Conservative takeover of education’s public bodies continues with Birbalsingh announcement at Social Mobility Commission

The announcement that the traditionalist free school headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, is the government’s preferred candidate to oversee the Social Mobility Commission marks another step in what seems an accelerating takeover of education-related public bodies by conservatives.

Birbalsingh’s is the sixth prominent appointment in recent years to publicly-funded bodies which influence education policymaking of someone who has traditionalist views on schooling, which appeals to right-of-centre ministers.

Indeed, she is the fourth high-profile traditionalist in the past 12 months to emerge as the candidate for a prominent government-appointed role which is important to the education debate.

Tracking this seems vital, for anyone seeking to understand how power currently works in education policymaking.

Birbalsingh position

Birbalsingh’s recent career history, and public profile as both a “super-strict” headteacher and a politically outspoken “small c conservative”, is well-known. Understandably, then, it featured in yesterday’s coverage of the announcement that she is the government’s preferred candidate to chair the Social Mobility Commission.

The Guardian highlighted her breaking onto the public scene in 2010, with a speech to the Conservative party conference about Britain’s “broken” education system, while both it and Schools Week mentioned her attack on what she called “woke” culture, as she defended this year’s controversial Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report.

Birbalsingh founded Michaela Community School in Brent, North London, in 2014. This has proved a spectacular success for the traditionalist schooling movement, with impressive exam results in 2019 and an across-the-board Ofsted outstanding rating in 2017. She will reportedly stay on as “headmistress” of the free school alongside her new role.

However, arguably more interesting than Birbalsingh’s looming appointment to this prominent role is that it underscores a trend towards overtly traditionalist figures being handed the reins of power at a string of bodies closely linked to government education policymaking.

Ofqual

If we survey recent appointments to key roles at the non-ministerial government departments Ofqual and Ofsted, and also at the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, the ascendancy of traditionalists – in what, in education, remains, of course, a deeply argued-over field of public policy -  appears remarkable.

At Ofqual, for example, a statistics-orientated regulatory organisation for which technical expertise rather than any political leanings would seem objectively as if it ought to be the key qualification for the job, both the chair and the chief regulator have expressed education views with which Nick Gibb, the ideologically-minded conservative former schools minister, would be very comfortable.

Ian Bauckham, the multi-academy trust chief executive who is the Department for Education’s most-frequently-turned-to external adviser, took over from Roger Taylor as chair of Ofqual after the latter stood down in the wake of last year’s GCSE and A-level grading fiasco. Taylor, a former Financial Times journalist who had been director of research for the data organisation Dr Foster, had been unafraid to speak out as problems hit the exams process. I am not aware of any strongly-expressed views he might have had on education reform itself.

Bauckham, however, is a traditionalist with views which can seem hard to disentangle from those of Gibb. A think piece under his name for the faux-grassroots organisation “Parents and Teachers for Excellence” states: “Education’s purpose is the induction of young people into our civilisation, teaching them the knowledge and wisdom which has accumulated across many generations, so that they speak the same language as other members of their, our, civilisation”. This is a classically conservative position.

Bauckham added: “We have too often thought that knowledge is somehow inferior to critical skills or creativity. This notion is reinforced in the minds of so many teachers by the lazy, but ubiquitous, use of the Bloom’s taxonomy pyramid in teacher training.”

In this piece, Bauckham mentioned Matthew Arnold’s “best of what has been thought and said” quote, which was also a favourite of Michael Gove during the latter’s time as Education Secretary, and also namechecked ED Hirsch, the American educationist popularised in the UK by Gibb.

Bauckham was joined at Ofqual last month, as chief regulator, by Jo Saxton. Saxton, whose technical qualifications for the job can seem slight compared to prominent predecessors at Ofqual, is another traditionalist. In 2016, she wrote a chapter in a collection published by the Conservative thinktank Policy Exchange called “The Importance of Teachers”, about teacher recruitment and retention.

