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.

But here is a top 10.

10 The government’s politicised double standards over the intervention regimes for local authority maintained schools, versus what happens in academies.

If a maintained school fails an Ofsted inspection, it seems there is no option but for its control to be changed: under a law introduced by the Conservatives, the Secretary of State has no alternative but to start the process of turning such a school into an academy, whatever the local community might think. The only practical way to reverse such a decision is for a governing body to secure a quick return visit from Ofsted, and for progress to be demonstrated.

By contrast, academies can go many years after failing an Ofsted, and remain in the same academy trust. Examples include this one – which failed an inspection back in 2012 and has had another “inadequate” and three “requires improvement” verdicts since, while remaining under the same chain, and Lodge Park, Corby, Northamptonshire, which, as reported last week, remains with the David Ross Education Trust despite failing an Ofsted five years ago, and with four other “requires improvement” judgements under that chain.  

Does the government believe in changing control when a school struggles, then, or not? As with so much of policymaking under this government, the answer seems to depend on ministers’ ideological preferences.

9 The government’s policymaking on phonics

I have to admit, here, that this is a field of policymaking where my knowledge is still developing, with investigations ongoing.

For, while the debate around the merits of systematic synthetic phonics is relatively well-known, and well-established, the detail around how the government has set about implementing its favoured policy over the past few years seem to be much less widely appreciated.

In recent months, Education Uncovered has been reporting on what are, for relatively small organisations, large sums of money going to the providers of the two dominant phonics programmes for English primary schools: Read Write Inc and Little Wandle. The former has made nearly £10 million of profit in four years for its owner, Ruth Miskin, while the latter saw the small multi-academy trust to which it is linked amass £4.6 million in a single year.

This policy area combines detailed government intervention with an apparent “market” in phonics provision, with the interaction between the two seeming to suggest a need for transparency which can be sadly lacking.

This is a field which, as with so much of policymaking since 2010, seems to put a large emphasis on personal connections around this government – raising debating points around possible cronyism. It is certainly one to continue to watch.

8 New GCSEs in modern languages

This development, which came to a head in 2021, seemed to typify this government’s approach of pushing through its favoured conservative/traditionalist approach to education reform via a selected policy loyalist, in the face of deep concerns voiced by professional bodies.

The move to reform modern languages placed a premium on pupils learning from a relatively small and, to its critics, “rigid” list of vocabulary, cutting the emphasis on real-world language. Proposed following the recommendation of an “expert panel” headed by the traditionalist academy chief executive and linguist Ian Bauckham, it seemed to line up curiously closely with Ofsted’s position on the subject, Mr Bauckham also having served on the inspectorate’s modern languages curriculum group.

The GCSE reforms were widely opposed, with the AQA exam board saying they would lead to declines in take-up of the subjects at GCSE, A-level and degree level and to students struggling to bridge the gap between GCSE and A-level, and both the Association of School and College Leaders, and the Association of Language Learning strongly critical. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages also co-ordinated a public statement noting widespread concern in relation to the review, which garnered 1,050 signatories. Nevertheless, the changes went ahead.

It is worth mentioning that, beyond the subject of modern languages, reform in English secondary exams, as largely happened earlier in the post-2010 Conservative era, continued to prove controversial, as discussed in a blog by Barbara Bleiman of the English and Media Centre.

7 Behaviour policymaking stitch-up

Education Uncovered has covered a fair few controversies about behaviour management in schools in recent years. And I have found myself trying to grapple with points of view on both sides of an argument which arguably has bigger consequences for pupils than most if not all other aspects of schools policymaking. For does a school’s “strict” regime enable pupils to learn in safety, or does it “sweat the small stuff” so much that children end up excessively anxious and demotivated?

Given the nuances of this argument, which by the way I have also been living as a parent, it has been disappointing that this government, again seemingly characteristically, appears to have over-staffed its advisory approach with ideological loyalists, rather than also seeking advice from other experts, who might offer different perspectives.

The Department for Education’s behaviour “taskforce,” led by its combative “tsar” Tom Bennett, appears to have lacked critics of the ideologically-favoured approach, including education psychologists. This is concerning. For governments need to understand the impacts on young people of behaviour policies, not least with much concerning evidence that many teenagers are struggling with their mental health. Also disappointing was that the DfE has put off publishing any assessment of its Behaviour Hub policies until well into the next government, while it will not even name most of the schools taking part.

