If David Cameron is looking for potential enemies, he need not worry about the Labour party. Mired in a five-way leadership race without any decent candidates or agendas, they are a danger only to themselves. Nor should he worry about rogue Liberal Democrats resigning to destabilise the coalition. His generous offer to hold a referendum on voting reform during next year’s May elections will keep them loyal until that date. The people with the energy and dedication to inflict damage on the government can be found in the teachers’ unions.
It is hard to overstate the power of teachers’ unions in Britain. For decades they have worked with local authorities to assert complete bureaucratic control over the schools system. The Education Secretary’s job is to pretend to have power (as Michael Gove will be finding out). The minister is tied like Gulliver in a matrix of regulations, legal threats, and arm’s-length agencies over which he has no power while the system is run by officials he can’t sack. From this stagnation, we have an education system run for the benefit of its providers more than its users.
If Mr Gove’s ambition were only to slash the schools budget, he would not represent a danger to the unions. But instead he wields a new model, in which schools will be independent of government — and able to pay good teachers what they like. With this will come a practice now obsolete in Britain: sacking bad teachers. Determined young teachers may even be able to set up their own school, just as determined lawyers can set up their own firm. There would be no need for a union, ensuring collective pay bargaining.
The teachers’ unions will resist reform with their own language. A school not run by local authority bureaucrats, apparently, is an ‘undemocratic’ school. They will denounce the creation of a ‘two-tier’ education system — as if the current system serves the sink estates as well as the rich. They will pull favours with Lib Dem MPs to insert spoiling amendments into the Education Bill, and deploy an army of lawyers who will threaten to sue the life out of any new school.
Arthur Scargill demonstrated how not to defeat a government. His vanity, grandiose political pretensions and extreme politics led him into pitched battles with the Thatcher government — which she was prepared for. The teachers’ unions will be more canny: they will hope to exploit the Cameroons’ well-known distaste of detail and short attention spans. They need only delay Mr Gove, hoping he will be replaced by someone else within 18 months. By then, the agenda might be dead.
Rather than march down Whitehall at the introduction of new schools, the unions will simply make sure that local authorities deploy every trick to stifle the upstarts. Simply ensuring that the new schools obey the 150-page admissions code — and can be sued for failing to do so — will bog them down in bureaucracy and lead would-be schools companies to conclude that it is not worth the bother.
Nigel Lawson once said that to govern is to choose. In Mr Cameron’s case, to govern will be to fight — and to do so with more energy, patience and vigour than his predecessors could summon. It is all too easy to walk away from school reform (as he has on health), but the result would be morally indefensible. To leave the system as it is would condemn another generation of underprivileged pupils to the scandal of sink schools.
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