Book review by Andrew Noble : Nick Davies The School Report: Why Britain’s Schools are Failing, Vintage Original Paperback (2000), £6.99.
Even if our wintry skies were not filled with louring rainclouds, we would be living discontentedly in partial darkness. Our skies are dark with chickens coming home to roost. Two decades after Thatcher’s allegedly entrepreneurial dawn and three year’s into New Labour’s evangelical, Clinton-derived “triangular” Third Way (right-wing policies in left-wing castoffs) our essential systems (health, education, transport) are disarrayed to the extent of endangering our civic, indeed, personal lives. Nick Davies’s incisive, deeply disturbing little book, derived from his rightly lauded Guardian articles, is not only an account of our fractured school system but a paradigm for how the degeneration of all British public services has been and is being politically “managed”.
Davies’s bock is a compelling mixture of first-class investigative reporting, especially of these schools sunk in the terrible impoverished depths of our society, and an acute account of the fallacies and consequent illogical actions of government policy. Central to this is governmental recourse to careerist pseudo-experts of whom the unlamented Chris Woodhead, clung to by Blair, was chief among men. Intelligent and informed dissidents have no part in a proper policy making dialogue. Davies gives such men a much-needed forum. Here, for example, is the account given by the Oxford economic historian, Simon Szreter, derived from a rigorous analysis of world Development Reports:
“By 1991 the best of continental countries were running a ratio of between ten and twelve pupils per teacher. ‘ But Britain’s state schools were still stuck with an average of nineteen students in every classroom. In the early 1990s, only four of the twenty five most developed societies had larger class than Britain – Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore; and South Korea – and Szreter suspects that when figures are finally brought up to date they may well have left Britain behind: ‘ No other democratically elected government In the modern world has dreamed up this master stroke of actually disinvesting in the educational resources of the nation.”
How is this educational state of affairs being managed? Certainly the efficacy of logistical planning of the traditional Civil service, not without shortcomings, has been traduced. In its place all our institutions have been corrupted by a pseudo-entrepreneurial management culture badly translated, from the highly suspect mores and jargon of the American business school. In a recent article in The Times Libby Purves cogently defined this managerialism:
The last decades of the 20th century in Britain were defaced and degraded over a wide field by a very similar culture to the one which wrecked the railways. Call it managerialism. Managerialists believe two things: first that specialist experts are of their very nature less fit to make decisions than some all purpose transferable boss; and secondly that there exists a set of immutable laws about competition, profit, communication, and so on which they can apply equally to any enterprise.
All our institutions are now morbidly impregnated by this managerial culture. Everywhere increasingly incompetent and authoritarian bureaucrats, in the name of unstoppable modernisation, absurdly define themselves as dynamic entrepreneur when, in reality, the only things they sell are their colleagues down the river. In an irony of Swiftian proportions, a half-baked theory of allegedly capitalist-derived freewheeling, endlessly flexible behavior has in an educational context, becomes practice of constant internal and external scrutiny. Rather than Western capitalism, we have a situation more akin to the apparatchik world of the redundant communist East.
Genuine teachers exist in a state of besieged depression or flee, the profession. The most manifest symptom of this incessant, paralyzing bureaucratic scrutiny is the colossal amount of time and energy it devours. It is also inevitable that under such pressure both schools and higher educational institutions derive survival strategies of varying degrees of deceit to misinform their banal inquisitors. Thus Davies writes:
The pressure to deliver statistical ends without genuine means now runs through the system. The Guardian last year reported that there was widespread evidence of schools cheating during Ofsted tests: renting expensive IT equipment for the duration of the inspection, hiding disruptive pupils, fiddling class records, making weak teachers take time off and temporarily replacing them with supply staff. We have been told of schools who helped themselves out of special measures by using LEA advisers to stand in for teachers who were likely to be criticised by visiting HM inspectors.
This huge bureaucratic gathering of supposedly vital information is also in inverse proportion to, not only the system’s inability to make sense of it but to transform it into practical, positive action other than varieties of public relations campaigns. Worst of all, Davies puts forward a powerful case that with regard to our schools the whole enterprise is undermined by a politically willful evasion, initiated by the smirking Kenneth Baker and accepted, like so much else, by David Blunkett, that there is no absolute relation between poverty and under-achievement. Poverty is neither an excuse not something a “good” teacher cannot overcome by a return to traditional, non-trendy methods.
At the start of his enquiry, Davies half-believed this endlessly reiterated educational propaganda. This is surprising because in 1998 Vintage published his terrifying Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain.
At the time Jack Straw noted that “this book should be required reading… it will shock many to the quick, that all this could be happening under their noses”. It has not, despite this, become a best seller among New Labour focus groups. This study of the 20 per cent lower depths of British society, the ‘sink estates’ and those areas where a vacuum was left by deindustrialisation, is one filled with abhorrent drug and sexual addiction and energised by self-destructive loathing, criminality and sadism. The darkest aspect is the suffering and torment of the children of this nether world. Victorian Dickens is mild in comparison. We have wolf packs of male adolescents. We have children deprived of any element of normal parental protection not only abandoned but also hated by their parents. Pedophilia is rampant and related to systematic prostitution so that one does not know which is more terrible: the children destroyed by this or those who successfully adapt to it with a peculiar hedonistic nihilism and £800 a week earnings. When Davies started to go into the schools of such areas what he found was an inferno of psychological and physical damage that made any possibility of regular teaching unthinkable. Consider this situation facing Head Teacher Libby Coleman in East Brighton:
The students had had a riotous summer, burning out half-a-dozen police cars on the estate. The police said some of the children were working for a new drugs syndicate who had moved down from Glasgow. The few new teachers she had hired were drowning in disorder in the classroom. Deciding to hire a counselor to help with the wilder children, Libby tried to explain that she had lost her sixth girl that year, pregnant; that a seventeen-year old former student had just been murdered on the rubbish tip next to the school; that the brother of one student had just been accused of helping to murder the father of another; that a boy had been run down on the crossing outside the school; that she had just had her purse stolen by a Year Eight girl who had evidently given it to her older sister, who was a prostitute, and that this older sister had used her credit cards, and so the police had traced her to her flat where they had found her dead from a heroin overdose along with her boyfriend , and so now the Year Eight girl had been taken into care and it was her friends who were upset and needed extra counseling.
Inevitably the Head Teacher was broken on the wheel of this environment; indeed psychosomatic and even terminal illness was endemic among the staff. Davies’s vision is a kind of social, psychological Chernobyl pumping out contagion in various ways into all levels of British society.
What we presently have however is a government in educational denial of this reality. Worse, we have in place as our legacy from Baker a set of policies schools that economically have, especially private ones, are given ten fold while the bottom layer deprived ones have even what little they have taken away. Much of this huge statistical, bureaucratic empire is, according to Davies, simply the rationalisation of traditional British class preferences.