Conservative party conference: Spreading opportunity, driving growth.
Policy Director
Spreading opportunity, driving growth: building a world-class education system.
There are many success stories from fourteen years of Conservative education policy in Government. Looking forward, what next for the sector, and where will the party focus its attention in Opposition?
The next stage of school reforms to close attainment gaps among harder-to-help cohorts, tackling acute disadvantage faced by pupils with special educational needs & disabilities, reforming Alternative Provision and the need for more technical education all featured in the discussion.
Shadow Education Secretary Damian Hinds joined a private roundtable with an expert group of participants, to discuss ways to improve social mobility and equip students with the skills for a future economy.
Three key takeaways from me:
- Choice and competition were key to school reforms from 2010 onwards — an experiment which hasn’t been replicated in other public services to the same extent. But making it work in practice relied on the system having spare capacity, as parents can’t choose between schools if every class has to be full to capacity. Participants discussed the implicit trade-off involved in that: tolerating some ‘inefficiency’ locally to achieve a much greater level of productivity in the system as a whole, and how to evaluate that.
- Parity of esteem between technical and more academic qualifications has been a key goal of government reforms like T Levels. And there is considerable cross-party consensus on the need to make this a reality - it was also a key theme in our roundtable on skills in the construction industry at Labour Party Conference last week. One participant believed we needed a different approach, because successive attempts to change the kind of qualification available haven’t seen much more uptake — instead we should try and change public perceptions directly though much more targeted marketing.
- Our understanding of disadvantage has changed over time, and will continue to change after the pandemic. Damian spoke at Re:State on this subject back in 2019, when the data showed that students with English as an additional language performed better than students who only spoke English, and that there was no longer a north-south divide in educational outcomes (but there was between London and the wider country). After the pandemic, it is clear that the harder to help cohorts are even more starkly correlated with family breakdown, involvement in the care system, and parental mental health, substance & domestic violence.