In this, Saxton wrote: “In ITE [initial teacher education] progressive ideas still dominate and, across the sector, the subject or domain knowledge still does not receive the attention it should.” She also cited ED Hirsch, the title of whose book, “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them”, she wrote had informed her choice of title for this piece: “The Initial Teacher Education We Need, Why We Don’t Have It, and How to Get It”. Hirsch, she said, within his writing had “identified progressive ideologies and the absence of structured knowledge in the curriculum as causes of under-achievement in American schools”.

In this piece Saxton then added her voice to complaints arguing, at that time, that Ofsted had been favouring in its inspections more progressive approaches to teaching, stating that there had been “Widespread complaints from schools in previous years that Ofsted had a predetermined agenda and a ‘preferred style of teaching’.” And, in an echo of that Matthew Arnold quote, she wrote: “The job of schools should be to share the best that has been thought and known.”

From 2011 to 2016 Saxton worked for Future Academies, the chain set up by the Conservative former venture capitalist-turned-minister Lord John Nash and his wife Lady Caroline Nash, which runs a traditionalist curriculum whose allegedly “knowledge rich” – though to critics it brings the phrase into disrepute - approach to primary history came in for detailed scrutiny on this website last term.

She then set up a chain of academies, Turner Schools based in Folkestone in Kent, which encountered controversy over its high numbers of exclusions and reportedly high levels of staff turnover. In its official application form for the DfE, the founders of the original Turner Free School, seemingly led by Saxton, cited ED Hirsch.

Saxton was named on the list of supporters of Parents and Teachers for Excellence at its foundation in 2016.

From March last year until becoming Ofqual chief regulator last month, she was of course working for Gavin Williamson, Education Secretary at the time, as an adviser.

Ofsted

The position at Ofsted may be even more interesting. The schools regulator has been subject to intensive scrutiny in recent months over its work on initial teacher education, amid concern that Ofsted inspections in the sector dovetailed closely with the government’s review of the sector, which was led by Bauckham and seemingly much in line with the thoughts of Saxton. I revealed last month that the inspectorate had been unable to back up a controversial statement about the sector, which had been cited in Bauckham’s report for the DfE, with any statistical data.

Ofsted is always very much the creature of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector. Amanda Spielman, HMCI since January 2017, holds traditionalist views on the value of a knowledge-rich curriculum and has, of course, been integral to the inspectorate’s work on this subject, though she has not tended to take too many overtly political or ideological pronouncements. Like three of the others on this list, she came to prominence while at an academy chain – Ark Schools.

Another figure at the inspectorate has been more explicit about her views in the past. Heather Fearn, appointed in December 2017, leads the curriculum unit at Ofsted and is, I understand, extremely influential behind the scenes, perhaps not surprisingly given the prominence now given to curriculum in inspections.

Fearn wrote a series of blogs in 2016, before joining Ofsted. In one, on the website of the Conservative Education Society entitled “Why I’m a Conservative teacher”, Fearn, then a teacher at a private boarding school, described herself as a small c conservative.

Again, in what sounds like a classic espousal of conservative thinking on schooling, she wrote: “Educationalists in their ivory towers… see the purpose of education as to shape society and push schools along untrodden paths in the blind faith they will build a better society. However, education is the evolved reflection of a society and is hollow when it neglects its primary purpose, to initiate each new generation into the ‘great conversation of mankind’.

She also wrote: “Left wingers railed against privilege while stripping schools of those very features that gave richness and worth to school communities. There is open rejection of the wisdom that led to the teaching of subject disciplines, valuing knowledge for its own sake, handing on the thoughts and ideas that make us civilised, make us human. Teaching has too often become a mechanical process with tick box inspections and classes often shared by two or more teachers as the ‘input’ can be ‘delivered’ by anyone.”

A piece by Fearn on the website Conservative Woman, in the same year, was entitled: “Our schools fail our children because they use failed methods”. In it, she accused Ofsted of becoming “the enforcement arm of progressive education”.

