It is quite common in politics for a statement to become an orthodoxy without ever having been true. A speech last week by Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, cast doubt on two statements that have become received wisdoms by virtue of repetition. The first is that the Conservative Party has no policies and the second is that the Labour Party is intellectually exhausted.
If there were any blanks in Conservative education policy when he stood up to speak, Mr Gove had certainly filled them by the time he sat down. This was a comprehensive speech in which he set himself the task of closing the huge gap in achievement between the rich and the poor. With 75,000 children eligible for free school meals, only 189 got 3 A grades at A level. Eton College managed 175 boys alone.
Mr Gove was ambitious. A pledge to concentrate on literacy and numeracy was especially welcome. About 40 per cent of primary school children every year do not reach the Government’s basic level in reading, writing and maths. Illiteracy is eliminable. Full literacy has been achieved in Sweden and the Netherlands and it can be achieved in Britain, too. Mr Gove’s proposal for a literacy test after two years of primary school is precisely what is needed.
The Conservatives have also realised that the best hope of achieving their objectives is to get better graduates into teaching. Students taught by the best teachers make three times as much progress as those taught by the worst. Mr Gove has understood that the successful City Academy programme, which he wants to expand, works because the schools are free from external control. He wants to remove the restrictions that inhibit existing schools from growing and new schools from being formed. When schools fail, they will be handed over to new management. Poorer pupils will attract more money.
If the Conservative Party achieves all this, its Education Act will rank alongside Forster and Butler in the historical reckoning. But if some of the policy sounds familiar, that is because, after 2001, this was Labour’s vocabulary.
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Mr Gove’s plans must be a source either of pride or frustration for the retreating band of Blairites. Pride, because his proposals, as Mr Gove cheerfully admits, are inspired by Mr Blair’s more radical latter years. Frustration, because intellectual dominance once achieved was so cheaply discarded. Mr Gove’s speech proves there would still be intellectual life left in the Labour Party were it not a family with the wrong members in control.
There is yet one way the Labour Party might redeem itself. Rather than retreat into comfortable, partisan opposition, it should accept that it shares Mr Gove’s ambitions and support him, offering only constructive criticism. It should offer the expertise of its best people, informally, to help make a once-and-for-all improvement in school standards.
This was a speech that heralds a revolution in schools. It might easily have been made by a Labour Education Secretary, if the title still existed. But Labour seemed not to realise that there was wisdom in its position.
It is a wisdom that Mr Gove has received gratefully. The wonder is that the Labour Party was prepared to give it away so cheaply when it had nothing else to say.