Principal, Martin Twist, speaks to The Telegraph on Education in the Sixth Form sector.
Featured News
Labour’s lack of vision on education is a matter of Phillipson’s priorities, Sherelle Jacobs, editor at The Telegraph
Martin Twist, the headteacher of St Charles, a state sixth form college in Notting Hill, was looking forward to a Labour government. A free spirit recruited in the New Labour era with a penchant for Aztec bracelets and jackets stitched with brightly patterned lining, his philosophy on education is a mulch of liberal progressivism and market pragmatism.
His school is a centre-Leftist’s dream. With a tight budget, he has turned around a struggling sixth form. His school – which is now rated Good by Ofsted – exudes a spa-like calm, that is serene rather than regimented, during teaching hours. The pupils’ passion is learning, authentic to the point of offhanded, with pupils emerging from history class trilling about the American Revolution and funny TikToks they were browsing the night before in the same breath. The timetable is planned so teachers can work a four-day week.
And yet Twist is coming to dread five years of Left-wing rule. “The educational sector is supportive of Labour ideology – not least its high value on public services. But at the minute we are just seeing strengthening of trade unions.”
St Charles is not a particularly unionised college but Twist will spend this week scrambling to avoid class cancellations as several of his staff strike, amid Labour’s mysterious decision to leave sixth form colleges out of a national 5.5 per cent pay rise deal. This comes after they were hit with the VAT raid, despite being state funded.
While Labour’s barely concealed vendetta against academies has gained a lot of attention in recent weeks, the party’s disdain towards maintained sixth forms – treating them as if they were an irrelevant anomaly – is also a manifestation of Labour’s bizarre approach.
Amid the chaos surrounding the party’s flagship education Bill, a couple of things are becoming clear. First, Labour has no grip. A Government with a detailed grasp of the system’s administrative quirks and bear traps could have avoided the coming strikes.
Second, although Labour appears reluctant to come out and clearly articulate its basic philosophy on education – which is why its education Bill is such an incoherent dog’s dinner – it apparently fundamentally disagrees with the notion that freedom is a crucial driver of educational excellence. Instead, Bridget Phillipson seems happy to allow the blob to take back control. The DfE – the most notoriously control-hungry department in Whitehall – has relished clawing back powers from independent academy trusts, though as senior Tories point out, it lacks the manpower to match its ambitions to “run the world”.
Non-academy schools are also bristling at a rash of clumsy top-down Labour directives, from a frenzied push to purge BTec courses to a mandate for all primary schools to offer free breakfasts. While the latter makes for warm and fuzzy headlines, among teachers it has gone down like a bucket of cold porridge. Many schools already offer a morning meal and would prefer the cash to spend as they see fit. “It all feels a bit like someone who has never seen the inside of a classroom had a bright idea after reading something in a policy paper,” sighs Twist.
It’s a tragedy, because Labour could have brought fresh vim to England’s education revolution. Though the Tories left office amid the fog of crumbling school roofs, they are good at spinning the yarn that theirs was a golden age for education. In reality, even academy trust heads privately admit that the Goveite turn lost momentum years ago.
With the teacher shortage beyond crisis point, Labour’s opening gambit ought to have been a thumpingly ambitious recruitment drive.
And had they been inclined, Labour might have even bettered the Tories by sounding the klaxon for freedom in education even louder. Instead of junking academy trusts, they could have improved them by slashing executive red tape. Some gripe that academies have actually eroded school autonomy in some ways, with heads not even free to choose the paint colour for their assembly halls. Some heads have plumped for forming unofficial “mini-trusts” that allow them to pool resources without having to deal with an overweening CEO. A sharper SoS would have brought those pioneering alternative models to the table.
Labour has also flunked an opportunity to try and raise standards by granting schools the kind of freedoms that might be counter-intuitive to many conservatives. Many heads are itching for more freedom to pump their budget into keeping their bottom 10 per cent in check, such as through after-school tuition. In rough schools, the single biggest thing holding back diligent pupils is the presence of classroom disruptors. Teachers are bewildered that the Left doesn’t appear to get this.
In the AI age, Labour could also have made a powerful argument for a creative revolution in education. While England’s traditional approach has strong merits, it is failing to prepare the next generation in their battle for relevance against AI. As computers become capable of crafting passable copy, writing functional software and conducting standard experiments, it is clear that the “mind workers” that many assumed would evade the automation Armageddon will need to be outstanding, rather than merely OK, at what they do. This has cataclysmic implications for a system that is fixated with nurturing all-rounders.
According to senior Labour and Tory MPs, the reason for the lack of vision is dismayingly simple: Phillipson, above all else, desires to be leader. She intends to run the DfE like an old-school socialist in order to curry favour with the Party grassroots. That way, she hopes that she will be in a strong position should Sir Keir Starmer be given the boot over austerity. Apparently England’s children are mere pawns on a chessboard to Phillipson, who just might be the most diabolically ambitious politician in the land.
Education was one realm in which Labour could have been ground-breaking. Instead, the Government’s attitude to school reform embodies the worst of the Left. On unrepentant display is its affection for command-and-controllism, its tendency to retreat into ancient centralising, socialising dogma for lack of original ideas – and a willingness to sacrifice the futures of millions for the sake of some vainglorious apparatchik’s self-serving interpretation of the “greater good”. How utterly depressing.