There is no doubt that Boris Johnson’s splashing the cash immediately after his election sent a little frisson of excitement throughout the education community. It might be a piece of early electioneering, but £14.2 billion was something worth believing in.
Wiser counsels might have warned that the current disastrous period of cuts in education was augured in by the self-professed liberal government of David Cameron, with the half-truth that he was maintaining the protection on education spending, when he was doing the exact opposite.
The half-truth was maintained by conflating absolute spending amounts with real spending adjusted for inflation, new pension arrangements and increasing school rolls.
Half-truths and statistical manipulations have always been the stock-in-trade for politicians, but you can’t help feeling that in this ‘post-truth‘ era we have moved into a different league. And the manipulation of the truth is spreading downwards and outwards from the top.
To start with, Boris’ new spending largess was part of a £50 billion give away bonanza leading up to the Conservative Party conference. The likelihood of it ever being fully realized is entirely remote. The Education Policy Institute were also quick to point out that only £2.5 billion over 5 years was new spending, the rest was planned adjustments for inflation and wage rises. Of that £2.5 billion, most of it was set aside for ‘levelling up’, which, in itself, could have a damaging impact on schools in high need areas of deprivation, as these are the very schools that were already at a disadvantage to more well-off schools that have fewer free school meal pupils.
In short, it would only need the slightest fall in projected public expenditure, perhaps as a result of Brexit, for the promises for additional spending to education to vaporise. Even now, the Coalition Against Cuts, which comprises most of the education unions, have issued an analysis of the just announced cash allocations for schools, showing that by 2020, 83 per cent of schools will have less money than in 2015. To recover the funding position of 2015, the government needs to triple the amount of funding available.
It is not just in the area of funding where false narratives are being constructed to promote the success of our education system: Academisation and the role of Ofsted are also front and centre.
The recent A-Level and GCSE results, which included a small increase in top scores, were trumpeted to the mountain tops as evidence of the increase in ‘Good’ and ‘Outstanding’ schools (by Ofsted judgements), while the real reversal in the closing of the ‘Achievement Gap’ and the alarming increase in the number of children leaving without any A-C exam grades are completely ignored by the government, as is the rise in formal and informal suspensions, the collapse of special needs provision and the mysterious disappearances of pupils from some school rolls.
One of the most curious aspects of this dichotomy and divergence in education realities has been the failure of Ofsted to intervene in any meaningful way to stop disappearances and suspensions or to deal with the lack of support for children in danger of failing. It seems they have been compromised by the success narrative that underwrites their continued existence. Ofsted’s new framework can’t be judged a success as long as any of these negative indicators are not being reversed.
In truth, however, the acknowledgement of areas of concern alongside indications of success could actually be held together and offered up to the public as credible assessments of where we are now, and could provide some realism and relief from the non-stop statistical manipulations and warpings of the truth. But that would suggest that the government and Ofsted are willing to express the complex realities of education system improvement and restore a little faith in public service and political probity; sadly that is something that has yet to be seen.