Mr Smith (I’ve changed his name) scared us. A giant of a man, with a huge beard and a car patched up with gaffer tape, he taught me English. He’d prowl around the classroom and point at you: “What do you think, Jon, hmmmm?” It wasn’t a question, it was a challenge. If your response met his approval, you got a nod and an eyebrow raise of surprise. If it didn’t, you got a squall of sarcasm and surliness.
He was, of course, a fantastic teacher. And at A Level, he taught me his most valuable lesson of all. It was about ideas. To have them, he said, was the easy bit. The hard bit was proving the idea mattered. Do the latter, he argued, and the world is yours.
It was Mr Smith I thought of immediately after reading the White Paper this week. While some will query whether anything in the White Paper was actually an idea, rather than a vague assertion (Sam Freedman wrote a fantastic piece around this), what struck me most was a nagging question about whether any of the “new” things proposed would really matter - to teachers, to the system, but most of all to pupils.
It wasn’t just the 2030 target for many of the key proposals that left you feeling like the answer was probably no; it was the parent-pleasing soundbites, the proposals that would attempt to nudge a minority of schools into very minor changes, and then some very vague discussion around the regulation of MATs. We are emerging from a period of huge upheaval and the stage was set for the White Paper to either kick-start a great recovery or propose a great rewrite of the system to, using the Conservatives’ own phrase, “build back better”. It did neither.
Lack of money is likely to be the cause. Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi exclusively told Tes he hadn’t asked for more cash from the Treasury, but he’s an ambitious, astute operator, so I find it hard to believe he would have willingly walked into the quagmire of creating policy with empty pockets. Without funding, how far could he really go in this policy document?
A tone of culture change
Interestingly, the freedom of a Green Paper certainly shows that transformative ideas are possible from the department. The SEND Review is an honest, ambitious, informed document. It confesses to the crimes of the past and seeks atonement. It is bursting with interesting, thought-out proposals.
And even if the complex logistical and process changes it proposes are years away, and even though there is no money for this document either, it sets a tone of culture change that will definitely matter in classrooms and school corridors. It says clearly that SEND children matter, that it matters where they are taught, that it matters that the system is respectful and equitable, that it matters that the system is inclusive, and that it matters that we take on the hard challenges and don’t shy away from them.
Of course, there are problems. Rob Webster and Simon Knight have articulated those problems with clarity in their reaction pieces this week. The document proposes standardisation and simplification and, without a lot of money and a lot of expertise, those things simply aren’t possible. But where the White Paper felt like a disappointment, the SEND Green Paper was a revelation in comparison.
The noises coming from the government over the past 12 months suggested the opposite would be true. The rumour mill had urged us to believe that the White Paper would put Reception into key stage 1, introduce Year 9 Sats, and even take on the unions. It was to be, apparently, an ideological mosh pit of ideas. The SEND review? Most thought it wouldn’t happen. And if it did happen, most thought it would be a huge waste of everyone’s time.
If we were going to have to compromise, I am relieved it has worked out the way it has. The challenges of SEND are among the most urgent problems in our education system. Yes, the sector needs a recovery plan and the White Paper should have been it - both documents should have been full of ideas that matter. But if I had to pick one document that mattered most? It would have been the SEND review. And credit to the civil servants who worked on it - the end result of that document is something of which even Mr Smith would approve.
