Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Parents, pupils and teachers at Downhills primary protest at plans to make the school an academy
Parents, pupils and teachers at Downhills primary in London protest against government plans to turn the school into an academy. Photograph: David Levene
Parents, pupils and teachers at Downhills primary in London protest against government plans to turn the school into an academy. Photograph: David Levene

Does Gove realise he is empowering future dictators?

This article is more than 12 years old
Peter Wilby
Michael Gove should take care – he is giving a future education secretary the power to simply abolish academies, says Peter Wilby

Four names will stand out when the history of English schooling since 1944 comes to be written.

The first three will be RA Butler who in 1944 established free secondary education for all; Anthony Crosland who in the 1960s accelerated the move to comprehensives; and Kenneth Baker who in the late 1980s introduced the national curriculum.

The fourth name will be Michael Gove who is on course to complete what Baker began: the creation of a fully centralised school system in which the secretary of state for education has the powers of an elected dictator.

Parents and teachers may have become aware of this only in recent weeks as they read about Gove's attempts in, for example, Haringey, north London, to force a small primary school to become an academy despite opposition from almost everyone in the local community. After all, Gove's rhetoric has been about making schools "independent", giving parents more options and liberating teachers from interfering bureaucrats. The free school policy in particular is presented as an opportunity for teachers, parents and community-minded individuals to try new ways of teaching children in a "big society" spirit.

But even if we accept that Gove means what he says about school autonomy, it still leaves a very large elephant in the room. He is changing, probably irrevocably, the whole balance of power in education. Keith Joseph, Baker's predecessor in the education department, lamented that no power was available to him. He had ideas, but no levers with which to implement them. Gove's successors will have roughly 20,000 levers: one for every primary and secondary school in England.

With breathtaking speed, the education secretary is removing schools from local authority control. Already, more than one in three secondary schools have academy status, and 29 local authorities have no community schools at all. The remaining two-thirds, plus the large majority of primary schools (which are still under council control), are faced with a pincer movement. On the one hand, they may be deemed to be "failing" and compelled to make way for academies, as legislation from 2010 allows. On the other, they may be so successful that Gove invites them to apply for the status of "converter academies", giving them extra funds that were previously used by local authorities for centralised services, and a decent chance of getting government approval for new or refurbished buildings.

By September this year, in addition to perhaps 2,000 academies, there will be more than 100 free schools, 24 university technical colleges (UTCs) and 18 studio schools. In the years ahead, we may also see "mathematics colleges" for 16- to 18-year-olds, announced last autumn. This, we are told, will provide admirable diversity and parental choice. But legally, all these schools are or will be academies.

This may seem a technical point, of concern only to policy wonks. It is not. The trustees of an academy have to sign a contract with the secretary of state who, for all practical purposes, is the sole source of funding. He or she, after giving notice, can turn off the tap and close the school at any time. The public, including parents, have no rights to lodge objections, still less to have them seriously considered. Nor is there any statute law concerning academies that gives anyone a basis to challenge an education secretary's decisions.

According to Sir Peter Newsam, former chief officer of the Inner London Education Authority (abolished by Margaret Thatcher for being too powerful), Gove has put "virtually untrammelled power … into the hands of his successors" and "the prospects for a dissenting school … or a whole range of a kind that a future secretary of state happens to dislike … look bleak". If the Tories dismiss Newsam as a voice of the old "education establishment", they should listen to Toby Young, founder of the West London free school, the first to get Gove's approval. "A free school's existence," he writes in his ebook, How to Set Up a Free School, "is contingent on the good will of the secretary of state".

Gove naturally believes in his own good intentions. But perhaps the following will make him pause. When Crosland introduced comprehensives, he had to use persuasion and political skill, alongside the limited powers available to him. He and his Labour successors did not wholly succeed: pockets of grammar schools survived. Under the powers Gove is acquiring, a future Crosland would be under no constraints. His word would be law, his position Napoleonic. Is that the future Gove wants?

Most viewed

Most viewed