Sunday 27 September 2015

Why do we talk about prime ministers winning power?

I half-heard an item on the Today programme this morning about Jeremy Corbyn needing to "appeal to older voters if he is to win power in 2020," and all of a sudden it was that last phrase that struck me. It is pretty much the universal formulation to describe the process of appointing a prime minister, to the point where I at least have never before questioned it. Why would I? Elections are competitive processes and the office of prime minister carries a great deal of power, so the leader of the successful party has clearly won power.

Except that, if you transpose the phrase to another context it suddenly sounds very strange indeed. Imagine if the newly-appointed head teacher of your child's primary school wrote to parents to announce that she had won power over the school. Even in the private sector chief executives do not win power over multinational corporations: they are appointed by the board (usually these days to rescue the company from whatever scandal its recent actions have embroiled it in).

The point is that both words in the formulation are problematic, and both transfer an inordinate amount of agency in the wrong direction. When a board 'appoints a new chief executive' or governors 'appoint a new head' the successful candidate has clearly won, but the linguistic formulation gives agency in the process to those who have appointed him or her. Not so, it seems, in general elections, where the electorate become not merely passive but absent from the phrase used.

And then there is the word 'power' itself. Yes, anyone heading a large organisation (such as a national government) has power, but is it not hugely more important that he or she has responsibility too? Yet there is nothing in the phrase 'winning power' even to hint at such responsibility. And with the current government in particular that is a massive problem. I have written before about the extraordinary way in which ministers in this government and the last have ceased to take responsibility for the areas under their charge. Time was that if a scandal broke in say, the NHS the relevant minister would take responsibility and resign, even if the scandal related to events that happened before they took office. Now it is as likely to be the minister who breaks (or even engineers) the crisis, to empower them to bring in more and more sweeping changes.

The current government like power, it is clear (which governments don't, once they get it?) and do not have a great deal of time for responsibility. How else could they preside over benefit changes that drive large numbers of their citizens to suicide? The thing is, while we persist in talking about David Cameron "remaining in power" until 2020 then we are, in a small but crucial way, gifting them more of that power and relieving them of more of the responsibility.

So what should we be saying? Pretty simple, in my view. In the early hours of the morning of the 8th of May 2020 I want to hear David Dimbleby say that "The British electorate has given Jeremy Corbyn responsibility for leading the country."

Well it could happen...

Wednesday 9 September 2015

Summer babies, or why does no one commenting on education understand education?

Just a little one, but I mention it because it seems to me indicative of a general trend. Pretty much everyone nowadays feels free to pontificate on any aspect of education they want (generally related to how shit British schools are) without the need actually to understand what they are talking about.

This morning Nick Gibbs announced a change in schools admission rules to allow parents of 'summer babies' (those born in July and August) not to send their children to reception class as soon as they are 4 but to delay school starting if they felt that to be more appropriate for their child. He said, "Parents know their children best and we want to make sure summer-born children can start reception at the age of five, if their parents think it is in their best interests. We are going to make changes to admission rules - but we want councils and academies to take immediate action."

Pretty uncontroversial, one might think. It has long been known that summer babies suffer a deficit throughout their school career, to the extent that August born babies are 20% less likely than average to end up in 'good universities.' A more anecdotal (but nevertheless fascinating) indication that I have myself tested and found to be true is this: at the beginning of a school year ask a teacher to name all of their year 11s from the previous year. The chances are that the names they fail to remember are those of the July and August-born students.

Quite why this happens is open to debate but it seems most likely that the experience of their first year in school, when they are only just four whilst others are nearly five, sets the tone for summer babies' entire school career. At that age the differences in maturity and confidence can be very pronounced and probably the youngest children become locked into a pattern of diffidence and insecurity from the start.

