NLT policy

Freedom to choose: will literacy policy in schools be less prescriptive under the coalition Government?

8 Jun 2010

It has been clear for some time that this year and next will be a period of enormous change for literacy in schools. Even before the election the previous Labour government had announced the gradual end of the National Strategies and significant reforms of the primary curriculum. The new administration has now taken schools and literacy reform forwards, inputting their own ideas and direction. At this early stage in the administration it seems that if the new Department for Education could use one word to sum up the new schools philosophy it would be freedom.

The clearest and most instant manifestation of this philosophy is the academies legislation due to go through parliament in the next few weeks. This will allow the potential creation of thousands more academies and will also give parents and other groups the opportunity to create new “free” schools without the blessing of their local authority. Education Secretary Michael Gove says that these moves will give parents greater freedom and powers as to where they send their children to school, so no-one should have to settle for a sub-standard education. It remains to be seen how many free schools will be set up and how many schools will make the switch to academy status, but this movement away from local authority control of schools could radically alter the education landscape.

The new administration will also give schools greater freedom over their budgets via the introduction of the pupil premium system. This essentially means schools will be allocated money per pupil and funding will follow the pupil rather than the schools. As this was one of the few policies to appear in both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat manifestos it is likely to be a high priority of the coalition government. Schools will be able to spend their budgets as they see fit in order to maximise the opportunities for their pupils. While schools may welcome additional budgetary freedom, there is a significant risk that services such as libraries and other facilities that support wider educational outcomes may lose out. As schools receive funding per pupil it is essential that they keep every pupil and so will strive to keep parents happy. For their part, parents are most likely to remove their child from a school if exam results are low, therefore schools may concentrate even more of their funding and energies into exam scores to the detriment of wider aspects of learning. In this system it is essential that all services working in schools are able to closely align themselves with the school’s strategic priorities. 

The new philosophy will affect everything from school structures to the specifics of literacy catch-up programmes. In 2007 the influential Conservative think-tank Policy Exchange produced a paper entitled ‘Choice? What Choice?[1] which explicitly criticised the Labour government’s policy of exclusively backing Every Child A Reader as a catch-up programme for primary pupils struggling with literacy. The paper suggested that schools should have greater freedom to choose from a range of interventions based on the specific needs of their pupils. To support this the authors suggested the introduction of a government accreditation system, based on randomised control tests[2], to enable schools to judge the effectiveness of various systems. The author of the report is now a key education adviser in the coalition government and so it seems likely that choosing interventions will be an area in which schools are given greater freedom.

One of the key challenges to any coalition government is finding areas in which both parties agree. In the current Liberal Conservative coalition both parties are in favour of reduced centralised control over schools. Indeed, one of the Liberal Democrat’s key education pledges was to replace the national curriculum with a slimmed-down minimum entitlement for schoolchildren. While reforms may not go this far, it is certain that significant curriculum changes are on the way and that these will aim to reduce the statutory burden on schools. This new direction has already created uncertainty as to the future of the proposed reforms set out by the Jim Rose review of the primary curriculum[3], although the new Department for Education have so far announced no concrete plans. One thing is certain: any changes will not be overseen by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which has already been scrapped by Michael Gove.

Granting schools and other services increased freedoms is always much harder in practice than in theory. Central government will be judged on the performance of schools and so will want to retain some say in how they are run. Often governments find that granting more freedoms prevents them from ensuring school standards and so change policy direction, it remains to be seen if this will happen in this case. However, for now the new coalition seems determined to push ahead with a programme of reform that gives schools greater freedoms.

’[1] Policy Exchange (2007). Choice? What Choice? Supply and Demand in English Education

[2] Experimental design that studies the effect of an intervention using at least two groups: one that received the intervention and one that did not; participants who are as close to identical in age, gender, ethnicity etc as possible are randomly assigned to a group in order to isolate the impact of the intervention.

[3] DCSF (2009) Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum

Tags: England, Northern Ireland, Policy, Scotland, Wales

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