Unpopularism (some policy thoughts for conservatives)

There's a media caricature of conservatism as being a sort of red-faced, reactionary creed. And, at times, we do sound like the angry bloke at the bar as he moves from beer onto double whiskies - "send 'em home, stop 'em coming, hang 'em, flog 'em, blame the parents, close the borders, scroungers, layabouts, druggies". For all of his modest manner, politeness and media-savvy approach, this is pretty much how a lot of folk see the Rees-Mogg tendency.

Now I really am a conservative, probably more of one now than I've ever been, and this means that we need to take one of David Cameron's cute observations - "there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as the state" - and ask what is means in terms of policy. We should also recognise that our social problems seem to be pretty resistant to both the left liberal's "give everyone a nice hug" approach and the reactionary's "kick them up the pants, the lazy oiks" policy platform.

Anyway it seems to me that we should start thinking about those social problems - social mobility, inequality in health and education, housing, community, crime - as conservatives. We should also draw on the actual evidence as to what underlies the problems and how a conservative outlook can make a big difference. None of what follows is economic policy, all of it is intended to strengthen social bonds, reduce barriers between people and places, and provide some pointers to a society based more on the idea of community than the one we have right now.

Crime and Punishment 1 -Shut down prisons. We lock up too many young men and, in particular, young men from less privileged backgrounds. This isn't just bad for those young men, it's bad for their partners, their children and for society. We should stop doing this, close down a load of prisons and make prison more effective. Prison doesn't work as a deterrent and acts to destroy families while damaging society still further.

Crime and Punishment 2 - Legalise pot. If your place is like mine, then hardly a day passes without a proud announcement from the local police about another cannabis farm they've found. Have you noticed how this is reducing the number of folk smoking weed? No? We're losing the war on drugs. With appropriate safeguards, licences and taxes legalised cannabis (and maybe some other drugs too) would immediately end a huge criminal enterprise with all its attendant violence and unpleasantness.

Families 1 - Pay childcare to mums (or dads). We're spending billions (getting on for £10 billion) on providing parents with childcare subsidy. Since the evidence tells us that full-time, attentive parenting is the best development environment for a toddler, we should make that money we currently pay to nurseries and pre-schools also available to mums or dads who opt to stay at home to raise their toddlers.

Families 2 - Divorce reform. OK, we're better off than the Americans as we don't have 'no fault' divorce but it's still probably too easy to get a divorce especially where there are children. We should reform the system so that the interests of children is central to any decision. And those interests must be guided by the evidence telling us that being raised by a single parent is one of the best ways to screw the life chances of those children.

Families 3 - Incentivise marriage. You know why we have marriage? Love and all that jazz innit. Nope - marriage exists to stop men leaving once they've fathered a child. And forget all the religion stuff - every single society on earth has marriage in one form or another. Marriage works because is places a social stigma (sometimes enforced by a familial big stick) on men who abandon women with children. As the evidence on life chances for children born outside marriage tells us, not having married parents is bad for children. We should incentivise marriage through the tax system and, for the least well off, introduce a specific benefit payable to married couples.

Education 1 - school place lotteries. Grammar schools are one of our things as Conservatives. We love them despite the evidence telling us that they make barely a jot of difference to overall educational attainment or social mobility. If we want working class kids to do better then we have to mix them with middle class (and posh) kids rather than, de facto, herding them into separate schools because of social sorting by house price. So rather than grammar schools, let's have school place lotteries thereby creating better social mix in schools to the benefit of those working class kids.

Education 2 - fund more extra-curricula activity. Non-classroom stuff is really important - sport, music, art, debating, clubs - and we've been gradually squeezing it out (mostly by pulling funding and expecting parents to pay). We should fund activity like music, dance and school sport directly and pay the teachers who support extra-curricula activity more money.

Health - merge 'clinical commissioning groups' into local councils. Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are the bodies that hold local budgets for the NHS. We've already created 'Health and Wellbeing Boards' to make them at least talk with the local council. We should go further and put all the health and care commissioning under the local council - it would be more accountable, more transparent and might result in some creative, community-based health initiatives.

Housing 1 - scrap the 'green belt'. All the evidence, wherever you look in the world, tells us that policies constraining the supply of land in large, growing cities result in unaffordable housing. Let's abolish anti-suburb, anti-sprawl policies and focus instead on a planning system that actually protects special, beautiful, and environmentally-important land rather than a huge blanket consisting mostly of agricultural monoculture with all its attendant ecological negatives. This won't make housing cheap overnight but it will set a direction for more supply of land, more homes being built, more variety and a chance for young people to aspire to own a home.

Housing 2 - extend the right-to-buy. Right-to-Buy was the single biggest transfer of wealth from government to people in our history. We need to extend right-to-buy to all social housing with similar incentives to those offered to council tenants in the 1980s. And we should give tenants of privately rented homes the right to buy when a landlord seeks to sell the property - again with a discount similar to that offered to social tenants.

And finally - scrap beer duty for drinks sold in pubs. The pub is the heart of the community - how often does some politician tell us this (usually while having their picture taken with campaigners opposing yet another pub closure). Well pubs are places where people drink beer, that's their primary purpose. So why, if pubs are so bloody important, do we slap a massive additional tax on those drinkers? Scrap the beer duty (and probably duty on cider and wine but not spirits) for the on-trade.

As I said - unpopularism?

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Free markets are better for fairness and equality than the state

Yet again we have evidence of how systems dominated by non-free, constrained or licenced systems (or else directly controlled by the state) are less fair and equal than free systems:



Business - that's the free market - is by far the best sector for social mobility. Rather than as with the law (what a surprise) where the man at the top being ten times more likely to be privately-educated, he's only four times more likely in the private sector.

This is because, unlike state-controlled systems like law, medicine, the army and the civil service, the private sector doesn't have the luxury of relying on Daddy and thereby ignoring 90% of the population. If you're good, your chances of getting to the top in private business are far higher. As a result private business is more innovative, more diverse and more creative than the public sector. This is because without that innovation and creativity businesses fail. And without diversity you miss out loads of people who'll bring to the skills, talents and originality you need to succeed.

Every time we look at the world, we see that free systems - markets, trade, speech, assembly, choice - deliver a more equal society. A society that can't be gamed so much by the wealthy, well-connected and fortunately-born. As I've observed before, it beats me why the left has such a down on freedom when it delivers the goods on fairness and equality better than their preferred state-directed utopia.

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Attacking the privately-educated for their success is the worst sort of envy politics

There's been a renewed - renewed as in the record has jumped and we're hearing the same bit of the tune again - attention to the success of private education in the UK. At its most polemical is Ellie Mae O'Hagan's proposal to limit by quota the number of privately educated people "in our establishment":

If 7% of the population goes to private school, then it seems only fair that 7% of Britain’s elite jobs should go to privately educated individuals. This would include chief executives, barristers, journalists, judges, medical professionals and MPs. The rest of these jobs should be divided between comprehensive and grammar school alumni in a ratio that reflects the numbers educated in each.

Now, leaving aside for one second the glaring moral catastrophe that this proposal represents, we have the idea that somehow the privately-educated achieve their success for reasons other than merit - Daddy's money and contacts, the right accent, the connections gleaned from going to school with the scions of the elite. That the young men and women leaving private schools in Britain might succeed because they are clever and have benefited from a fantastic education at brilliant schools is simply not considered. Yet I suspect, far more than cash or contacts, this is the main reason for the success of these young people.

The Social Mobility Commission set up by the UK's Conservative Government published a report that sets out the question well:

Our results indicate a persistent advantage from having attended a private school. This raises questions about whether the advantage that private school graduates have is because they are better socially or academically prepared, have better networks or make different occupational choices. Whilst we do control for formal differences in academic achievement, we cannot model whether privately educated students are better prepared for job interviews and for the world of work directly.

The authors, Lindsey Macmillan and Anna Vignoles from the Centre for Analysis of Youth Transitions (CAYT) poke around at this question - is it who you know, who you are, who your Dad is or is there something else?

