Labour’s school reforms - good or bad for education?

Name: Labour’s school reforms - good or bad for education?
Start: 2025-02-08T13:00:00+00:00
End: 2025-02-08T15:00:00+00:00
Location: Cherry Reds

Schedule

Sat Feb 08 2025 at 01:00 pm to 03:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Cherry Reds | Birmingham, EN

The legacy of the last 14 years is that England has risen in terms of educational attainment in international league tables, whilst Scotland and Wales are struggling. 90% of schools are now rated good or outstanding compared to 68% in 2010.
However, more than a million children are now in classes of more than 30, and there are challenges in recruiting teachers to teach physics, computing, and foreign languages. There is a real and persistent educational attainment gap between the north and south of England, between Wales, Scotland and England, and between private and state school pupils.Forty thousand teachers leave the profession each year, and pay, workload and flexibility are cited as the reasons.
Increasing numbers of children are not in the school system, a situation seemingly exacerbated by the Covid measures, with Rachel de Souza, Children's Commissioner in 2024 identifying some 10,000 children having disappeared out of the system "to destinations unknown to their local authorities." Additionally, the cohort of primary children born during the Covid pandemic measures is said to be experiencing speech and language delay in much higher numbers than normal.
Via the Children’s Well-being and Schools Bill, Labour’s intention is to introduce one national curriculum, a shared core, which all state schools including academies will have to follow. The new curriculum, they claim, will reflect the diversity of communities in the U.K., prepare students to overcome barriers they face and address the issues facing our society. Music, art, drama and sport will not be neglected. Reforms will set young people up for life and work and will drive high and rising standards. Children with special needs will be made to feel more included.
Following the tragic suicide of a head teacher on receipt of an "inadequate" rating for her school, Ofsted ratings have moved from the current inspection regime of single-word overall grades. Ofsted will produce a scorecard report where different aspects of the school’s performance are detailed. Education Secretary Bridget Philipson said that the ratings were “low information for parents but high stakes for teachers”.
To address the teacher recruitment and retention crisis, teachers will be allowed to work more flexibly and carry out more of their duties from home. Imposing VAT on private schools is intended to raise funds to recruit 6,500 more specialist teachers. Measures for fewer items of school uniform and universal free breakfast club provision aims to encourage more children from poorer families to stay in the school system.
Will the new national curriculum provide consistency to ensure all students have a broad education and clarity for their parents on what they should be taught, or produce conformity where experimentation and innovation are driven out? Will scrapping the one-word Ofsted ratings mean opacity on school performance for parents and prospective teaching applicants. Will it improve teacher morale? Are standard schools the place for increasing numbers of children identified as having special needs, however inclusive they might attempt to be?

In November 2024, Oxford educated Phillipson, who attended Saturday drama lessons and learned to play the violin told schools to focus on wellbeing and belonging, rather than exam results. Becky Francis, who is leading the Curriculum and Assessment Review, has called setting children by ability “symbolic violence” and condemned the obsession with academic achievement. Is Labour’s approach going to be effective in addressing the problems facing schools and teachers? Does it downplay or minimise the problem of the attainment gap by instead refocusing on “wellbeing”? Or is wellbeing the foundation for attending school and getting an education?
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