Why Bridget 'Little Red Riding Hood' Phillipson is the wolf terrorising private schools
Bridget Phillipson’s attitude to education suggests England’s high standards could start to fall down towards Scotland’s
It’s not much fun running a private school these days, even less than running for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, as Angela Rayner goes down one of her many sofas to find change for her stamp duty bill and Peter Mandelson packs his bags in Washington.
But someone’s pain is someone else’s gain and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, her class-warrior credentials freshly burnished by her tax raid on private schools and the crushing of aspiration it represents, was duly rewarded with more than enough MPs to support her bid to succeed Ms Rayner by Wednesday evening. A Battle of the Bobs against sacked minister Lucy Powell looms.
Ms Phillipson will no doubt continue to take pride in her mistaken belief that VAT on private school fees would have little effect on school rolls and generate oodles of tax revenue because, as she put it, they had been “crying wolf” as numbers hadn’t tumbled after big fee increases. But in May the Independent Schools Council’s annual survey showed the immediate exodus was around 13,000, with a lot more to come, not Ms Phillipson’s “optimistic” guesstimate of about 3,000 fewer private pupils.
Historic decline of Scottish education
Even if the revenue isn’t as expected, she will doubtless greet stories of those families being forced to take their children out of their favoured schools with a haughty retort that they shouldn’t have undermined the state’s offer by going private in the first place. If St Robert of Newminster Catholic School was good enough to get her to Oxford, then its equivalent elsewhere should be fine for everyone else, goes her argument.
While Labour is in power, there’s no going back but at least standards in English state schools have largely held up. The only comparison we have, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), shows higher ability levels at age 15 for all three tested abilities, reading, maths and science.
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While Scottish children aren’t far behind on reading (496 points to 493), it’s still a decline from 526 points in 2000, and with the fall in maths (from 506 in 2006 to 471) and science (515 to 483), it means today’s Scottish 15-year-olds have the same abilities as their predecessors 20 years ago had at age 13-and-a-half. It’s a staggering story of failure, and almost all on the SNP’s watch.
England is now ranked 11th for maths and 13th for science out the 81 OECD countries, compared to Scotland’s 29th and 30th. Further evidence of progress in England is the number of schools rated good or outstanding under the recently discontinued Ofsted system rose from 68 per cent in 2010 to 90 per cent last year.
Phillipson to follow Scotland downhill?
It’s very small comfort that, with the same exam system as England, Welsh education has gone off a far steeper cliff than Scotland’s, and maybe it’s just coincidence that Labour has been running the Welsh Assembly throughout the 26 years of devolution.
The obvious point of all this is that those families forced out the private sector in England can at least be reassured that attainment in the kids’ new school is still likely to be good, even if the facilities and extracurricular activities are not up to the same standard. There is choice beyond council-controlled community schools, be they foundation and voluntary schools, academies and free schools run by not-for-profit academy trusts with freedom to follow a different curriculum, or selective state-funded grammars, so no surprise Ms Phillipson wants to get her socialist claws on the academy system.
Perhaps she aspires to follow Scotland where, unless you pay for an expensive house in Jordanhill, it’s the local council school or nothing, and the education establishment circles the wagons at criticism, blaming “neoliberal tendencies” and “politicised point-scoring” for regarding attainment as the best measure of success, as did two Stirling University sociologists and education advisers when the last Pisa results were published.
Inspectors’ superlatives for Fettes
The closest thing Scotland has to an English-style curriculum is at the top private schools, so no wonder Fettes College was cock-a-hoop last week when the outcome of a snap inspection ordered by the Scottish Government in February was issued, rating the £54,000-a-year boarding school as outstanding for its curriculum and for raising attainment and achievement.
The inspectors struggled to find enough glowing superlatives – an aspirational vision with a clear focus on academic excellence, very high-quality experiences across all areas of the curriculum, pupils “develop significantly, their confidence and self-esteem” ─ and no wonder the head Helen Harrison, in her final year, was delighted after what has been a murderous year for all private schools.
Fettes is fortunate to have a stream of potential international customers to cushion the VAT blow, and praise like that is the marketing department’s dream, but cost-cutting and redundancies have been unavoidable there too. Elsewhere, the VAT squeeze is beginning to bite hard and at George Watson’s College, which my kids attended, new head Lisa Kerr has had to cut around £3.5 million from her budget.
And it’s being noticed further afield. This week Ms Kerr posted an article from a Canadian news site on Linkedin which described how Alberta saw private schools as partners to tackle issues, while Ms Phillipson’s attack had “given Canadians a real-life case study, with conclusive results” which proved “kneecapping educational entrepreneurialism and school variety doesn’t solve problems”.
Indeed. And the problem with Ms Phillipson’s “cry wolf” accusation is there was a wolf, except this time Little Red Riding Hood had the fangs and soon she’ll be the Little Red Deputy Leader. Come the November budget, there will be more than private school lambs to the slaughter.
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