The education year in England

By Mike Baker
Education correspondent, BBC News

Jamie Oliver: Influential figure

If one image could sum up education news in 2006, it would be Jamie Oliver and a plate of burgers, chips and beans.

That is only partly because this year brought new, tougher guidelines governing school food.

While others have campaigned long and hard for the same end, it was Jamie Oliver who galvanised the government into action.

But there is another reason why the celebrity chef is a symbol of 2006: he personifies the government's new susceptibility to the influences of external lobbyists.

After several years in which they had a free rein to direct education reform, ministers now face many new and stronger challengers.

For a start, critics on the Left have grown in confidence after the successes of the concerted campaign against the Education and Inspections Bill.

Although the government succeeded in getting its Bill through Parliament, the opposition from Labour MPs, peers, and pro-comprehensive campaigners scored some hits along the way.

Influences

First, they won the promise of a new code of practice on admissions that tightens up on covert selection.

Secondly, they brought a change of emphasis on trust schools: the government switched from highlighting their status as independent, business-sponsored schools to emphasising instead how they would play a collaborative role with other local schools.

After 52 Labour MPs voted against the government's flagship education reforms, many on the Left appeared to have new confidence to look beyond the Blair era.

At the same time, the Conservative Party, under David Cameron and his education spokesman, David Willetts, began to exert a stronger influence on the education debate.

Although the Tories do not yet have a complete set of policies, they now look quicker on their feet after jettisoning some of their earlier policies, not least the opposition to university fees which always sat oddly with their support for free markets, and their support for academic selection which went down poorly with most teachers.

Already, by focusing attention on parent-friendly issues such as school dinners, special educational needs and phonics, the Conservatives have influenced changes in these areas of government policy

Collective breakdown

The third challenge has come from the teacher unions.

While still a long way short of the influence they had up until the 1970s, there are signs they are becoming more confident in their resistance to certain government initiatives, sensing perhaps greater support from parents for their campaigns against testing, league tables and market forces in the school system.

The unions' honeymoon with the Labour government is now well and truly over.

One or two of them seemed ready for the divorce court and the so-called "social partnership" was looking much weaker with both the NUT and the head teachers' union, the NAHT, outside it.

The annual conference of the NAHT in May was an extraordinary affair: at times it felt to observers as if they were present at a collective nervous breakdown. Head teacher after head teacher came to the rostrum to talk about the stress of coping with Ofsted, targets, and central directives.

The union's general secretary, Mick Brookes, warned the government that head teachers were "sick to the back teeth" of talking and were now "ready for action".

That has not happened (and there may have been an element of conference rhetoric to it) but it was a sign that, despite a strong injection of cash into schools, the profession was no longer so enamoured of all the government's policies.

Change at the top

Quite apart from the big political battle over trust schools, there has been plenty else to chew on.

The year began with another row over sex offenders getting jobs in schools, matured with the city academy programme being dragged into the cash-for-honours affair, and ended with renewed concerns over school standards and a debate about the legacy of Tony Blair's schools revolution.

The perceived political weakness of Ruth Kelly, who finally lost her job as education secretary in May, and the impending departure of Tony Blair, have made this a roller coaster year for education politics.

Ms Kelly was the first to pay the price; she failed to command support from either the profession or her own backbenchers. A safer pair of hands was sought in Alan Johnson.

He got off to a good start, knocking heads together to help bring an end to the long-running pay dispute in universities just in time to avoid chaos for the summer's exams.

Although usually a smooth operator, he hit trouble over faith schools as he executed what one opponent called "the fastest U-turn in British political history".

After appearing to have given the go-ahead to require new faith schools to accept a proportion of pupils from outside their faith, he seemed to backtrack in the face of a concerted campaign by the Catholic church.

Skills

As the year drew to a close a number of things threw doubt on the effectiveness of recent education policies.

The final university admissions figures showed a 4.5% fall in the number of new undergraduates accepted onto courses in England.

Ministers are hoping this is a temporary blip caused by last year's larger than usual increase as students raced to get in ahead of the new fee regime.

The arrival of an FE Bill, and publication of the Leitch Report, underlined the impression that, after nine years, the government is only just starting to tackle the problem of skill shortages.

Meanwhile, the darker side of the new focus on 16 to 19-year-olds has begun to emerge with the astonishing statistics showing a fall of 700,000 in the number of adults taking courses in FE and adult education.

Then, as Tony Blair announced plans to fund the introduction of the International Baccalaureate in schools, the debate about the usefulness of A-levels was reopened.

With the IB, the impending Pre-U and the forthcoming Diplomas, some regard the post-16 curriculum as looking very fragmented and wonder where it is all heading.

Will 2007 see a rallying behind the beleaguered A-level, or a further stage in its demise?

Standards under scrutiny

Finally, Ofsted's annual report made unhappy reading for Alan Johnson; or at least, the media version of it did.

Several newspapers reported that Ofsted had found 51% of schools to be failing. Closer scrutiny showed this to be a rather liberal interpretation of the description "satisfactory".

In fact, the proportion of secondary schools branded unsatisfactory was 13% - serious enough, but a long way short of 51%.

Nevertheless it was enough to restart the old debate about standards. For Tony Blair and his supporters it was evidence of the need to press on even faster with creating more city academies and trust schools.

For his opponents it was a sign that the past decade has not brought the changes promised by that "education, education, education" speech.

Expect 2007 to be even more political as the Brown-ites and the Cameron-istas prepare to do battle over schools, colleges and universities.