She then backed the government’s position on the use of phonics to teach children to read, as espoused most forcefully and sustainedly by Gibb. Fearn wrote: “Despite the overwhelming evidence* for the benefit of using phonic decoding to teach early reading, outlined in [Labour’s] Rose Review, Labour followed the lead of the educational establishment which is bitterly opposed to emphasising phonics over ‘mixed methods’ for ideological reasons and has fought the phonics screening check introduced under the Coalition every step of the way.”

Ofsted has also faced controversy in recent months over the publication of a series of curriculum research reviews, over which I understand Fearn had influence, including in maths, and in modern languages, with Bauckham among six members of an Ofsted advisory group on the subject.

Children’s Commissioner

Finally, of course, December saw Rachel de Souza, the traditionalist-minded former chief executive of the Inspiration Trust academy chain, emerge as the government’s preferred choice for the role of Children’s Commissioner.

She duly started in that post in March, putting out a widely-quoted “landmark” report seeking a “new deal” on children’s mental health which nevertheless seemed wary of putting any figure on the level of funding needed from the government to support this ambition.**

Her chain’s commitment to “knowledge rich” approaches sometimes seemed less than unswerving – I wrote in 2019 how de Souza had appeared to have had a falling-out with its then director of curriculum Christine Counsell over how committed it needed to be on the subject. However, de Souza is very closely connected to Conservative figures: the Inspiration Trust was, of course, set up by the former academies minister, and friend of Lord Nash, Lord Agnew, while de Souza has also been close to Liz Truss, the foreign secretary and equalities minister who presided over Birbalsingh’s appointment. She was also one of the two founding directors of Parents and Teachers for Excellence, on whose initial list of supporters Munira Mirza also featured. Mirza is director of the Number 10 Policy Unit and reportedly a fan of Birbalsingh.

De Souza is also reported to be on an “assessment panel” for Birbalsingh’s job.

All in all, this makes four traditionalist appointments to prominent roles since December: De Souza to Children’s Commissioner; Bauckham to chair of Ofqual; Saxton to chief regulator at Ofqual; and now Birbalsingh to chair the Social Mobility Commission. It looks as if any trend in this direction has sped up under Boris Johnson, and particularly since he gained much greater power at the 2019 general election.

Implications

Some might see the need for nuance around some of the above. There are some differences between the public positions these figures have taken: Birbalsingh, for example, has been as far as I can see the only overtly “anti-woke” figure among those detailed above, though arguably Fearn’s pre-Ofsted statements come close to rivalling Birbalsingh’s in terms of avowedly conservative – or Conservative – political statements. Spielman, as mentioned, has not been so direct.

However, the general thrust of these appointments is clear.

Traditionalists might not see a problem with any of the above. This is based on a narrative that these public figures tend, of course, to build and feed. It says that a “progressive” education establishment, allegedly in charge of initial teacher education, local authorities and, via the unions, schools themselves, is the problem.

The “progressive” viewpoint, would be the argument, needs constantly to be taken on. Having critics of such an approach effectively taking control of a string of public bodies influential in education is exactly what needs to happen, proponents of this view would say, in order for the “right” kind of education to prevail and for children to get the schooling they deserve.

I am sure that political sympathisers of Labour were given positions of influence before 2010, though I am not convinced that it was going on in quite the same way before the coalition.

Yet it seems to this observer that there might be several problems with the above. At the very least, we need to be aware of what has been happening, in order to discuss it.

To consider, first, the specifics of what seems to me to be a weakness of the traditionalists’ position, they appear to speak very little about the effects of poverty on education. Or, at least, poverty tends to be spoken about only in terms that it must not be used as an excuse against under-achievement.

This is clearly problematic. There was, perhaps, an example of how this can run into difficulties last month, when Spielman reportedly appeared to suggest schools’ providing of food parcels for children’s families during the pandemic had distracted them from being “able to focus on providing an education to all their students”.

Not only were these comments reportedly criticised as “ill-judged” by headteacher unions. But I understand they went down badly among some Ofsted inspectors: I was told that there was basic understanding within the inspectorate that children needed to be fed in order to learn, and that Spielman’s comments underlined a sense of her being out-of-touch with the classroom.

