UK schools fiasco was accident waiting to happen, but Boris Johnson didn’t see it
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Pundits are rightly accused of exercising the wisdom of hindsight, but some political disasters really are inevitable and have been loudly predicted before the event.
The UK government’s most recent fiasco, over the grading of state examination results for 18-year-old school students, was one such event. It was an accident waiting to happen and everyone seemed to know it, except Boris Johnson’s ministers and the regulator in charge.
There’s a deeper lesson here for the ruling Conservative Party: if it wants to avoid being blamed for these regular bureaucratic crises — or, even better, if it wants more competent management of public services — it must give up its addiction to a highly centralised state, where the buck can only stop with the politician in charge.
Johnson says he wants his to be a transforming administration. For the country’s sake, one can only hope that he means it. The Conservatives have to learn the lesson that comes hardest to British politicians of all stripes by decentralising powers far beyond the cloistered world of Whitehall, where public servants and politicians exist cheek by jowl and compound each others’ policy mistakes.
The exam-grade debacle shows the system’s inadequacies. Back in early July, a House of Commons committee report, chaired by a feisty Tory MP, warned that the education regulator, Ofqual, was heading for trouble after the latter ingeniously decided to give an algorithm the job of deciding A-level exam grades. The report said the algorithm would favour the children of rich parents taught in small classes in private schools. Bright children in big state schools would suffer. In August this prediction was amply fulfilled. Ofqual and the education secretary Gavin Williamson had sat on their hands and screwed up.
Williamson duly stuck the blame on Ofqual. In his self-serving view, he wasn’t politically accountable. Ministers set the policy, goes the theory, public servants are responsible for implementation — and errors.
Yet it’s the politician’s job to intervene when emergencies loom. There’s no such thing as “arms length” in a crisis affecting anxious 18-year-olds with university offers to fill and their even more worried parents. Williamson and his ministry failed to act, even though he had the power to intervene. Eventually, he was forced to fall back on teacher estimates for the grades, such was the outcry.
The education secretary has form: he botched the reopening of schools in the summer term. Instead ...
The UK government’s most recent fiasco, over the grading of state examination results for 18-year-old school students, was one such event. It was an accident waiting to happen and everyone seemed to know it, except Boris Johnson’s ministers and the regulator in charge.
There’s a deeper lesson here for the ruling Conservative Party: if it wants to avoid being blamed for these regular bureaucratic crises — or, even better, if it wants more competent management of public services — it must give up its addiction to a highly centralised state, where the buck can only stop with the politician in charge.
Johnson says he wants his to be a transforming administration. For the country’s sake, one can only hope that he means it. The Conservatives have to learn the lesson that comes hardest to British politicians of all stripes by decentralising powers far beyond the cloistered world of Whitehall, where public servants and politicians exist cheek by jowl and compound each others’ policy mistakes.
The exam-grade debacle shows the system’s inadequacies. Back in early July, a House of Commons committee report, chaired by a feisty Tory MP, warned that the education regulator, Ofqual, was heading for trouble after the latter ingeniously decided to give an algorithm the job of deciding A-level exam grades. The report said the algorithm would favour the children of rich parents taught in small classes in private schools. Bright children in big state schools would suffer. In August this prediction was amply fulfilled. Ofqual and the education secretary Gavin Williamson had sat on their hands and screwed up.
Williamson duly stuck the blame on Ofqual. In his self-serving view, he wasn’t politically accountable. Ministers set the policy, goes the theory, public servants are responsible for implementation — and errors.
Yet it’s the politician’s job to intervene when emergencies loom. There’s no such thing as “arms length” in a crisis affecting anxious 18-year-olds with university offers to fill and their even more worried parents. Williamson and his ministry failed to act, even though he had the power to intervene. Eventually, he was forced to fall back on teacher estimates for the grades, such was the outcry.
The education secretary has form: he botched the reopening of schools in the summer term. Instead ...