Focusing just on the 6 months immediately after graduation, a graduate’s socio-economic status is not associated with their chances of entering the highest status occupations, except via the positive effect that it has on a person’s academic achievement, degree subject, degree class and university choice. In other words, there is no evidence that socio-economic status is playing an independent role in helping graduates secure access to the highest status occupations straight after graduation. That said, those who attended private school do have a better chance of entering these occupations, even compared to individuals from state schools with similar characteristics and similar levels of education achievement.

The researchers controlled for using networks and contacts finding that, while these connections were used to get into good careers (and why not), even when they aren't public school educated young people still seem to do better. It's about the young people not the young people's mum or dad or the street they live in. That and the school.

This is rather the point. Instead of looking at private schools and asking what they're doing right, what we see - from right and left in Britain's political spectrum - is a classic piece of envy-driven politics. Because the young men and women who go to independent schools succeed in life we must do something to change things, to level the game by chopping off the legs of the private schools. Forget that parental income and influence, elite contacts and commitment to their children's success apply regardless of the school - let's abolish, tax, restrict or otherwise punish those schools for the sin of being very good at their job.

So instead of caterwauling about the iniquity of how some young people are fortunate to benefit from the great education on offer from Britain's independent schools let's ask how we get more of that great education for children whose parents haven't the cash to buy places at those schools. And I'm not talking here about the grand boarding institutions like Eton, Winchester and Westminster but those fantastic day schools like Leeds, Bradford and Manchester Grammar Schools. And there are ways to do this - starting with the Assisted Places scheme so spitefully scrapped by Tony Blair:

Under Margaret Thatcher’s government, they were plucked from poverty and taken out of state schools to attend top private schools instead, courtesy of the state.

The children of the Assisted Places Scheme are now in their 40s. And according to research published today, about half of them are likely to be earning at least £90,000 a year and sending their own children to private schools – but none of them will be dirtying their hands with any kind of manual work.

There you have it. Ordinary - even working-class - children given the chance of a bash at that great day school education. And it works. So let's have more of it? Or better still let's try some other ideas - voluntary schools vouchers where parents can take the cash the government would spend on their child's education, top it up if necessary and buy an education. How about something akin to the old direct grant system - essentially a private school means test (it gave me the option of putting Dulwich College on my choices at eleven). A bit like this:

...a “much better” model was the Open Access scheme trialled by the Trust at Belvedere school in Liverpool, where every place was available on merit and the Trust paid for those whose parents could not afford it. The school had 30 per cent on free places, 40 per cent paying partial fees and the rest paying the full amount.

Back in the 1950s private schools shifted their attention and effort from giving a pretty standard schooling to the scions of the elite - young men and women more or less ensured top positions by virtue of being the establishment - to developing an intensive and rigorous academic education to their students.

Using data from the National Child Development Study and the British Cohort Study, we examine how pupils born respectively in 1958 and 1970 were faring in the labour market by the time they had reached their early 30s. We show that the private/state earnings log wage differential rose significantly from 0.07 to 0.20 points (and thus the premium rose by 15 percentage points) between the two cohorts, after controlling for family background characteristics and for tests of cognitive and non-cognitive skills that they possessed at an early age. We also find that the private/state gap in the chances of gaining a higher degree rose from 0.08 to 0.18 between the cohorts. Our estimates imply that half the rise in the earnings differential can be attributed to the improved qualifications being achieved in private schools. These results are reinforced by similar findings based on successive cohorts in the British Household Panel Study.

Why was this? Why did the private sector up its game on academic educational achievement? Look at that was happening in the 1950s - a generation of grammar school educated young people from all sorts of backgrounds were pushing at the door. We had a series of state-educated prime ministers - Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major - and the professions of law and medicine stopped being the preserve of the posh. If private schools hadn't upped their game they'd have been out of business.

So let's do the same again - I'm a neutral on the grammar school debate but if we can capture the spirit of those times and set young people on an aspirational academic course again we'll be doing every part of the education business a favour. I know this is possible because schools like Dixons, Michaela and West London Free School are doing just this by looking at the ethos and approach of the day schools and saying "we can do that in the state sector". Mix in some vouchers, assisted places and direct grant arrangements and we might get the step change in educational outcomes that we need and which our young people deserve.

But attacking young men and women with a private education - excluding, discriminating and barring - is a recipe for a worse system, for the poor and failing parts of our education provision to have just another excuse for not delivering the goods. In the end it doesn't really matter where someone went to school - business, arts and sports are judged on achievement, ability and contribution not how much cash someone's mum and dad had. That politics, law and journalism aren't should be their concern not an excuse to attack the private school educated people who succeed in those professions..

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Why London dominates (or how the London problem isn't really a London problem)

Aaron Renn picks up on how tech superstar, Peter Thiel sort of accidently exposed the truth about Chicago (in Chicago):

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

The problem for Thiel was that he said this while speaking at an event in Chicago. No surprise, it didn’t go over well. An enquiring questioner wanted to know, “Who comes to Chicago if first-rate people go to New York or Silicon Valley?”

Now leaving aside the responses from miffed Chicago fans (the city that is not the band) Renn raises and explores an interesting point about the USA. Here he borrows from Charles Murray to make his point:

[I]t is difficult to hold a nationally influential job in politics, public policy, finance, business, academia, information technology, or the media and not live in the areas surrounding New York, Washington, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. In a few cases, it can be done by living in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, or Houston—and Bentonville, Arkansas—but not many other places.

For those not up on US billionaires, Bentonville in the HQ of Walmart.

Transfer this observation out of the USA and we have the elements of a thesis about why London dominates the UK - indeed, why London is so dominant in Europe. It seems likely that, just as Peter Thiel says, smart people head to one or two places - Renn reports that a quarter of HPY (Harvard, Princeton, Yale) graduates live in or around New York. I've no data for the UK but does anyone want to bet against Oxbridge graduates overwhelmingly living in and around London? We know it's true of tertiary education in general:

Given that most persons aged 30–34 will have completed their tertiary education prior to the age of 30, this indicator may be used to assess the attractiveness (or ‘pull effects’) of regions with respect to the employment opportunities they offer graduates. Map 5 shows tertiary educational attainment by NUTS level 2 region for 2015: the darkest shade of orange highlights those regions where at least half of the population aged 30–34 had attained a tertiary level of education. By far the highest share was recorded in one of the two capital city regions of the United Kingdom — Inner London - West — where more than four fifths (80.8 %) of the population aged 30–34 possessed a tertiary level of educational attainment. The second, third and fourth highest shares were also recorded in the United Kingdom, namely in: Outer London - South (69.3 %), the other capital city region of Inner London - East (68.2 %), and North Eastern Scotland (66.1 %); note that all four regions in Scotland recorded shares above 50%.

The three regions in Europe with the highest concentrations of graduates are all in London which seems to repeat what we've seen from the USA where New York, Boston, Washington and San Francisco dominate. And it means that the UK, by defining its regional achievement through comparison with London, has created an economic development problem. The city's success creates a virtuous circle - the clever, ambitious people are in London doing clever ambitious things meaning that clever ambitious people from elsewhere in the UK - perhaps even in Europe - head to London because that's where clever, ambitious people go to be clever and ambitious. With the obvious result that, the occasional Bentonville or Omaha proving the rule, places elsewhere have to make do with less clever, less ambitious people and as a consequence slower economic growth.

The European data on tertiary education tells us that this supercharged agglomeration effect is pretty consistent - everywhere capital cities and places with a lot of research infrastructure suck up the graduates leaving other places with less of the talent needed to achieve that aim of 'closing the gap' between successful places and less successful places. The problem with London, New York and San Francisco (and, no doubt, were we to look: Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai) is that their agglomeration effect sucks the brightest and most able from places that, of themselves, are seen as relatively successful. Clever and ambitious Parisians head to London, just as the brightest in Chicago switch to San Francisco, Washington or New York.

