Top 10 education policy scandals of the past five years

What are the biggest education policy scandals of the last five years? With the general election just days away, I wanted to try to get my head around this question. For it seems right to try to set out some defining events under a government whose era seems to be drawing to a close.

Education Uncovered was set up for two reasons: to try to hold contentious national policymaking to account, and to cover developments at school level which have implications for national policy.  

While there have of course been plenty of school-level controversies reported on by this website in recent years, the purpose of this piece is not to look at these more local stories specifically, but at national-level policymaking.

And, thinking back, there are some common themes in what follows. To what extent will policies we saw under Conservative governments be replicated in the years to come? It seems likely that, whatever the parallels of education policymaking in the last 14 years with what might follow under a Labour government, this era will come to be seen as distinctive. It is to be hoped that some developments listed below might even be remembered as shocking, from a future perspective.

It seems useful, in any case, to look back on some of the more eye-catching among them. I concentrate, below, on developments since the last general election in December 2019. Apologies if some which might be included are not: there is no claim to be definitive, especially with regards to the order, and it could be said to be a crowded field for policy scandals.