NEW ARRIVALS AND THE FAIR SOCIETY
This morning I reached into a box in our bedroom and carefully brought out a little brown woollen outfit. Our daughter was dressed in it when we brought her home after her birth two years ago and we will need it again within a week. I could not be more excited about our imminent new arrival. Last time we did not know whether our baby was to be a boy or a girl (hence the brown outfit) and we don’t know this time either. I think it’s a girl. My wife assures me it’s a boy and given that she has lived with it for the last nine months I am not going to argue!
When I am asked why I want to become an MP I often talk about children and their future. Children who come into a world that has been formed and shaped by others (politicians especially) and whose life chances depend critically upon the kind of society they are born into. I believe that one of the great tests of a civilised society is how fair it is and that, of course, requires some kind of definition.
Fairness does not mean that we all have to be entirely equal in every sense or that we should try to socially engineer a world in which there are no winners or losers, in which political correctness is allowed to run riot and an envy of those who have succeeded is promoted at every turn. This approach destroys initiative, diversity and excellence and leaves us all poorer as a result. But fairness does dictate that opportunity should be available as much and as equally as possible and that the most vulnerable in our society should be protected.
Right at the heart of the opportunity agenda lies education. Education that great driver of social mobility. That critical opportunity for those from less advantaged backgrounds to get on. I believe that, next to a stable upbringing, the most important gift that any child can receive is a good education. I feel particularly strongly about this notion because my own life has been radically shaped by it.
My mother and father left school at 15 and 14 years old. The reason was simple. They grew up in conditions of considerable hardship. My father spending most of his childhood in a variety of none too pleasant children’s homes. My mother, one of a family of seven living on a run-down council estate fared little better. Whilst she did well at school, there was never any question of her staying on. It was always understood that she and her friends would leave as soon as possible to provide support for the family finances. For the majority of the children my mother grew up with there was no real educational opportunity at all. It did not matter how bright or hardworking you were or how much you wanted to learn or how much you wished to be a doctor or a lawyer or even an astronaut who might one day touch the moon – you knew that it was pointless even to dream of these things let alone to strive to achieve them.
The greatest opportunity I have had (along with meeting my wife) was a free place at a grammar school. I never looked back and still to this day I am the only member of my family (including my brother and countless nieces, nephews and cousins) to have attended university. That free place was my great opportunity in life. There was nothing fancy about my school, its buildings were redundant army barracks and our playing field was an old military parade ground a 30 minute bus ride away, but it set me up for everything else that followed and I will forever be grateful for it.
Tony Blair also recognised the vital importance of education. He gave a speech before he first became Prime Minister in which he pounded-out the priorities of his future administration as ‘education, education, education.’ He recognised its role in improving a child’s life chances, its ability to create a fairer society and, of course, the added value that a good system of education provides for a modern economy. To be fair to Labour they backed up this commitment with huge investment. Over the following decade the money spent per pupil increased by 48% in real terms.
The problem is that the results stubbornly failed to follow the cash. After more than a decade of the ‘money-go-round’ OFSTED report that over a million children have been failed by our education system, employers state that many school levers are unable to compose a decent business letter and universities continue to provide remedial courses to many new undergraduates. All of this in an increasingly globally interconnected and competitive world in which knowledge-based industries are king. And what of the social mobility that British education was to help to accelerate? Well, it’s declined. We’re back at the levels of the 1970s.
So what has gone wrong? Well, I believe that you can seek to improve state education in two distinct ways. You can focus on ‘Content’ and you can grapple with ‘Structure’. Content is about what goes on within the school system (pupil-teacher ratios, what is taught, what is tested and how, how classroom discipline is maintained etc.). Structure is about how the market for education operates and critically where the balance of power lies between the desires of parents and the authority of the state. I believe that where the government has gone wrong is to over-focus on Content whilst being too timid on Structure. To attempt to force up standards through prescription from the centre (numerous SATS tests, CVA scores and the like) as opposed to looking more closely at how to free up parental choice and let that vital influence drive up standards.
In order to provide more choice for parents we must be radical. We must allow far more providers of education into the market and encourage a greater diversity of provision. This means allowing more schools to be built and run by educational charities, existing school federations, local parent groups, faith organisations, universities, businesses, livery companies, philanthropists, co-operatives and not for profit organisations amongst others. In each case the pupils at these new schools being funded by the state and on the same basis as existing state schools. And of course none of these schools being permitted to charge fees.
We then need to make it as easy as possible for parents to choose between schools and to move their children from one school to another (if they are dissatisfied with the education being provided). By empowering parental choice (‘I can send my child to the school of my choice’) at the expense of bureaucratic diktat (‘this is the school that your child will attend’) we will drive up educational standards as popular schools expand and less popular ones improve or decline.
Sweden adopted this model 15 years ago and now has an education system that is amongst the best in the world. A system whose very success promotes fairness, equality of opportunity and social mobility. The kind of society in which I hope our new baby can grow and flourish. Boy or girl?