Labour calls time on 'exam factory' approach to schooling

A Labour government would end Westminster’s “alpha male” education reform culture, the shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, is to promise in a speech setting out the party’s plans for schools. He aims to call time on the “exam factory” approach of recent years and offer in its place greater autonomy for teachers and school leaders.

Hunt will say there is an affliction bedevilling Westminster culture, in a thinly veiled dig at former Conservative education secretary Michael Gove: “The cult of the big reformer. A sort of alpha male compulsion to see everything through the prism of your ‘reforming legacy’.”

Speaking in London on Friday, at the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders, Hunt will say change must come from the bottom up, “through giving teachers and school leaders the freedom and autonomy to deliver an exciting education”.

He will say: “The existing model of school improvement is creaking at the seams. The idea that if we just raise the targets, stamp our feet and demand a bit more, then every child will fulfil their potential is now, surely, approaching its end stages.

“We have to chart a course – carefully, slowly, consensually – away from the narrow, ‘exam factory’ vision of recent years.

“England’s demographic surge affords us a tremendous opportunity to do something different. We need to build scores of new schools in areas of need.

“So, this is a chance to rethink some of the fundamentals of the industrial model of schooling. Embrace new pedagogies. Experiment with new curricula.

“Place some of those remarkable new digital technologies at the service of the 21st-century teacher.”

Hunt also wants to create a mechanism to allow schools to leave an academy chain, modelled on football’s Bosman ruling, which frees players to leave one club at the end of their contract and join another without a transfer fee being paid.

Academy funding agreements typically run for about seven years, but Labour wants to cut contracts to around five years.

According to Labour, the government has never spelled out a process that enables a good school to leave a poor academy chain. Hunt will invite the best education innovators from around the world – from Australia, America, Singapore or Finland – to come and open new schools in coastal towns, rural market towns and coalfield communities, where standards are currently low and needs high.

For ASCL members , however, funding is expected to be the key concern. Dr Peter Kent, the ASCL president and headteacher of Lawrence Sheriff school in Rugby, is expected to call on the next government to ensure that education funding levels are “sufficient, sustainable and equitable”.

And he will urge politicians not to sacrifice children’s education “on the altar of deficit reduction”.

He will say that some schools and colleges are already failing to make ends meet, and the situation is expected to deteriorate over the next 18 months due to pay rises and increases to pension and National Insurance contributions, which will add around 4.5% to costs, without taking inflation into account.

In an average secondary school of 920 students, it will cost an extra £199,000 – the equivalent of four or five teachers.

In a reference to both Labour and Tory offers on future education funding, Kent said: “Even before the underwhelming offers of a future based upon flat cash, or an inflation increase that will be swallowed up by increased pupil numbers, many ASCL members were telling us that they had gone past the point where efficiency savings could be made.

“Too many institutions are having to grapple with the reality that the level of funding is not enough to sustain the quality of education that our children deserve.

“Our children only get one chance and will not understand if we tell them in five years’ time that their education has been sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction.”

Kent will also call for a national fair funding formula. Earlier this week, ASCL published analysis showing that schools in the most poorly funded areas will, on average, each receive £1.9m less than those in the best-funded areas in 2015-16.

“Wide variations in the level of funding across the country cannot be justified and have to be addressed,” he will say.

Responding to Hunt’s speech, a Department for Education spokesperson defended the government’s record, claiming that free schools had brought new ideas and approaches to innovation.

“Thanks to our plan for education more children in England have the opportunity to go to a good or outstanding school than ever before and free schools have been crucial to that change,” the spokesperson said.

“A recent survey revealed how free schools are bringing new ideas and approaches to education - with 84% collaborating with neighbouring schools or planning to, two-thirds offering an alternative to the national curriculum in some or all subjects; and around half providing an extended school day.

“We know teachers are embracing modern technology and using it to make lessons more informative – as well as using it to measure the success of their own techniques.”