Michael Pain, Founder, Forum Strategy
This last weekend marked Gordon Brown’s 75th birthday. Amongst all the commentary, what has come through is that Brown is undoubtedly seen by so many as the most principled and respected ex-Prime Minster of our times. Brown wasn’t without controversy, he could do ‘politics’, he made some key mistakes (yes, the gold sale, the microphone etc…!), but his stance on most policy issues (agree or disagree) was congruent, and his leadership on issues such as the financial crisis of 2008 was, rightly, lauded internationally, including by a newly inaugurated Barack Obama.
Beyond the landmark birthday (many happy returns, GB), why do I bring up Brown today? Well, it’s ironic that the man is making the news at the same time as Labour’s first major education white paper since Brown’s ‘Children’s Plan’ – in 2007, and I think it’s important to consider the difference between the transformational, legacy shaping policy of the Brown era and the generally well-intentioned ‘management’ policy we’ve seen in today’s white paper from Bridget Phillipson.
Again, agree or disagree with the politics, Brown – using his reign at the Treasury and his policy freedoms (as a result of his 1994 leadership agreement with Blair) – demonstrated that he came from a small but well-defined line of giant social reformers, not least including Nye Bevan, Clement Attlee, Barbara Castle, and Harold Wilson. It was an approach that merged a commitment to funding and investing in society, with an expectation that policy would create both the infrastructure and tangible participation – truly rooted in community – to secure deep-seated and long-term social reform, with clear foundations and multi-generational impact.
“(There was) an expectation that policy that would secure deep-seated and long-term social reform, with clear foundations and multi-generational impact”
And this, I’m afraid is where the chasm opens between the last Labour government (and those reforming predecessors) and this current one. This white paper addresses some important issues, it has some helpful funding and management solutions, but, dare I say it, it fails to meet this standard of ‘once in a generation’ touted on the Secretary of State’s media tour of recent days, for one fundamental reason – it does not address the root causes of the SEND crisis or, alongside that, present a sufficiently clear vision for the specific role of education in a modern world. In fact, it fundamentally confuses all these things.
Instead, it approaches the current issues as would a reactive firefighter or a well-intentioned technocrat, rather than a government with a majority even greater than Attlees’ in 1945 and comparable to Blair’s in 1997. Attlee built the welfare state from the bottom up, including the National Health Service, secured secondary education as a right, and introduced family allowances. Blair and Brown brought us Sure Start, the academy trust and NLE model empowering headteachers to lead area-wide school improvement, and landmark employment rights for parents. Those rushing to ‘welcome’ and ‘praise’ this (again, I’ll say it – well-intentioned) white paper before it was even published, probably exposed their desire to ingratiate themselves to the Secretary of State far more than providing a considered and contextual view of its reforming merits. But I digress.
This is a white paper that expects more of schools, when the issue at hand, and the solution to much of the challenges it outlines, begins well outside their circle of control and influence – the earliest stages of children’s lives. And it, increases accountability and responsibility on school leaders and teachers for issues over which they have such little control. In short, it is the continuation of an underlying and concerning trend over the last fifteen years towards more and more responsibility and accountability on schools for bigger societal issues that instead need genuine and bold reform. It is wrapped up in promises of funding, systems, paperwork and noble collaborative exercises, whilst failing to make the big, bold and focused investment it needs to make in the early years and family wrap-around support. I know this can’t all be addressed overnight, but any sense of such a recalibration features nowhere in the documentation. Indeed, on reading this, one can only begin to imagine the volume of paperwork and administration involved on already burdened school leaders and teachers who want to get on with the core work of educating and supporting children.
When Brown approached the issue of poverty, poor social mobility, and special educational needs he did so from a foundational approach. This is no clearer than in the huge investment and roll out of Sure Start – which left the legacy of a generation before being swallowed up by the austerity ‘bean counters’. Until the early 2010s, school readiness – including speech and language development – was getting better, relative poverty amongst children had fallen by 600,000, the number of pupils with a formal SEN statement fell – despite rising awareness, and more parental qualifications were being secured. This secured life chances for so many and led to the record results in our system right up until before the pandemic. This was demonstrated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies research of 2024, which found that children who were eligible for free school meals and had access to a Sure Start centre boosted their GCSE results by three grades, relative to similarly poor children who were not able to access Sure Start. It also found that Sure Start increased the prevalence of support for SEN amongst children across the system, as needs were picked up and addressed earlier on. Like the NHS, Sure Start was transformational. We are now, a decade on, paying the huge price of its closure, and the MKII version – Best Start – announced by Labour last year pales in comparison, both in terms of its reach and funding. Where as Brown spent many billions and billions on Sure Start in the 2000s (with the ‘return’ as stated above), this government is spending millions on its Best Start over the next three years – in the late 2020s! This goes to the very heart of the lack of reforming zeal and focus.
So, the white paper has missed the biggest trick, and it has fallen short. Whilst it is right, and noble, that the SEND challenges should be well managed and resourced, it has failed to ask the difficult, but most important and far more strategic question of all?: why is there rising levels of SEN in the first place and what can we do about it in a very different world to that of ten years ago? There is no doubt a combination of declining levels of school readiness and parental engagement, a lack of Sure Start style support and signposting services – including the impact on early identification of need, and greater use of technology amongst parents as well as children at an earlier age with less time in free play and engaging in social interaction, have contributed significantly to rising levels of SEN. Yet there is no reference to addressing these underpinning drivers, and so the costs of maintaining and managing this new ‘system’ of SEND will inevitably grow without the foundation underpinning to address the root issues that lead to so many children being designated as SEN as they enter or proceed through the education system. The same applies to falling attendance and poor behaviour, this is a white paper about managing the issue and constant cure, rather than getting to the cause and prevention. The costs – personal and financial – will continue for at least another generation. It’s like patching up the leaks on an ancient dam, important and noble in the short term, but you also need to be building a ‘state of the art’ one behind it.
