Speech to NAHT National Conference May 2007

The NAHT calls upon the Government to reword its priority for the next Comprehensive Spending Review as ‘Schools, Schools, Schools’.
To achieve this it needs to:
1. See standards now rise even further through a reduction in the
command and control of central prescription and structural change.
2. Reduce the amount of wasted expenditure in the failed regimes of major consultancies and ‘quangos’.
3. Lever up school-based expenditure, and reduce disparities amongst schools throughout the country. Enable school leaders to ensure that every child has the opportunity of attending a good school. That is real parental choice.

SATs SIPs Early Years Foundation Stage Trust Schools Performance Management 14-19 Curriculum 21 Education Acts in 21 years Extended Schools Modern Foreign Languages
Academies New Primary Strategies Schools Sports Partnerships FMSIS
RAISE online new OFSTED, and 47 new Initiatives facing Primary Schools, and 54 facing Secondaries. The command and control of central prescription is ever present and increasing. It is now causing many schools and children untold harm. High-stakes testing is one example. It doesn’t have to be this way.

In her address to the International Confederation of Principals in Auckland in April, Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand ruled out national assessments and consequent ‘teaching to the tests’ as derogatory to good educational practice. Not many DfES Ministers or senior civil servants were around to listen.

This command and control mentality affects local authority services as well. One of countless recent examples is where some auditors are now expecting Governing bodies to produce minutes that record which individual Governor said what in order to prove financial probity.
Where is the Trust?

There is no doubt that we have to congratulate the Government for the resources they have put into the education system and that schools have had real rises.

It is also true that we as a Country expect much from our schools. It is a pity we do not expect more from our parents.

On the debit side of Government, lack of transparency, double counting, and new initiatives poorly thought out and ill-resourced, and even more structural change continue unabated. This is no longer acceptable.

It could be persuasively argued that in its first phase central prescription through the production of national curricular and standards was of significant assistance to the education of our children. This is now no longer the case. Sir Ken Robinson has spoken of the great need to allow schools to be creative. True personalization cannot be introduced by decree. Isn’t it amazing that we have to have a national Implementation Review Unit at all? Schools have become the testing ground for the latest wheezes of Ministers/senior civil servants/and of the major consultancies.

In his Easter address, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor criticized modern Britain’s ‘now generation’ culture. Too often people expected everything ‘almost instantaneously’, he told an Easter vigil at Westminster Cathedral. It was noticed that not many DfES Ministers or senior civil servants were found to have taken part in the vigil.


There is now the prospect of businessmen and women being fast-tracked into school leadership. What is the first thing they will do?
Surround themselves with PA’s rather than TA’s. We must strive to
win control back so that the education of our children is a partnership of teaching and learning.

Government is now wasting substantial resources in centralized prescription. As the rate of educational spending is due to slow significantly from 2008 it is vital that they recognize that schools raise standards not sanctuary buildings – a very apt address for the DfES.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Let us now look at those who have plundered educational expenditure to date. Over half of such expenditure fails to find its way into schools. Why? Well what does the data tell us?

Examples include a culture of not trusting schools, so for Extended
Schools we have the former NRT - now TDA Development Group requiring local authorities to employ people to send back compliance traffic lights on how many schools are signed up and working on the
Extended Schools agenda.
Or the £12 million given to SERCO those well-known prisons to military hardware group to lead a consortium to raise capacity in local authorities to support Extended Services. Talk about the unspeakable leading the unknowable. Place your trust in schools.

According to data I gained through the Freedom of Information Act,
the DfES has 43 Centrally Managed Consultancy Frameworks and it just so happens that between April and December 2003 43 major contracts were issued.
However, in 2005 this had increased to 124,
and in the financial year just finished there were 181.

If it was Desert Island discs the major consultancies might choose the following as their favourite song:
‘You’re just too good to be true’.

Price Waterhouse Coopers, KPMG, Ernst and Young and the others must be rubbing their hands with glee.
I am not saying that perhaps some of those working in the consultancies used to work in the DfES.
I’m not saying that some of those who work in the DfES used to work in the major consultancies.
I’m not even saying that they went to the same school or belong to the same club.
I am just saying our children deserve those resources.

Less central prescription and less reliance on the major quangos and consultancies would enable school-based expenditure to be levered up.

This would in turn assist in addressing the need to reduce the significant disparities of how schools are funded between different authorities and within those authorities themselves.
Why is a child worth so much less in some areas than others?
Clearly, there are particular needs in London and the major conurbations, and also to address special educational needs and social deprivation, but why so many other disparities?

The following examples are from George Phipson’s Section 52 analysis (for the year to March 2005) are for Primary pupils, but a similar picture is present for Secondaries.
Lincolnshire £2527
Swindon £2593
Dorset £2690
against a National Average of
£2823.
A 250-pupil school in Dorset would receive an extra £34,000 if funded at the National Average. In Swindon this would be an extra £57,000. In Lincolnshire, this would rise to £75,000. There are many similar examples.
Why so great a disparity across the Country. Doesn’t Every Child Matter?

We need creativity not control.
We need quality not quangos.
‘It is time to trust schools.’
Mike Welsh