Again, these policies would appear to have many consequential impacts on young people. Where is the evidence, in the round, about those impacts? We still have not seen it. A new government would be a great opportunity for a fresh look at policymaking in this complex area.

6 Oak National Academy

Where to start with Oak National Academy?  An initiative which won plaudits for providing a substitute for in-person education via on-line lessons during the pandemic, it was also controversial from the start.

Why, for example, did the government provide nearly £5 million of start-up funding to this new organisation without so much as going out to tender, when another, seemingly less ideologically favoured, body barely received a response to an email?

As time has passed, and this initiative rapidly morphed into being an “executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the DfE”, controversy around it has solidified. In November 2022, 13 education sector and supplier leaders, including the heads of the National Education Union, Association of School and College Leaders and British Educational Suppliers’ Association, called on the government to scrap it.

The suspicion has been that Oak, allocated £43 million over three years by the DfE in its new incarnation, was a vehicle to allow greater government reach into the detail of what was taught in classrooms, as perhaps glimpsed in the pre-pandemic pilots of Complete Curriculum Programmes in schools.

Again, this seemingly would allow an ideological approach in line with government thinking to prevail. With Oak set up to be “strategically aligned with” the DfE, the question now might be whether a Labour government will want to keep it, and line it up with its own political priorities, or scrap it entirely as a Conservative-era development. (Indications from Labour’s “Council of Skills Advisers” report last year, led by Lord Blunkett, are that Oak may stay, given that it was quoted favourably).

Regardless of the question of Oak’s future under Labour, this development has seemed to underscore a centralisation of policymaking around ministers and favoured individuals within the profession, with not much transparency: the New Labour-era Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, for example, published advice to ministers with which they could disagree, in public. The current set-up sees this no longer happening.

5 Misrepresentation of statistics

Well, this is an everlasting bugbear of mine, of course. It’s not new – I wrote an article for the TES, for example, back in 2017 under the headline “the government’s manipulation of the data on free schools is shameless” – and it will never be confined to a single political party.

That said, there was something particularly brazen about the Education Secretary continuing to highlight data generated by Ofsted inspections even after an intervention by the official statistics watchdog.

In April, the National Education Union had complained to the Office for Statistics Regulation about the use of statistics, by both the DfE and the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan herself, showing the proportion of schools adjudged good and outstanding by Ofsted had risen from 68 per cent in 2010 to 89 per cent this year.

In May, Ed Humpherson, the OSR’s director general, wrote back to say that Ofsted itself had acknowledged that statistics on its inspection outcomes had limited “comparability” over time.

Factors which may have undermined such comparability include the varying frequency of inspection for schools according to their previous Ofsted gradings – previously outstanding schools were exempted from inspection for most of the 2010-24 period, for example, meaning their grades could not fall, while others could rise – and also the fact that the title of the third rating in Ofsted’s four-level system was changed from “satisfactory” to “requires improvement” in 2012. Ofsted inspections have never been designed as a check on national education standards; they are meant to assess only individual schools. The selection of those schools to be inspected is a result of the latter; the selection would be different if the purpose were the former.

Despite this, Ms Keegan continued to make the comparison during the general election campaign.

Any politician should be held to account for presenting statistics in a misleading way. Someone leading the education system, who should be setting a good example for young people in how they present data, surely has an extra responsibility not to act in this way.

4 Chronic lack of transparency

Education Uncovered was founded in part to highlight issues with transparency: occasions when information which surely should be public has not been released.

A lack of openness continues to be a weakness of the academies policy, which is arguably defined by its behind-closed-doors elements, with academy trusts being set up through a contract agreed privately between the trust itself and the Secretary of State. Crucially, too, control of schools is decided in private meetings between civil servants and their advisory boards, with background papers considered by these boards in making their decisions not even routinely made public. Much of the academies set-up is ripe for reform; this element should certainly be opened up under a new government.

But there are other striking instances of a lack of transparency which have made my jaw drop in recent years.

Remarkably, the government’s data on how much it has spent setting up free schools has not been updated for more than four years. This was highlighted recently, with the announcement that a free school estimated to have cost £35 million – Parkfield, outside Bournemouth – is to close. It has still not had its costs disclosed officially, despite opening more than a decade ago, in 2013. This is public money.

