Phillipson’s Charm Offensive With Birbalsingh Completely Backfires

“Dear Secretary of State

Thank you for meeting me and one of my deputies on Monday. I understand you have also met other trust leaders recently. You will have noticed in our meeting how disappointed we were with your responses to the legitimate questions teachers have of the government’s proposals. I assure you, we are not alone in that feeling.

As teachers, we often hear politicians say how much they care about education. One of two things always follows: either that they are that rare politician who is truly interested in schools; or they are that all-too-common politician who simply wants to appear that way. Monday confirmed that you are firmly in the latter category.

You are not interested

Politicians who truly want to raise standards for our most deprived communities would ordinarily be interested in hearing from the people who know best how to do it: the teachers.

Take our own school of Michaela. Last year, pupils at Eton College (fees £60,000 per year) received 53% grade 9s across all their GCSEs. Michaela (a non-selective state school in a converted office block in Wembley) achieved 52%. Anyone who thinks that black and brown kids from the inner city are destined to be underachievers are wrong. They should meet our children. And with the right values, the right leadership, the right school freedoms, we prove them wrong every time. One would have thought a Secretary of State keen to spread aspiration across the country would want to ask: how is this done? How can we raise the standards everywhere? Yet when we spoke of our successes, you did not probe to find out how we achieve what we do. You are not interested.

There are other schools that show, day in, day out, that seemingly ordinary kids from seemingly ordinary homes are anything but ordinary- when they are given the power of a great education. We asked you which schools you have visited you believe are models of excellence. You could not
answer.

We asked you to explain why it is that academies were able to drive up standards. You are removing their freedoms so you clearly don’t believe their freedoms lead to success. So what does? You could not answer that either. We asked you to name any single school that you believed is driving up standards. You talked around the houses as politicians do but, again – no real answers.

Academies tailor their curricula to the communities they serve and are only able to do this because of curriculum freedoms – freedoms that you are now removing. You insisted that some schools were not meeting your ‘floor’ curriculum requirements. We asked you to name one school that does not offer a core curriculum to its pupils. You could not name a single one.

One can repeat that something is a ‘floor and not a ceiling’ ad infinitum as you did in our meeting, but teachers know when someone is pulling the floor from beneath them.
There are serious and pressing problems in education that every headteacher is dealing with: SEND provision, absence, recruitment and others. You are doing nothing to solve any of these.

You have said that you want to address recruitment. But you are making it harder for schools to hire new staff. There will be fewer Maths teachers in our classrooms because of your butchery to the Advanced Maths Support Programme, pulling its funding. You are closing schools” opportunities to hire teachers without the mountains of bureaucracy that your state-sanctioned, centralised stamping requires. We tried to explain this, but you gave no real answers.

You are passing a law that we must all follow a brand-new curriculum, before you have even told us what it is. Every teacher knows what this means: more money and thousands of hours spent changing resources, on content you haven’t even decided or announced. Time away from children means time away from raising standards. We tried to explain this, but again, no answers.

You do not seem to understand your own bill

I believe your lack of clarity and interest stem from a deeper problem. This became very clear meeting you on Monday. You do not appear to know your own bill.

When we asked you to explain how the recruitment of new teachers would function, you said that this detail was covered in the bill. When we read to you the relevant extracts from the bill, you said that it would be clarified elsewhere. When we looked elsewhere, we didn’t find any answers to the questions we were asking.

When we asked you to explain how the changes to published admissions numbers (PAN) would function, again you did not appear to understand. This rule change means that local councils can deliberately reduce the capacity at popular good schools in order to force those families towards less good schools which are undersubscribed – for obvious reasons. When we asked what you would say to a mother desperate for a place for her child in a good school who now misses out because of deliberately reducing the capacity at these schools, you were unable to answer.

You just kept repeating that “we disagree” because you not only don’t know the content of your bill, you don’t know the obvious impact it will have on the ground.
You’ve had 14 years in Opposition to prepare for this. It is your full-time job. It should not be left to school leaders to point out the holes in this bill.

This is about a Marxist ideological dislike of academies – and no one is fooled by claims to the contrary

So why do all this? Why claim to love academies when you are in fact turning all academies into the equivalent of local authority schools? Academies have been a source of innovation precisely because school leaders have the freedoms to innovate. You cannot remove fuel from a fire and insist it will heat the room just the same. You do not get innovation without these freedoms. But you know this. The reality is that your record in Parliament reveals what you really think of academies, which is that you hate them. You have repeatedly voted against academy reforms from 2010-16. You claim to be a great believer in the high standards that they have brought, as if lines in a press release somehow magic such things into being. But we saw you twist your face with disgust every time you said the word ‘academy’ in our meeting, repeating that the worst schools are in fact academies’. A good Secretary of State would want to help the lower-achieving academies use their freedoms in the bespoke ways the higher-achieving academies have done. But that would require the humility of asking school leaders, instead of assuming you know best.

You are pretending to like academies because in the face of such obvious success, it is difficult to openly oppose them now that you are Education Secretary, in the way that you have done throughout your parliamentary career. You don’t want school leaders to have the freedom to do what is right for their children. You want the state to have total control. You should stick to your convictions and be clear: you do not believe academy freedoms are a good thing and you believe that central government is the answer. At least that would be honest.

You should have higher ambitions for our children. You should show more respect to our teachers. As I said at our meeting, take a few hours away from Whitehall and visit our school in Wembley so that you can see what I mean. Or, you can stick by your Marxist beliefs and debate me on a public platform: which is better for our children, school leaders who make the decisions for our schools, or you in central government?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely”