You may not know this, but I really really try to greet pronouncements from the Department for Education in a positive manner. But, quite frankly, they make that impossible. I’ve quickly skimmed through the latest thing, the education White Paper, from that non-august institution, and it reads to me like a mixture of creative fiction writing, wishful thinking, poor institutional memory and bad policy.

The White Paper, Opportunities for All, was published today (28 March 2022). Here are some extracts, with my comments.

I can’t say I noticed this “backing” when Gavin Williamson was in post, but perhaps I was sleeping that day.

When I first read this, I thought it said “we will deliver 5000,000 teachers”. I wondered if the DfE was going to order them from Amazon. I mean, given the dire teacher shortages in the UK and elsewhere, where would these people be coming from? I mention “elsewhere” because part of the White Paper suggests recognising teacher training qualifications gained abroad. Apart from the quality control aspect, why would those teachers come here when they are (probably) needed in their own country?

But then I realised that it’s not teachers who are going to be “delivered”, just opportunities. Fair enough: I can give you, dear reader, the opportunity to donate £1,000,000 to the Terry Freedman Benevolent Fund. Doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen. (But if you are interested, just get in touch.)

Note, in passing, the usual awful language: “delivered”. It even goes against the government’s own guidelines:

Let’s move on.

This seems to involve or at least intends to “build on” the work of the Oak National Academy to produce an “arms-length curriculum body”. There is no such thing. Before you know it, Ofsted will be asking headteachers and teachers if they are using the resources from this “arms-length” body, the implication being that that’s what is expected. The same thing happened with the Key Stage 3 Strategy, and the same thing is planned for the “voluntary” extension (for some schools) of the school day. (See below.)

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think the DfE should be getting involved at any length with the school curriculum, beyond stating, as it has done for years, that it should be broad and balanced.

Incidentally, they have used that awful word “deliver” twice in the same sentence. Do you think the people who drafted this were the inspiration for the renewed emphasis on literacy?

There’s that word again. Does this mean that the new length applies only to average schools, or does it mean that schools that currently teach more than 32.5 hours will have to cut down? At least Tony Blair wanted all schools to be above average: why is Zahawi settling for just “average”?

Anyway, I can’t work out whether this means the whole school, teachers, kids, all of that, some of that, or whether the gaps will be plugged by the non-existent tutors. Clearly, nobody at the DfE has learnt the lesson of Mulla Nasrudin’s donkey, or indeed one of Zahawi’s predecessors, Kenneth Baker. Baker decreed that teachers had to put in 1265 hours a year. I was teaching at the time, and my colleagues and I thought this was wonderful, because it was less than we were doing. We could get it down to the requisite magic number by not taking any after-school clubs. The only teachers who did not take that stance were the PE teachers, who had after-school training and weekend fixtures to take care of. Incidentally, 32.5 hours over 39 weeks comes out to 1267.5 hours over the year, so perhaps Zahawi is trying to out-Baker Baker.

Even though this new week length is voluntary, schools will have to publish on their websites how long the school week is, and if it’s less than 32.5 hours then Ofsted will ask why, if your school is deemed to be failing in some way. So, I am assuming that this is voluntary in the same way as a headteacher I worked for was democratic. On my first day in the school, he called me into his office:

Headteacher: Freedman, I wanted to inform you that I believe in democracy.

Me: Oh yes?

Headteacher: Yes, by which I mean that anyone is free to agree with my decisions or resign.

Let’s move on.

What an utter waste of time and money. Early in my teaching career I bought a copy of Michael Marland’s The Craft of the Classroom, which explains very clearly how to obtain orderly behaviour in the classroom. Sure, we all have bad days from time to time (especially, for some reason, when it’s windy), but we deal with it. I don’t think we need a diploma.

What we do need is adults who model good behaviour in daily life.

It is a great pity that whoever drafted this paper appear to be completely ignorant of the history of past educational declarations of this nature. Instead of learning from the past, we seem doomed, as Santayana warned us, to repeat it.

The good news is that this is only a White Paper, so may not actually make it into law. The bad news is that it probably will.