As the recent ‘Skills Imperative 2035’ research by NFER found, the impact on life chances and the ability to secure the skills for the modern world are already well in play by age five. It states: “Children’s material, emotional and educational environments explain a significant share of inequalities in their cognitive and behavioural development (Bocock, Del Pozo Segura and Hillary, 2025a), shaping later skills. Skills are cumulative and gaps emerge early and widen over time, shaping later outcomes. Parents need more support, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.” Could the foundational need and imperative for huge early years investment be any clearer, not just for kids, but for the economy?
This is where the last Labour government was head and shoulders above this one. They knew that you had to do something bold, transformational, embedded in communities, and genuinely ‘once in a generation’ to leave a lasting legacy, not create simply a management system with some money behind it. I have no doubt many of the proposals in today’s White Paper will help mitigate the current crisis, but they are not a long-term solution and they do not come close to Attlee or Brown’s foundational and transformation institutions. They are – when it comes to it – noble initiatives with bits of money attached to them., but they also place the burden of delivery even further on schools and teachers. It was to Brown’s significant bad luck that the global financial crisis gave way to deep austerity, but his legacy of transformational reform, as we have seen, sustained for more than a decade.
So, what does this mean for trusts and schools? It means that whilst the operational may change, the visionary and the strategic is still firmly demanded of you. There are some fantastic examples of trusts that are securing the foundation of early years – as best they can – through community engagement, outreach services, and nursery provision also. And they are also building a sense of shared endeavour and pure accountability, between parents, the community and schools, from the earliest stages, where it is clear collective responsibility matters so much. The relationship between these trusts and parents is shifting, so it is not simply service provision, but partnership with purpose, with trusts enabling parents as best they can to give children the best start in life. At least the encouragement of community-centred trusts in the white paper is a positive in this regard, though the nitty gritty of making this a reality in practice will be down to trust and school leaders. There’s plenty of inspiration within the system for this, as we have been championing and advocating for at Forum Strategy for many years.
However, even on academy trusts this is largely a ‘management’ white paper. While Blair and Brown (and Gove) provided freedom for the profession to innovate, this is steeped in proposals for Ofsted inspections, no reform, just an extension of the top down accountability model that is looking increasingly outdated, despite yet another patching up of a dam with the recent new framework for schools. My fear is we will see all the old themes arise, where trusts that were intended to be responsive to their communities and pioneers, will now have an eye on the framework at every turn. It will inevitably curtail and it will straight jacket, and it will be limited by the capability and knowledge of its authors and the point in time in which they wrote it. This isn’t close to reform, its consolidation of the centre, the disempowerment of trust leaders, and a massive step away from the vision and rationale of those who created the trust sector, who were more forward thinking and far more innovative leaders than we have today. The expectations that trusts are more rooted in their community is the right one, using a national inspection framework to ensure it happens is a contradiction; this should be led by the board and made clear as part of their core responsibilities as directors.
What do I like about the white paper? Well, it has some great management stuff in it, that operationally will help somewhat
– the potential reintroduction of ‘home school agreements’, or at least the principles for some;
– Headteachers standards that will place an emphasis on working with transformative employers, school leaders and experts across different sectors to capture and share examples of outstanding leadership;
– The potential for a more focused and manageable online complaints system, designed nationally. I hope this places an expectation of parents to explain how they are helping to mitigate the issue they raise where possible; and
– Plans for schools to monitor every child’s sense of belonging and engagement by 2029 – only around 60 per cent of schools currently do so.
– The expectation that large trusts. for example, trusts with a national footprint look to achieve local coherence through local hubs or clusters.
As I say, there is a lot of well-intentioned stuff, useful tweaks and nudges. But the bigger issue that looms, despite these helpful operational nudges, is, how much can trusts and schools take on operationally where genuine wider reform and investments feels tepid?
I will add one more thing about the launch of this white paper that has undermined it. The education sector must be built on the foundation of good governance and good process. Yet, the presentation of substantial policy from the white paper to the media before it had been presented to Parliament modelled neither. It epitomised that this is a white paper geared for a world of PR and short-term headline cycles, and not providing enough reforming substance for genuine long-term change. Leaders must walk the talk.
A couple of months before the last election in 2024, Gordon Brown said: “The wilful destruction of Sure Start… after 2010 had set back opportunities for millions of children’s futures. That’s why our country desperately needs a new Sure Start…. If you provide a supportive environment to children in their early years and invest in their futures, the results will be life-transforming. I was determined after 1997 to create Sure Start to do just that.” Brown’s view was reinforced by David Blunkett who said that reinvention of the policy was “crucial to the wellbeing of so many young people in the years to come.”
My final quote here goes to Estelle Morris who, also in 2024, said “So often, policy-makers discard promising initiatives to save money and the whole cycle has to start again.”
Sadly, this Labour government, like in so many ways, and with a majority even greater than Attlee’s, are falling far short of the reforming giants who proceeded them. They have not started again, they are patching up an ancient dam, rather than building a new and transformational one behind it, ready for the decade ahead. It’s all rather disappointing. Yet…
More than anything, the biggest takeaway for trust leaders is what is not said in this white paper. An emphasis amongst trusts on community-centred leadership that generates a shared and collective sense of endeavour for the future, invests in children and families from the earliest years as far as possible, and – in doing so – spots and addresses the issues before they arise further down the road, is what will make all the difference. How best can you achieve that with the levers you have at your disposal? That is the real question.
