Alex Massie: Adonis’s lessons for Scots

SCOTS would be wise to look hard at a revolution sweeping state schools south of the Border, transforming schools and their results, writes Alex Massie.

A test: Aside from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who was the most significant figure in the last Labour government? You could, I suppose, contemplate the claims of Peter Mandelson, Donald Dewar or Mo Mowlam but the correct answer is Andrew Adonis. The former schools minister will be recalled as one of the few ministers who really made a difference. Without Lord Adonis, there might have been no revolution in English education.

The growth of “academies” – that is, independent state schools – was Adonis’s mission, and the central part of an educational revolution that, pupil by pupil, classroom by classroom and school by school, is beginning to transform English state schools. Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove’s free schools programme is principally an extension of reforms introduced by Labour. These in turn embraced the best elements of Kenneth Baker’s reforms from 20 years ago. Boldness takes time to pay off and reform is a matter of perseverance.

Now Adonis has written a memoir – Education, Education, Education: Reforming England’s Schools – that should be read by every MP and MSP. It’s probably the most important political book of the year. I know suggesting Scotland might have anything to learn from how they organise matters in England offends “civic Scotland’s” unearned sense of superiority, but, nevertheless, the fact remains that English educational reform offers a way forward for Scotland too.

It is worth recalling how the English political and educational landscapes have been transformed. In 1995, the authorities closed Hackney Downs comprehensive in north London. The school was, by any standard, a dismal, even grotesque failure. Even abolishing one of the worst schools in England proved controversial, however. The Times Educational Supplement published a harrowing editorial complaining that Hackney Downs was the victim of “murder”. The paper despaired that “the school was labelled a failure and since failure is unacceptable, it must close. What crude logic!”

Crude indeed! Yet right. But Hackney, so long a byword for inner-city deprivation and despair, has become an unlikely success story. In 2004, Mossbourne Academy, one of the first independent state schools championed by Adonis, opened on the same site once occupied by Hackney Downs. Within five years, 80 per cent of its pupils were gaining five good GCSEs, including English and maths. It is, according to its headmaster, “a grammar school with a comprehensive intake”. No wonder Mossbourne became the flagship for education reform.

Across England several hundred under-performing schools have been or are in the process of being transformed by the academy revolution. The process is still incomplete and there remains considerable regional variation. Reform is a generational project. Many of these new schools are in London; Yorkshire and other parts of northern England are still waiting for the revolution. Importantly, London’s success also demonstrates that education reform is not a sop to the middle classes in their leafy suburbs. On the contrary, it makes the most difference where the need is greatest: amongst the poor.

Adonis recalls being told by a teacher in Sunderland that children once turned “left to get a job in a shipyard or right to go down to the mines. All those jobs have gone now. They might as well walk straight on into the sea”. Defeating that kind of defeatism – the soft bigotry of low expectations, as George W Bush memorably put it – is about as important a task as exists in contemporary politics.

Poverty is not destiny, either. A generation ago, Hackney’s GCSE results were half the national average; now Hackney pupils perform at or around the national average. Indeed, London’s schools, long the stuff of middle-class nightmares, are now, pound for pound, the best-performing state schools in England. In 2011, Mossbourne sent nine pupils to Cambridge University. In London there are now 164 comprehensives at which pupils from poor backgrounds obtain exam results that are better than the national average for all pupils.

There are many reasons for London’s success, but competition between schools within the state sector must be one contributory factor helping explain why the city’s schools are improving so rapidly. Success, once achieved, becomes something to be emulated. Mossbourne Academy in Hackney inspired five more schools in the borough to apply for academy status and begin the process of reinvention.

The success of academies, once a controversial policy opposed by much of the educational establishment, can no longer be denied. As Adonis told the BBC recently: “All three political parties in England have come to support academies. Nobody would want to close those schools down. On the contrary, they want more of them.” The reason for this transformation in attitudes is simple: academies work. It takes a special kind of arrogance to object to this kind of transformation and a wondrous level of complacency to presume Scotland has nothing to learn from our southern neighbours.

If there’s a pro-reform consensus in England there’s a similar, if opposite, consensus in Scotland. Here the educational establishment thwarts any structural reform. Change is a challenge and challenges are best avoided. It is ironic that Holyrood education secretary Mike Russell suggests Michael Gove’s reforms to GCSEs in England risk “centralising” English education, while the SNP presides over an educational apparatus in Scotland in which schools are given precious little independence. We pretend our education system is excellent but, deep down, we know it’s only really adequate. This despite many good intentions and pockets of excellence. We’re not as good as we like to think we are.

The comprehensive experiment has failed. Consider Scotland’s educational “gold standard” of achieving at least five Highers at grades A-C. There isn’t a state school in Scotland at which the majority of pupils achieve this standard. Not one. Even in East Renfrewshire, by some distance the most successful school district in the country, only one in three pupils will achieve five good passes at Higher. In Glasgow city itself, just 7 per cent of state-educated children leave school with five Highers in their pocket. This should be a rage-inducing national scandal.

Glasgow’s case is unusually dreadful but the national average is hardly much better. Just 12 per cent of state-schooled pupils achieve five good Highers. It is true that the percentage doing so in Edinburgh (14 per cent in 2011) might be higher if fewer pupils were “creamed off” by private schools, but the popularity of private education is an insufficient explanation for state-school failure. After all, in places without private schools – such as the Borders or Dumfries and Galloway – pupils do no better than their counterparts in the cities.

It is not surprising private education is so popular. The top-performing private schools such as the High School of Glasgow, Dollar Academy or George Heriot’s, routinely meet this “gold standard”. In these schools, more than 70 per cent of pupils leave with at least five excellent Higher passes. That is to say, the top independent schools are often ten times more successful than Glasgow’s state schools and five times more successful than Edinburgh’s. Some of this discrepancy may be explained by selection, parental support and other middle-class advantages, but that does not account for all the differences.

Governance matters. The answer is not – contrary to what many English Tories appear to believe – more selection in secondary schools, but greater independence for schools themselves. Independence and good governance – a powerful school ethos, proper discipline and, just as vitally, seriously high ambition – have been seen to be the key elements of the academy project in England. It beggars belief that it could not make a comparable and transformational difference north of the Border too.