For London - regardless of Brexit - this process is likely to continue and, in doing so, for the problems of London (expensive housing, the occasional late train, crime, air pollution and so forth) inevitably become the problems of the UK. Planning policies are adapted to fit London's housing crisis, health policies to reflect the worries of a thirty- and forty-something population, and transport policies designed for the needs of big city commuters. The dominance of London - The London Problem - doesn't just skew the UK's economy but it also profoundly influences the complete range of national government policies. That London Problem isn't really a London problem but results in a national policy programme suited to the clever and ambitious who have - because that's where the opportunities are - headed to London.

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Bradford schools - how many children will we let down before we get it right?

So someone shares this article on Twitter. It's a story about an 'A' Level student who didn't quite get the grades to go to her chosen university. First reaction is sad for her but tough - there are thousands of students who've got tantalisingly close to meeting a challenging offer. There are other opportunities, other options, life goes on.

But the story's not really about the girl who didn't get her offer, the story's about the school:

Getting into Durham University is never going to be easy. But it’s near impossible when the school you go to has been placed on special measures by OFSTED three times since you started.

Failing OFSTED obviously shows the school is shit, but it also leads to another flaw that you’ll find in every school like the one Megan and I went to: The pass rate is way more important to the school than how well the students actually do.

Megan would never have even received an offer from Durham had she listened to her Head of Sixth Form, who told her that A-levels would be too difficult, and advised her to take BTECs instead. BTECs can be sneakily added into the overall A-level results of the school, making it look better than it actually is. BTECs avoid any risk because, realistically, who fails them?

These state school teachers are lying to intelligent students, stunting what they can achieve, all for the sake of league tables. It’s hard to know whether to blame them, or the government and regulators who incentivize that kind of behaviour.

And one other thing. The school is in Bradford and, as you know, I'm a councillor there.

I've a feeling that Megan will be fine. She'll get to a good university doing a subject she enjoys. She'll do well and get into a good career. But there are a load of other young people at that school who we're not talking about. These are the ones who left at sixteen with nothing. The ones who might have got an 'A' Level or two. The ones talked out of even applying for university. The ones who'll just be statistics on Bradford's skills gap, unemployment and crime levels.

The school in question is in 'special measures' and is in the process of transferring to an academy chain. Let's hope - once all the arguing over contracts is done - that this means the school, once one of Bradford's better schools, can start delivering the education that children going there deserve.

For Bradford as a whole, it's just another reminder that improving Bradford's education is like a depressing game of whack-a-mole - every time we get a failing or struggling school turned round, another one rears its head elsewhere. The City's education system lacks the capacity to respond - this isn't about the capability of the education staff, the best head teachers and the most effective governors but simply the realisation that we haven't enough of them.

I've argued - indeed the Conservative Group has put forward motions on the subject - that we need to start sharing capacity with neighbouring authorities, to begin to create a sort of 'Yorkshire Challenge' akin to the successful 'London Challenge'. This is rejected for what seems at times to be 'not invented here syndrome' plus ideological resistance to the central government agenda of academies, free schools and a tighter curriculum.

But in the end this isn't about ideology but rather about the very practical task of getting all schools to work like the best schools. We can see what works - ethos, leadership, good planning, high expectations - but too often allow matters like who owns a building or employs the staff to get in the way of running a good school. These days, us councillors have precious little to do with schools - we don't set the budgets, we don't determine what's taught and we don't inspect. Ofsted wants still more powers - our role in school improvement and chunks of child protection work - and the gradual procession to academies seems inevitable.

Rather than moan about the injustice of all this, we should see it as a liberation, as the opportunity to start saying things about schools, teaching, funding and the role of Ofsted that need to be said. To point at failing schools and say "you're failing", to act as an advocate for parents and pupils let down by bad schools and to challenge the use of poverty and social conditions as an excuse for failure.
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Grammar schools aren't the solution but they're better than doing nothing

Were it not for our national debate (I'm being kind here) about health, I would describe the current grammar schools argument as the most inane and purposeless debate in modern politics. I get that schools are important but the degree to which all this is presented as a binary choice - you either have grammars or you have comps - is perhaps the most depressing aspect of the debate.

I could take any number of texts as the basis for discussing the problem with this grammar school debate - we're all holding forth, adopting prejudging and poorly informed positions and lobbing insults at each other. But first a couple of general points.

Opposing grammar schools is anti-choice. I know everyone wants to make out that it isn't and that somehow there is no choice involved in parents choosing whether or not to get their children to sit an entrance exam for a school (or group of schools). We do have a problem with parental choice - "you have a right to express a preference" is the official line we've heard a hundred times as schools catchments exclude children. This is a failing in the system that's entirely down to the (anti-market) way in which we organise education. The free schools idea was intended to remedy this problem and in doing so raise standards but the entrenched LEA establishment resisted and still resists liberalising our school system.

The current comprehensive system is just as elitist - perhaps more so - than a grammar school system. Take the best comprehensive schools in the country and check out their catchments. The best schools are surrounded by the wealthy parents of children who, in the 1960s, would have gone to grammar school. Entire ghettos of privilege determined by house price. Not only does this screw up the supposed 'fairness' of the comprehensive school system but it does untold damage to communities, especially in inner cities, as the most successful and highest achieving relocate to live near the good schools.

Right now, for many places, doing nothing isn't an option worth considering. It's pretty easy to sit in rural Sussex and talk about the wonders of comprehensive education. If you live on a peripheral estate in Bradford, in East Leeds or in Hull the story's a bit different - that comprehensive system means your child is likely to go to a school that's not good enough. And plenty of parents - poor parents who are struggling to do the best for their children - have no choice at all unless they're lucky enough (and their child bright enough to pass) to live in a place where the grammar school offers a way out.

None of this makes grammar schools either the right -or more to the point, all of the - answer. We can't present grammar schools as a panacea for our lack of social mobility or poor standards of educational outcome because the evidence tells us they don't provide that answer. The problem is that neither of the two entrenched camps is offering a route to an education system that does offer a real chance to working-class children from Bradford's Ravenscliffe estate or Branksholme in Hull.

So when Chris Dillow suggests that the grammar school debate is out of the same box as the Brexit debate, he's right (although he reasoning isn't). It's the lack of choice and opportunity plus the manner in which the "elite" manage to grab all the good stuff - and then lecture folk about anti-social behaviour or how they're all too fat. Comprehensive schools were introduced for the right reason but, over time, it has become clear that they simply haven't delivered - except for the same sort of folk who, in times past, were the ones who got their children into the grammar schools.

This grammar school debate is a distraction from the main challenge in education. Here in Bradford we've had decades of state-directed solution-mongering with pretty much no change to educational performance. We were at the bottom of the pile when we reorganised in 1998, still down there in 2002 when we were forced to outsource, hadn't improved much ten years later when it all came back "in-house", and still show little or no signs of improvement. Having a couple of grammar schools might help a little but probably won't change much - it's the system that's rotten not how we distribute children within the system.

Yet the same educational establishment that's eager to stop any new grammar schools is just as keen to prevent us having a more open market in education - even a relatively cautious attempt, free schools, resulted in an unholy alliance of unions, so-called educationalists and left-wing politicians dedicated to killing off a genuine attempt to try and break the stranglehold of LEA establishments and deliver better schools for the children of working class Britain. Children in Bradford have poorer education and their parents less choice because the Council's leadership decided to object to, delay, oppose and generally stall any attempt to deliver new schools.

So, yes, grammar schools aren't a great way to solve the problem with standards and social mobility in UK schools. But those proposing them are at least trying to address these problems rather than simply offering - as the educationalists opposed to grammars are doing - more of the same old rubbish. This might not matter in Hertfordshire or East Sussex - or even in Ilkley or Bingley. But in a lot of places doing nothing simply condemns another generation of children to languishing in a failed system delivering lousy outcomes and next to nothing in terms of opportunity.

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Creating a Yorkshire Powerhouse - it's down to us not the government in London

My eponymous great-grandfather was born in East London. Tragically he died young - in his thirties - leaving a widow and young children. He died in Wakefield.

