A personal and idiosyncratic account.

AuthorTomlinson, Sally

Education, Education, Education: Reforming England's Schools

Andrew Adonis

BITEBACK PUBLICATIONS, 2012

This is an important and well-written book, persuasively documenting a major and on-going reform of education in England from a system where, via Section 1 of the 1944 Education Act, the Minister for Education had a duty to 'secure the effective execution by local authorities, under his control and direction, of the national policy for providing a varied and comprehensive service in every area' to one where the Minister has a direct contract with every school and the education service is effectively centralised with no local democratic input.

The book documents the way in which Adonis, during his career as an education advisor to the Blair government and then as a Minister after his ennoblement, undertook a 'complete reinvention of the comprehensive school'. Adonis dedicated himself to transforming failing comprehensive schools, a 'cancer at the heart of English society', into academies, independent state schools with 'dynamic independent sponsors taking charge of their management' (p. xii). Since the abolition of local authority influence in education was suggested by the right-wing Hillgate Group in 1986; Mrs Thatcher in her speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1987 made a plea for 'independent state schools'; and the Secretary of State for Education in the current Coalition government envisages all schools eventually becoming academies, the book should be of more than passing interest to Labour supporters. Reviews of the book so far have been largely positive, but being considerably older than the author and having lived through many of the imperfections in the education system he documents, there is an alternative story to the one this book presents. An initial measure of agreement must be with the book's quotation from R. H. Tawney that 'what a wise parent would wish for their children, the state must wish for all its children' (p. 35). The problem is that in our current intensely competitive education system the wise parent is all too often one who wishes for advantages for their children, and forgets the losers.

In the introduction Adonis makes reference to his own deprived background, though he attended a fee-paying boarding school in rural Oxfordshire, and was mentored first by his head-teacher, who introduced him to Keble College, Oxford, and then by Roy Jenkins. His arrival at his private school removed him from the 'vast adolescent jungle' of Borehamwood school (p. xviii), one of the many he terms 'secondary-modern comprehensives'. Despite studying history he has a curiously ahistorical view of how our mass education system developed out of class, political and religious interests, and which, despite the best efforts of egalitarians and philanthropists, continues to perpetuate inequalities. He is committed to ending class divisions in education, bridging the private-state school divide and raising educational and skills standards for all, as are the legions of educators, past and present, who have been working to achieve these aims over the past sixty years. It is therefore a pity that in order to defend his support for academy schools he felt the need to attack those he feels impeded these aims. Villains include egalitarian head-teachers; teachers; unions; local authorities (especially local authority chief education officers, who are 'here today, gone tomorrow' (p. 56)); further education colleges; education professors (especially Ted Wragg (1), whose reference to him as 'Lord Barmey of Bedlam' obviously hurt); and...

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