Memorandum submitted by the British Humanist
Association (BHA)
THE FUTURE FOR SCHOOLS: DISRUPTION, PERVERSE
INCENTIVES AND MORE RELIGIOUS CONTROL
THE BRITISH
HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
(BHA)
1. The BHA is the principal organisation
representing the interests of the large and growing population
of ethically concerned but non-religious people living in the
UK. It exists to support and represent people who seek to live
good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs. The census
in 2001 showed that those with no religion were (at about 15%)
the second largest "belief group", being two-and-a-half
times as numerous as all the non-Christian religions put together.
Other surveys consistently report far higher proportions of people
without belief in God—especially among the young. A 2004
survey for the DfES found 65% of those aged 12-19 had no religion.[20]
By no means all those without religion are humanists and even
fewer so label themselves, but our long experience is that the
majority of people without religious beliefs, when they hear humanism
explained, say that they have unknowingly long been humanists
themselves.
2. The BHA is committed to human rights
and democracy, and has a long history of active engagement in
work for an open and inclusive society, and open and inclusive
schools. The BHA has always taken a strong interest in education,
especially religious and moral education, and has participated
in many official consultations and working parties. In 2002 it
published a policy paper on religion and schools, A Better
Way Forward.
THE WHITE
PAPER "HIGHER
STANDARDS, BETTER
SCHOOLS FOR
ALL"
3. The priority this Government gives to
education is welcome, and many of the proposals in this White
Paper are also welcome—for example, the emphasis on personalised
learning support (including help for gifted children as well as
those who fall behind), on information for parents, on better
management of disruptive behaviour and on professional development
for teachers. We are also pleased at the proposal to abolish Schools
Organisation Committees, whose membership includes the very churches
whose proposals to take over community schools or expand religious
school provision the Committees adjudicate upon, making them judges
in their own court.
4. However, much in the White Paper is open
to serious objections. It proposes structural changes that will
be disruptive and are built on inadequate knowledge and experience.
The proposal for trusts is barely sketched but suggests confusion,
the potential for a lack of accountability and a loss of democratic
control. The reliance on market mechanisms of competition between
schools for pupils will create perverse incentives that will do
serious damage. And trusts and the proposal for parents to create
new schools seem sure to put even more of the school system under
religious control. It is these objectionable aspects of the paper
on which we comment below.
DISRUPTIVE REORGANISATION
BASED ON
MINIMAL EVIDENCE
5. Even well considered and necessary changes
of organisation are disruptive and may absorb disproportionate
time and attention. In schools, this means that teaching—especially
individualised attention to pupils—and the extra activities
that turn schools into communities rather than just places for
study suffer while the reorganisation is planned and implemented.
Closing schools and re-opening them is especially disruptive.
6. This can be a price worth paying in the
short term if the prospect for the long term is proportionate
and assured—but the short term for administrators and politicians
can be a large chunk of the school life of several cohorts of
children.
7. When reorganisation is driven not by
careful pilot schemes and experience but by impatience and doctrinaire
preconceptions, it is impossible to justify. This is, sadly, our
view of many of the White Paper's proposals. Change is seen as
a virtue without qualification, choice for parents is elevated
above everything, and the future is painted as one of constant
revolution. We foresee widespread confusion interspersed with
islands of excellence, unconsidered comparisons with which will
cast accusations of failure against the inevitable victims of
a system that elevates competition above cooperation for shared
ends and new buildings, new sponsors above lasting values.
8. It is not for us to provide a full-blown
alternative pattern, but we are convinced that the key lies in
a broad pattern of inclusive neighbourhood schools, minimising
the chances of middle-class opt-out and therefore using the ambitions
of parents to drive improvement in all schools; and in revealing
to children the value of learning and acquiring skills for their
own sake rather than merely as instruments for future advantage.
The test of success in a school should be broader than numerical
scores after questionable tests. The Government's rejection of
large parts of the Tomlinson report is, in this regard, highly
regrettable.