As Education Uncovered revealed last September, at that time 18 free schools had closed without having their building and site costs publicly disclosed. They still have not been revealed, of course, with that update not being forthcoming.

It is surprising that the DfE has not come under more pressure from, for example, the cross-party Public Accounts Committee over this lack of disclosure.  

I was also staggered that the DfE would not release the names of “partner schools” taking part in its Behaviour Hubs initiative.

And perhaps even more jaw-dropping was the department’s stance in the last few weeks that it would not be releasing the names of individuals sitting on its English Hubs Council, partly on the argument that its members would not have expected transparency, despite several having gone public themselves.

A new government might be a chance to reset some of these positions. We shall see.

3 The Initial Teacher Training market review

The government launching a major structural reform to teacher education while continuing to face severe challenges on classroom recruitment generated gasps of disbelief at the time. With recruitment numbers having plunged since this initiative, it continues to provoke deep controversy.

After the move was announced through the appointment of an “expert group” – to be led by Ian Bauckham – in January 2021, there was speculation among some close observers of this process that ministers had pounced on an uptick in teacher education applications, which had been driven by the pandemic, to launch a set of reforms designed to exert more control over university teacher education courses.  

There was some rowing-back on the detail of the group’s recommendations when the government announced its response in December 2021. However, the thrust remained the same, with key elements including the requirement for all providers to apply to the DfE for “re-accreditation,” and teacher education having to follow as a minimum requirement a “Core Content Framework” set down by the DfE.

Fewer than half of providers were reported at the time to have made it through the first round of re-accreditation. The eventual number making it through two rounds did rise, although according to a recent inquiry report from the House of Commons Education Committee, there will be 21 per cent fewer initial teacher training providers in 2024-25 (179 providers) than there were in 2022-23 (226). There were persistent complaints that some strong providers, including those with strong Ofsted records, did not make it through the paper-based accreditation set-up. Although the select committee reported that some de-accredited providers were now still operating in the system by partnering with those which had retained or gained accreditation, questions will remain over the wisdom of putting the sector through this given what many now describe as a recruitment “crisis”.

Meanwhile, that uptick in application numbers proved sadly temporary. In 2023-24 the number of recruits to secondary ITT courses was only 50 per cent of the government’s targets (down from 83 per cent in 2018-19 and 79 per cent in 2021-22; it had temporarily hit 83 per cent the first year after covid hit, in 2020-21). Even for primary ITT, it was running at 96 per cent in 2023-4, which was less than the 103 per cent figure of 2018-19.

These reforms happened despite most teacher trainees having found their training good or excellent, according to a survey of more than 1,000 of them back in 2022.

Reform in this area seems to have had some characteristics common to quite a few developments charted in this article: ideologically-driven reforms which will seem to critics to be pushing at or beyond the limits of rationality, in terms of objective considerations of managing the system effectively; the reliance on an overlapping group of advisers from the education sector to push through conservative-leaning reforms; and perhaps some behind-the-scenes policy co-ordination with Ofsted, which started re-inspecting teacher education before the “market review” was announced.

Again, the interesting question is what might change under a Labour government.

2 The government’s handling of the covid pandemic in relation to schools

Sometimes it is possible to hear Conservatives arguing that education reform has been among the party’s successes of the past 14 years. I hear this and wonder how bad policy must have been in other fields. It is, of course, easy to contest on a range of fronts any judgement that initiatives in the field of education have been a success overall, with content on this website of course providing ample evidence raising questions.

However, if asked to come up with a quick response on the question of education policy being a success or not since 2010, I would point readers to a single document, published in August 2021 for the Institute of Government by the veteran former Financial Times journalist Nicholas Timmins.

This report, entitled “Schools and coronavirus: The government’s handling of education during the pandemic,” saw its author catalogue many failures of DfE decision-making in relation to covid and schools, including “dreadful communications,” culminating in the situation in January 2021, “when many primary schools were opened and then told to close again on the same day”.

The worst failing, wrote Mr Timmins, was the failure - with policy conducted at this time under Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and Gavin Williamson as Education Secretary - to make contingency plans for schools over the summer and autumn of 2020. These would have acknowledged the possibility of future lockdowns, and that exams might have to be cancelled again in 2021, both of which happened, with the lack of planning meaning there was a “failure to have anything in place to handle the second cancellation of exams in 2021”. The 2020 exams had themselves descended into a “debacle”.

