The Case of England

The Case of England Marc Tucker with Judy Codding National Center on Education and the Economy New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce 2005 National Center on Education and the Economy, 2005 The Case of England Putting in Place a National System to Raise Student—and System—Performance No state in the United States has produced gains in student performance as fast or on as wide a scale as has England in the years since Maggie Thatcher first became Prime Minister. This is the story of the system that Thatcher put in place, John Major continued and Prime Minister Blair has refined and, in many ways, actually made to work. To that extent it is a story of educational policies and strategies that bear close study by anyone interested in duplicating England’s achievements. But it is no less a story of individuals and the political leadership they provided, without which the other story would not have happened at all. I will tell the political story, too, because, without it, it will be hard to explain how changes so fundamental could have occurred so rapidly and their champions prevailed so completely. We will speak here of the changes that have taken place in England’s education system. England is itself a country of about 50 million souls, about the population of California and Illinois combined. Its population density is about three times that of continental Europe and, though it is one of the world’s richest nations, its Gross Domestic Product per person (number 12 in the world) is only about two thirds that of the United States. As the world now knows, what was only recently a fairly homogeneous nation when it came to race and ethnicity has become home to a rapidly growing number of people born elsewhere, often of different race and ethnicity from the native English. The United Kingdom now tops the charts in the number of applications for asylum among industrialized countries. When Maggie Thatcher came to office, the issue was Britain’s economic performance, which had been dismal and declining for years. Thatcher campaigned as her father’s daughter, a certified member of the middle class, not the privileged class, who had learned from her father not only the virtues of self- reliance and hard work, but who had also absorbed from her observations of his National Center on Education and the Economy, 2005 2 grocery business the realities of world trade. Thatcher took a dim view of the effects of the growth of the benefits bureaucracy in Britain and declared that the best way to help Britain’s poor and its suffering middle class was to whittle down the ranks of government and make Britain competitive again in world commerce. For Thatcher, education fit right into this picture. She herself had risen to power not through the peerage but through the opportunities that education had given her, and she meant to make those opportunities available to everyone. On the point of education, Thatcher sat squarely in the middle lane of the American political tradition. The irony is that this would lead Thatcher to greatly expand the central government’s role in education. But we are getting ahead of our story. In the early years of Prime Minister Thatcher’s time in office, people spoke of the changes in English education as revolutionary. And indeed they were. But, in retrospect, one might have seen them coming. As early as 1976, in his Ruskin College address, Prime Minister James Callaghan, a union man through and through, and a stalwart of the Labor Party all his adult life, called for a Great Debate about education in England. He charged that the educators were producing graduates who lacked the basic skills needed by employers and who preferred work in academe and government to work in the private sector, that the educators had failed to prepare students with the competence in science and technology needed to power a modern economy, and had embraced teaching methods that worked well enough in the hands of exceptional educators but produced dubious results in the hands of ordinary teachers. He wondered aloud whether England needed a national core curriculum, set by the central government. And he strongly implied that the teachers had rejected the claim of anyone but education professionals to a legitimate voice in education policy, and were running the education system, not to meet the needs of students and their parents, but to suit their own interests and convenience. The educators, of course, were represented by the National Teachers Union, possibly the most powerful union in Great Britain and a core constituency of the party Mr. Callaghan headed. The speech was an act of sheer political courage. National Center on Education and the Economy, 2005 3 But things went from bad to worse over the next dozen years, culminating in a bruising national dispute over teachers’ pay, which ended when the union lost, as the Labor government imposed a settlement on the teachers that they had fought tooth and nail. As these events unfolded, the teachers lost whatever public sympathy they might have had in prior years. The phrase “producer capture” came into use by the analysts of the time to describe a sector of the economy, in this case education, in which policy had appeared to be hijacked by the people who produced the services, thus denying the legitimate interests of the people who were supposed to be served. During this same period, an increasing number of local town and city Councils were taken over by representatives of the hard Left, who promptly squared off against the central government in London. Under the Education Act of 1944, these councils controlled the local education authorities, which in turn controlled the schools. Increasingly the public saw the councils as the partners of the teachers in the process of “producer capture.” The councils demanded more and more money for an enterprise that appeared to produce more and more for the teachers and less and less for the students and their parents. So matters stood when Margaret Thatcher squared off against Jim Callaghan in 1979. Education was very much on her mind. She had been Secretary of State for Education in Ted Heath’s government in 1970-74. Her views on the subject were very much in harmony with those that Jim Callaghan expressed in his Ruskin College speech a few years later. She, too, thought that education had been hijacked by the professionals. She thought British educational standards dangerously low when compared to those of other industrialized nations. She was determined to wrest control of education from the local councils, which she, too, saw as captured by the hard left and by the professionals, and seize it at the national level. This was not simply a matter of disempowering a level of government that had come to be dominated by the opposition party. Thatcher came to power on a platform of arresting and reversing Britain’s economic decline, and believed that she could not make good on that platform unless she National Center on Education and the Economy, 2005 4 could greatly increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of British education. And she could not do that as long as the local councils held all the cards. When she was in opposition, Thatcher had formed a think tank with Sir Keith Joseph called the Center for Policy Studies. Many of these ideas were crystallized into plans in the papers issued by the Center. Joseph became Secretary of State for Education in 1981. Sir Keith Joseph began his tenure by trying to revolutionize British education with a school voucher initiative. But, in time, he came to see that there was no way to succeed in structuring such an initiative and carry the day in Parliament in the time available before the next general election. So the next few years were devoted to more incremental approaches to the problems he and the Prime Minister wanted to solve. The Prime Minister, however, wanted to go much further than these incremental reforms, largely guided by the civil servants in the Department for Education and Science, would get her. The result , which came in the third Thatcher administration, was the Education Reform Act of 1988, the greatest change in British education policy since the Education Act of 1944. In the years from 1944 to 1988. the central government had very little control over local education. The Education Act of 1944 had actually transferred power to the local level of government from London. From time to time, government commissioned and issued major reports that were intended to influence local decisions, but did not mandate them, and Her Majesty’s Inspectors used the esteem in which they were held to gently nudge the system this way or that, but the chance that any given school would be inspected in any given decade was nearly zero, and, in any case, the Inspectors had no authority over the schools that they inspected. The national government was little more than an interested bystander with modest moral authority and little more. The Education Reform Act of 1988 greatly decreased the authority and power of the local level of government, sending that power both up and down. School National Center on Education and the Economy, 2005 5 heads (the people we call “principals”) acquired more authority and parents and school governors were likewise given more power. The governors (a sort of school board for each school) were given more power as well as more responsibility to implement the national reforms and the parents’ powers were enhanced by permitting more choice among schools and changing the funding scheme so that the money followed the student when they changed schools.

Load more