But, leaving aside the trad/prog battle – and to do so, I realise, is immediately to depart from the traditionalists’ side – there are of course wider problems with this trend.

Second, we can start to see a pattern, in terms of a flight from independence of viewpoint in those advising government.

There is a case that ministers have responded to advisers speaking out by appointing people less likely to do so. So, for example, a review of the national curriculum in 2010 which ended with three of its four independent advisers resigning was followed by serial appointments of Bauckham, whose views would appear to make him unlikely to depart from the ministerial script, to curriculum advisory roles.

Roger Taylor’s outspokenness was also followed, after he resigned, by Bauckham replacing him.

Amanda Spielman’s predecessor as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, though coming from ministers’ favoured academies sector, and speaking the language of how a traditionalist education could fire social mobility, argued against Ofsted bringing any particular view – including a ministerial view – on the detail of pedagogy, and became an unlikely outspoken critic of the academies policy in his latter years in the post. His replacement has not been so confrontational with the DfE.

Finally, while Kevan Collins, an experienced educationist who came to prominence under Labour, ended up resigning from his post as the government’s “Catch-up Tsar” having hit out at ministers’ alleged underfunding of the post-pandemic recovery, as mentioned above de Souza, in a position which could have been critical in a similar way, demurred.

Ministers themselves no doubt view public figures’ reticence on going public with any criticisms – if indeed they have them – as a strength. I am not sure the public should be of that opinion, with an independence of viewpoint surely leading to better policy in the long run.

Third, if positions among public figures in education become too ideological, there are dangers in terms of the truth-telling that in an ideal world would be a central part of public life, and to educational life. Publicly-funded education bodies such as Ofsted should not be failing to reflect research fairly.

On this subject, personally I would prefer educationists, if they are to cite a figure close to ministerial affections such as ED Hirsch, to do so with scepticism to the fore. That is, they should cross-examine his work and subject it to analysis, rather than reference it without critique. For this, surely, is central to the rigorous academic scholarship that traditionalists must hold up as an ideal***.

Fourth, there is a danger, if people are being appointed to public positions based on their political or ideological views rather than their experience or qualifications: are they really the best people for what can be technical, demanding and publicly important jobs, or just those with views and connections deemed most acceptable to ministers? If it is the latter, then arguably we are missing out on better-qualified people to do important work.

Fifth, if there is an element of networking to the above appointments – and, on setting out the endless connections, it is hard to believe there is not – does this not work against the very from-the-ground-up ideals of a policy such as social mobility?

But I would say the final two problems are the most significant. A sixth reason for concern might be that there is a danger in itself in having too narrow a range of views represented by those now in control of our education policy institutions. As even Dominic Cummings has suggested in relation to the government’s handling of the pandemic, there is a potential problem with “groupthink,” as ideas are seen to be so unchallengeable within a group that lateral thought becomes impossible. This is a practical issue but also one of legitimacy and fairness: in a field as complex as education, with a wide range of views on offer, is it really a strength, in a democracy, to see such a narrow field of opinion reflected in those in power; not just in the politicians, but now in their advisers and officials as well?

As a seventh problem, in a democracy we need checks and balances: some sense of a plurality of views to keep in check the powers of central government. We need our institutions to have some sense of scepticism about political narratives – I say that as a journalist who questioned, for example, New Labour’s policy of emphasising, as Fearn puts it, lessons being “delivered” in the pursuit of better results metrics – or else we look much less free as a country. We need a sense that expertise and experience exists outside of the politically dominant narrative – which itself is driven forward by a party with considerably less than half of the vote in the UK – and for it to be respected.

I would have thought that even those wedded to the currently dominant side of England’s trad-prog wars would be able to see some of this. As mentioned, at the very least we need to keep a track of this phenomenon.

*I think the evidence may not be so straightforward.

** De Souza’s report states: “This report is an appeal directly to the Government, to the Treasury, to put children at the heart of the recovery,” but without putting any figure on what was needed.

***Or is it not, in reality: questioning and critique are not knowledge-transmission, and therefore not needed?