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Vice-Provost's View: Professor Chris Husbands on education policy in the run-up to the General Election

12 February 2015

Professor Chris Husbands is Director of the UCL Institute of Education and UCL Vice-Provost (Academic Development) a new role to which he was appointed on 11 Feb 2015 in which he will exercise general oversight of UCL's human resource management policies and practices for academic and research staff.

UCL IOE

This is my first opportunity to write a 'view' piece for The Week@UCL, which makes this the first 'view' from the UCL Institute of Education. The merger of IOE and UCL offers, so those of us who have worked on it have planned, a real opportunity for innovation and development across the whole of UCL's agenda. 

London Festival of Education

An early highlight to look forward to is the London Festival of Education, hosted in the UCL Institute of Education on Saturday 28 February. LFE 2015 is a major urban festival celebrating education in all its forms in and beyond London, debating the key issues of education in schools, work and universities, all with great food and entertainment alongside. It's an event run by those who are passionate about education for those who are passionate about education. Inspirational professionals, including teachers, academics and heads, will be there alongside policymakers, educational organisation leaders, bloggers, researchers, students, parents and young people, together with major politicians leading a Question Time and great performance artists. It's an opportunity to meet education's big names and hear different ideas and perspectives, following your inclination, rather than a timetable, and making the day your own. This is not a conference but a festival filled with challenging content and entertainment.  Tickets can be bought from the London Festival of Education website where you'll see the impressive line-up of speakers and events.

Education policy in 2015

Beyond LFE, I thought I'd use this opportunity to express some thoughts on the way education policy is developing at this, the start of 2015. As I write this, the General Election is just a hundred days away. A lot can happen in a hundred days: it was the time between Napoleon's return from exile on Elba through to his defeat at Waterloo exactly 200 years ago, and it was the whirlwind period when Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the New Deal to combat America's Great Depression. And this is a General Election like no other - whatever the outcome, long-held assumptions have to be re-written. Not since the 1950s has a governing party increased its Commons representation; no Labour opposition has returned to majority power after just one term; no parliament has been hung twice in succession. Something will have to give in the election of 2015; the permutations of power after May 2015 look bafflingly difficult to predict. Political and policy gossip is playing with any number of possible outcomes: you can join the fun on sites like Electoral Calculus.

It was in 1997 that New Labour swept to power promising that its three priorities would be 'education, education, education', and it's now routinely the case that education is one of the most strenuously contested areas of public policy. Since the 2010 election, the Coalition government has upturned the structures of English education, with far-reaching reforms to schools policy, including school organisation, assessment, curriculum, funding, and accountability, to vocational education, including apprenticeships and to higher education, including student fees and the role of private providers. 

Both universities and schools are far more autonomous, constrained by greater exposure to quasi-market pressures. Moreover, the public and policy debate around education has fractured and become noisier. It has become global. Debates about the quality of education in England are now routinely considered, often through the lens of international surveys and rankings such as the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment and ideas about (a phrase one almost never heard a decade ago) 'education system performance' globally. Into the territory staked out by the OECD's influential and tireless chief analyst, Andreas Schleicher, now march global organisations like the Gates Foundation, the Pearson think-tank, the Grattan Institute and the Varkey Foundation: globalising thinking about education policy.

Social media and debate about education policy

And the debate has become more populous. Often driven by the twitterati and the blogosphere, the range of voices has become wider, more fractious, more quarrelsome. If tweets and blogs make everyone a policy think tank, they also privilege the eccentric and the individual. No policy idea can be floated now without instant condemnation from somewhere on the web. Two quite different examples make the point - one from outside education, one from inside. The Labour MP Emily Thornberry famously tweeted her photograph of an English flag bedecking a house during the Rochester by-election, was roundly condemned, and sacked about 12 hours later. But the micro-details matter: she posted her tweet at 3.11 pm. The first tweet describing her as a 'snob' was posted just two minutes later. And a second example. For a quarter of a century, OFSTED has been inspecting English schools against published frameworks, and teachers have grumbled about it. It was Twitter which provided a forum for a handful of teachers and headteachers to make sharp criticisms of OFSTED's approach to judging the quality of schools based on judgements about individual lessons, and OFSTED which chose (perhaps wrongly) to meet its Twitter critics (photographs of the meeting posted on Twitter, naturally) before, coincidentally or not, revising the practice of 20 or more years.

What really influences education policy?

During the election campaign we will see a curious fiction: politicians will try to convince us that their policies alone can shape education for the better. They will set out their personal visions for education. They will debate the level of university fees for students, the importance of different qualification measures, how to improve schools, curriculum, the importance of currently vogueish ideas about 'character' and 'grit', how to assess pupils, how to train teachers. 

But the fact is that power is relentlessly draining away from politicians. It is draining away upwards (if things can drain upwards) to international and inter-governmental organisations, and downwards to noisy interest groups, to think tanks, to individual universities and schools. This isn't new: it's been observed in political science for a decade and a half and it's now arrived in education. 

You can see the evidence from early years to universities. There is the increased concern with taking best practice, whether it is from the apparently successful education powerhouses of the Pacific Rim or the socially inclusive systems of northern Europe. There is the increased influence of global league tables and benchmarking in universities and schools. There is the arrival of international capital to the education market in England and the increasing activity of UK universities and schools in international markets. And then there is the fracturing squabble of the internet populated by those who believe in strongly in (say) a knowledge-led curricula, or (say) transferable skills, or (say) the importance of 'grit' and resilience, and who are able find others, often geographically dispersed, who share their views and make common cause in their schools and classrooms. There's increasing evidence of such groups serving as vehicles for lobbying, for implementation and for development. Power moving upwards and downwards, away from politicians: change is driven from above and below governments.

This doesn't mean that the national policy levers are wholly unimportant, but it does mean that we should take with a large pinch of salt politicians' claims to have the policy shift which will change education - whether it is the pupil premium, a new qualification framework or a new curriculum. 

More thoughtful politicians - and perhaps that is too much of an oxymoron in a noisy election campaign - will understand that the new world demands a new approach: making alliances, building longer-term frameworks in which autonomous, globally networked systems can operate. The world is moving faster than the ability of politicians to shape it; and they don't yet understand it - or at least, not in an election campaign.

Chris Husbands, Director, UCL Institute of Education and Vice-Provost, Academic Development

You can find out more about Professor Husbands in this week's 'Spotlight On'.

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