9. Instead, the Government's strategy appears
to be to build on special cases of success. Academies are held—on
minimal and very mixed evidence—to be a model for the future
(some are already failing, and there is evidence that some expel
substantially more pupils than other schools and take fewer children
from disadvantaged homes etc). Foundation schools share both the
mixed record of academies and to a lesser extent their privileged
funding.
10. Nowhere does the Government stop to
consider that a large part of any comparative success by these
schools may be due not to their legal and administrative basis
(an unlikely hypothesis the moment it is propounded) but to
(a) their generous funding;
(b) their attraction for the most ambitious
teachers and parents; and
(c) the well-proven effect of being
in the limelight—the Hawthorne effect—which notoriously
cannot be generalised.
TRUSTS: UNCLEAR
ROLE; UNACCOUNTABLE;
UNDEMOCRATIC
11. The proposal for Trusts extrapolates
out even more dangerously from the still inadequately tested experience
of Academies. The White Paper pays no attention to the increased
complexity of administration and consequent burgeoning bureaucracy
from the structure they propose. In future, many heads will (if
these proposals are implemented) have to deal with:
(c) (perhaps) a School Council;
(d) a "School Improvement Partner";
(f) the head of the Trust's lead school;
(g) the sponsor organisation(s) for
the Trust; and
(h) even perhaps the local (education)
authority.
12. This could lead to great confusion.
Moreover, the head will probably be acting to some other school
as its School Improvement Partner, since most of these SIPs are
to be head teachers themselves. (The role of the School Improvement
Partner is singularly ill-defined: it is said that they "will
be equipped with new data that will pinpoint pupils or groups
of pupils (for example those from a particular minority ethnic
group or middle ability boys) who are making less than expected
progress, either across the board or in particular subject areas.
They will then work with their schools, assisting them to put
in place plans for improvement". Why not give the data to
the head and leave him or her to plan improvements, rather than
give the job to a peripatetic head with his own school elsewhere
to run, and who is now probably in competition with his partner?
Or has he resigned that to his own SIP?)
13. The role of the Trust itself is left
quite unclear. They will have a role in spreading best practice—clearly
a sensible idea in itself, but there are simpler ways of achieving
it. So what role is left for the Trust when there is already a
board of governors? The Trust is an answer looking for a question.
If Trusts are created, governors could be abolished within a few
years. The interests of the majority of parents, represented now
by elected school governors, will perversely be sacrificed; occasional
meetings dubbed Parents' Councils will have as limited use as
the annual Governors' meeting with parents, the requirement for
which the Government scrapped a few years ago.
14. Moreover, Trusts would surreptitiously
expand the influence of religion in education, since the churches
are to be encouraged to create trusts and take community schools
under their wing. We return to this topic below in para 27.
15. So, not only will the school system
be taken from the local democratic control of LEAs but even the
generality of parents will lose out in favour of independent and
uncontrolled Trusts, too often running religious schools totally
financed from the public purse. Even in the market-driven and
competition-obsessed USA such an idea would be unthinkable: there,
school boards are directly elected by the communities they serve.
THE COMPETITIVE
MARKET MODEL
IS WRONG
FOR SCHOOLS
16. The White Paper proposes a market solution
in a context where the market can only bring disastrous results,
since it depends not only on a sufficient number of successful
schools expanding and new schools opening to incentivise the rest
but also on a concomitant constant succession of failing schools
contracting, closing and being replaced. The distraction from
actual educational endeavour for all concerned is alarming. It
is bad enough in industry (where it is at least well established
that the outcome is greater efficiency and better provision of
goods) that the price of vigorous competition is company failures
and redundancies. In schools it will not only be teachers who
find themselves redundant but children who find their schooling
disrupted for years on end. It is difficult to imagine that this
is a price worth paying for any particular route to school improvement,
let alone one that is speculative and unproven.
