And with that, the cupboard was bare.
If Old Mother Hubbard were to be appointed education secretary by whoever replaces Theresa May this summer, she would be disappointed to find little more than cobwebs in the policy cupboard marked “Schools”.
The publication this month of Edward Timpson’s review of exclusion policy was a strange event, not least because it was the last major schools announcement we were expecting from this government. No Green papers, no White papers, no legislation, no reviews. Nada.
Brexit paralysis has reached the Department for Education, as we knew it would. Of course, ministers will point to the oncoming train wrecks of T levels and the Augar Review of university tuition fees as signs of policy life, but in the area of 5-16 education, that’s your lot.
Cue thousands of heads and teachers jumping for joy: many believe that what the school system needs more than anything is a hiatus in ministerial meddling.
And, up to a point, they would be right.
Writing about her decision this week to retire early, celebrated school leader Ros McMullen recalled how one of her early headteacher mentors kept a picture of every education secretary he had “outlived” on his office wall as a reminder of the short-termism of policy. The best heads remember that their professional life cycle is way longer than that of their political masters, and approach their sillier machinations with that in mind.
But that is only half the story. In truth, this is a bad time for the government to have evacuated the battlefield. Several areas of education policy are in crisis and urgently in need of attention. Let’s start with the ongoing crisis in the recruitment and, more importantly, retention of teachers. The Early Career Framework, published in January, represented a start. But this will need much ministerial support if it is to live up to its promise - and the same goes for the recruitment and retention strategy, which was full of good ideas in theory, but now needs to be delivered.
There have been many fine words spoken in the cause of reducing workload, but what teachers need now is action. Little appears to be forthcoming.
Which brings us to the wider funding crisis. The past few months have signalled a step-change in the way the Department for Education talks about the investment needed by schools. Out is the insistence that the sector has never had more money; in are public utterances about the areas in need of extra cash. Why? Because this autumn had promised a Comprehensive Spending Review; a time when the Treasury negotiates with Whitehall’s spending departments over what their budgets are going to look like in the coming years. But, owing to the Brexit omnishambles, it looks likely that this process has been kicked into 2020, and so schools will be stuck with the current unacceptable funding levels for at least another year.
All of this was rather well summarised by McMullen in her piece this week: “As heads, we witness families thrown into poverty, cuts to every social service, school budgets squeezed and endless demands that schools ‘close the gap’ caused by the disadvantage in the first place. This is nonsense.”
It maybe counter-intuitive, but now is not the time for ministers to walk away. We need ministers to stay and fix this mess.
They say all governments eventually run out of steam. This administration has ground to a halt. At exactly the wrong moment. Expect no bones in Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard for some time.
@Ed_Dorrell
This article originally appeared in the 24 May 2019 issue under the headline “Old Mother Hinds’ cupboard is bare - make no bones about it”
