his errors, and their energetic, almost evangelical approach to education reform clearly echoed New Labour’s early spirit as well as its main theme.
The Tories were particularly keen to build on New Labour’s academy programme, extending it far beyond the impoverished inner-city areas that it was originally intended to serve. Academy status was natural conservative territory, with its freedom from local authorities, from national agreements on teachers’ pay and conditions and from an often constricting curriculum, imposed, incidentally, by the Conservatives when they were last in power. But, in a crucial political twist, the Tories planned to use this special status to the advantage of the already advantaged. These freedoms were now to be offered to existing ‘outstanding’ schools, with the ultimate aim of creating a network of ‘independent state’ schools to sit alongside, and appear to outshine, the maintained sector—that is, schools funded through and supported by local authorities.
Initially, at least, academy conversions attracted less publicity than the alluring ‘free school’ idea. In terms of their legal status, free schools were to be virtually identical to academies; publicly funded but independently run, they had the added ideological appeal of appearing to emanate from the combined dynamism and desperation of parents and teachers up and down the country. A few parent-sponsored schools had opened under New Labour, but the more successful of these, such as Elmgreen School in West Norwood, South London, worked closely with its local authority. The academy model, however, enabled a complete break with local democracy.
A Tory Green Paper on education, published as early as November 2007, had already floated the idea of parent- and philanthropist-promoted schools and claimed that, if elected, a Conservative Government would seek to create 220,000 school places over the next decade. Now, in the immediate pre-election period, Gove and Cameron were keen to create an impression of unstoppable momentum. Gove spoke of the ‘hundreds’ of parents and groups of teachers who had contacted the Tories expressing an urgent interest to start their own school: not just the ‘yummy mummies with sharp elbows’, but also ‘the Gateshead mum … a no-nonsense working-class woman passionate about her kids’, or ‘groups in Birmingham who have strong representation among the Afro-Caribbean community, some of them with links to churches … desperate … to set up schools.’2 Cameron promised ‘to bust open the state monopoly on education and allow new schools to be established’.
The Tory free school model was far from the original free schools, a distinct, libertarian tradition within English private education in the twentieth century that stressed genuine intellectual freedom, unfettered creativity and vigorous school democracy. The Tories had nothing like this in mind. They looked instead to neoliberal experiments within the Swedish school system, instituted since the 1990s, and the US charter school movement, which now educated a million and a half children, many of them from low-income homes, outside the public (state) school system. Taken together, these international examples of pedagogic experimentation helped project a public image of a party finally at ease with the diverse, modern world. According to Cameron, these were important models, ‘making sure there’s excellence, there’s competition, there’s innovation’. It was several months before serious doubts began to be aired more publicly about the effectiveness and wider social impact of both the Swedish and US models.
In the period running up to the May 2010 election, there was considerable media interest in a number of free school campaigns. These could not easily be yoked together in terms of their demands, as many of the groups arose from distinct and inevitably complex local factors. They ranged from the efforts of journalist Toby Young, who had rejected his local comprehensive in Acton, West London—a school judged by Ofsted to be ‘good with outstanding’ features—and gathered a bunch of well-heeled parents to explore the establishment of a free school, to a band of parents in Kirklees, Yorkshire, who wanted to convert an existing middle school, serving a number of villages, into a local secondary school. Inevitably, all were lumped together in media reports as state-school parents ‘fed up with their educational options’. However, as writer Geraldine Bedell perceptively observed, although ‘the tone of the argument is often angry … everyone wants the same thing: a good, free, local school for all.’3
Suddenly, proposals put forward by comprehensive reformers over several decades—from smaller class sizes, to more resources for poorer children, to greater freedom for teachers—had apparently been hijacked overnight by the new right. It was striking how often Michael Gove employed the term ‘comprehensive’—an attempt, perhaps, to link his party with fairness in the public mind and to banish some of the lingering images of elitism, arrogance and class partiality it displayed during the 1980s. In the winter of 2009, in the promisingly entitled A Comprehensive Programme for School Reform, Gove set out five priorities for changing our schools. But the ‘c’ word was used here in its blandest sense, to mean ‘of large content or scope’. A year on, the department deflected criticism of unfair admissions practice by referring to government plans for ‘a comprehensive programme to make opportunity more equal’.4 In the run-up to the election, David Cameron visited the free school advocates in Kirklees and signed his name on the parents’ outdoor campaign wall, adding: ‘Let’s support parents who want great state schools for their children. I salute your courage and dedication, and we will not let you down.’
At the same time Cameron worked hard, if not entirely successfully, to present himself as an ordinary, averagely sharp-elbowed, middle-class parent, ‘terrified’ of not finding a good state school for his young children.5 It was a sign of changed times that an Eton-educated Tory leader felt obliged to send his children to state schools, although other front-bench figures, out of the direct line of fire on the schools issue, chose an expensive private education for their children. Cameron’s close ally, George Osborne, withdrew his two children from a state primary in 2008 in order to send them to a non-selective preparatory school in West London. In an interview in March 2005, shortly after he was made shadow chancellor, Osborne said: ‘I hate that kind of tokenistic politics where the politician uses his private life to illustrate some broader point. When it comes to choosing a school, we will make a decision on which school, state or private, we feel is best for them.’
But the Tory trump card was Michael Gove, one of the very few senior front-bench figures who could credibly front an education revolution based on apparent popular discontent. The adopted child of an Aberdeen fish processor, Gove had won a scholarship to private school and then gone on to Oxford. Gove clearly represented a different educational trajectory—and social class—to that of Cameron, Osborne and other leading Conservatives. If he was not—quite—the poor boy made good, he was certainly one of Alan Bennett’s History Boys. Clever, witty and personally charming, Gove also had, as one feature writer observed, the faint air of vulnerability of the man who has risen far and fast. At times, however, his mission on education has seemed largely focussed on getting more people like himself—the naturally brilliant who were not born to rule—to an elite university: the classic grammar-school narrative that still obsesses our nation. Gove liked to speculate in public about what would have happened to him if he had been obliged to attend some poorly performing local school.
If a general alliance between entrenched privilege and aggressive, yet ultimately deferential, aspiration has powered so much of recent British education policy, the confident, gilded Cameron and the restless, brainy Gove perfectly exemplified the mix in human terms. There were echoes of the close political and personal partnership between the privately educated Tony Blair and his educational mentor, Andrew Adonis, the brilliant son of a Greek Cypriot immigrant, who won his chance to shine with a scholarship to a state boarding school.
From the outset, the Coalition ruled, not as if it had come to power as a result of a carefully crafted cross-party consensus, but as if it had won a massive popular mandate for fundamental transformation. As lead partners in the Coalition, the Tories were clearly determined not to commit Blair’s mistake and wait before pushing through radical change. When an ebullient Gove rose to introduce the Queen’s Speech debate on education, in late May, sitting to his right was a faintly dazed-looking Sarah Teather, the new Liberal Democrat minister