17. The Government sees parents as the driving
force for improvement. Apart from the fact that the interest of
many parents will be confined to their own children, the White
Paper's extrapolation from particular cases to the whole system
assumes that the energy and dedication of the minority of parents
who devote extended time and admirable energy to the interests
of their own children's schools (let alone those who serve without
such a family connection) can be endlessly replicated across the
system. Most parents have neither the skills, energy, time or
sometimes even interest to give so much to what in their own memory
was until recently provided automatically and reasonably successfully
in return only for their payment of rates and taxes.
18. The risk is that the gaps will be filled
by people whose good intentions are accompanied by ulterior motives,
which may well be the promotion of their religion, or the prosecution
of a commercial advantage, or some other motive far from the good
education of children.
19. To engage parents, the White Paper continues
to promote the shibboleth of choice. It aims "to create the
conditions where every parent has the choice of an excellent school"—does
that mean, "the choice of an excellent school, a few average
schools and a failing school"? If not, what does it mean?
Presumably the vast majority of parents will choose the "excellent"
school—and be disappointed. "There will be no return
to the divisive 11-plus", says the White Paper, but the system
it proposes is likely to be even more stressful.
20. Further, the choices parents make will
feed back into the system, reinforcing not just success but also
failure: a school will only need a poor set of exam results or
some bad publicity and it may enter a vicious spiral downwards.
21. This is the consequence of a market
system in which rational choices by individual parents, driven
by their wish to optimise the outcome for their own children,
will rarely if ever add up to an optimal solution for the whole
community. It is the prisoner's dilemma writ large, with the system
providing every incentive for parents and schools to defect from
the cooperation that would yield the best results overall. We
all understand the way such systems work and there is no good
reason for the Government to embrace such a system.
22. Further, what is true for parents' choices
is true also for schools' choices. Moves by one school to maximise
its success will often be at the expense of other schools. Competitive
adjustments of salaries risk repeated overbidding at great expense.
Admissions systems are notoriously open to manipulation and small
advantages quickly breed runaway attraction for ambitious parents.
The Code of Practice on admissions, only advisory, is little more
than a fig-leaf, leaving schools to choose whether or not to conform—to
their own apparent disadvantage—or to stretch interpretations
or simply ignore it so as to take in the children most likely
to produce the good GCSE results that will lead to more material
rewards for the school. Besides, the Government envisages a future
in which all schools, not just a minority, will be able to select
10% of their intake by "aptitude", which has never been
adequately differentiated from ability.
23. "There are those who argue that
there is no demand for choice; but this ignores the reality that
the vast majority of parents want a real choice of excellent schools",
says the White Paper, but without quoting any evidence. Most parents
would presumably be satisfied with one excellent or just good
neighbourhood school. To meet that demand, of course, all schools
would have to be good or excellent. The evidence that parents
want to choose, when their children are only 11, between a school
specialising in languages or one specialising in science has yet
to be produced. And specialist schools, even if they do well by
those with an "aptitude" for one subject, do no favours
to those without that aptitude, whose choice of school is further
limited or who, if admitted, may find themselves second-class
pupils when priority is given to the favoured subject.
24. Even if parents had any wish for a choice
of schools, the choice for any individual family is bound to be
limited—and differentiation of schools will often restrict
rather than expand real choice, especially in rural areas where
distance will dictate that there is little real choice. How many
specialisms can be catered for in any neighbourhood? Rarely more
than one. How many areas can offer both single-sex and mixed schools?
Few. Moreover, some areas already offer no choice but religious
schools—an inappropriate situation in a country where almost
half the population have not even a nominal religion[21]
and a DfES research study found that 65% of teenagers were atheists
or agnostics.[22]
To expand religious provision of schools is to limit choice yet
further for the majority.
25. That parents want good schools rather
than choice is apparent from the lengths to which they will go
to get their children into schools with a good reputation for
success. If parents (as so many notoriously do) will feign religious
belief, go to church regularly for years and help out at church
events despite having no religious convictions, is that a vote
for a church school or for a good school?
