Good local schools for all – even Nicky Morgan gets the point at last

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/10/good-local-schools-nicky-morgan

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It has been a source of some amusement to me and to many of my friends to hear the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, talk about the fundamental wish of most parents for a good local school. To witness this unassailable truth from the lips of a Conservative cabinet minister, indeed from the lips of a cabinet minister of any party, is satisfying.

Poll after poll reveals that this is a priority for the electorate. Yet the prevailing rhetoric of the past decade has been barely concealed disdain for the local offer, especially if it is a socially mixed community comprehensive school.

Instead, parents have been urged to subtly register a nagging doubt that if they aren’t casting around for that greener educational grass, or engaged in a school choice “arms race” replete with private tuition, false addresses or bogus church attendance, they are somehow failing their children.

It is why I helped to set up the Local Schools Network (LSN), to give a voice to parents who use and support their local schools. We wanted to celebrate the achievements of those schools and to remind people that they are more than just a vehicle of good educational achievement. They knit communities together and enable children from very different backgrounds to learn from each other.

Carrying the torch for the local school hasn’t always been easy. We are generally lumped in with the rest of the Gove “blob” by the so-called reformers, or characterised as wanting to deny choice to others. The former chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, once described me as the educational equivalent of the Taliban.

In fact, the reverse is true. Our aim has always been to show parents that they can often find a positive choice on their doorstep. It has also been to bust the myths, often rooted in anecdote or distant history, around state education.

Carrying the torch for the local school hasn’t been easy. We are lumped in with the rest of the Gove ‘blob'

The image of the downtrodden local comp is just one of those overworked inventions, which is why two of my fellow LSN writers and bloggers, Melissa Benn and Janet Downs, have now produced School Myths, a guide to the most common education caricatures, complete with evidence to challenge them.

Some need no introduction. Judging by his speech last week, David Cameron seems to be the last man standing to believe in the biggest myth of all – that academies and free schools are automatically superior to other schools. One wonders how many more select committee, Ofsted, National Audit Office or other independent reports pointing to the opposite conclusion will be needed before the penny drops. Or maybe he just doesn’t have any other interesting policy ideas?

But the other everyday fallacies – local authorities run schools, teachers don’t need qualifications, private schools have magic DNA, a market approach to schooling automatically raises standards and a progressive education automatically lowers them – also benefit from a thorough trawl through the evidence. This generally shows that most of the claims we are routinely fed about education are just not true.

Comprehensives haven’t failed. They may not all be perfect but all-ability schools have opened up opportunities for young people that didn’t exist under the old selective system. OECD chief Andreas Schleicher, the man with his finger on all the international evidence, reinforced this point last week in his exposé of commonly held global education myths. Countries that routinely select or segregate children by ability are not ranked among the most successful.

Local authorities haven’t run schools for years; it is better if teachers are well trained and benefit from high-quality professional development. That legendary private school DNA may be over-rated and, judging by the poor success rate of private school academy sponsors, where it does exists it is not readily injected into the state sector.

But the evidence also shows something else. Too often complex policy questions are presented as simple black and white choices. In fact, the reality of running a successful school system is a lot of grey.

So local authorities can have a productive role in education without running schools; choice and good local provision can co-exist. What is wrong with a choice of good local comprehensive schools? Good teachers can and must impart knowledge and also develop skills. State and private schools can learn from each other and all good heads seek to innovate regardless of which type of school they are in, but no one has a monopoly on exciting new ideas.

I suspect the authors of School Myths could have uncovered several more popular misconceptions: England’s schools aren’t necessarily falling down the international tables; current performance measures don’t always tell you if a school is really “good”. And when it comes to poorer children, schools can’t do it all without addressing wider inequalities in society.

I am not holding my breath in anticipation that the negative mythology of state education in England will evaporate overnight, but gathering and disseminating the evidence for our supporters feels like an important task at the moment.