David Green responds to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families:
Ed Balls claims that the Tories want excellence for the few, whereas he wants excellence for everyone. Worse still, the Tories want schools to select parents, while he wants parents to select schools. And the Tories are complacent. Balls will ‘intervene and drive change in the system’ while the Tories will merely ‘stand back and hope for the best’.
Let’s take him at his word: ‘parents and pupils should choose schools not the other way round’. A policy-maker genuinely committed to parents choosing schools would carry out an honest evaluation of places where it has already been tried, such as Sweden. Instead, the Swedish system is dismissed. And, if parental choice is the genuine aim, why prevent parents from setting up their own schools or giving their backing to people who will do it for them? Balls declares that this would mean ‘new schools and surplus places springing up wherever a willing group of parents or sponsor comes forward’. Yes it would — that’s the point. But to him it’s ‘a recipe for cuts and chaos’.
The real dispute is not between good intentions and bad intentions, as Ed Balls implies. On the one hand there are people with good intentions who are practical, open, self-critical and pay attention to real outcomes. And on the other there are people like Ed Balls who claim to have good intentions but who think it’s always (conveniently) too soon to make a final judgment about whether their policies have worked. The great philosopher of the open society, Karl Popper, wrote about the importance of developing a ‘social technology’ that would allow reforms to be improved and shaped as the results emerged. In particular, reforms must be on a human scale, so that cause and effect could be unravelled. He was not opposed to governament provision and belonged in the tradition of social democracy, but he wanted reforms that genuinely improved conditions. He called his approach ‘piecemeal social engineering’ and contrasted it with ‘utopian social engineering’. Utopians suppressed criticism or hid behind high ideals. Critics were forced into silence by implying that they lacked idealism — they did not care enough.
Mr Balls constantly repeats the mantra of ‘excellence for all, not the few’, but the last thing he wants is an evaluation of how well policies since 1997 have worked. He wants another chance to do more of the same in the hope that it will come good this time. Under the latest ‘national challenge’ 638 failing schools have been targeted. They must get five A*-Cs for over 30 per cent of their pupils or they may be closed.
Karl Popper was right. All the talk about excellence for all is a ploy to distract attention from what’s happening this very day in our schools. We should move towards policy-making based on a ‘social technology’ of reform that allows everyone — teachers, parents or anyone else — the chance to try out their ideas in open competition. In an atmosphere of free inquiry, excellence is more likely to be the daily reality than it could ever be under any politician who is sufficiently foolish to think he knows enough to ‘intervene and drive change in the system’.
David Green is director of Civitas.