 What was also unsurprising this morning was that Nick Gibbs made it pretty clear that it was Local Authorities' inflexibility that was the problem here- that the only thing standing in the way of concerned parents doing the best for their children was the dead hand of local bureaucracy. The BBC certainly went along with this implication, as did the papers. Even the Mirror (not known for its instinctive support for the Tories) wrote, "Schools and councils, which are responsible for admissions, often say summer-born pupils must go straight into year one and miss out on the reception year altogether. That means parents can feel pressured to send their child to school before they are ready."

Case closed, surely? This is a much-needed reform, with the government stepping in to remove a needlessly bureaucratic piece of regulation.

Well, yes and no, and this is where the issue of commentators not understanding education comes in. Because there is a reason that schools and local authorities are so intransigent about the year of entry of children into the school system, and that is because they are forced into it by the government itself! Anyone actually involved in the school system would know this, yet as far as I am aware the point has not emerged in this morning's commentary.

The thing is, a school's exam results (and therefore its position in league tables, its Ofsted ratings, even its freedom to avoid compulsory academisation) is based on age cohorts rather than year cohorts. So for instance GCSE league tables (such as the crucial 5+ A*-C including English and Maths figure ) include only the results of students who reach the age of 16 during the academic year in question. Summer babies who have been allowed to enter the school system a year late would be in Year 10 when they reach 16 and so would have no GCSE results to report. Because of their late start they may well do really well, and get a whole hatful of A*-Cs by the end of Year 11, but those results will simply not count in any analysis of the school's success or otherwise. Instead the students concerned will be counted amongst the utter failures- those who have achieved nothing at all.

Let me give a simple example to illustrate the point. Say there are 200 students in each year group and 20 of them are summer babies who have been 'kept back.' Then say 90 (45%) of the year group got 5+ A*-C, including 15 of the 20, who are now not the youngest but the oldest in their year. Excellent! Good result, surely. Errr, no. Because the 'kept back' students' results don't count, though the equivalent 20 from the year below DO count towards the total cohort. So the result the school has to report is not 45% but 37.5% (75 of 200 students). Which, unfortunately, is below the government-imposed 'floor target.'

So the school involved will quite likely be put into Special Measures and flagged up as a failing school.

So the problem is not the admissions rules set by Local Authorities but the system of counting exam results set by Government, as any educationalist could tell you. And yet, not a single mention of that in all the reporting of this I have seen.

Sigh. At least I don't work in schools any more.

Sunday 6 September 2015

You can frighten some of the people some of the time...

Q: What do Scottish independence, the migrant crisis and Jeremy Corbyn have in common?
A: Despite the Establishment trying to frighten them into one viewpoint the British public eventually stuck two fingers up and went the other way.

I think this statement requires a bit of unpacking.

First, what do I mean by the Establishment? Well, I am referring to a strange and unholy alliance that seems to have grown up on some issues between the Libdemtorylabour party high command, the newspapers and mainstream TV. Basically, all those who seem convinced that UKIP (which received 12.6% of the vote in the 2015 election) represents the views of the British population and Nigel Farage is their spokesman. There is (on the face of it) little in common between the SUN, the BBC and the Labour party, but on all three of the issues mentioned above they seem to have been pretty much of one mind, and passing on more or less the same messages to the population at large. Which were (and are):

Scottish independence - Oooh. NO! Definitely not. Scottish independence will result in economic collapse, the disintegration of our glorious country and the summary execution of English incomers at the border by armed SNP terror groups.

Migrant crisis - Shit! Help. We're going to be overrun. There are swarms of them out there and they are ALL climbing the fences in Calais to get to Britain.

Jeremy Corbyn - Oh My actual God! He will single-handedly bring about a reversal of the space-time continuum and take us back to the seventies! There will be rubbish in the streets, black and white TV and crimplene flares. And Jimmy Saville ffs!

I am summarising, but those were pretty much the messages. And how did the Great British Public react? Initially they seem to have gone along with it. The pro-independence campaign had a slow start in Scotland, for a time Jeremy Corbyn seemed a bit of a joke, and few people seemed keen to challenge publicly the ludicrous idea that most of sub-Saharan Africa was parked out in Calais, waiting to get across to Britain where they would, on arrival, be given a house and generous benefits for life.

