The Daily Novel

At first sight the changes at education should please the workers at the chalk face. Blair famously used all his rhetoric to proclaim his commitment to them; when asked what his priorities were he replied, ‘Education, education, education’. In practice his education secretaries reinforced the introduction of the new managerialism to the university sector started under the Thatcher government. Blair had his own backroom boy as a junior minister who thought he knew better what was good for education than the teachers.

Brown with his clunking fist has given education real clout at the cabinet table. In his reshuffle he has given education two cards in the pack. And Ed Balls who is to be responsible for the schools sector is the joker in the pack. He is one of the new Prime Minister’s oldest friends who is widely known and respected by the Treasury and in the City, and who is intelligent enough to realise that the new managerialism is mostly claptrap. Like twelve others amongst the twenty-two sitting around the cabinet table he is part of the Oxbridge elite. He went on from there to Harvard as a Kennedy scholar, one of the best places to make contacts with the American elite at the same time as getting a first class education. He began his work life on the Financial Times. As did Shirley Williams, one of old Labour’s best education ministers, nearly forty years earlier.

Brown intriguingly also tried to bring Shirley Williams, now a Liberal Democrat, into the government as part of his botched attempt to co-opt Britain’s third political party to the success of his administration. Apparently, the Baroness is still considering taking on a role as an adviser and giving him the benefit of her fine mind, vast experience, and, co-incidentally, her own Harvard connections.

What all this signals is that the Blair era of faith in faith schools is at an end. Though Brown is a son of the Manse and no less ardent in his private religious beliefs than Blair, he is not a closet catholic and is highly unlikely to fill the junior education posts with colleagues of that ilk.

John Denham is quite as much his own man as Ed Balls, though he comes into the cabinet with the delightful Blairite job title as Innovations, Universities and Skills Secretary. (Yes, just think about. You can as a cabinet minister realistically attempt to influence how universities are run. But what can you do about influencing the development of innovations and skills, apart from write articles for the newspapers and rabbit on about it on the television.) Denham is one of tiny minority of the new cabinet who went to a decent old fashioned metropolitan university and entered Parliament as the MP for his university town (Southampton). He was one of the very few junior ministers who actually resigned his job because of his opposition to the Iraq war. Subsequently he has used his role as chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, to challenge and constructively criticise the government.

That’s the good news.

The worrying aspect is that Brown reveals his Blairite tendencies by messing around with the structure of educational administration, which day to day is done by the Civil Service. He is splitting schools from the universities, despite the steadily growing realisation, that what is needed is closer co-operation between the two sectors. The wisest voices at the chalk face have realised this for many years. It took over ten years for the unions from the older universities and the former polytechnics to merge into the new University and College Union. It will probably take more than ten years for UCU to merge with the school teaching unions. Real change just not happen quickly when it involves institutions.

Just how much havoc is created by breaking up the department of education and skills remains to be seen. Much will depend on the how well the two education ministers co-operate with each other and how much attention they pay to the huge potential disruption involved in creating new administrative units of government.

All I can do is recommend some weekend reading. Co-incidentally Frank Heller, who died last week, wrote many things highly relevant to these issues. He worked for many years at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, who were and are one of the world leaders in promoting a multi-disciplinary approach to achieving institutional change. I first met him when I was at London Business School in the mid 1970s working on a project called The Quality of Working Life. He was the director of the Tavistock centre for decision making studies for thirty years until he retired in 1999. This quote from The Guardian obituary sums up what he was about.

Frank’s abiding interest lay in the exercise of power and the consequences of sharing power, mainly in work settings. Concerned about the use of appropriate and ideally longitudinal research methods, where data is collected over time, and recognising that much could be learnt from exploring the exercise of power in different institutional contexts, he engaged in a series of comparative projects that helped to establish his reputation.

Frank did his Ph D at LSE in occupational psychology. This discipline, unlike most of the psychology taught at Oxbridge, concerns itself with how academic theory can be used to effect changes in the workplace. Inevitably that leads to a multi-disciplinary approach because as soon as you begin to study why human beings behave as they do at work, you realise that as well as internal psychological imperatives you have to look at sociological and economic influences.

The Tavistock ethos, which is also influenced by neo-Freudian thinking, is based on getting people to talk to each other at a deeper level and confronting, rather than avoiding, the conflicts that arise when human beings try and work together with other human beings. Maybe if Frank Heller had been at the Granita restaurant table in Islington, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown allegedly made their pact to resolve the conflict that arose because of their mutual wish to succeed John Smith as leader of the Labour Party, he would have been able to help them resolve their deep-seated antipathies which led to some of the nastiest feuds between Blairites and Brownites when they actually achieved power.

I like to think so. As well as an impressive intellect Frank had a keen sense of humour, which he used to change the course of a conversation. And he retained until well into his eighties a zest for life, continuing with his regular visits to the ski slopes until shortly before he died.