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On education, Labour failed our children

This article is more than 12 years old
The government has finally acknowledged that its centralised control of schools doesn't work – but for many, it's too late
Fri 26 Jun 2009 08.18 EDT

There comes a point, it seems, when even the most obstinately blinkered of ministers and departments can no longer avoid the facts. One by one the totems of Labour's disastrous education policies are being dismantled.

Today's Guardian reports that the government is to abandon its national strategies for schools when it announces its white paper on education next week. That means that the much-loathed literacy and numeracy hours in primaries, with their rigid, minute-by-minute dictation of how every teacher must structure and deliver their lesson, will stop being compulsory from 2011. Instead schools will be able to make their own choices about what their children need and how they should teach.

This, coming from a department whose controlling and centralising instincts would have been applauded in a Soviet state, is truly revolutionary. It is a (very) belated recognition that treating children and classrooms as if they were car parts and assembly lines is a strategy that simply doesn't produce skilled, or educated, or motivated pupils.

It's taken the government years to acknowledge this, because for the first few years of the national strategies, after Labour's election in 1997, test results soared. Ministers preened themselves. Everyone else knew it was because teachers were swiftly discovering how to teach children to the test.

Once they'd learned how to do that, nothing improved. The test results at 11 have more or less plateaued in the last six or seven years.

The strategies don't work at any level other than the most superficial.

Teachers feel helpless when they are in front of classes that aren't grasping the points at the speed the national timetable lays down. There is no flexibility. The national plan compels a teacher to move on, no matter how many children are being left behind. Frantic booster classes at ages seven and 11 teach children the short-term tricks they must know to get them through Sats tests.

Even those who can keep up find the lessons stultifying. Some years ago English teachers in secondaries started reporting that 11-year-old children were arriving saying they hated the subject. For years they'd been exposed to passages by brilliant writers like Michael Morpurgo or Philip Pullman, but not in order to be enraptured by their stories or taken into another world by their prose. No, it was in order to analyse their paragraphs and identify how many adjectives and nouns they had used.

It's hard to know what has finally forced this change. Perhaps it's the shaming results of the department's latest wheeze; the piloting of new single-level tests in English and maths to replace the Sats at 11.

These are supposed to be taken – like music exams – when a child is ready.

What the pilots have revealed is that 14-year-olds are regularly scoring much lower in the tests than 11-year-olds.

There's only one explanation for this, which is that children were never really understanding their subject in the first place; they were just being crammed, and a few years on, they've forgotten how to do it.

Should we be pleased that the government has finally recognised this truth?

I don't think so. I think the appropriate reaction is fury about the wasted years.