Britain faces an education crisis. To reopen schools, Boris must be bold
After the coronavirus crisis comes the educational crisis. Of the many consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, the loss of at least six months of schooling for the great majority of children is likely to be the most lasting and perhaps even the worst. This loss was foreseeable, but it is not irreparable. Yet the Government shows little urgency or energy in tackling what will, unless vigorous efforts to mitigate the damage are undertaken, turn into a disaster for a whole generation of pupils.
This week, the Prime Minister sought to reassure the House of Commons that he was on the case. Challenged by Sir Keir Starmer to set up a cross-party schools “task force”, Boris Johnson insisted that there would be a “summer of catch-up”. Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, would be announcing far-reaching measures, he promised, targeted at disadvantaged pupils in particular.
So far, the mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse. Not even a squeak has emerged from the Secretary of State. The latest figures show that 93 per cent of pupils are not yet attending school. Many, of course, are receiving an excellent education online. But there is growing evidence that the gap between children from more or less advantaged backgrounds is being exacerbated by their enforced absence from school. Educational inequality is much worse than economic, for ignorance is harder to overcome than poverty. Once those whose lives at home may be chaotic even in normal times also lose the habit of daily school attendance and cease to work towards examinations, they are destined to drift into an underworld of crime and drugs from which there is no escape.
Summer schools sound sensible, and may help to limit the damage already done. But for the 700,000 or more who have done no work at home, summer schools are not the solution. That is certainly the view of Katherine Birbalsingh (pictured above) the inspirational headmistress of Michaela, the free school in Wembley that has brought hope and achievement to some of the poorest families in London. “Summer school is the dumbest possible idea,” she wrote on social media. “All summer school will do is to continue to exacerbate the divide between the kids who work and the kids who don’t. The kids who haven’t worked during lockdown won’t come in. The kids who worked really hard will.”
The Prime Minister should listen to a headmistress who, unlike his own minister, knows what she is talking about. In fact, he should do more than that. He should take up Keir Starmer’s idea of a task force, but put Katharine Birbalsingh in charge of it. The Leader of the Opposition would not like it, because she is anathema to the teaching unions to which the Labour Party is in thrall. But only a person with the dynamism and leadership skills of Miss Birbalsingh could cut through the bureaucracy of “the Blob”. She has the charisma to reach out to parents and teachers, to persuade them to work through the summer.
But the task force must have teeth. Without an element of compulsion, the weakest will go to the wall. The Government has the powers it needs to order schools to reopen and to tell parents that their children must attend. The able head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, could be tasked with sending Her Majesty’s Inspectors into thousands of schools in the poorest places to get them up and running first. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, should earmark money for this endeavour, to be ring-fenced from the rest of the education budget. This project needs a name. How about Operation Catch-up?
What of Gavin Williamson? He has shown himself unequal to his task. He was far more enthusiastic about closing schools than he has been at reopening them. The brightest of the rising stars in the Government is undoubtedly Kemi Badenoch. Her talents are wasted at the Treasury. Boris Johnson should sack Williamson and bring in Badenoch.
It was William Gladstone, the eminent Victorian, now in the firing line as his family made its fortune from slave plantations, who did more than any other Prime Minister to lift the educational attainments of the poorest. Beginning with the Forster Education Act of 1870, over the next few decades schooling gradually became universal in Britain. Along with the abolition of fees, what was decisive was the force of law. Attendance at school has been compulsory for all children up to the age of 10 for only 140 years.
It was a Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who introduced the principle of compulsion. (Surprisingly, Disraeli, the great imperialist, has not yet been targeted by the iconoclasts. He will be.) Boris Johnson does not want to go down in history as the Tory Prime Minister who let compulsory education lapse by default. It was Disraeli who wrote: “The Youth of the Country are the Trustees of Posterity.” Now, more than ever, Boris should be bold on behalf of our youth.
