What’s driving Boris Johnson’s new schools programme, revealed exclusively in the Guardian today? The answer lies not in Downing Street, but 170 miles up the M1, with a revolt in a Cheshire market town. You don’t expect mutiny in Nantwich, but it was here a Tory shires revolt took place.
In February 2017 the main square of the town was packed with locals protesting about the cash crisis in their schools. Their outrage made national news, and it chimed with other shaming stories that were spilling out of classrooms: of cash-strapped headteachers begging pupils to bring in their own loo roll; of teaching assistants getting laid off in droves and staff setting up food banks to feed their own pupils.
When, just weeks later, Theresa May called her snap election, the protest leader Laura Smith stood for Labour in Crewe and Nantwich. The former primary teacher took on the junior education minister Edward Timpson – and won. On the night that sealed May’s fate, it was an emblematic battle that underlined the Tories’ complacency about the country they ruled. “Everybody thought [the campaign] would be about Brexit,” Smith said later. “But it was school funding.”
That 2017 insight of a Westminster newbie is conventional wisdom today in Downing Street. Boris Johnson is in trouble on schools, and he knows it. Unless he sorts it out he won’t claw back the likes of Crewe and Nantwich, and he won’t have a hope of winning a general election. That’s why, in the Tory leadership debates, he named education as a priority, second only to Brexit. And that’s why the government has lined up the bombardment of policies this paper reveals today. Put together, they make a dazzling display of political fireworks: a big cash injection; a drive for more academy schools; finger-wagging on student behaviour; and a final flourish on raising teacher numbers. Bang-bang-bang-bang. The headline writes itself: Boris’s Schools Revolution!
And that might have been the story, too – until today’s publication of a briefing meant only for ministers and officials at the Department for Education. It is full of the stories that the government doesn’t want you to know, such as slashing the number of teaching assistants, as urged by No 10 and the Treasury, even though civil servants know this will go down like a bucket of cold sick with parents and teachers. The briefing advises: “We recommend we continue to push No 10 not to include this publicly.”
Consider also the focus on headteachers being encouraged to “use reasonable force” on misbehaving students. Education officials caution that such a policy will “impact disproportionately on children in need of a social worker, children with special needs and … Black Caribbean Boys”. In other words, it will be state-led discrimination against minority groups. Ensuring that more kids are excluded will simply feed them into pupil referral units or lead to them getting schooled by gangs, so that police and crime commissioners, note the officials, “worry about rates of exclusion driving knife crime”.
Of all the many policy-impact documents I’ve read, I have never come across one which warns that government plans will lead to more kids being maimed and killed, just for the sake of something that will look good across the front of the Daily Mail.
But what about the money? How do the sums fit with the boasts being made by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s top aide, that the government is ready for “the most beautiful spending round you’ve ever seen … billions and billions and billions of pounds”?
The centrepiece is a one-off £2.8bn, which doesn’t reverse the cuts made over the course of this decade by the Conservatives. To do that, calculates the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, Johnson will need to stump up £3.8bn every year. And the majority of schools won’t see an extra penny, since the briefing makes clear that cash will be directed at “areas of the country that have been historically underfunded”, such as the south-west, Essex, Kent and the shires.
The funny thing about those regions is that they just happen to be full of Conservative target seats. Think Canterbury, think Stroud … think Crewe and Nantwich.
This isn’t sorting out our schools crisis – it is neutralising an electoral image problem. It is retrofitting policy to suit the polling objectives. Most of all, it is feigning concern while failing children. Over this decade of cuts, our classrooms have been turned into the new frontline of the welfare state, with staff filling in for councils in financial collapse and parents in precarious jobs or terrible housing. Any serious attempt to fix our schools would have to be combined with money to rebuild our welfare state.
More dishonest yet is the startling pledge: “By September 2022, we want to see teacher starting salaries at £30,000, putting teaching at the top of graduate labour market.”
An excellent bit of politics, which conveniently ignores the fact that teachers’ salaries are set not by ministers but an independent body, and that well before 2022 – indeed before this Christmas – Westminster expects a general election. But when the headline is so good, who minds if it’s contradicted by the story? Who at No 10 cares if they break the supposedly cast-iron impartiality of the civil service as long as it’s printing true-blue election leaflets?
I cut my teeth as an economics journalist while Gordon Brown was first clunking around No 11, so I won’t pretend that all these tactics are brand new. But what shines through every pronouncement of this administration is its contempt for accuracy and, ultimately, for the public.
This month started with Johnson dropping £1.8bn of “new money” on the NHS – that headline lasted until the afternoon of the announcement, when Downing Street was forced to admit that £1bn of that money was not new – and that the rest of it might not be either. Similarly, these school policies burst with many spending commitments that, the private memo admits in line after line, are merely “reprioritised programme spend” – Whitehall’s way of saying they’ll be paid for by cutting other parts of the teaching budget.
Even so, millions will be poured into creating more academies and free schools, neither of which can be justified by any review of the evidence, but both of which Cummings is set on, intending to turn England into the most deregulated education sector in Europe. When Cummings was at the Department for Education, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, Kevin Courtney, remembers his boss, Michael Gove pinning up on his office wall “a vertical map of England, with arrows showing how far academy trusts had penetrated parts of the country” – a Dad’s Army-style graphic of school privatisation. (A source tells me that academies minister Lord Agnew has given the map pride of place in his office.)
None of this would fly in a serious country and with a press that retained a brain and a backbone. But we don’t have that. We have newspapers that yelp with glee at the sight of the prime minister swimming in the Bay of Biscay. And as revealed in this memo, we have a government that isn’t defined by care for the children who represent the future of this country. No, at its core is something pernicious: a cold, hard cynicism about what gets headlines, what tickles swing voters and what might win an election.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