This isn't some terrible story of loss or tragedy and nor was my great-grandfather one of those victims of industrial capitalism. He was a wine merchant. Not only is this a noble calling but it explains why he ended up in Wakefield. Put in simple terms there was better business to be had (and perhaps less competition) in Yorkshire than there was in London. As my boss, Judith Donovan, said to me when I arrived in Bradford on 27 July 1987 - "A hundred years ago, Bradford was the richest city in the richest county in the richest country in the world."

How things have changed. Now, too often, Yorkshire paints itself as a victim, bashed and battered by the tides of globalisation, ignored or patronised by the powers down in London. It is a theme we hear again and again from 'leaders' in Yorkshire - that somehow the economic gap between England's greatest county and those southern nancies is down to the perfidy of national government. London is rich because, as if by a dark magic, all the good stuff in England is sucked away from places like Yorkshire for the folk living in that huge city to spend on fancy bus tickets, overpriced coffee and criminally-priced one-bed apartments in Stockwell.

Here's the Yorkshire Post:

Yet the frustration is that Yorkshire has so much more to offer and that this region’s limitless potential will not be maximised until the Government invests sufficient sums in this county’s human capital – school standards have lagged behind the rest of the country for an unacceptable number of years and are having a detrimental impact on job prospects – as well as the area’s transport and business infrastructure so more world-leading companies can be persuaded to invest here.

Today is Yorkshire Day and it is worth giving the Yorkshire Post its due for setting out an agenda for the county that genuinely reflects much of the debate going on up here. But it's a shame that the habit of holding out the cap and fluttering those Yorkshire eye-lashes still remains. No-one's denying that Yorkshire - and the North for that matter - needs investment but when all they hear is the regional politics version of "got some spare change for a coffee" is it really a surprise that government doesn't rush to help out?

Take education. The Yorkshire Post rightly highlights how Yorkshire's levels of educational attainment lag behind those elsewhere in England and in many ways this is a scandal. But what's the bigger scandal - that politicians in London aren't throwing cash at the problem or that the leaders in Yorkshire haven't got any plan, policy or strategy to address the problem? Where's the education 'summit' bringing together political and business leaders from across the county? Why haven't local education authorities - along with schools - pooled their investment in educational development and improvement?

The same goes for transport. Again the Yorkshire Post reminds us that Leeds is the only big city in England without a tram system or metro. And that - quite rightly - the government pulled the plug on that city's latest wheeze, a new 'bus-on-a-string'. I recall sitting in a meeting - in some slightly tatty, anonymous office block in Leeds - and formally giving Bradford's support for what was dubbed 'supertram'. And I remember adding, at the end of the presentation, that it was a great shame said 'supertram' wasn't going to Bradford or, indeed, anywhere near Bradford. The single busiest inter-city commuter route - Leeds-Bradford and vice versa - didn't register.

So - again - where's Yorkshire's transport plan? Have the transport great and good gathered to set out how we'll respond to 21st century challenges in transport? Or have we just sat mithering about ticketing and real-time information as if they're the answer to the question? Why should - other than for reasons of political calculation (hence Cameron launching the 'Northern Powerhouse' in Shipley) - central government do anything for Yorkshire when Yorkshire's not doing much for itself?

Even on devolution, political calculations - both sub-regional and by the political parties - has meant deadlock. Yorkshire - after London itself - is the only English region with a genuine identity. Yorkshire Day really is a thing (my friend Keith Madeley and the Yorkshire Society deserve a lot of credit for this). We really did showcase the glories of the county through the Tour de France and its child, Tour de Yorkshire. And the county really does have everything - except, that is, the leadership to get on with devising responses to our challenges without waiting on someone in London first giving us the thumbs up.

I learnt a couple of important lessons recently. The first was during a meeting with Lord Adonis following the National Infrastructure Commission publishing reports on Crossrail 2 and Transport in the North. The lesson was that London had prepared, done the legwork, written a plan and set out how that city would fund half the cost in the time Northern leaders had drawn up a scope for a possible plan the content of which wasn't set. London will get the money because London knows what it wants. Here in Yorkshire we just ask for more transport investment - we have no plan.

The second lesson is that London's planning is far deeper - more granular as the trendies put it - than any spatial or urban planning anywhere else in England. In part this just reflects the fact that London is a city and has a coherence (and obvious centre) that Yorkshire doesn't have but it also demonstrates that our fragmented systems of government, business leadership and administration won't allow for that level of planning. Here's what I wrote in June about New London Architecture's exhibition:

During a brief visit to London, we called in to the New London Architecture exhibition at The Building Centre - it's just round the corner from the British Museum and well worth an hour of your time not least for the splendid model of central London at the heart of the exhibition. The NLA uses this magnificent visual to present a vision of the new London emerging through investment, initiative and development and is accompanied by a series of short films featuring NLA's urbane chairman, Peter Murray, talking through the challenges - homes, transport, place-making, environment - and setting out what's already happening and how built environment professionals including architects, masterplanners, designers, engineers and builders can deliver a better city.

What comes across in these films is the scale of engagement between public and private sectors - the projects highlighted on the grand model or featured on the wall around the space are mostly private sector projects. For sure there are the great transport schemes sponsored by London's government and supported by national governments but we also see investment in public realm, privately or in partnership with boroughs, by the great estates - Cadogan, Bedford, Grosvenor and the Crown - that enhance the City's character and variety.

Above all there is both a sense of vision - one shared by mayor, boroughs, transport chiefs and developers - and an intense granularity to that vision. We're so familiar with vision being just that - grand sweeping words accompanied with carefully touched up pictures. But this London vision comes with hundreds of individual projects, with emerging plans across the 32 boroughs (all pictured on the walls around the huge model), with examples of individual masterplans for smaller places and with specific project plans ranging from hospitals and university facilities through housing schemes to pocket parks or street markets.

The Yorkshire Post is right to make the case for the county and to present it to the Prime Minister. But we also need to make the case for bringing the county together, for a new agreement - with or without devolution deals - to work together on planning for Yorkshire's future. If - in some few years - we can take people to an exhibition put together by a private organisation demonstrating how Yorkshire's people, businesses, charities and landowners share a clear, radical and creative plan that is being put in place then we will be changing the county for the better.

I fear that, after a brief flurry of excitement and a modicum of political grandstanding, the Yorkshire Post's welcome initiative will be lost. Not because folk in Yorkshire don't want their county to be better but because we've not made our own plans for making the county once again, the richest place in the richest country. So long as we wait for handouts from London this won't happen.

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Quote of the day - on teachers who blog and tweet

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A quite superb little article from Andrew Old contains this gem of a paragraph:

But, of course, there are many reasons why teachers on social media might be worth listening to. Teachers work in actual schools, not theoretical ones. Some educationalists have not tried to teach a child in decades (sometimes never) and their ideas about how it should be done are pure fantasy. Teachers don’t have to follow an ideological line. Educationalists, by contrast, have a habit of signing up to doctrinal statements like this one. Teachers on social media are often actually trying to communicate a clear message. Educationalists are often just trying to prove how clever they are, even if it means saying things that are not understood. But most of all, teachers on social media have little reason to lie about educational issues. They are speaking to other teachers about things both they, and their audiences, encounter. By contrast, educationalists don’t even unanimously agree that telling the truth is a good thing even in principle. And don’t get me started on educationalists who claim to speak for teachers, claim that criticism of them is criticism of teachers, or who insist that they should have a place in a professional body for teachers.

The whole article is a brilliant challenge to the arrogance of academia. As such, it is a delight and relevant way beyond the field of education.

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Things that aren't really true.

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Like this...

The most important factor is women’s education. Already today, an Ethiopian woman with secondary education has on average only 1.6 children, compared to a woman with no education who has 6 children.

We're told this again and again but raised levels of female education are a consequence of another more important change - raised levels of income and the end of subsistence farming. If people are poor (and scratching a living from a tiny, unfertile plot of land on less than a dollar a day is what we're talking about here) then having lots of children makes economic sense.

