Jonathan Porter, Deputy Head (Academic), tells The Spectator why he is worried about what Labour might do to our schools.
This article first appeared in The Spectator online on 12 January 2025.
In my first lesson teaching Year 8 in inner-city Birmingham, one boy, seeing the opening slide of my ‘Introduction to Judaism’ PowerPoint, rocked back on his chair, and, with a level of focus that he never matched again, simply said, ‘I f***ing hate the Jews.’ The Teach First training programme had promised us ‘challenging’ schools. And that was exactly what we got.
Behaviour was bad, but so was the curriculum. There was little or no teaching resources, which meant that each night we had to hurriedly reinvent the wheel. Surely, I thought, someone must have created a worksheet on Genesis 1 before?
The other oddity was how we were encouraged to teach. The favoured pedagogical style was what is called ‘minimally guided instruction’ – a pedagogical theory with roots in Romanticism which, while highly seductive, has the downside of not being very good.
We were told to involve the pupils – sorry, ‘learners’ – in as many varied activities as possible. Pupils in rows facing the teacher were out; grouped tables with the pupils facing each other were in.
To those of us training at the time, it was hard to believe that the hours of cutting out pieces of card were really necessary. I knew Jonny kept kicking Kevin, but was there really such a thing as a ‘kinaesthetic learner’? And why weren’t my pupils getting more empathetic when I asked them to put on De Bono’s thinking hat?
Despite all of this, there was a buzz.
The coalition government had just taken power and, whatever else they might have been getting wrong, there was a sense that, for education at least, change was in the air.
The Education Endowment Foundation, founded by the government the year before, was committed to providing evidence-based resources for teachers to use in schools. Two years later, ‘ResearchEd’ was formed by classroom teachers to debunk the pseudo-science that had seeped its way into teacher training.
Injected into this intellectual petri dish was a new catalyst: Free Schools. New Labour’s Academies programme, under Lord Adonis, had successfully begun a structural revolution in the noughties and now groups of teachers could set up comprehensive state schools, distanced from local authorities’ muddled ideological control. With a new performance measure, Progress 8, schools would also finally be judged on their pupils’ average academic progress, regardless of their different starting points.
Thirty years on from the original Academies’ programme, and a decade and a half on from the first Free Schools, we have worked out what works. Some schools teach so well that their pupils achieve two grades more than the national average. The same pupil who is awarded a set of 6s at GCSE at one school will likely receive a set of 8s and 9s at another.
Pupils at Mercia School in Sheffield, Mossbourne in Hackney, and the school I was fortunate enough to be a part of, Michaela School in Wembley, have all had their lives changed as a result. The academy trusts at the top of the Progress 8 rankings, such as Ark and Harris, are managing to do this at scale.
But we should worry about what comes next.
Some of the sounds coming from our new Labour government are encouraging. The Education Secretary’s recent slap down of the hard left when they suggested making school exclusions more difficult will be a relief to senior leaders grappling to keep good order in their schools.
Thoughtful teachers know that the precondition of learning in any classroom is the quality of behaviour. And the thing that drains the energy of teachers is the small number of pupils whose behaviour has an outsized impact on school culture. ‘Teacher Tap’, an organisation that surveys teachers’ opinions, found in a 2024 survey that 30 per cent of all teachers said they had witnessed pupils fighting that week.
A progressive Labour government won’t waste valuable time making school exclusions more difficult: it will spend time and money improving the quality of alternative provision for children who, for complex and heartbreaking reasons, cannot be taught in mainstream classrooms.
But their recent changes to academy freedoms look like a step in the wrong direction.
Rather than celebrating the autonomy both Labour and Conservative governments have given schools since the Blair years, Bridget Phillipson appears to want to restrict it. The ‘Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill’ will remove the freedoms of Academies to set pay, employ staff without ‘Qualified Teacher Status’ and curtail the creativity these schools have enjoyed over the curriculum.
The move is significant because it suggests that the Government is more interested in flattening and levelling down school practice than it is identifying excellence. More worryingly, it raises the question of whether the government has understood the relationship between freedom and standards: do they think that schools that help pupils to achieve two grades more than the average are able to do so because their curriculum is the same as everywhere else?
We’ve seen such muddled thinking elsewhere. Sir Keir Starmer was originally upbeat about ‘oracy’. And there could be much to commend it. Encouraging pupils to articulate their answers in pairs in ‘turn and talk’ tasks before sharing answers with the class boosts confidence and almost certainly helps children to improve the quality of their thinking.
But when the Labour party uses the word ‘oracy’ it sounds like the faddish technique that was pioneered at the less-than-stellar ‘School 21’. Founded by Peter Hyman, formerly senior adviser to Sir Keir Starmer, School 21 believes that the best way to prepare pupils for the 21st century is project work and the teaching of generalisable skills, despite the overwhelming evidence that we can only become skilful within domains of knowledge.
And how progressive is cancelling a state schools’ Latin programme? The Department for Education has recently told schools that it will be terminating its Latin Excellence Programme, and not even at the end of the school year, but in February. It seems that, just at the moment when the government is making independent education harder, it’s choosing to restrict classical education to the private sector.
The broader worry is that our new government isn’t capitalising on, or even curious, about what works.
For a long time Finland was held up by educationalists as a beacon of progressive education but, in recent years, its light has been flickering. In the most recent international PISA survey, England has overtaken Finland for both reading and maths. England also scores highly on other international tests: our Year 5 pupils are ranked fourth in the world for reading in the PIRLS assessment and our Year 9 pupils are ranked sixth for maths in the TIMSS assessment.
Whisper it, but England is the new Finland. After this educational revolution, teachers from the Netherlands, Australia and the US no longer go to Helsinki to see lessons but London and Sheffield. In which other areas of public policy can we say the same?
The silence from the government is unnerving. Is it because they don’t agree? They seem not to be interested in the science of learning, school culture and spreading what works across our system, but curtailing the freedoms that engendered such ingenuity and innovation in the first place.
Another lesson I teach is on England’s non-conformist movement. My pupils learn that the movement came to prominence by striking out at a complacent establishment. Valuing education highly, non-conformists established their own schools and universities, and these became famous the world over as engines of innovation and scientific enquiry. England became the envy of the world.
The Anglican establishment of the day, rather than harnessing and learning from such churches and their ‘enthusiasm’, often sought to spurn them. The establishment hunkered down with what was easy and comfortable, rather than allow these new churches to offer gentle, but vital, critique.
It is often said that Labour owes more to Methodism than to Marxism. Let us hope so.
