ASCL Director of Policy Julie McCulloch on politics as the ‘art of the possible. Expand
Working on your behalf to influence government policy
ASCL Director of Policy Julie McCulloch on politics as the ‘art of the possible.’
In what has felt like something of a busman’s holiday, I’ve spent significant chunks of my spare time over the last few weeks helping my daughter to revise for her citizenship GCSE. As well as finally understanding how the single transferable vote system works (I’m great fun at parties) and struggling to remain politically impartial during discussions on voter apathy (well, yes, it’s possible that mistrust in politicians may play a part...), this has l ed me to reflect on the role that ASCL plays in attempting to influence policy.
The widely shared Serenity Prayer, originally written by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, asks for ‘the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference’. Far be it from me to disagree with the Reverend Niebuhr, but I reckon he missed a category. Let’s call it ‘the tenacity to keep chipping away at things that you don’t think are a great idea, but others are determined to do anyway, in order to try to make them less bad’. It’s not catchy – in fact, it’s often frustrating and infuriating – but it’s a key part of what the ASCL policy team does.
Sometimes – and this is the most satisfying and rewarding part of our work – we’re able to work with ASCL Council (www.ascl.org.uk/council) to develop and put forward our own proposals for change, such as those in our report A Great Education for Every Child: The ASCL Blueprint for a Fairer Education System (www.ascl.org.uk/blueprint).
Occasionally, we’re able to convince ministers that the bright idea they’ve come up with is so bad that they need to go back to the drawing board. Much more often, though, we operate in a world where politics is the ‘art of the possible’ – where our job is to respect the democratic right of politicians to enact the policies on which they were elected, while helping them to see what the impact of those policies will actually be on the ground and encouraging them to base their plans on sound evidence.
Many of the policy ‘wins’ we achieve because of this work are hard to quantify. They can come as a result of months, or even years, of relationship-building and negotiation. They are also often difficult to shout about, with conversations taking part under rules of confidentiality, and early drafts of policies quietly dropped or improved.
Given all these challenges, it’s gratifying when we can achieve change, and to share that impact with members. We’ve had several such moments over the last couple of months. These include the following:
- the government’s commitment in the schools white paper and subsequent Schools Bill to – finally – introduce a direct national funding formula – something for which ASCL has campaigned for many years
- a significant reduction in the number of qualifications that will be defunded to smooth the path for the take up of T levels; ASCL has campaigned, along with other organisations as part of the #ProtectStudentChoice campaign, for BTECs and other Applied General Qualifications to remain available to students, and the list of defunded qualifications would undoubtedly have been much greater without this campaigning
- the permanent extension of free school meal eligibility to families with no recourse to public funds (NRPF); we’ve been working with several campaign groups as part of the End Child Food Poverty initiative to call for this change
- the publication of the Online Safety Bill, which includes several measures for which we have been calling for some time
We were also pleased to receive, and to be able to share, an apology from the Secretary of State (SoS) for sending a letter to heads on the May bank holiday Monday announcing his intention to create a league table of schools’ spending on the National Tutoring Programme. This was in response to a joint letter from ASCL and NAHT calling this out as a direct contravention of the department’s own workload charter. However, we remain deeply concerned about the substance of the letter, and about the SoS’s broader obsession with gathering and sharing more data about school and college performance, regardless of how accurate this may be or the potential negative effects of doing so.
The big education policy news this term, of course, has been the publication of the government’s Schools Bill (tinyurl.com/2p8ecsab). This provides the legislative basis for the ambitions set out in the schools white paper (tinyurl.com/mttbyyv7) (though it’s worth noting that many of the policies in the white paper, such as the introduction of the ‘parent pledge’ and the expectation that all schools will have at least a 32.5 hour week, don’t appear in the Bill, as the government doesn’t require new legislation to push them through).
The Bill proposes several wide-ranging and significant new laws. We agree with many of these, particularly the proposals to properly regulate ‘illegal’ schools. We also agree in principle with the desire to streamline the complex and bureaucratic way in which academies and trusts are currently regulated.
However, we are deeply concerned about some aspects of the Bill, which appear to grant sweeping additional powers to the Secretary of State over how individual schools operate. We are not reassured by the DfE’s line, set out in one of its ‘factsheets’ on the Bill (tinyurl.com/2rvd5hz8), that it doesn’t actually intend to implement most of these powers, at least in the short term.
At the time of writing, we are liaising with our legal partners, Browne Jacobson, to better understand to what extent the Bill would give the Secretary of State additional powers, as opposed to simply consolidating existing powers currently set out across a range of different legislation. This will give us a firm basis on which to potentially lobby MPs and peers to propose amendments to the Bill as it makes its way through Parliament.
So, a slightly more philosophical update from me than usual in this edition. I know that politics – and political lobbying – can often feel like something of a dark art. I hope this has provided some insight into the way ASCL engages in this work, on behalf of members, children and young people.
FIND OUT MORE
See ASCL’s consultation responses at www.ascl.org.uk/consultations
Julie McCulloch
ASCL Director of Policy
@juliecmcculloch
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