26. Why, in any case, should such exclusive
emphasis be placed on the wishes of parents? They are important
but there are other interested parties—employers, the wider
community and its needs, children themselves and even learning,
to which the White Paper implies a wholly instrumental approach.
THE CREEPING
GIFT OF
THE EDUCATION
SYSTEM TO
RELIGIOUS INTERESTS
27. We wish to draw particular attention
to the way the White Paper proposals will certainly accelerate
the creeping gift of the education system to the churches. This
is not the place to rehearse the reasons—of infringement
of young people's autonomy, of social, ethnic and religious divisiveness,
of undeserved reputation based on hidden selection, etc—for
opposing religious schools. Enough to say that the public, whenever
asked, are firmly opposed to them.[23]
Yet the Government pursues a policy of expanding the religious
sector in education and of eliminating totally any "voluntary"
financial contribution to religious schools, so that there is
no longer any doubt that the propagation of religion is being
directly financed by the taxpayer.
28. The effect of religious Trusts—with
Government encouragement—taking over community schools has
already been mentioned. "Schools that acquire faith-based
Trusts would not automatically become faith schools—that
would require a separate statutory process"—but there
is no reason to believe that this process would not be set in
motion in most cases: such non-religious schools, it can confidently
be predicted, will rapidly be re-opened as religious, with little
chance of it being stopped without extraordinary exertions by
concerned parents.
29. Trusts will be an easy route for religious
sponsors to take over community schools—and many sponsors
(the academies programme has already shown) will be fundamentalists
with religious axes to grind, such as Sir Peter Vardy and Bob
Edmiston whose Emmanuel Schools Foundation and Christian Vision
organisation respectively espouse firmly anti-evolution creationism
but are welcomed by the Government and given schools in which
to promulgate their views to impressionable minds.
30. But the White Paper also encourages
a group of parents "to ask for a new primary or secondary
school . . . to meet a lack of faith provision . . . Local authorities
will be under a duty to be responsive [and] to provide dedicated
consultancy support to help parents develop a concrete proposal."
The Schools Commissioner will also be mandated to assist in this.
31. So a small number of religious parents
who organise a campaign will be able to command public resources
to develop proposals for new religious schools, LEAs will be under
pressure to commission such schools when proposed (it is plain
that LEAs are already being told by the Government that capital
will be available only for the type of school the Government wants—academies
and religious schools, for example), and that when parents are
attracted by new and well financed buildings and by promotional
razzmatazz, "local authorities will need to move quickly
to close [non-religious] schools that [as a result of this unfettered
but rigged competition] are failing to attract sufficient pupils."
32. The Government's bias to religion has
rarely been seen so nakedly and it is time it brought its policies
back in line with the wishes of the public.
CONCLUSION
33. We hope that if the White Paper proposals
are implemented our worst fears are not met. But it seems plain
to us that the perpetual revolution in organisation, the emphasis
on structures rather than learning, the perverse incentives built
into the system, the removal of democratic control and the creeping
takeover by religious bodies are at least unhelpful and potentially
divisive and destructive. We hope the Government will think again.
November 2005
20 Young People in Britain: The Attitudes and Experiences
of 12 to 19 Year Olds. DfES Research Report RR564, National Centre
for Social Research 2004. Similarly, in a survey of 13,000 13-15
year olds, 61% declared themselves atheist or agnostic (Revd Professor
Leslie Francis and Revd Dr William Kay, Trinity College Carmarthen,
Teenage Religion and Values, Gracewing, 1995. Back
21
35% do not believe in God and 21% do not know-YouGov poll for
Daily Telegraph of 1,981 persons aged 18+, December 2004. Back
22
Young People in Britain: The Attitudes and Experiences of 12
to 19 Year Olds. DfES Research Report RR564, National Centre for
Social Research, 2004. Back
23
For example, 64% say "Schools should be for everyone regardless
of religion and the Government should not be funding faith schools
of any kind"-ICM poll for The Guardian 23 August 2005. Back
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