A Journey (100 page)

All these reforms are, in the final analysis, simply means to an end. The end is not choice. The end is quality services irrespective of wealth. The end is opportunity to make the most of your ability whatever your start in life. The end is utterly progressive in its values. But the only progressive means are those that deliver the progressive ends.

The first academies had been massively oversubscribed. It was plain this was not solely because of the new buildings. It was precisely because the academy school seemed to belong not to some remote bureaucracy, not to the rulers of government, local or national, but to itself, for itself. The school would be in charge of its own destiny. This immediately gave it pride and purpose. Because the sponsors were determined and successful individuals, they brought that determination and drive for success into the school. And most of all, freed from the extraordinarily debilitating and often, in the worst sense, politically correct interference from state or municipality, the academies just had one thing in mind, something shaped not by political prejudice but by common sense: what will make the school excellent.

So, even in areas like Hackney, where I visited the new Mossbourne Community Academy at Hackney Downs on the site of a previously failed comprehensive, and where you might have expected the local middle class to be a bit sniffy and precious, the emphasis on rigorous discipline, a proper dress code and good manners was like a dream to parents, poor and comfortably off alike. When the
Dispatches
programme on Channel 4 did a covert programme on the new Doncaster Academy, with footage of some parents complaining that their kid had been threatened with expulsion if he didn’t turn up to school on time, I knew we were really getting somewhere. Of course, the programme-makers thought people would be outraged by such draconian discipline, whereas naturally the other parents were delighted.

Though the academy idea was watered down after I left, it had an unstoppable momentum and will easily recuperate and get back to full strength. In late 2006, I announced – again I’m afraid to shrieking and barking from next door – that we would double the existing programme to four hundred schools, and was satisfied then that if we attained that and combined it with foundation schools, we would be on a transformative path.

Gordon will protest that he never opposed the programme, and to be fair he never did so head-on; but it was obvious his people weren’t in favour, and getting anything out of the Treasury required a machete constantly slicing through the thick foliage of their objections day by day. I recall an event at Downing Street where we welcomed head teachers who were going to apply for foundation-school status. One of them blithely told me he had come up against the express advice of his local MP. ‘Oh,’ I said, irritated, ‘who’s that?’

‘Ed Balls,’ he replied, unaware he had confirmed my sense of where the GB team sympathies really lay.

The initial assessment of academies was often described negatively, but the whole tenor even of the negative coverage was, in a sense, a mark of their success. People compared academies to the best schools, conveniently forgetting that they had, in every case, replaced state schools that were failing chronically – i.e. we had chosen the toughest nuts to crack. The very fact people made such a comparison was a measure of the very heightened expectations around them. It was assumed they would be good, a cut above, fit to sit alongside the best. And that was precisely the measure we wanted.

Today, of course, the results are clear: academies are improving three times faster than other schools. But, back then, some were bound to struggle, some even fell by the wayside and had to be recovered; yet taken as a whole, they succeeded – not beyond my imagination, but in line with it.

The party opposition was fairly steady and consistent. To my sadness, even Estelle Morris questioned academies, going back to the old saying ‘standards not structures’ and bemoaning the fact we had ditched the mantra. But the whole point was that without the different structure, there was no possibility of achieving the higher standards. Neil Kinnock weighed in, by now pretty much routinely offside and agitating for my replacement by Gordon. His take on academies was that they were elitist, though on closer examination it was less that they were elitist in the sense of being for the wealthy – plainly they weren’t – and more that they were better than other local schools. For me, this was the point. However well motivated, it was classic levelling down. It was an argument that went to the heart of what New Labour was about and its championing of aspiration. Equity could not and should never be at the expense of excellence. My abiding insistence was never give up on excellence, wherever it might be. Attacking it – irrespective of what we felt about grammar schools, private schools, special schools, any schools – was to commit a fatal solecism. It meant that, in the ultimate analysis, we were prepared to get rid of something that was excellent on the basis that it represented the wrong ideology.

Now, by the way, it can be true that such a school might represent the wrong ideology. I am opposed to selection aged eleven. It’s too crude, too final, and therefore too determinative at a ridiculously young age of a child’s life chances, or, to put it less emotionally, their academic ability. I used to reflect on the experience of my brother Bill. He is a wise, sensible, level-headed and thoroughly decent man. It was and is a privilege to have him as a brother. He is also very clever, now a High Court judge, after being a top QC and author of academic works on banking law.

When Bill came to take his entrance exam for Fettes back in the 1960s at the age of thirteen, he only just passed and was put in a lower academic stream. He really had not shone at all. By the time he sat the Oxford exam five years later, however, he had developed and got to Balliol with an exhibition.

Kids change, and therefore separating them out at an early age is not right or fair. But the way comprehensives were introduced and grammar schools abandoned was pretty close to academic vandalism. And not a great reflection on the Secretaries of State – mainly Labour but also Tory – who, of course, continued to send their own children to private school. Not experiencing through their own children the reality of the change, and hugely egged on by the teaching establishment, they legislated so that grammar schools (selective but also excellent) were changed into comprehensives (non-selective and frequently non-excellent, and on occasions truly dire).

This was done because the assumption was that the only reason grammar schools were better was because they were selective. This is to make the same mistake as when people say that private schools are good just because the parents are middle class, better off and the facilities are better; i.e. they are better only through privilege and class.