This isn't an argument against sending girls to school more an observation that parents don't send girls to school if they need human resources to scrat a living from the land. The work them and marry them off as soon as they can produce babies. So when Oxfam and others idealise marginal farming systems despite the ecological damage they do, they also prevent the growth that means fertility rates will fall.

Educated women, like lower fertility rates, are a consequence of economic growth - the former isn't the cause of the latter.

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Knowledge gives power (and don't ever forget it) - a comment on criticism of Michaela Community College

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Michaela Community School is one of those free schools so detested by those who prefer the conformity and straightjacket of a rigidly defined, state education system. Not for such left-wing folk is the idea that variety, difference and new ways of working are urgently needed if we are to transform our education system for the better. So the critics circle and seize on the tiniest levers to have a go at the school.

So it is with a blogger rather grandiosely called "Edsacredprofane" (his name is Peter Ford, or so the blog says). This man clutches at the motto of Michaela Community School to write a bewilderingly indulgent attack on the values of a school he has not visited and, I assume, relies on its website to frame his argument. And what an argument - littered with references to Foucault, to post-modernism and to Marx it twines itself around the schools motto to manufacture a critique of the school itself:

Of course we all have reason. The enlightenment gave us reason. The power of reason enables each individual to escape the circumstances of existence. Only to an extent. As Marx put it “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”. Knowledge is power became the byword for the enlightenment. Later thinkers such as Foucault and the post modernists challenged the theory that knowledge is power, or rather, they agreed that knowledge is power but it carried the power of those who seek to oppress us, keep us sub-servient.

Wow! This blogger then indulges in that slightly 'man of the people' shtick that some writers love - describing how he came upon these thoughts while watching a football match at some unspecified East Lancashire ground (he also seemed slightly hung up on making a point about how people in Burnley drink a lot of benedictine - which is interesting but somewhat irrelevant to the ethos of a London free school). And he makes another irrelevant point about how 'some of the poorest' wards can be seen from the stands of that football ground - I'm guessing it's Turf Moor.

So what is the motto that has so offended Ford? It's a simple one - "knowledge is power". It would appear that our blogger doesn't really believe that knowledge is power or rather he thinks that what Michaela Community School thinks is knowledge isn't actually knowledge. Or something like that - it's all very confusing. It seems that the school has observed that it's ethos is founded on the ideas of Ed Hirsch - ideas that are altogether too prescriptive for Ford.

We then get into a Marxist analysis of the Tower of Babel (seriously this is about the motto of a school):

It seems to me that the story is unravelled not by Hirsch or even by scriptural exegetics but by Marxists who would point out that “the tower” was not so much a human project but a structure in which there is a top and a bottom. In other words a hierarchical class structure. Was that God’s point? Was God a proto Marxist?

To be fair to Ford he backs off from this slightly lunatic use of biblical metaphor to return to his main argument (knowledge isn't power). At this point he drops the post-modernist Marxism and return to the enlightenment by misusing Descartes - the point the French thinker was making was that the fact we think about ourselves proves we exist not that thinking is more important than knowledge.

It does seem that the real debate here isn't actually about Michaela's motto but rather about the ideas of Ed Hirsch and in particular the 'common core' and 'cultural literacy' ideas he promoted. And the measure of these ideas' value isn't to be found in Foucault, Marx or even the bible but in the success or otherwise of the school. Indeed there is sufficient of a positive impact from Ed Hirsch's approach to suggest that we'd do better to consider it than dismiss it (especially when the dismissal is based on seemingly random thoughts at a football match).

Indeed I suspect parents - or the ones not steeped in half-baked philosophy - would rather like the idea that Hirsch promotes:

‘Breadth of knowledge is the single factor within human control that contributes most to academic achievement and general cognitive competence. Breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status. The positive correlation between academic ability and socioeconomic status is only half the correlation between academic ability and the possession of general information. That is to say, being ‘smart’ is more dependent on possessing general knowledge than on family background. Imparting broad knowledge to all children is the single most effective way to narrow the gap between demographic groups through schooling’.

We send our children to school so they learn stuff. And while part of the stuff they need to learn is how to ask questions and how to challenge, a great deal of it is passing across a bunch of accepted and established facts about the world - that often maligned 'book-learning'. And parents want their children to leave school with the power to succeed - informed, knowledgeable and excited by the challenges the world throws up. Parents might just get this from Michaela Community School but I fear for the children at a school run on the principles Ford propounds:

...the essence of education is not to accumulate knowledge as a “thing in itself” but to learn how to challenge it; build upon it progressively and avoid creating new power structures even where they seem to have progressive foundations.

This approach is the very content-free, voyage of discovery approach to education that might be great for a few very bright children but for most it's a recipe for not knowing enough to ask the questions - to make those challenges that Ford thinks are important.

To understand why knowledge gives children power, we should attend a public enquiry and watch as people are given privilege simply because they are 'experts', because they have knowledge that the lay person doesn't have. In the end Michaela Community College understands this and Ford, too wrapped up in his witty cleverness, doesn't. We should wish the school - regardless of its motto - well and hope that it delivers on its mission - for if it does it will be a great school:

We believe all pupils, whatever their background, have a right to access the best that has been said and thought. This includes a variety of writers, from all parts of the world, and thinkers from all the ages. The curriculum at Michaela Community School ensures that pupils are knowledgeable enough about the world around them to transform it in the future. 

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No English child, not even the very poorest, lives in "Victorian condidtions"

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The airwaves have been filled with that traditional Easter refrain of teacher trade unions moaning about their lot. And amongst this has been a 'report' (I can't find it on their website so no link) from the NASUWT about child poverty. From the media reports this work is a collection of anecdotes from NASUWT members - pretty useful given that these are men and women at the 'front line' who undoubtedly are seeing examples of neglect and poverty in the children they are teaching.

But comments like this are quite simply misleading:

"Children in 2015 should not be hungry and coming to school with no socks on and no coats - some children are living in Victorian conditions - in the inner cities," said one unnamed teacher.

Now I know the term 'Victorian conditions' is simply a hyperbolic description but we really should recognise that, even for the very poorest in our society, life is vastly better than it was for the poor of England's 19th Century cities. Here's American writer Jack London (yes, the same bloke who wrote 'Call of the Wild') on East End slums:

The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot. [9-10]

London reports in detail on the slums including such practices as renting 'part of a room' and the letting of beds to three tenants for eight hours apiece. And the chances for children in these places - certainly compared to the circumstances of the children described by NASUWT members - were a different order of deprivation:

They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, over-crowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will make can readily be imagined. (from Arthur Morrison's 'A Child of the Jago')

Yet we persist in trying to suggest that child poverty in England today is in someway comparable to these conditions, to playing an exaggerated sensationalist game of poverty pornography.

Child poverty in parts of Lancashire is as bad now as it was in Victorian times, a councillor claimed today.

Coun Brian Rollo, who represents Preston’s most deprived ward Ribbleton, said “shocking” figures of up to 38 per cent of youngsters living below the poverty line show Britain has hardly moved on from the end of the 19th century.

The reality - and we should remind ourselves of this every time we discuss relative poverty - is that the 'poverty line' described by Cllr Rollo describes a level of material comfort that hardly anyone in Victorian England enjoyed. It's not just the free education, free healthcare and benefits system but the triumph of 100 years investing, innovating and creating. Radios, televisions, cars, running hot and cold water, central heating systems, an abundance of cheap food (so abundant that plenty of folk want to make it more expensive) and cheap clothing.

This isn't to deny poverty - the lack of what we see as essentials remains a problem and a challenge - but it is to say that the conditions in which the very poorest children live are vastly better than the circumstances of children in Victorian England.

Why do Bradford's schools do so badly?

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Perhaps the most worrying thing about Bradford is the continuing underperformance of the District's schools - certainly relative to other local education authorities (LEAs). This problem isn't a new one - back in the 1990s we saw the same situation and the Council then found the fault in Bradford's three-tier system of schooling and abolished middle schools. Ofsted then piled in and produced a damning assessment of Bradford's performance, closely followed by government education ministers who insisted that the Council outsource its LEA functions (this was by this point, of course, a Labour government minister insisting a Conservative-led council outsource the LEA functions).

