Michael Barber chatting to former PM Blair |
Barber sticks by Blair through ‘fick and fin’
Michael Barber chatting to former PM Blair Francis Beckett reviews new books that reflect education policy
MICHAELBarber was a good man fallen among Blairites. A teacher, then a trade union official, then an education professor, he rose to head up the Stan- dards and Effectiveness Unit in David Blunkett’s Department for Education and Skills, then moved to Downing Street to set up Blair’s Delivery Unit.
I knew him when he was with Blunkett. He and his political master had remarkably different styles. He sat with me over pints of beer in the Westminster Arms, thoughtful- ly trying to persuade me that my criticisms of New Labour education policy were mistaken. Blunkett bullied and blustered, threatening to sue me.
Barber’s memoirs, In - struction to Deliver, are entertaining, well-writ- ten, occasionally indis- creet, but discreet where it matters. He is no Alas- tair Campbell: having taken the Blairites’ shilling and done their bidding, he is not going to turn on them now.
All the same, there’s the occasional uninten- tional glimpse of how government under Blair worked. I loved the moment, at a Delivery Unit seminar, when Blair got up to go and, accord- ing to Barber, “he touched my shoulder as a friendly gesture to say goodbye. I doubt this was thought through from his point of view, but to me, in front of that audience, the ges- ture was of incalculable benefit”. You get the strong sense of a medieval court, where a touch from the king implies favour.
Barber was not always wrong, but he was wrong about many things, and one of them was testing, as Warwick Mansell demonstrates in Educa- tion by Numbers. This careful, forensic book from the only journalist to have specialised in this arcane subject, shows how the government’s narrow focus on testing and statistics has dam- aged British education.
Children now face assessment at ages 5, 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. As Mansell puts it: “results statistics are the key to whether teachers, subject departments and schools are judged successes or failures.” Inspirational teaching is out. Teaching to the test –the tick-box approach – is in as I realised when I tried help- fully suggesting to my son someangles on an A- level history subject that might not have occurred to him. He knew better: his teacher had told him the things he needed to know. He was right: he ignored me, and got an A.
Which is a part of the reason why Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley argue, in Education make you fick, innit?, that education as it is now organised is little more than an instru-
ment of social control.
“Dedicated obsessively to the vocational ‘needs’ of the economy, education, whether in school, college or university, no longer aspires to emancipate the minds of future genera- tions.” This passionate and thoughtful book provides a potted history of British education since the 1944 Education Act. It devotes a chapter to the Thatcherite revolution and another to New Labour, neither of which are at all attractive to Allen, a schoolteacher, and Ainley, professor of training and education at GreenwichUniversity. Theirs is the idealistic left-wing view which lay at the heart of the1944 Act, and it is cheering to see that this view still has such lucid and coherent advocates.
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