But in time things changed. Support for Scottish independence grew through a grass-roots movement of unprecedented scope, coming to within a whisker of victory. Corby emerged as the front runner, increasingly desperate scare tactics by the BlairMandelbrot doing nothing but boost his momentum. And as for the migrant crisis - well that has been the most heartening of all. Because what people did was not pontificate or protest. They started giving. It has been a grass roots campaign again, people collecting and distributing stuff for the migrants in Calais and offering places in their homes to Syrian refugees.

And what does that show? That, thank God, scare tactics only work up to a certain point, and in today's interconnected world probably less well than they ever did before, because people can talk to each other now. They no longer rely on the Establishment to provide their world view.

They have learned that they can say, "No. Fuck off. We are better than that."

What would it mean for the Labour party if Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader?

I would begin by saying that Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader appears a foregone conclusion, except that the combined effects of unreliable polls and extreme press coverage make any such definitive statement questionable. It really is quite hard to dig beneath the hyperbole-ridden narrative to discern what real people actually think, but what I can say is that a remarkable range of people of my acquaintance seem (sometimes to their own surprise) to be pro-Corbyn.

However his election will not (would not) be the end of the story. There is a line of argument that suggests that he will lead the Labour party, and henceforth the country, back to the sunlit uplands of austerity-free social justice and progressive socialism, and another that he will preside over internal division and electoral collapse unmatched since the days of Michael Foot. Others of course believe that it won't make a blind bit of difference either way.

So what is the truth? And, more generally, what difference does it make to a large organisation like the Labour party (or an even larger one like the United Kingdom) who is or is not appointed its leader?

I have always found it mildly irritating when presenters on TV history shows say of a castle that it was built by King Alan (or whoever. There never was a King Alan, I don't think, but I like the name). Whatever the truth about the construction of the castle in question, one thing can be said with some certainty: King Alan did not build any part of it. Indeed King Alan would probably have struggled to tell one end of a pickaxe from the other and would have been very unlikely to have had any meaningful understanding of the load-bearing properties of stone arches. Why should he? He would have had people to do all that.

The same thing applies in a more general sense to the leaders of almost any large organisation. It is often said of chief executives that they "built the business up from nothing" and of head teachers that they "turned the school around," but what does that actually mean? The chief executive of a widget-manufacturing company will never have manufactured a single widget and neither will the head teacher have done much in the way of teaching of the students in their school. Indeed in very large and hierarchical organisations the head will have had very little direct involvement at all in any aspect of the running of their organisation. There will be levels and tiers of management between them and any of the actual workings so that their role becomes purely strategic.

So is that the fundamental importance of a leader then - to provide strategic direction? That would seem almost too obvious to be worth stating. Yet even there the importance of the leader is a shifting and amorphous thing. In really big organisations the only ways for the leader to provide strategic direction are through the appointment of (a few) key individuals and the occasional statement of principle. Yet the really effective leaders are those who appoint independent-minded people with strategic understanding of their own and then delegate to them not just tasks but responsibility and decision-making power too. And if they do that, is it not the people they appoint that begin providing the strategic direction? What is more, though the central decisions and keynote policy statements that a leader makes would appear to define strategic direction, in reality that is often less clear. Keynote policy statements are often pretty vague and amorphous things until they are translated into working policies, and that is work that is never done by the leader who made the initial statement.

All of this is very true of party leadership and of the office of prime minister as well. The PM may have made a grand statement in a party conference or an election manifesto, but that means nothing whatever until it is translated into deliverable policy by an army of civil servants, by which time it may well resemble only very loosely the vision that the politician initially outlined. They can hire and fire of course, but only (in most cases) within the relatively restricted pool of elected MPs, each of whom will have his or her firmly established strategic vision, to the point where cabinet reshuffles seem less like opportunities to provide strategic direction and more like attempts at herding cats.