We then had about ten years where it was, shall we say, convenient for the Council to suggest that the continued poor performance of Bradford's schools (they did get a little better but not by much) could be blamed on Serco who had won the contract to deliver those outsourced LEA functions. Towards the end of those Serco years a new excitement fell onto Bradford's education bureaucrats and the councillors they advised. We were bringing education back in-house - for at least three years the planning for this process was the obsession of the local leadership and, once complete, everything would change as we could deliver a 'step change' in the District's schools.

We're now nearly five years into this time of excitement. The LEA has been under the same political leadership - the same person - since 2010 and the situation is that, as the local paper reported, results at 16 have declined leaving Bradford joint second bottom with Blackpool in the ranking of LEA performance.

The percentage of Bradford district pupils passing at least five A* - C GCSEs, including English and maths, fell from 53 per cent in 2013 to 44 per cent in last summer's exams.

The results leave Bradford tied with Blackpool in joint second bottom place, with only Knowsley in Merseyside faring worse.

The statistics, published yesterday by the Department for Education, show that 16 Bradford schools have fallen under the Government's "floor" standards, which require at least 40 per cent of students to get five or more A* - C GCSEs including English and maths. 

We all know that this is unacceptable (or I hope we do) and Bradford's education leadership has adopted a plan to improve attainment - here's a quote from the introduction that suggests a degree of complacency:

“The Strategy was revised from the one published in June 2012 after we carried out a detailed analysis of data and it also follows discussions with leaders of school partnerships and governing bodies. This revised Strategy has a focus on accelerating our improvements."

So between 2012 and 2014 our performance got worse - across almost every measure. It's not clear at all what improvements there actually are to 'accelerate'. To give the plan its due, in its bureaucratic way it sets out actions the Council and its "partners" will be taking - recruiting the best leaders, having every school good or outstanding by 2017, targeting underperformance, annual visits to schools, improving governance, sharing local best practice, and targeting underperforming groups.

What is missing from all this is any acknowledgement that Bradford doesn't have the knowledge, skills or capacity to deliver the ambitious targets set by the Council. Setting targets is easy but there is little confidence that Bradford's schools will actually meet them  - and, as one of the targets is still to be below average but not as below average as we are right now, the targets aren't exactly earth-shattering.

There are some things we know - mostly about what doesn't affect performance. We know that whether the LEA services are delivered in-house or by a contractor makes little or no difference. We know that focusing on Ofsted assessments of school quality doesn't reflect in performance outcomes at 16. And we know that increasing resources available to schools isn't the issue - school spending in Bradford has risen by some £70 million since 2010. Moreover up to 2013 not reductions had been made in central LEA spending either.

This leaves us with several other factors. The first is ethnicity:

Putting in place additional resources to support our work with underperforming groups. We are currently revising our strategy to respond to high levels of pupil mobility and a significant increase in the number of pupils and families who are not only ‘new to English’ but also ‘new to education’, with a focus on 15 Primary Schools with mobility at or above 15% (the District average is 8.4% for maintained schools).

We are constantly reminded of how many different languages Bradford's students speak with the implication that somehow this is part of the reason for underperformance. All those foreigners coming here with their children speaking a funny language drags down performance - it's a sort of perfect UKIP argument. One that has no supporting evidence, indeed the opposite seems to be true:

...now new research suggests there is a much simpler, single, reason for a decade of improved GCSE results in the capital: London schools do better than the rest of England because they have a higher proportion of ethnic minority pupils.

The report by the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) at Bristol University argues that the diversity of the capital's population is a key reason for the "London effect" because ethnic minority pupils tend to achieve higher grades than those from a white British background.

Back in 2011, 67% of pupils at London's state schools were from ethnic minority backgrounds - the figure for Bradford was 43%.  Tower Hamlets with 80% of its pupils from such backgrounds was 30th in the LEA rankings in 2013 compared to Bradford's 140th. For an even more stark comparison nearly half of pupils in the London Borough of Redbridge are Asian - and in 2013 Redbridge was the 11th best performing LEA. There is nothing to suggest that Bradford's poor schools result from having a large proportion of ethnic minority pupils.

So if it isn't the organisation of the LEA and it's not ethnicity then what is the problem in Bradford's schools? We are told to look to London and specifically the London Challenge as a model for improvement. And leaving aside the evidence suggesting a changed ethnic mix is the main reason for London's school improvement, this approach provides various interventions that affect outcomes:

The CfBT argues that five key interrelated factors were “critical to London’s success”. It cites the London Challenge school improvement scheme, improved performance by some local authorities, the academies programme, Teach First and good leadership.

Now there has been talk about a 'Bradford Challenge' but this rather misses the point. London has 32 LEAs across a very varied set of demographic and social circumstances and while Bradford District is a big place, London is nearly twenty times bigger. Worse still the District's education leadership is inward-looking - there is nothing in the attainment strategy about reaching out to other places or programmes, just a relentless, bull-headed Bradford machine approach (coupled with a frantic flapping around looking for other things to blame for the problem).

If we look at West Yorkshire, there is the capacity for such a programme but the two high performing LEAs (Wakefield and Calderdale are both in the top 30 nationally) will need persuading to co-operate with the two poor performing LEAs (Bradford and Leeds). This suggests several options.

The five authorities could agree a joint approach and pitch for resources to the Department for Education to deliver a 'West Yorkshire Challenge' in schools with the programme run on much the same basis as for the London Challenge. I've no idea whether the money would be forthcoming (although the tendency of political leadership in Bradford's education to focus on attacking the government rather than improving education won't help) but it would be worth a punt.

An alternative route would be to turn the Combined Authority's 'strategic economic plan' on its head and shift resource from (I would argue) pretty ineffective short-term labour market interventions into a long-term school improvement programme backed up with resource from each LEA budget. This would require the self-interest of some of the partners on the Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) to be set aside but would have the advantage of being a wholly locally-owned project.

In addition, Bradford needs to look very closely and critically at leadership in the local education sector. A warts-and-all approach would examine the leadership of the LEA, in schools and in the various bodies that make up the education system. We need to be prepared to intervene to supplement weak leaderships through executive head programmes and, if needs be, through strengthening the accountability mechanisms in schools. We need to look at the recruitment of leaders - this is part of the current plan but simply appointing Schools Recruitment and Retention Strategy Lead Officer isn't the solution. Again we must be prepared to resource the recruitment of better head teachers - there's a very competitive market for the best heads and right now Bradford isn't getting a look in when it comes to getting these people to come and work in our schools.

Lastly, Bradford needs to be more creative - actively supporting new free schools rather than setting obstacles in their way, sitting down with the leaders in private sector education - Bradford Grammar School is one of the best schools in the country and this isn't just down to its intake - and drawing on the best governors at the best schools to help drive the programme. And instead of grumping about academies we should think about how to learn the lessons from the best of them - both in Bradford and elsewhere.

It don't know the answer to the question I posed in the headline - why do Bradford's schools do so badly. And I get no real sense that the political and professional leadership in the Council are any closer to the answer than I am. What we can't afford is to carry on either trying to find excuses or else simply doing more of the same over and over again in the vain hope that somehow it will work this time. It's time for something to give.

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We're all going on a soma holiday. On the teaching of happiness.

"you do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma."

Many years ago I sang in a folk choir at church (I'm guessing that any last vestiges of my street credibility are now gone). One of our standards was a song called "The Happy Song" - it's lyrics were along these lines:

People ask why I sound so happy
And why I always sing a happy tune
It's only happy songs they hear in heaven
I'm singing so that God can hear me too

And so on in that vein all to one of those annoyingly cheery and catchy tunes essential to modern hymns (or 'Praise Songs' as I believe they're known now). The whole message of the song - and I can't vouch for the theology here - is that God wants us to be happy so dammit we're going to be happy by singing this song.

