Memorandum submitted by the Association
of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL)
The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL)
is a professional association and trade union representing over
160,000 members in schools, colleges and other educational settings
across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
CONTEXT
1. ATL's response to the White Paper, "Higher
Standards, Better Schools for All", must be set within the
political context. The media coverage before the launch showed
the determination of the Prime Minister to pursue his aim of irreversible
reform of public services. His explicit statement that private
schools are the best schools explains his vision of a market of
independent schools, with the market strengthened by easier entrance
of new providers and better information for consumers. Education
ministers have emphasised different aspects, especially personalisation
and parents exercising influence within rather than between schools.
Much back bench reaction has been negative, although some of it
is difficult to relate to the actual content of the document.
The conclusion must be that much of the debate is a function of
the current concerns within the governing party about its general
policy direction and leadership rather than directly connected
to the detailed proposals.
GENERAL
2. Like other recent education policy
statements, the White Paper is full of evidence of policy conflict,
with apparently contradictory positions.
The major difficulty for proponents of markets
in public services is that if they are free at the point of delivery
they must be quasi-markets. Without a price mechanism,
it is difficult to reconcile supply and demand. As applied to
schools, this leads to producers choosing consumers rather than
the reverse. Given that at least 85% of pupil achievement is due
to factors outside the school, this produces a substantial market
advantage for popular schools. The market cannot ensure the kind
of pupil mix which has been shown to maximise overall achievement.
The White Paper continues with the Government's
practice of simultaneously promoting both market mechanisms and
also policies to ameliorate the negative effects of those mechanisms.
This is the underlying reason for the conflicts and contradictions.
3. Much of the 116 pages are the Government's
narrative of its past achievements and current programme.
This description is unexceptional.
4. The proposals as printed are limited
and bear little resemblance to either the pre-launch or post-launch
discussion.
The proposals for legislation in the Annex cannot
be described as amounting to substantial system change. With the
exception of the introduction of a new category of school, they
are incremental, and in two controversial areas, school independence
and admissions, there is virtually no change.
PARENTS
5. The proposals on parents, taken together,
do not represent a substantial change in the relationships between
schools and parents, or LAs and parents. Some of them are particularly
irrelevant to small town and rural parents. The allocation of
funds to support choice behaviour only makes sense if it is assumed
that parents decline to exercise choice only for reasons of deprivation
or ignorance; there is no evidence that the 45% of pupils who
attend their local secondary school are all in those categories.
6. Perhaps the most significant changes,
from the point of view of teachers, will increase their rights
vis-a"-vis parents:
— A clear and unambiguous legal right
for teachers to discipline pupils will be introduced.
— Legislation will give head teachers
new powers to search pupils for knives and other weapons and the
Government will review an extension to include drugs and stolen
property. This will reduce the capacity of oppositional parents
from objecting to schools taking action to secure discipline.
— Parenting contracts will be usable
earlier, the use of parenting orders extended, and parents expected
to be responsible for excluded pupils for the first five days.
ATL recognises that the law already supports
school staff in the reasonable performance of their duties, but
welcomes the clarification and strengthening which is likely to
result.
TRUSTS
7. Some of the provisions in the White Paper
for stimulating market behaviour are relaunches of powers already
available but which have proved unpopular. Parents have not rushed
to take advantage of their current rights to propose new schools,
with the exceptional case of Lambeth scarcely representing a national
model. Although the proposals for Trust schools appear in the
parents chapter, it is clear from other sources that it is not
parents who are expected to establish them. The proposal that
in Trust schools parents will have relatively less representation
on the Governing Body is a good illustration of the confusion
at the heart of this policy.
8. It is difficult to see how proposals
for a new kind of governance will lead to better learning and
teaching, and there is very little argumentation other than an
assumed superiority of the private sector. ATL contends that the
Trust proposal is irrelevant to the needs of England's pupils
and will not be attractive to any but a handful of England's schools.
There is to be no requirement or apparent incentive for schools
to acquire Trusts. If so minded, they can gain the same degree
of independence by becoming foundation schools (although very
few have used that opportunity) without having the encumbrance
of a possibly interventionist Trust with a majority on the governing
body.
9. Yet the Government is committed to promoting
Trusts. The enforcer will be the Office of the Schools Commissioner,
whose brokerage role will be crucial. From the above, only arm-twisting
will achieve more than a tiny number of Trust schools, and it
must be concluded that the Schools Commissioner will do the twisting,
perhaps using the same kind of tactics that the DfES Academies
Unit has used to secure compliance from local authorities. The
intention for the Office to report to the Secretary of State provides
inadequate accountability. Despite its role to interpret local
parent opinion on the provision of schools, there is no intention
to make it locally accountable.
10. There is a clear potential contradiction
at the heart of this policy. If local parents make it clear to
the Schools Commissioner that they want good local community schools,
or that they do not want Trusts on their patch, is that what the
Commissioner will support and report? This indeed would be the
test of whether the Government is right to claim that parents
want a market in schools.
ADMISSIONS
11. While ATL welcomes the proposed legislative
changes, they are simple matters of detail which do not address
the complex questions concerning balancing parental rights with
the needs of children individually and collectively, the community,
and the system as a whole. ATL notes with regret that the proposed
revised Code of Practice did not adopt many of the Select Committee's
proposals, and believes that a stronger Code with mandatory compliance
is necessary. As it is, the White Paper virtually proposes the
status quo, which is unpopular as well as ineffective.
SCHOOL DISCIPLINE
12. ATL welcomes the commitment to implement
the recommendations of the Steer Committee. It may be that the
clarification of the rights of teachers to discipline pupils,
including searching them, will be seen in retrospect as the most
important provision within it, and is much more likely to improve
learning and teaching than any other White Paper proposal.
SCHOOL WORKFORCE
13. The continuing commitment of the Government
to Social Partnership as the route to workforce development is
welcome, despite the recognition on all sides that partnership
working is not easy. ATL will continue to inject its own interpretation
of new professionalism into joint development work. It is also
important that the TDA as the modernisation agency understands
partnership working.
14. ATL welcomes the rapid establishment
of a national working group to take forward pay and conditions
issues for support staff.
LOCAL AUTHORITIES
15. ATL regrets the proposed power of the
Schools Commissioner effectively to replace local democracy as
the arbiter of the local authority's school planning function.
However, any change in the balance of powers between schools and
local authorities is slightly in favour of the latter. Local authorities
are to remain the planning agency, taking over the School Organisation
Committee function. ATL welcomes the reinforcement of their duty
to intervene in "underperforming" schools, and with
the LLSC their clearer power to co-ordinate 14-19 provision. The
duty to promote fair access as well as diversity and choice is
noted, and ATL seeks further detail on the powers which will be
given to Local Authorities to comply with this duty.
November 2005
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