2.5 The other developments in British education system

During the late 1980s and 1990s a variety of national bodies and think-tanks from the left to the centre-right produced 'positive and radical proposals' for vocational education. All acknowledged that Britain had fallen behind internationally and was failing compete with the rest of the world industrially.

In April 1995 Gillian Shepherd invited Sir Ron Dearing to conduct a review of the existing system of post-16 qualifications, with a view to encouraging greater parity of esteem between academic and vocational qualifications. The exercise was a fairly pointless one, because in her letter to Sir Ron (10 April 1995) Shepherd wrote 'Our key priorities remain to ensure that the rigour and standards of GCE A Levels are maintained'. This made any radical overhaul of the system almost impossible.

As expected, the Major administration chose to ignore its advice and announced that A Levels would be retained, academic and vocational courses would not be integrated, and institutions would not be reorganised into a coherent system - 'though government initiatives hoped to make it look as though this was happening' [2,p.17]

It was another missed opportunity - and a particularly disappointing one, given that the number of students staying on after 16 had begun to rise after the introduction in 1986 of the common GCSE exam.

Middle school closures

the development of middle schools had been extraordinarily rapid during the 1970s, reaching a high point in the early 80s. But they had a relatively short life and began to disappear during the late 1980s, a process which became more rapid during the 1990s. David Crook has argued that, in addition to a lack of sustained party political support, there were four main reasons for the demise of middle schools:

• they had different age ranges and were accordingly deemed 'primary' or 'secondary', so they suffered from an 'identity problem';

• their staffs were often a mixture of former primary and former secondary teachers, so they suffered from a clash of 'two cultures', as Hargreaves pointed out;

• their financial viability was questioned - especially in the light of falling rolls; and

• their educational justification became problematic following the introduction of the National Curriculum, whose key stages the middle schools straddled.

The last two of these factors proved decisive.

Falling rolls (fewer pupils) made schools more expensive to run. The obvious solution was to close some, but school closures always cause politicians problems - parents naturally like their children to attend nearby schools and don't want them to have to travel long distances. However, closing a middle school did not generally result in children having to travel any further - they simply went to the local first/lower school (which became a primary school) and then on to the local secondary school (whose age range was extended from 13-18 to 11-18). The result was that both these schools (the new primary and secondary schools) became bigger, resulting in cost savings.

The National Curriculum's Key Stages 1-3 (covering ages 5-7, 7-11 and 11-14) created a problem for schools in three-tier systems which straddled these age boundaries. First (or lower) schools, which taught the first year or two of KS2, had to liaise with middle schools, which taught the last year or two of KS2, over which areas of each subject they would teach. Similarly, middle schools, which taught the first two years of KS3, had to liaise with upper schools, which taught the last year of KS3, over what areas of each subject in KS3 they would teach.

Bearing in mind that an upper school might have three or four feeder middle schools each teaching different areas in different subjects at KS3, and that a middle school might have six or even more feeder first schools all teaching different areas in different subjects at KS2, it quickly became clear that this was a logistical nightmare. (I had some experience of it myself!) It was much simpler to have the transfer between schools at a break between Key Stages - which effectively meant at age 11.

Many parents and teachers liked the ethos of middle schools and wanted to keep them. When the debate about Oxford's middle schools got under way in the early 1990s, one of the arguments used by their supporters was that national research showed a drop in attainment in the year or two after children moved into secondary schools. The drop in attainment did not appear to happen when the children stayed on in middle schools for an extra couple of years.

It was also argued that children aged 11-12 fared better socially in smaller middle schools than in larger comprehensives.

But neither argument cut much ice. The decision was made on the two points outlined above (cost and curriculum) and despite a strong campaign by middle school parents and teachers, Oxford's middle schools eventually closed in 2003.

During their eighteen years in office, the Tories had weakened the power of the local authorities, diminished the influence of the teacher unions and forced the Labour Party to rethink its education policies. But these successes had encouraged them to ever greater extremism, notably in their promotion of selection and their right-wing vision of 'traditional' education. As Jones (2003:122) notes:

This triumphalist moment did not last. In many areas - funding, assessment, selection - Conservative policies had provoked strong oppositional movements, for which the principles of equal-opportunity-orientated reform were plainly an issue. Conflict with such movements proved damaging for Conservatism, which by the mid-1990s faced protests over low levels of education spending in the English shires, large-scale opposition in Scotland to 'Thatcherism' in education, and a boycott by teachers in England and Wales of national assessment procedures. Thus, a peculiar double movement was in process: even while the basic building blocks of its system were assimilated into a two-party consensus, in other respects Conservatism's educational policies were contributing to the electoral debacle of 1997.

The Tories went into the 1997 general election promising that grant-maintained schools would be allowed to select up to 50 per cent of their intake by ability; technology and language colleges up to 30 per cent; and all other local authority schools up to 20 per cent. And John Major declared that he would like to see 'a grammar school in every town'.

In the end, the government destroyed itself. Having called for a return to 'traditional values' in his 'back to basics' campaign, Major found himself leading an administration mired in endless allegations of sleaze and widely regarded as fiscally incompetent - a sin for any Tory government. It was swept away in the general election of May 1997 when Tony Blair's 'New Labour' party scored a landslide victory.

Chapter 3