In the years since I was last caught singing "The Happy Song" the world's attitude to happiness has evolved into something of an industry. We have Bhutan's 'gross national happiness' (unless of course you smoke or happen to be from the Nepali minority). We had the flirtation of David Cameron with happiness measures as an alternative to dull old 'gross domestic product'. And we have a whole area of pretty dodgy academic study into 'happiness' led by former New Labour cheerleader, Lord Layard.

Now Lord Layard has teamed up with everyone's favourite health fascist, Lord Darzi to publish a really important study and to call for every child in the world to be taught how to be happy.

Children of all ages should be given an hour’s “happiness lessons” every week to nurture their development and stop schools behaving as “exams factories,” a major report will warn this week.

Indeed the good Lords argue that this sort of teaching must be given "the same attention as reading and writing". Indeed, the Lords say, our schools, far from being the happy and smiling places they should be, have become stress-filled exam factories full of children in need of counselling. So therefore we should teach children a set of approved 'lifeskills' and have counsellors on tap in case little Johnny or Mary get a bit sad.

The problem with this (and the term "well-rounded" is thrown around here) is two-fold. Firstly, we don't send children to school to spend an hour-a-week "discussing their emotions, setting positive life goals, and learning how to cope with everyday pressures and social media". And secondly - as teacher and education writer Tom Bennett has observed - one of the lifeskills that children need to learn is that some stuff is very hard and pretty stressful:

The business of education intrinsically requires many actions that are, dare I breathe it, difficult. Learning is hard work; better learning is often very hard work indeed. Nobody became a Professor of Electronics by playing the Xbox. There are often fun ways of learning, and if you’re good at your job, you’ll be good at implementing them. But there is often the point where you concede, willingly, that in order to get anything done, then elbow grease must be applied. 

Rather than making clear that learning how to do arithmetic and geometry is both essential and hard, we allow children to believe that there's a cop out - "I'm excused your hard maths lesson sir, my counsellor says it's too stressful for me".

Imagine a world where a vaguely defined happiness is deemed to be the primary aim. Not the rollercoaster, football supporter sort of happiness - ecstasy at Adrian's penalty to defeat Everton in the cup is replaced with a deep and abiding gloom at the team's abject surrender to West Brom. Rather it's a soma sort of happiness - a lowest common denominator contentment:

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” 

It is a misplaced idea that human children lack the strength to deal with the stress of taking examinations and the expectations of family, friends and society in general. This is not to say that some children really do struggle with the pressure but to observe that, of the 700,000 or so young people who take GCSEs each year, only a handful really need help.

Instead of focusing on identifying the child with a problem, what Layard and Darzi propose is a vague sort of new age version of sitting in a circle of hands singing Kum Ba Yah.

...schools must address the emotional and spiritual needs of their children, as well as their intellectual development...

The effect of all this isn't to make for stronger adults or a better society but rather is to gentle young people - in one respect in the original meaning of the word:  "touch (a person or animal) gently, typically in order to make them calmer or more docile". But it might also be in the brutal manner of Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time':

When a man is severed it is referred to as gentling. This term came about sometime after the Age of Legends and reflects the view that male channelers are like wild animals (due to their eventual madness) that must be controlled.

The world that Layard and Darzi want is a place where risk is eliminated, where challenge and assertiveness are sins, and where (and I'm grateful to Andy Bower on Twitter for this) narcissism and introspection are seen as essential 'life skills'. This sort of society is one where a benign, motherly state holds contented citizens to her bountiful bosom, where those citizens are discouraged - even forbidden - from doing things that might result in hurt or upset, and where the greatest achievement is a contented nothingness, a sort of perpetual infanthood.

This is the world of prizes for all, of dumbed down exams everyone passes, where games don't have winners and in which people look to the state's supposed bounty before their own enterprise. It's a world of citizen's income where folk can live out their lives as supine drones contributing nothing except the contented humming of "The Happy Song". It is a profoundly depressing prospect, a world where edge, excitement, speed, risk and challenge are frowned on - where they're not actually banned.

The object of government isn't to smooth and still everything so no-one is ever unhappy but rather to create the circumstances where we can, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, engage in the 'pursuit of happiness'. If my happiness and pleasure comes from things that are risky that's my business. If I choose to do something hard, dull and stressful because of the happiness it will bring me in the future, again that is my business. But it is no business of government to, in effect, declare some things too stressful, too hard. Nor is it the business of government to pretend that a successful life can be conducted without risk, stress and difficulty because that is quite simply a lie.

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Schools: we should focus on attainment not religion

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British Values. I'm not really alone in struggling to understand what these mysterious things might be especially when they are set out like this:

“It shouldn’t take any intervention from my Department to say that young people should be learning the fundamental British Values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, tolerance and respect – because these British values are fundamentally a good thing."

I'm a big fan of all these things but they aren't what I would understand by 'British Values' - indeed these concepts predate the existence of Britain and could best be described as human values. I also think that teaching young people the value of democracy, liberty, law, tolerance and respect is a good idea - not to the exclusion of reading, writing and arithmetic but definitely a good thing. But teaching young people about democracy, liberty, law, tolerance and respect is a good thing everywhere - not just in Penge or Queensbury but in Peshawar and Phnomh Penh too. These values are universal.

The problem we have is that the government has chosen to use the idea of 'British Values' as a rod to strike at traditional religious beliefs - whether Muslim or Christian. To define British Values in terms only a Guardian reader would recognise.  Here's Nicky Morgan again:

“The events in Birmingham last year showed what happened, when those that don’t subscribe to our fundamental British values try to hijack our education system, radicalise our children and break those societal bonds. What happened in Paris this month, showed what can happen when people like that succeed.” 

What we see here is the deliberate juxtaposition of traditionalist religious opinion with violent terrorism. What Mrs Morgan is telling us is that teaching traditional Muslim religious values (to be clear, I don't find these values particularly appealing) leads more-or-less directly to young men using Kalashnikov rifles to slaughter cartoonists. More to the point, there is no suggestion at all that teaching these values is necessarily at odds with democracy, liberty, law, tolerance and respect.

The truth is that Ofsted - and the Department for Education - has adopted the stance that any hint of religious exclusivity or faith-based education is questionable. And this doesn't just apply to the schools in Birmingham targeted in the 'Trojan Horse' campaign but to schools with a Christian ethos - here's St Benedict's Catholic School in Bury St Edmunds:

The school was the focus of controversy when Ofsted last year included it in a blacklist of schools failing to promote “British values” and downgraded it from “good” to “requires improvement” because younger pupils were unaware of the dangers of radicalisation and extremism.

Quite what those younger pupils were exposed to isn't clear - perhaps they were learning about that well known Catholic radical, Guido Fawkes? Or maybe teachers were telling them that The Inquisition was actually a fine institution dedicated to saving souls rather than to torture and execution by fire? The truth of the school is that it's a great school providing what parents want - a safe place and good education:

St Benedict’s Catholic Secondary School in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, was ranked 56th best in England when School Performance League Tables were published last week. It was also listed as the “top state comprehensive school” in England and Wales, and has the highest percentage of A-level passes in Suffolk and the second highest by just one per cent ­ of GCSE passes in the county.

More recently Ofsted has acted again - pushing two Christian 'free schools' in the North East towards closure with a focus on 'diversity' rather than on the actual performance of the school. Ofsted pulls up one school, Grindon Hall as follows:

"...the wider curriculum, including form time and the school’s assembly programme, has too narrow a focus to enable pupils to think for themselves and reflect about the fundamental British values needed to live in Britain today.”

The term 'wider curriculum' refers to the stuff that isn't teaching maths, English, geography, science and so forth. But the truth about the school is that it is delivering what parents want - good results:

A-level students at Grindon Hall Christian School have produced the best A-level results of any school in Sunderland. The school pulled ahead of all others in the city with an average point score of 225.

GCSE students are also celebrating, having made the school one of the best-performing state schools in the city. 68% of Grindon Hall's GCSE students achieved at least five A* - C grades including English and Maths.

