heart from the fact that no one thinks it’s going to happen, and of those people who will need to think about it anyway, half of them like it and half hate it. It will consume a vast amount of DfE time over the next year (I heard rumours this week that there’s upwards of 50 officials working on it, which is essentially the entire group of civil servants left who aren’t doing RAAC….) but it’s unlikely to be a core retail politics offer. This is something that the PM believes personally, and he wants to do.
Finally, it is worth noting that education ends up playing a role in other announcements too. One of the under-thought through elements of Keir Starmer’s four new towns which he told Robert Peston he wants to build, is how the new schools are built (I mean legally and governance wise, not bricks and mortar wise), as well as how they’re staffed (hello, a decent chunk of the promised 6,500 more teachers.....). This definitely falls into the category of technical, but important. Hopefully the DfE will flag it with the Shadow team during transition talks. More nerdy detail and thoughts from me here.
5. Ed tech and AI is education’s “reform fairy”.
You couldn’t move at Labour conference, seemingly, without running into people from Tony Blair’s Shadow No10 Institute for Global Change. Which is now almost all about tech as a route to solving public policy challenges, including education. The beauty of tech policy is that – if it works – it genuinely can be a productivity shift that drives superior outcomes at the same or lower cost. But there’s a huge risk that it’s the reform fairy, as the Economist have dubbed it – things which you can say which mean you don’t need to spend money because reform X will solve the issue for free.
Both the Tories and Labour are thinking a lot about AI, and there’s a lot of discussion in the fringe on it. I’m not well qualified to opine on this, so I simply observe that there’s a massive danger in early adopters running off into the sunset, of terrible products being foisted on schools, and on DfE having nowhere near the skill and ability to quality assure and sense check this emerging market, leaving alone the security and privacy safeguards. I am willing to believe it can make a difference – in particular, I have heard convincing cases made around adaptive assessment, around mitigating teacher shortages (especially at the higher end of learning), and around teacher workload. By contrast, I’m not entirely convinced a Headteacher AI chatbot is going to fly. But let’s see.
Finally, I am both obliged, and more than willing, to give a massive shout out to Public First colleagues for their work in the last two weeks. We have published work on the politics and policy of tuition fees, and on the case for libraries in primary schools. We have released polling on parents views around education and on aspiration. We have spoken on panels covering tutoring, teacher supply, inequality, parents, and housing. Jess’ post sums up some of the work we’ve undertaken, but there’s a lot more there too – and a lot more to come before Christmas!