“All I learnt at school/Was how to bend not break the rules”: so sang Madness in their 1980 hit Baggy Trousers. Thirty-six years on, it may as well be an anthem for the Conservative party, which seems to be losing all sense of classroom discipline, testing the very limits of political coherence.
The suspension of collective responsibility over the EU referendum has loosened party unity generally. For more than 10 years, David Cameron has (with a few conspicuous exceptions) held together his fractious tribe, maintaining the internal truce that was his principal legacy from Michael Howard. But — by design, rather than by accident — that truce has been shattered by his relaxation of the rules as the referendum approaches. And dissent is hard to contain: once released, it metastasises fast and unpredictably.
As disclosed in the Observer, Graham Brady, the chairman of the backbench 1922 committee, has opened another front in the Tory civil war, a conflict that had hitherto been confined to the vote on Brexit and its prospective impact upon the Conservative leadership. In this case Brady was taking aim at the government’s plans, revealed in the budget, to compel all state schools to become academies by 2022.
“I’ve always favoured greater autonomy for schools,” he said. “But I do think there is an issue if all schools are to become part of huge new chains, in which there is little accountability or parental involvement.”
Academies, you will recall, are state-funded schools in England, outside town hall control, that fall into three broad categories: sponsored schools run by a government-approved sponsor; “converter” academies that seek the new status but do not require a sponsor; and free schools, new institutions set up from scratch as academies. This structural option has its roots in the Blair era, the first academies having been established as far back as 2000.
Hugely controversial from the start, they were defended thus by the former prime minister: “The end is not choice. The end is quality services irrespective of wealth. The end is opportunity to make the most of your ability whatever your start in life. The end is utterly progressive in its values.” Needless to say, this did not and does not persuade the academies’ detractors who claim, confusingly, that the strategy both atomises and centralises the schools system.
In one respect, Brady is dead right. The white paper introduced by Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, “expects all governing boards to focus on seeking people with the right skills for governance, and so we will no longer require academy trusts to reserve places for elected parents on governing boards.” The promise of an online “parent portal” is scant compensation for a guaranteed presence on the governing body. It is not too late for Morgan to rethink this mistaken clause.
This aside, it is important to recall that the 1922 chairman has form in educational controversies. In 2007 he resigned as shadow education minister over Cameron’s refusal to reopen the debate over selection and the 11-plus. Brady was never going to win the battle — but he had the party and much of the press on his side, a measure of the mythic grip with which grammar schools continued (and continue) to hold the Tory tribe. In the wake of this furore, David Willetts lost control of schools policy to Michael Gove.
Nine years on, one suspects that Brady still sees academies as pound-shop grammar schools, a poor substitute for the real thing. No less important, his views chime with the leaders of Tory councils in Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Trafford and Kent who are, to quote one Oxfordshire councillor , “fed up with diktats from above saying, ‘You will do this, and you won’t do that.’ This is not why I became a Conservative.”
I’ve never been much impressed by the claim that local education authorities — for whom full-scale “academisation” spells something close to doom — offer “local democratic control”. The decisions that count are taken by town hall officials no more accountable to parents than the demolition team in the opening pages of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that arrives to knock down Arthur Dent’s home (the plans having been on display in the cellar of the local planning office, “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”)
Similarly weak is the argument that academies represent the “nationalisation” of schools. This reflects a refusal to acknowledge decentralisation unless it includes town halls. But power can also be devolved directly to schools, with the ambition to transform them from uniform branches of a centralised system into independent civic institutions, genuinely responsive to local needs.
As always with public service reform, there is the question of pace. It was always Blair’s ambition, he recalls in his memoirs, “that, in time, all schools could and should become self-governing trusts”. I am told that — contrary to his reputation as a Maoist — Gove urged No 10 to proceed with a measure of caution towards full academisation, always making sure that there was sufficient capacity in the system (cash and human capital) to take the strain. But in the budget one saw the side of Cameron and George Osborne that is radical rather than risk-averse. Their objective to achieve full academisation in six years is no less bold than their ambition to achieve a £10 billion (Dh52.3 billion) surplus by 2020.
In the case of school reform, the perils are imminent. Contentious legislation was never going to be straightforward with a working majority of only 17. Only a handful of Tory MPs need rebel against this measure to send it tumbling into the long grass — and it is safe to assume that the chairman of the 1922 would not have intervened unless a fair few of his backbench colleagues were similarly minded. In normal circumstances, there would be an easily negotiable way forward, aligned, no doubt, with discreet reminders that a reshuffle is likely in the summer. But the circumstances are very far from normal.
Inhibitions are evaporating. The EU row has acted as a solvent upon the mortar that holds the masonry of the Tory movement together. The pillars shudder; the structure shakes. “The secret weapon of the Conservative party is loyalty,” said the frequently quoted David Maxwell Fyfe . So secret, in fact, that one wonders now if it is there at all.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Matthew d’Ancona is a visiting research fellow at Queen Mary University of London and author of several books including In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition.