Surely this is what really matters? Unless Ofsted and Nicky Morgan think that the nice young people leaving Grindon Hall will suddenly up sticks and join some sort of violent religious cult?

In Bradford, Ofsted and the Council have been going into schools because of this focus on fighting 'extremism', on British Values. Which would be fine if they were doing the same for schools that were failing academically. At the same time the political leadership in education has been using its time and resources to conduct a vigorous anti-government campaign rather than on trying to get the changes in place that might offer a better chance to young people in Bradford.

Ofsted is creating demons and hobgoblins - "these people are radicalising our children" - or else wibbling on about diversity - "children don't have any non-white friends" and supposed intolerance of gay and lesbian people by ten year olds. It is time the government stopped all this and began to focus on what matters to parents - and, quite frankly, to the children - how well the school does in its main job of providing young people with a decent education. In the end it's attainment Ofsted should be inspecting not a nebulous and dangerous concept called 'British Values'.

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Taking schools policy out of political control means bureaucracy not better education

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We hear it all the time.

A former permanent secretary at the Department for Education, Sir David says there should be no more major changes to the curriculum, qualifications or structural changes to schools during the course of the next Parliament.

He wants an independent body to set long-term policy, separated from the shifting demands of party politics.

This could create a qualifications system that would support a changing economy, he says, arguing that this would include replacing A-levels with a broader, baccalaureate-style exam system.

OK it's schools on this occasion but it could be health, policing, criminal justice or even the economy. In every case the argument for removing politics from the management or administration of a given public service is made by someone who will gain from such a decision. It is the former bureaucrat running a teacher training operation, the former police inspector, a body made up of health professionals and experts, and the assorted grandees of the City along with their house magazine, the Financial Times.

And because we hate politicians (with some justification on occasion) it's easy to nod and agree with the sages, with the experts who tell us that taking the politics out will remove all the bad stuff and will mean that they can create a wonderful system that will do the job just fine.

Except they won't. Trust me on this folks, they won't. It is disingenuous for Sir David Bell, who used to run the Department for Education, to suggest that bureaucrats like him have a fantastic, ready-to-roll system of education just waiting for the politicians to get out of the way. What Sir David wants - and I understand that Labour's excuse for an education spokesman likes this idea - is for an independent body run by him and his mates to replace the current system where we the public have a tiny bit of a say in how the system is run.

Indeed the independent schools body - doubtless called something like Education England - will have a board crammed with Sir David's pals (all pulling down a handy little stipend to top up their pensions) and a Chief Executive on £250,000 a year who will set policy for the long-term. There will be expensive offices in London, a lobbying team and a pleasing round of international trips, conferences and dinners for all those involved. Unfortunately it won't make the slightest iota of difference to schools and, worse, will mean that any semblance of democratic accountability for one of our critical public services is lost. Replaced by know-all folk most of whom are, as is Sir David Bell, responsible for the current mess in the first place.

So long as education is funded through direct taxation we have no real option but for the direction of policy to be in the hands of those people we choose to set policy. We call these people politicians. And politicians sound off about education, about bad schools, lousy teachers and bad management because the people who elect us care quite alot about what happens in schools. So when a school in our patch does well we shout about it and when a school does badly we worry.

If you remove politics from education policy (except do note that you don't actually do this), the result isn't a dramatic change or improvement but stasis.  In reality the moans from Sir David are more about a personal (self-interested) dislike for policy rather than any real conviction that a mystical, politics-free independent body would be any better. Believe me, we in Bradford know about taking politics out of education - it doesn't work.

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What on God's earth is the 'Social Integration Commission'?

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OK I checked it out:

The Commission has three main aims:

1) Explore the nature and extent of social contact between people of different ages, ethnicities and social grades

2) Assess the impact of social division on the UK economy and society

3) Make practical and affordable recommendations across key policy areas

We will publish our initial findings in June 2014 and share our recommendations in January 2015.

Not at all sure about all this and it's pretty difficult to find out who set the commission up and for what purpose. After all the word 'commission' is rather quango-esque and implies some sort of government approval or endorsement. Which I guess is why that name was chose by The Challenge who actually set it up.

The Challenge - I know, I know. What, who or how is The Challenge? Apparently it's:

...the UK’s leading integration charity which exists to strengthen communities by bringing people from different walks of life together.

No, I'd never heard of them either. But what I can tell you is that The Challenge doesn't get much income in the regular manner - it had an income slightly north of £27 million and spent just short of £25 million in the year to 31 October 2013. However just £1.88m of that £27m income came from voluntary giving. The remainder of the money is a contract to run the government's National Citizen's Service. This isn't what you or I would understand as a real charity.

So we have a pseudo-charity funding a body set up to look and sound like an official body tasked with a specific policy enquiry. A body chaired by a former advisor to Tony Blair. So the predictable result is this sort of unevidenced opinionating: 

Matthew Taylor, chairman of the Social Integration Commission, said that the increase in faith and free schools is stifling diversity and stopping children from different races and backgrounds mixing.

This may be the case (although my Catholic school was more ethnically diverse than more other schools in the area) but Taylor presents no evidence merely a sort of mushy, neglectful, bien pensant criticism of the government's education policy.

This really is a lesson in how government-funded charities use that position (and the money) to create means to lobby government despite the oft expressed desire of the government to stop this practice. Worse still, the Social Integration Commission presents itself as a semi-official enquiry guaranteeing it coverage- all just a little disingenuous.

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In which their representatives remind us that teacher trade unions are bad for education

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The regional branch of Ofsted has published some mildly critical comments about Bradford's schools. And it's true that our schools are not closing the gap and that, to put it mildly, the Council's leadership on this matter are rather complacent. But - and this is important given the close links with Bradford's political leadership - the response from teacher trade unions is utterly shameless.

Firstly, here's what Ofsted suggested:

Nick Hudson, Ofsted director for North East, Yorkshire and Humber, said: “The fact that Bradford is ranked 144 out of 150 nationally is clearly a concern."

He added: "I think the answers lie in secondary schools in Bradford and secondary schools on the borders of Bradford that are performing well.

"The Council should maybe look beyond its borders to see why other schools are doing better than those in Bradford are. My advice is the Council needs to seek links with these areas." 

Helpful advice - look at nearby schools perhaps in Calderdale, Leeds and Kirklees that are doing better.

So what do the teacher union representatives have to say. First up is the NUT:

Ian Murch, Bradford spokesman for the National Union of Teachers, was sceptical of the findings. He said: "Ofsted often finds what it is looking for. There are high levels of deprivation and in some inner city schools there are a lot of children who don't speak English as a first language.

"These schools are measured to the same standards. Performance of children from some of the poorest families are measured against children from well off areas whose parents went to university." 

Of course there's no deprivation in Leeds, Halifax or Huddersfield! Yet again we see a series of excuses rather than an urgent desire to improve Bradford's education. Plus the re-run of the myth about children with English as a second language being less able - which they aren't:

Schools with large numbers of migrants and pupils from ethnic minorities gain the best GCSE results because they have a stronger work ethic, according to research.

A study by Bristol University found that schools with a diverse pupil population performed significantly better than those filled with white British children.

It emerged that the effect could be worth an extra eight GCSE grades compared with the rest of the country – the equivalent of leaving school with straight A grades rather than Bs.

So you see, Bradford's schools aren't poor because of immigrants. Too many of them are just poor schools.

On to the NAS/UWT representative who launches into a rant about resources:

"Many schools are having to cut back, and have bigger classes with fewer staff. Standards in school is a much bigger issue than Ofsted would have you believe." 

Bradford's schools receive some £75 million more in funding today than they did in 2010 with much of this going to schools with more children from deprived backgrounds. Pam Milner, the representative in question is simply making stuff up.

These responses are worse than complacency (and that's bad enough), they amount to a denial that teachers have a central role to play in delivering the improvements in standards. Yet all teacher unions have done is promote strikes and other industrial action - things that do nothing to help the children their members teach. And rather than face up to their responsibilities these representatives shift the blame onto government, parents, immigration - anything but the schools themselves.

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