Interestingly, Mr Timmins’ report had also identified structural problems created by the move from having all state-funded schools overseen by 150 local authorities, to having thousands of them reporting, ultimately, to Whitehall via the academies scheme. This had happened, said a “DfE insider,” because “the whole point of the academy programme is to get schools off councils”. The resultant “highly centralised approach” had accompanied a lack of trust in local authorities, leading to a confusing picture which had not helped with the pandemic response, the report even quoting one “highly experienced academy leader” who said: “Whether you are in the local authority or the academy world, you would not start from here in designing an education system.”

More recently, WhatsApp messages from 2020 presented to the Covid inquiry reportedly showed Mr Williamson had opposed requiring masks in schools because he “didn’t want to give an inch to the unions” who had called for them. Putting political point-scoring above objective considerations of pupil and staff safety, as this would suggest, clearly should be seen as scandalous.

By the way, the government’s response to covid includes what could be seen as a “sub-scandal:” the widely-criticised implementation of a National Tutoring Programme.

More than four years after the onset of covid, the wider context is questions remaining over the timing of the government’s decisions on school closures, perhaps most controversially the decision to re-open pubs before classrooms; and the decision not to fully fund covid education recovery as recommended by its adviser, Sir Kevan Collins. The pandemic put a strain on leadership as few events have in recent decades. Sadly, the record here for the government is far from good.

1 Ofsted making up research findings to support an apparent political agenda

It may seem surprising that the government’s handling of covid could be kept off the top of this list of scandals by anything else. And indeed, I am not arguing, here, that anything could really top decision-making in response to the pandemic in terms of its impact on pupils, parents and staff. The ongoing, multi-faceted effects of decisions on safety, lockdowns and exams u-turns must trump those of all other policy moves over the period.

However, I am putting this next item top because it seemed so flagrantly scandalous. If a non-ministerial government department, which should have as its defining mission telling the truth about what it finds, were caught essentially inventing research findings to suit a set of ideological preferences, that should indeed be seen as outrageous. I cannot recall any case of a government body acting in this way in 27 years of covering education policy. But this seems to have been the case in this instance.

The issue under discussion, here, is Ofsted’s “research reviews” on particular national curriculum subjects. To be fair, not all subject reviews come in for criticism. But on, for example, maths and English, some of the detail about what had happened was staggering.

In maths, the Association of Mathematics Education Teachers (AMET) complained that in the case of 86 of the 307 separate academic references in Ofsted’s document, the inspectorate’s statement in its research review did not match what the referenced work had actually said. AMET called for the review to be withdrawn.

Professor Mark Boylan, of Sheffield Hallam University, then told Schools Week that he was “astonished” to find Ofsted citing his research to support a statement that homework motivated children, when he had not investigated the issue.

Professor Mike Askew, former president of the Mathematical Association, accused Ofsted of a “complete fabrication” in relation to work he had carried out with a fellow academic and which was cited in Ofsted’s report.

Among a string of controversies in relation to the English report were a group of authors – including the recently-published teacher Carol Atherton – accusing Ofsted of “gross misrepresentation” of their work, and another, Professor Debra Myhill, criticising Ofsted for appearing to have “predetermined views” and cherry-picking research to fit.

The inspectorate’s line seems to have been a set of traditionalist/conservative approaches to education matching those of the schools minister, Nick Gibb.

Is the above unfair on Ofsted? Two years on from when I was investigating and writing about it, my view is that this scandal remains vastly underplayed. While Ofsted will defend its reviews as not based on an exhausting considerations of the literature, it is vulnerable to criticism not just of “cherry-picking” from existing research, but of actively making findings up, as is clear from the detail of items referenced above.

For an organisation supposedly premised on the ability to tell the truth about institutions it is inspecting – though, increasingly, Ofsted reports on schools can seem not to do that, as covered on occasion by this website – this should be seen as devastating. The ability of a non-ministerial department to use its influence to support what is essentially a political agenda should be questioned deeply, too, in a democracy.

So many of the scandals on this list have common themes, Including politicisation testing the limits of reasonable or rational policymaking; the use of policy insiders to push through developments which will be seen as controversial with much of the profession; and, too often, a lack of transparency.

Will such tendencies continue after Thursday? This, of course, is the most interesting question now.