The truth is that both types of school are good for other reasons too. They are independent. They have an acute sense of ethos and identity. They have strong leadership, and are allowed to lead. They are more flexible. They innovate because no one tells them they can’t. They pursue excellence. And – here is a major factor – they assume excellence is attainable. In other words, they believe failure is not inevitable, it is avoidable; and it is their fault if they don’t avoid it, not the fault of ‘the system’, ‘the background of the children’ or ‘the inadequacy of the parents’.

Now, of course, these characteristics – attitudes of thought, if you will – are easier if your parents are middle class or you select. Easier to think; easier to do. But the whole basis of my schools reform was that they weren’t impossible or unattainable in state schools that were non-selective, provided we were a) prepared to acknowledge the reasons why grammar and private schools worked, b) prepared to let state schools have the same freedoms and encourage new ways of working with new partners, and c) prepared to fund them better.

I used to have fierce internal arguments all about this, even with my closest staff. In the end, the trouble often came down to this: if you introduced a really good school in an area full of really average ones, lo and behold the parents all clamoured to get their children into the really good one. And, yes, of course that caused consternation among all the parents that failed to get their children in, and the local councillors, teachers and so on. But as I used to argue: that simply cannot be a reason not to have the really good school; that must be a reason for analysing why the others are average or worse and changing them.

I remember visiting a school in London just before the 1997 election. As the head teacher welcomed us in, there was a fight going on in the foyer. We stood talking for a time until – the noise of the scuffling being distracting – he said, ‘We’d better move elsewhere.’

‘Shouldn’t we stop that?’ I said, pointing to the scrapping students.

‘Not really,’ he said as he led us down to his study. He then explained how the families in that neighbourhood were problematic, drugs were a real issue, kids were badly brought up and not interested in studying. It was a credible – and to him absolutely persuasive – explanation of why the school was bound to fail. He was, by the way, a nice guy and committed. He also said that since the school had ‘not a great’ reputation – i.e. everyone locally thought it was a dump – they ended up taking the excluded pupils from other schools.

The point was that we accepted failure, and not just the individual failure of certain of the pupils, but a collective failure for all of them. I knew two things were clear: I would never accept such a thing for my own children; and it would never be true that all the pupils and/or all the parents shared the same attitude or problems. What we were permitting was a disaffected and alienated minority to sour it all for the majority. Of course, we shouldn’t accept failure even for the disaffected and alienated. But to accept it for the entire school – and there were hundreds like this when we took office – was gross, an unbelievable social injustice; and what’s more, one which our mistaken ideology had helped perpetrate.

Prior to 1997, the Conservatives had partially tackled the issue with grant-maintained schools, whose status gave greater freedom and independence. The trouble was it was partial, and basically freed those schools already doing better. This was not wrong, and I fought hard to ensure that though we altered the status – the party hated grant-maintained schools – we tried to keep the basic freedoms. But the journey from 1 May 1997 to 27 June 2007 was really about first correcting the partiality of that programme – focusing on the poorest schools instead – and then, second, creating through the academy programme a whole new type of school that could fulfil the purpose both the grant-maintained and our reforms aimed for: quality state schooling. Whereas the Tories paid most attention to middle-class schools, I knew that in order to gain universal or at least widespread acceptance, the programme had to be for the worst of the system as well as the best.

But what a fight it all was. And even in the latter months of 2005 when I was battling away, now with a trusted inner group of ministers who shared the same vision and knew this was where Labour had to be, we were still very much in a struggle with a large part of the party. However, I felt we were winning the argument.

We were battling on other fronts too. Just before Christmas, the Civil Partnership Act came into force, granting the same rights and responsibilities to same-sex partners as enjoyed by married couples. I was really proud of that. On this one, the PLP were largely supportive, of course, but I reflected on how absolutely vituperative the debate had been in days gone by, when the Tories had savaged us over our position on gay rights. In the 1980s it had been a real problem for us as we feared losing votes in by-elections, and yet here we were with the Act coming into force, and a general air of celebration.

The first couples to use the ceremony were in Belfast. I must say I expected a bit of a backlash, but it passed with barely a murmur. We received messages from round the world and I appreciated just how much it meant to so many people, more than I had ever thought when passing the legislation. It must be a horrible thing to feel you are consigned to second-class status as a result of something that is natural to you. So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the extent of the outpouring. But I was.

In a way, the best part was that by then the Tories had also come to support it, meaning that the issue would not be used again as a dividing line in British politics. This was an important gain for the health of our political debate, I thought, and the way the issue played revealed something of the changing nature of politics. I always felt progressive politics had to create a different set of paradigms about politics in order to achieve a greater and deeper spread of support. I evolved over time a position – again, similar to that of Bill Clinton – of what I would call ‘tough on crime, pro-gay rights’ politics.

This might seem the correlation of two completely separate questions, but to me they indicate a significant shift in progressive social attitudes. In the old days, a Conservative was hard line on law and order and on ‘political correctness’ issues like immigration and gays. The left-winger was liberal, the right-winger illiberal. My generation had defined a different paradigm: what you did in your personal life was your choice, but what you did to others was not. So a distinction came about between attitudes to human beings (non-discriminatory in race, gender or sexuality) and attitudes to social order (we need to impose it). It is still possible to find on both right and left the old attitudes and divisions prevailing, but much less so, and politicians who don’t understand these changing currents are likely to flounder.