And yet, it is the leaders who have made the political weather over time, is it not? There would have been no New Labour revival without Blair, and (obviously) no Thatcherism without Thatcher. And to take the example most closely related to the topic of this post, it was Michael Foot whose appointment hammered the last nail into the coffin of Old Labour, was it not?

Well, yes and no. Thatcher came to define a generation with its unholy amalgam of unbridled free-market capitalism, social division and the diminution of all forms of collective action. Blair was synonymous with Cool Britannia, PFI and the availability of highly skilled, cash-in-hand Polish builders. Yet did they change the weather or simply reflect meteorological changes that would have happened whether they arrived or not?

And what of Michael Foot? A more decent, principled politician it would be hard to identify yet the utter collapse of the Old Labour project did take place on his watch and the worry that the appointment of the modern-day politician who most closely resembles him (Jeremy Corbyn) will have the same effect seems a reasonable one.

I would argue though that the contexts are utterly different, and context is all. The assumption from a cursory analysis of UK history would be that Blair and Thatcher were effective leaders and Foot ineffective, but that is to ignore their context. Blair and Thatcher each in their own ways articulated a desire (which struck a chord with the electorate) for change - for an escape from a set of attitudes and process that people had tired of. In Thatcher's case it was an escape from the ageing and crumbling post-war consensus on the need for large and bureaucratic collective structures (nationalised industries, banks, unions) to to keep the country on the straight and narrow. In Blair's it was the nasty parochial anti-communiarianism of Thatcherism people were fed up of.

But what of Foot? Well it seems to me that he didn't offer the populace escape from anything really. In a time when many people were pretty much fed up of collective action, in "the longest suicide note in history" he proposed more of it. There might have been a great deal of unease about where Thatcher was taking the country, but even the working class (so-called Essex Man) was guiltily seduced by the idea that maybe they wouldn't have to sit through interminable union meetings any longer but could sell their council houses, get a credit card and spend, spend, spend.

Jeremy Corbyn's context is very different. It is free-market capitalism that the general populace is sick to the back teeth of now. They have had enough of city wide-boys putting their pension pots on the 3.45 at Chepstow and laughing all the way to the bank when the bet failed, leaving them having to work until they are 75. There is a depressing uniformity, and has been for years, to what politicians are allowed by their spads to say in public and at least Jeremy Corbyn is saying something different, and even appearing to say what he thinks rather than what a focus group in Wolverhampton has determined is the most electorally acceptable thing for him to say.

Being a refreshing voice on the media circuit is very different to being party leader of course, let alone PM, but what is interesting is the effect Corbyn has had during the campaign, even on what one might think to have been the archetypal tough audience- his leadership opponents. Until he emerged as the potential winner the Labour leadership[ contenders appeared to be vying with each other for the "Blandest Political Statement Imaginable" prize - desperate to show how electable they would be by never saying anything whatever that might alarm or offend (or indeed interest) anyone at all. Yet, stung into action by Corbyn's direct honesty and inexplicable popularity they have suddenly started coming up with ideas that one couldn't imagine having been pre-approved by Conservative Central Office. Yvette Cooper caught the changing public mood rejecting Tory little-Englandism by arguing for  the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees and Andy Burnham said he would include Corbyn in his cabinet and agreed with many of his ideas.

And I can't imagine Corbyn being a Brown-like control freak intent on stifling any and all opinions that are not congruent with his own world-view. The role he has laid out for himself in the campaign is something between what Belbin would call a 'co-ordinator' and a 'plant' and that really isn't a bad position for a party leader, or indeed a PM, to take. If he can regenerate the self-belief and political engagement of the Labour party and remind them why they (presumably) got into politics in the first place then maybe all he has to do is make a few high-minded statements of principle and let others get on with the business of translating those into policy.

For too long Labour has been frightened of its own shadow and ashamed of the political compromises they have had to make to cling to power. But that is no sort of atmosphere to bring out the best in people. So if Corbyn at least gets people thinking a bit and gives his colleagues the confidence occasionally to say what they actually think, then maybe that is all that the Labour party needs.

We'll have to wait and see.

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