By Geoff Barton
General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders

Former Department for Education adviser Sam Freedman is a man with a good turn of phrase. But he surpassed himself with this observation on Rishi Sunak’s British Baccalaureate plan.

“The issue with the Bacc idea,” he said, “is not whether it might be a good proposal in theory but the absurdity of suggesting it now when everything is falling apart. It’s like turning up to a house fire and proposing redoing the kitchen.”

The ‘house fire’ in question is something approaching an existential crisis in our education system.

Teacher shortages are so severe – across so many subject areas – that the challenge is increasingly to get any qualified teacher in front of a class, let alone a teacher who is a subject specialist.

The SEND system is a mess, with sky-high deficits in high need budgets, logjams in obtaining Education, Health and Care Plans, and schools often in the financially ruinous position of having to provide support without enough money to do so.

Added to that is a rising tide of mental health problems, high rates of persistent absence, a school estate which requires £11.4 billion of repairs, and a cost-of-living crisis which is making poor children even poorer.

Alternate reality
For the Prime Minister’s big policy idea then to be the vague notion of a British Baccalaureate at an undetermined future date suggests he is occupying an alternate reality.

And yet, thus far, that is pretty much it as far as the Conservatives’ plans for education go. We might find out more at the party conference in Manchester which starts on Sunday but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

I suspect what we will get in the run-up to the next General Election is rhetoric about the success of phonics, Pisa scores, and the free schools’ programme but a void of any meaningful policy proposals, let alone any sense of vision.

Given that the Conservatives are 21 points behind Labour in the opinion polls, we might do better to look at what Labour will be saying at their party conference the following week in Liverpool.

In fact, Labour have already set out their education plans in a document called ‘Breaking Down The Barriers To Opportunity’. Here it is in full. It isn’t an easy read but the ever-excellent Teacher Tapp have used artificial intelligence to identify the key proposals and then ranked them in order of the priorities as decided by a poll of teachers. Read it here.

This fantastic piece of work shows that Labour are definitely on to something in their proposals over more mental health support, reforming Ofsted, breakfast clubs in every primary school, and an annual entitlement for teacher training.

Private schools
That sounds like good news for Labour and for education. But things get a lot more vague when one searches Labour’s policy document for a sense of spending commitments and how they will be funded.

It talks about recruiting and training “thousands” more teachers, mental health professionals, and expanding careers advice. This will be paid for by levying VAT on private schools and ending their business rates exemption, with “nearly £1bn” of this money invested “in the package of policies in this paper.”

Labour has got into a muddle over the question of whether this entails removing charitable status – which it has this week announced it is not going to do after all. But the substantive element of the policy – the removal of tax exemptions – remains in place.

However, the question of how much that policy will raise is debatable – given that it is also likely to cost money as children are displaced from independent schools into the state sector because their parents can no longer afford school fees or their school closes entirely.

As annual state expenditure on schools has to increase by something like £2 billion to £3 billion each year just to meet rising costs, Labour’s policy is therefore marginal at best in terms of making any meaningful difference to school funding.

Big decisions
There is some politics at work here, of course. Labour is understandably wary of making any big spending commitments which will make it vulnerable to Tory attacks about potential tax rises. And so it has come up with a formula to pay for its policies in a way that it thinks will appeal to voters – even if it won’t actually pay the bills in practice.

I suspect that politicians on all sides know the financial realities – and that at some point after an election, there will need to be a public spending adjustment to rescue our public services from a spiral of decline. Some big decisions will need to be made about how that is funded. There are only three options – taxation, borrowing or cuts to other areas of government spending. All are fraught with political risk and difficulty – hence why we won’t see anything this side of a General Election.

The first priority, of course, is to get elected. But, at some point, the government – whoever that may be – will need to put out the house fire.

(By the way, if you haven’t read ASCL’s manifesto for the General Election on what we think the political parties need to commit to – please do give it a read here).