Yesterday, Bridget Phillipson made a speech on the attendance crisis. Bolstered by research from the Centre for Social Justice (the hosts of this speech) and previous work from Public First, she outlined measures to tackle the sharp jump in absences since the pandemic – including adding attendance to Ofsted’s safeguarding remit, providing universal breakfast clubs for primary children and using, er, AI to join up records for children across school, health and social services. Slipped in near the end of the package was a brief reference to language development interventions; curriculum reform soft-pedalled, in other words, just as in Labour’s ‘Breaking Down Barriers to Opportunity’ mission statement.
If this strikes you as a social policy argument being delivered by a Shadow Education Secretary, you’re not alone. After a decade and more of emphasis on teaching and learning in education policy, Labour are suggesting that the curriculum – teachers’ bread and butter – needs to be put on the back burner for a while. For the first time in years, something other than pedagogy, standards and the curriculum is being framed as the main obstacle to achievement, and the attendance crisis is a manifestation of this. Both recent reports on attendance highlight that it is rarely the quality of teaching that leads parents and carers to keep their children out of school. Instead, it is lack of support for issues adjacent to their learning, such as mental health difficulties and SEND challenges. In a striking section of the speech, Phillipson refers repeatedly to barriers that children face without touching on the curriculum (a word that features only once in the speech):
It is that wider sense in which the school system is failing. Barriers to learning. The fastest growing legacy of Tory rule.
Barriers because children haven’t come in. Barriers because children aren’t ready, that day or that year. Barriers because children haven’t slept, and can’t concentrate. Don’t succeed when they should, aren’t learning when they ought.
Barriers because the children simply aren’t well. Barriers that speak to the wider failure. The piling of expectations on schools alone, that schools alone can never meet.
I wonder if Labour realise how bold a statement this is, and how radically they’re breaking with the way that education policy has been made over the last fifteen years. Ever since Michael Gove brought Katharine Birbalsingh on stage at the Conservative Party Conference in 2010, the Tories have bet the house on teachers. In keeping with Gove’s meritocratic understanding of education, initiatives focused chiefly on how better teaching could produce better outcomes. The curriculum changed; new professional qualifications sprang up; the content of initial teacher training attracted more scrutiny. Alongside this emphasis on teaching and learning, a battery of current and former teachers have assumed positions as civil servants, political advisers, commissioners and tsars. To solve a school problem, the theory ran, you need a schoolteacher. There’s an extent to which it’s worked, too: post-pandemic PISA outcomes were less bad than in other jurisdictions, and English pedagogical expertise enjoys a global reputation. It’s no wonder Phillipson praised Gove’s ‘energy’ and ‘high standards’.
But after almost a decade and a half of this approach, Phillipson’s speech implies that Labour sees the problem differently. This speech makes a claim that the balance has swung too far away from the basic necessities, such as food, housing and mental and physical health provision, that make it possible for children to benefit from good teaching. It’s a claim I think they have ample grounds to make: although the attendance crisis provides an obvious and immediate fulcrum, the stagnation of outcomes and widening attainment gap over a longer period speak to a crisis which predated Covid. By taking this approach, Labour have attempted to get to the root of under-achievement (they liken the Tories’ Attendance Action Alliance to a ‘Coughing Control Campaign’, tackling symptom rather than cause), but they’ve created a new dilemma in the process
Unlike poor behaviour, pedagogy and progress, absenteeism, which takes place outside schools by definition, requires the intervention of experts dealing with that problem outside schools. But the scope and severity of cuts to ancillary services has not only rendered any such experts under-amplified (or, indeed, nonexistent), it has also left schools picking up the pieces: 72% of teachers report helping students with non-academic matters more than they did five years ago. Arguing that other services reeling from years of cuts are best placed to make the difference in education is unlikely to go down well with teachers who’ve had to pick up the slack in these fields for years. Even if it did, the dearth of commentators (and even language) to articulate problems in these fields leaves Phillipson without the luxury of strident advocates for her argument à la Bennett and Birbalsingh.. The dearth of effective advocates when it comes to these external social crises is so severe that teachers (specifically Teach First alumni) have been drafted in to shake up prisons and social work and advocate for reform in these fields. Deviating from a teacher-centric approach to education policymaking leaves Labour surveying a barren landscape for influential allies, all while risking accusations of being soft on standards and sidelining the expertise of teachers.
So should Phillipson keep teachers onside by touting them as the solution to the problem? That option seems just as difficult. Work on teacher retention highlights the expansion of the role, particularly during the pandemic, as a major factor in teachers leaving the profession. Many teachers are reluctant to be treated as another wing of the emergency services amid stagnant wages and conditions that provoked massive industrial action last year. Not only that, but To put it another way, if Phillipson wanted to position teachers as the solution to the crisis in schools, she would need to make an emphatic and evidenced justification for a large, well-funded expansion of their role (and encroachment on several other professions’ areas of expertise in the process). This would do little to endear her to a profession brought to its knees by workload, or to a Shadow Treasury team with minimal fiscal headroom for such schemes and the pay demands that accompany them.
In short, Conservative school policy has envisioned a bright child struggling to learn from an under-supported teacher in a chaotic classroom. With better curriculum, teachers and assessment, they’ve argued, that child’s life chances will improve. Labour’s argument is that in too many classrooms, there is an empty seat where that child should be. This speech by Labour makes a totem of the empty seat and the ‘TO LET’ sign in the youth centre, the out-of-office email from the mental health practitioner and the parent’s bare purse in the supermarket. Bridget Phillipson has inadvertently stumbled into doing education policy via social policy, a move that breaks with decades of orthodoxy in the schools world and champions the cause of a child we can’t see. It will take all her skill to pull it off.
Will Yates Writing 
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