Why “joyless curriculum” is bad politics

Politicians want to do two things when they make statements, or set policy. They want to do things which will improve outcomes. But they also want to say and do things which are popular, electorally. (This is often seen as distasteful, but it shouldn’t be — saying and doing popular things is how you get elected and stay elected, and without that you haven’t got much chance of doing stuff that will improve outcomes).

Both of those are difficult! Especially in Opposition, where the resources available to you to think and make up policy is much harder than in government.

And so to Kate Green, and ‘joyless curriculum-gate’.

Ben Newmark has already written a brilliant and deservedly viral piece about why the Shadow Education Secretary’s words are, policy wise, such a misstep.

I wanted to add to this by showing why it’s a dead end, politics wise.

As I say, making policy, and especially testing its popularity, is difficult in Opposition. Regular polling, and focus group work, is very expensive, and tends to be saved for the biggest of policy proposals. So an Opposition tends to be reliant on third party polls and research into opinion — or messages given to them by people around them, on which more below. But on curriculum, there’s a real paucity of proper polling, because it’s a subject (excuse the pun) that requires quite nuanced understanding, and much polling on it doesn’t really get to grips with it.

So when Kate Green says things like:

“We’ve got a curriculum now that’s information-heavy. It’s traditionalist in its approach and while, of course, you do want children to acquire a high level of the basic essential skills they need all through their lives and for their future studies and employment, education has become a bit joyless, and that’s not the fault of schools”

then I pause. I do a *lot* of work on education opinion polling and focus groups. I’ve literally never heard a normal person, parent or student, express the view that a curriculum is information heavy or traditionalist. These are not terms that normal people use. Joyless — or a view that school isn’t enjoyable — is a concept that is discussed, but although some parents and pupils do say that their children don’t enjoy school, an awful lot more express quite a lot of satisfaction with their schools and with education. And I would wager large sums that very few people connect their unhappiness or their child’s unhappiness with a specific pedagogical or curricular model.

If you want to make policy on education, as the Shadow Education Secretary, then parent views are critical. So it’s worth considering what people do think. Let me tell you what I see from parents and their views on education. Some of this is drawn from polling, but much is taken from my insights and those of my colleagues, principally Ed Dorrell, from a large number of focus groups with parents in the last twelve months or so — not all on education directly, but where education has come up. Importantly, I’m going to focus here on what are variously called working class parents, or C1C2 parents, or traditional Labour voting parents, from across the country — many of whom switched to the Tories in 2019, with significant electoral consequences.

What do these parents think about education?

• They want schools with high academic standards (and with children that are more middle class). Working class voters are more likely to express a preference for schools that are closer to their home than middle class voters, but when research takes account of the actual choices available to primary and secondary parents, this finds that “all families do indeed choose schools on the basis of their academic performance, as measured by the percentage of pupils exceeding the expected level at key stage 2. Parents also value particular peer groups, preferring schools with low proportions of poor children”. Focus group work consistently finds this — people talk often about ‘the good school’ in the town for example.
• All parents, everywhere, want good behaviour , in a ‘traditional’ way— but working class parents even more so. Every poll on this issue I’ve ever seen suggests that parents want schools to maintain strong discipline. Concepts such as restorative justice are barely understood, but when they are, and explored, there’s little sympathy for them. Parents like detentions, they are content with explusions, they want silence from children when teachers ask for it. Working class parents, in our experience, feel this particularly.
• They want their children to be happy. This is consistently one of the first words that comes up, unprompted. As noted, above, most parents think their children are happy (this declines in secondary) and normally parents who think their children aren’t happy (as opposed to worrying in general) have a specific reason why. Worries about mental health and peer pressure are consistently heard.
• They want their children to go to university — including if they didn’t themselves — or if not, they want them to get an apprenticeship.
• They are hawkish on waste and welfare. They worry that schools don’t have enough money, and are incredibly sympathetic to claims from heads about funding shortfalls. But they also simultaneously don’t think schools always spend their money effectively, and nor does government. Specifically, on free school meals, working class parents are quite hawkish, and think that it’s their responsibility to feed their children, not schools or government. (But they all love — and I mean love — Marcus Rashford. He is approaching David Attenborough levels of fandom in focus groups).
• They’re ambivalent about school structures. A good chunk of parents still can’t say whether their child goes to an Academy or not, and about even numbers who do know can come with some good things that Academies and MATs have done as can come up with bad things they’ve done. People are generally sceptical about Free Schools. They like independent schools, and most parents would like their children to go to them, but for many working class parents, it’s like asking whether they’d like their child to go to Mars on a spaceship.
• They trust teachers and heads implicitly. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance that goes on when parents describe a bad educational experience their child has had or is having. Parents on the whole are very reluctant to criticise teachers. When they think that something isn’t working, and they want it to be done better — and we saw a lot of this during lockdown with frustration with online learning — they are keen to get the school’s implicit or explicit permission before doing their own thing with their children.
• They LOVE Ofsted. There’s a reason the Tories talked about Ofsted in their last manifesto a lot, and that’s because Labour’s commitment to scrap it went down very badly with these groups of voters (and it cut through as an issue).
• And finally, and importantly, they’re relaxed, happily ignorant, and indifferent about most curriculum, pedagogical, and accountability issues. The average parent has no in depth understanding — and nor should they! — about pedagogical styles, seating plans, lesson duration, Ebacc, marking, and the like. When specific things cut through, it tends to be over accountability, and whether a curriculum is being narrowed (not a word they would use) in order to prepare for exams. There is definitely, in fairness, some nervousness among some parents about the exams that children take, and whether there are too many and cause worry and stress. The phonics test and multiplication tests are popular. So are A Levels. GCSEs and SATs less so. But concern about exams and stress isn’t linked to a particular approach taken by schools. And parents love league tables, and all use them — or rely on the information from them which they get from other parents.

So these voters — traditional Labour voters — just simply don’t talk in terms of a joyless curriculum, or about rote learning, or about punitive accountability. If anything, they tend the other way in terms of their support for what is painted through those words. But there’s two groups of people who do talk negatively about these things. Those are Labour activists, including and particularly those who work in education. And those are teacher trade unions.

And here’s the rub. These two groups are very available to Kate Green, and not shy about voicing their opinions. And nor should they be — doing so is part of the privilege of being a political activist, and literally the job of senior trade union officials. But it’s the job of a politician to separate out the counsel of vested interests, from an assessment of where voters are. To not fall victim to the availability heuristic and assume that the views of such groups are representative of public opinion. And on this one, Kate Green has simply got it politically wrong.