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Thursday 10 November 2016

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With Liam Fox gone, Michael Gove will also be weakened

Vested interests that block reform will not be defeated through official channels alone.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, could be next in the line of fire - With Liam Fox gone, Michael Gove will also be weakened
Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, could be next in the line of fire Photo: AP

Not everything is wonderful about private education; not everything is bad about the state system. But I can think of at least one unambiguous advantage of the independent sector: no one within it criticises you for doing well.

In the state system, it is often otherwise. Success is suspect. It is evidence of “elitism”. It brings you under the unfavourable scrutiny of the authorities. It is as if coming top of the Premier League put you in danger of relegation.

On this measure, Cardinal Vaughan School in west London is in big trouble. Its places are seven times oversubscribed. It got 11 pupils into Oxford and Cambridge this year. According to The Daily Telegraph’s table, it is the most successful comprehensive school in the country. Its parents and staff are fiercely loyal to it.

Sure enough, “The Vaughan”, as it is commonly known, has come under constant attack from the education bureaucrats in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster. In the 1980s, they tried, but failed, to abolish its sixth form. Two years ago, they complained about its admissions to the Schools Adjudicator because its policy favoured families who were actively Catholic over those who were not.

Last year, the diocese set to work to appoint “foundation governors” who would outvote the elected parent governors and staff representatives who always support the school’s disciplined, traditionally religious and academically rigorous ethos. It tried to get round the rule that foundation parent governors should be, as the rule obviously intends but does not precisely state, parents of children in the school. The ensuing court case has prompted the Government to strengthen the law to prevent such a thing happening again.

With the retirement last year of The Vaughan’s popular headmaster, the diocese saw the chance to find a successor who would change the attitudes of the staff and so neutralise the staff governors. The foundation governors held pre-meetings to concert their line in advance. It was made clear – though never explicitly stated – that they would not select either of the admired internal candidates from the school. Both men are the sort of old-fashioned people who refer to the “headmaster” rather than the “headteacher”: the diocesan people don’t like the cut of their jib. When these two candidates applied, the foundation governors said that the field was “not strong enough”, and delayed the selection process. Although the job description stipulated that the appointee must have “sustained” experience of sixth forms, the foundation governors shortlisted the deputy head of a school with no sixth form; he had had no sixth-form experience for 16 years.

Almost all the parents protested at what was happening. At one meeting of 400 or so of them, a vote showed all but two parents supporting the school against the diocese. Such is the diocese’s dislike of parental opinion that one of the only two who voted the other way was promptly made a foundation parent governor.

At the beginning of this week, the parents told me they were heading for defeat. The selection process of the governors was showing all foundation governors determined to oppose the total of parent governors, staff governors and education authority representative, which they always outnumber. A diocesan stooge would be appointed by Wednesday, I was assured.

Then something extraordinary happened. On Wednesday, the attitude of the foundation governors suddenly changed. They remained unanimous, but now they were unanimous in the other direction. All of them said that they wanted the younger of the two internal candidates, Paul Stubbings, to be the new headmaster. The other governors could not believe what they were hearing, but rejoiced. Mr Stubbings was appointed.

What had happened? Why this Pauline conversion? It seems that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, was so struck by the strength of the parental protest that he looked into the matter. He did not like what he found. Under the 1996 Education Act, he has the power to order an investigation of whether a governing body has behaved unreasonably. On Monday or Tuesday, he telephoned the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, and told him that he was minded to do so in this case.

It seems that the archbishop was displeased with Mr Gove, but also alarmed at the prospect of an investigation: processes would be inspected and minutes unearthed. In the past, the foundation governors have always appeared to do whatever the diocese wanted. Now the diocese did not want an investigation. No one is saying exactly what happened next, but on Wednesday, Mr Stubbings was appointed. With a bit of luck, he will achieve his ambition of turning The Vaughan into an academy.

So here is a situation very characteristic of our education system. A school which has what most schools would die for – the almost unanimous satisfaction of its parents – has to fight and fight and fight for the survival of its ethos. Its opponents are education authorities, whether secular or church, which are supposed to have the care of schools, but which tend to prefer their own power to that of parents and teachers. They long to enforce the egalitarian educational theories (such as no “setting”) which have dominated, and failed, for half a century.

By an apparent paradox, the only means by which such little platoons can be upheld is by central government intervention – in this case, by Mr Gove. Every “free school” and every academy, every bid for greater autonomy, has to battle its way into existence against officials who detest such ideas. Only with the help of the minister can bureaucracy be defeated. In the long term, such methods could not work. No Secretary of State could fight each case everywhere. But this is a transition. Once academies and free schools and the rights of parents really take root, once head teachers can really hire and fire whom they want, Mr Gove and his successors can become no more than a distant court of appeal. Independence will be entrenched by law. It will seem incomprehensible to future generations that any school which was full and thriving ever faced the wrath of the authorities. But just now, the political battle rages. The bureaucrats, like trade union leaders in the early 1980s, fight to maintain their unanswerable power. Maximum political pressure needs to be massed against them.

Which brings me, oddly, to the demise of Dr Liam Fox. The Defence Secretary allowed his informal adviser Adam Werritty to get tangled in a web of lobbying interests. This was wrong. But it is the bureaucrats, not the public interest, who will do well out of this fiasco. By our constitution, ministers are supposed to be in charge of them. Nowadays, empowered to investigate their own ministers, the civil servants are in charge of their masters’ conduct. They will make sure that Dr Fox’s successor has even less political freedom to operate than he did.

Mr Gove has no Fox-y problem with commercial interests. But if you look at his valiant efforts to achieve permanent change in British schools, you will see that he could get little done through strictly official channels alone. He needs to have political outriders with him, clever young special advisers who can work out quickly when an anxious parents’ group needs support or when an archbishop needs telephoning. Such advisers are anathema to the regular Whitehall apparatus.

Now that Dr Fox has gone, watch as the emboldened established powers turn their fire on Mr Gove – or on whichever secretary of state is trying most actively to take power from the bureaucracy which has misruled us for so long.

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