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Ed Balls is right on one thing at least: we do not have a "world-class" education system. When you consider the hyperbole and self-congratulation to which this Government is genetically prone, this is a huge admission of failure.
If we are not "world-class" at schooling by now, we might well wonder what has been the point of Tony Blair's "Education, Education, Education" crusade. Blairites will gnash their teeth and point out that things might be a bit classier by now were it not for the running wars about education and much else in public service reform.
Come the next election though, voters will not differentiate between warring Labour tribes: they will look at the audit of achievement, who has the better plans for the next steps and, crucially, whom they trust most to make them reality.
That is why the education wars being launched now will loom large at the heart of the battle. It is also why Mr Balls, a potential future Labour leader, has a tough sell to the most sceptical focus group in the land: parents.
Some of the early briefing around the document focused on a "10-year mission" to revive the education system, which made me laugh in a bitter sort of way. We hadn't even started our family when we had the first pledges of a decade of education reform. By the time another decade has elapsed my firstborn will have finished secondary school. "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans," as John Lennon observed.
Balls's ideas are rooted in an admission that something is not working, despite the numerous structural reforms of New Labour, and the facts support him.
The latest Pisa study, even stripped of those Eurovision Song Contest arguments about how countries assess themselves, puts Britain on a par with other states suffering a crisis of confidence in their education systems - Germany notably - and way behind the countries whose reforms have really raised achievement.
Some of this can be measured. Rather a lot of it, we just know from life. When I tried to hire extra childcare to work awkward hours around our jobs, the list of applicants quickly ran down to two. One was a young woman from Hackney who had five good GCSEs and a promising CV as a teacher's assistant specialising in literacy. The other was from Swaziland, less experienced and relatively new to the UK.
Before the interview, I was predisposed to the first candidate. But her speech was slovenly and we discussed children's books but she couldn't remember which ones she had particularly liked reading to her charges.
Simple tests like "What would you do with the kids on a rainy day?" fazed her. It was clear, however, that she had passed through the education system as a set of joyless milestones. It had left neither enthusiasm nor inspiration. She was no wantonly ignorant Vicky Pollard: but she had been utterly failed by her schooling - whatever it said on the certificates.
The other candidate turned out to be a joy. She copes with any task thrown at her, shows the children black-and-white films on rainy days and tells stories of her own naughty schooldays which delight and inform them. Just turned 20, she has the life skills and confidence to prosper in a country and culture vastly different from her own.
At this point I started to understand those parents who ship their children off to Caribbean schools: the Swaziland option also seemed enticing.
Mr Blair was, in my book, absolutely right to free up school structure and fight his own party for academies - and no one has a better idea, as David Cameron has acknowledged by adopting the programme. But there is more to schools than their structures: namely the expectation of what kind of education we want from them - and that has been too little addressed.
Now Mr Balls promises a clearout of the "clutter" from primary school curriculums overseen by the man behind the phonics drive: and changes to the primary testing regime. For children who fall badly behind, there has been no agreed process to ensure schooling tailored to their needs - the paper seeks to address this.
All parents with young children in school come to fear the impact of a small number of low-achievers, who are often disruptive: both parties need to produce more coherent and workable solutions here. Mr Cameron cannot whisk every miscreant off to a pupil referral unit; Mr Balls is still evasive on the rights of heads when it comes to what should trigger expulsion.
If it is to be more than the latest "great leap forward" the Labour plan requires a huge jump in the quality of teaching and must enable teachers to adjust how they teach different groups if "personalised" is to mean what it says.
The Children's Secretary is enamoured of the Finnish model here. It's all Scanditours in education these days - Mr Cameron is equally fixated on Sweden. What the Nordic countries have done is to ensure that teaching is a high-status profession with competitive-levels of entry. Perhaps the plan to make all teachers study to Master's level will help: but it is hard to remedy quickly the mistakes of a generation whose own education has been lacking in the fundamentals.
More fundamentally, it is not obvious how shorter tests held more frequently (in the sense that the resits allowed in his scheme would impose a near permanent state of testing) can deliver the same clarity about a school's stronger and weaker areas. Tests are the one reliable piece of evidence parents have about the standards their children are reaching and they will need convincing that an alternative is an equally reliable indicator.
What I still sense in the Brownite world view is a reluctance to address middle-class concerns directly, which is a weakness in a government which needs to hold that part of the turf from Mr Cameron's incursions. Neither Mr Brown nor Mr Balls shows any sympathy for parents who flee to the private sector. One of the more telling incidents in the Blair years was the ex-PM's reaction when asked if he had objected to a close aide choosing a private school (in London), as she was unhappy with the local choices. "Of course not!" he replied in bafflement.
Mr Brown and his allies do not radiate that same understanding of the ultimate dilemma that faces many parents, nor the same awareness of how wary they are of promises. The Schools Secretary will thus be under even more pressure to deliver on his grand plan than his predecessors in the job.
Parents won't hang around for 10 years on the off chance that the "world-class" thing may eventually come to a classroom near them.
Reader views (1)
It's all got to start with dsiscipline. You can't teach undisciplined hoards who just disrupt the class for the few that want to learn.
- Martin H. Watson, Teddington, England, 13/12/2007 14:45
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