Dear Ms Morgan: let's look at your 'undead' education team

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/sep/02/nicky-morgan-undead-education-team-michael-rosen

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Dear Ms Morgan

I was interested to read a recent article by one of your party's supporters, Matthew d'Ancona. He was encouraging you to carry on the good work of your predecessor, particularly in his effort "to liberate comprehensives from the dead hand of town hall control" (16 August, Daily Telegraph).

As I go about the country, I hear people wondering what has replaced this "dead hand". If academies and free schools aren't controlled by town halls, who are they controlled by? People are becoming aware of the team of regional commissioners who will, by some kind of special virtue that is not immediately apparent, be undead hands. Yet, we also know that, ultimately, it's you and your team at the Department for Education who carry the can. If d'Ancona is right, you folks must also be whatever is the opposite of a dead hand. You must have some special vivacious, insightful, in-touch qualities which outsmart and outperform those dull old town hall people. So to remind myself, this is the lineup: you, Nick Boles, Nick Gibb, David Laws, Edward Timpson with Lord Nash as your permanent under-secretary of state for schools.

I looked up your profiles on Wikipedia to see if I could find some common element that would prove to be the key to your special place in the fabric of our education system.

At first, I thought it might be that you were all educated at Oxford or Cambridge, but then I noticed that two of you were at Durham. Even so, plenty of common ground between you there, ground which could so easily have been diluted if you had anyone in the team with, say, a non-university background.

As the youngest among you is in your low 40s, you did all benefit from having your fees paid by us – a privilege not granted to present-day students and their families, so perhaps it might sometimes be difficult for you to have gut knowledge of what it must feel like to leave university £20,000 in debt.

There's some common ground between you in that your degrees are all in administration: law, economics and PPE (philosophy, politics and economics). We might also say that this means that none of you has studied at degree level English, maths, a modern language, an ancient language, geography, history, drama, music, science or technology. Would it be fair, do you think, to wonder if this might limit the team's expertise in relation to the spread of subjects taught in schools?

Moving earlier in your formation as national leaders, I was interested to see that all of you were educated at fee-paying secondary schools, though one of you – Nick Gibb – seems to have experienced at least some time in the maintained sector at secondary level. Some might say that this doesn't matter. After all, the effortless superiority acquired from private education is what enabled the British elite to run the empire, and in recent years, this elite filled the upper echelons of the banking sector that has served us all so well.

Given that vast quantities of educational research come across your desks, I wondered if a higher degree or two might not have given your team that critical edge when it comes to spotting flaws and errors in methodology but that sort of thing wasn't deemed to be necessary when your team was being put together.

Talking of research, I wondered if this government's drive to improve the education of the least advantaged could benefit from some hard evidence. For example, when comparisons are made between their respective and relative achievements, are free schools, academies and local authority schools on the same ground?

Here's a simple check that I as a parent would really like to see: could we have the stats on students in the different kinds of schools at the point at which they take their GCSEs? In order to know that no kind of covert selection is going on – either by intake or due to school exclusions through the five years of secondary education – we parents need to know whether academies and free schools have the same proportion of students with special needs, students eligible for free school meals and students with English as an additional language as the three or four local authority schools nearest to them. Just to be clear, it's not sufficient to give us these stats by "area", as that would disguise the highly differentiated patterns of settlement that exist in every small locality. We need to know if any free schools or academies are by some mechanism or other managing to avoid putting significant percentages of these three kinds of students in for GCSEs. Can you give us those stats, do you think?

Yours, Michael Rosen