Coffee House Shots
Is Keir right to scrap one-word Ofsted verdicts?
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I'm quite alarmed that what we lay at the narrative has been framed around this. I mean, obviously, people have been looking at a tragic case of the head teacher who took her own life after, who's given a negative of stead review. But the BBC will send you an alert on your phone saying that the family, of the British family, of the head teacher is welcoming this move, almost as if you're looking at the future of her education through this isolated instance. Typically, in journalism, you don't ascribe motive to suicides. It's one of these ethical things about reporting, because when you look at each of these cases, there can be various complicated factors as there were in this case. So I'm deeply uncomfortable about this political framing of the off-stead through that. But also, the point about these schools, and you can drive past these schools and see that they will declare off-stead has declared us to be good or outstanding, etc. I mean, when it goes right, this is a signal which helps parents understand. So perhaps you should argue that parents should be in the dark, that the grading of these schools should be opaque. I think they said they're going to come up with a new kind of multi-format. Well, I think it all depends then on whether parents have got the ability to work out if they are choosing a first and second and third choice for the school. On what basis are they going to choose? What grounds will they have for making that choice? So what I'm concerned about is that not so much that the old system should be scrapped. I mean, the system having the words good and outstanding. There's PG Woodhouse made jokes about this a century ago about reducing schools to the extent where good means bad, which effectively does. What I'm concerned about is whether the teacher power and parents power agenda that was started by the Blair government to continue to Michael Gove is going to be killed off under the Starmer and Phillipsian government. It's still unclear to me what they're going to replace this with. They're talking about these reports, so it'd be a more thorough report in terms of where the school performed, where it didn't perform. But there's also a delay until you even get there. I think the unions are, of course, very anti-offstead. Abolish offset has been the call from the trade unions for some time. I think Richard Phillips in the past has tried to use her actually standing up to the trade unions on offstead as an example of labor not being carried to everything the unions ask for. But it can be interesting to see where they get to in terms of what actually these report things look like. Every country in the world has got an offstead or a relatively democracy anyway, because, of course, parents need some kind of guidance. I think offstead should be doubled or treble than its budgets. I mean, the problem with the system right now is that inspectors are just a few in the ground that they need to go in and sometimes only one or two days they've got to make a judgement. And I think that could be replaced with a system where they will go in and basically say to the school, "Okay, right now you'd get a bad fit results, but you need to do X, Y, and Z." And the schools are given chance to recover. So I think the offstead process is very important for the caliber of the quality of education in the country. But weakening it because the unions don't like people giving verdicts on their members' performance is that's not about children, that's just about the adults. But I mean, don't they have a point in the sense that we know that we do have something of a teacher's crisis, not enough teachers, not enough people signing up to be teachers. And the stress of these offstead inspections is one of the things that does drive that. I'm not sure if a teacher crisis, I think Bridget Phillips is kind of conjuring this up. If you look at how many teachers we need, which is how many we've got, there's less than 1% difference. Now, of course, that's not ideal, but it's as close as you're going to get in a kind of system like this. But the system itself, like for example, Peter Hyman, who was influencing Keir Starmer, is a great advocate of Orissey, for example. And Starmer's given the speech about Orissey's going to be his foundation principal for school reform. Orissey was tried on school 21, that was Peter Hyman's school. And what we know about that school is it went down two offstead ratings. And that's pretty seriously the wrong direction. So that allows us to have a meaningful discussion about techniques, whether we're tried, did they work, or did they not? Now, look at Catherine Bribble sings at Michaela Free School. That's one of the, I think it's ranked the best single school, state school in the country, for improving the performance of kids. So you can look at the other thinking, what experiments did they do there, what techniques did they use, what worked, and what didn't. So all of these things are actually, these tools are interesting and important, into working at what's going right and what's going wrong. And so I'm not quite, so I think what we need is a greater, a bigger offstead with more resources, which is able to give more report. I'd like, for example, head teachers to be able to go through a drill, being able to call offstead teachers, even if it's not their offstead year and say, look, if you'd come in right now, what would you give us? Where are we good, where are we bad? That's the kind of relationships you would need. But it all depends on taking a Blairite or a Brownite approach to education. And right now, I'm not saying it's Brownite, it's just not clear to me how Blairite it is. I mean, I'll give you one example of that. Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, he was on the gifted and talented scheme when he was young. He credits that Blairite reform with a kid from modest background, like him being given an elite education and going on to succeed as he did. Now, the gifted and talented scheme was abolished by the Brownites because they regarded it as elitist. There is a massive divide within the Labour tradition here, and it's still not clear to me which way we're going. Katie elsewhere, we've had some Tory leadership campaign launches. Could you take us through them? So Parliament is back today, and he's gathering for the first time since the summer recess. That's the Labour legislation that I'm sure we'll get into more than further in the week. But this morning, you've had the launch of the Cammie Badenot campaign and the launch of the James Cleverley campaign. You've also had Robert Janrich meeting with various senior journalists for a bit of a welcome back. And then we're getting a Tom Teugenhart speech tomorrow, Puty Patel launched on Friday. So I think, taken together, of course, this is all ahead of the first knockout round on Wednesday. I think there was probably the most anticipation ahead of Cammie Badenot's launch because she, quite early on, the message from her team was effectively. She's going to properly get going in September. You'll see her doing some things in August. I mean, she did definitely do some of the hustings and did some touring and meeting members. But I think they were quite clear that the official launch would have to wait. And today, it was interesting because you can contrast it with the James Cleverley launch that happened an hour or so after. And James Cleverley was talking about specific policy measures. Obviously, a former Foreign Secretary. He was talking about 3% defense spending that he wants to do. He was talking about abolishing stamp duty. He was talking about building upwards and planning regulation. He was really trying to, I think, demonstrate what he wanted to do in terms of policy, if he would have come lead to the opposition and then somehow get to the place where you're making promised election, maybe you get to government and get to do things. Cammie Badenot taking a very different approach saying that she does not want to get into policy. And actually, why have the same policy debates that the Tory party had the past couple of years when they were in government, they had the chance to do it? And if they didn't, is it not a bit of time to actually take a step back and think more about beliefs, frameworks, founding principles? And there, she was talking about how her party needed to be happy, to be confident in the Conservative again. She said in her campaign video, which they played before it started, that, you know, Nigel Farage, Qistama, have something in common. They both sound very negative about Britain. She actually loves Britain. In the Q&A, she was pressed a bit on, well, what about some of your colleagues who say you're abrasive? And she said, well, actually, the only people she really wants to turn her attack on are Labour and others, not her own party. And she plans to, I think, make that clear to colleagues. So, two different, two very different ways of doing it. When Kami Baden was asked about net migration, for example, both Tom Thuggenhardt and Robert Genwick have said that they would be, you know, in favour of a cap. She said, well, why are we getting into caps? Because David Cameron did it. It was hard to meet. You can't say they're pros and cons, but maybe the lesson is that we need to stop just coming up for arbitrary numbers. And she also said, similarly, ECHR, saying you're going to leave it as a bit too simple. And then why do you need to rush into these things? I think the question is, is that sustainable? And maybe she'll change tech for quite a long contest, but when most of your other candidates, bar mails tried to, hasn't even had his official launch yet, are getting really into policy as they try and amp up things about them. If you're the person constantly saying, well, I'm not going into that, is that going to get a tricky dynamic? I think it has the potential to, but certainly there was quite high energy. Francis Moore, the Cameroon cabinet minister, introduced her, and then Claire Katino, closer as she's seen our ally, and then was the current MP to introduce her. Which is obviously, I think, trying to say something about it. She has significant figures in the Tory party behind her. And Fraser, just finally, we are entering the business end of what has been a very long Tory leadership contest. Who have you been most impressed by, or maybe surprised by? If I can subtly dodge that question and answer instead what I've noticed as editor, our readers, first of all, aren't particularly interested in this. When you look at the traffic figures, it's not getting great. Of course, we're covering it brilliantly, as we cover all politics, brilliantly. I think that the Cami Badenock blogger wrote earlier is currently the second most read. Fraser, before you completely undo my work. What was first getting? How creative Scotland was corrupted by gender ideology? Exactly. Now, the point is, it's not setting the tether at once. Cami Baden is currently beating the AFD. There you go. Right. Well, Katie, anything you write needless to say, right, is... Just if we're going to go there. Also, let's get back to your point. I do agree with Fraser broadly speaking. I think it's hard to know what public interest there is in a very long contest, but people who, you know, at minimum are going to be in power in four five years. And what Katie was saying in our last column, I think, explains a lot of it. There was an impression that this is not going to be the Tory leader who fights for next election. But this is going to be a caretaker. But, instead, if they thought this was going to be the caretaker, as it were, the person who's going to take on Keir Starmer until the next election, there might be more interest in this, but there isn't. I've actually been impressed at how Robert Generic has improved his position so much from where he started it. Impressed at his parliamentary kind of deafness, he seems to have had more success than Cami Baden, so far. In building unlikely allies, we saw Neil O'Brien, who was very close to Cami part of her team, endorsed Generic at the weekend. I thought that was quite significant. I mean, he's obviously, I think he's quite keen on the ECHR, for example, so people will have their various reasons. It seems to me as if Cami Baden's strength is with the membership, which is very recognizable, and in her campaign launch video, it makes all the right points there, that this year as a fighter, somebody who's conversation tends to turn towards. But to get to that stage, she needs the MPs to put her in the final two. And at the moment, I think that's in the balance. And I think it's in the balance because the way that MPs see this race is very different to how the members see the race. And it seems that Robert Generic has been working with the most success, in relative to a starting position amongst the members. Well, thank you, Fraser, thank you, Katie, and thank you very much for listening. 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