Commenting as the Department for Education (DfE) today (Mon 28 Mar) reveal their long-awaited White Paper for Education, Paul Whiteman, general secretary for school leaders’ union NAHT, said:

“No one would disagree with the ambition that every child should be supported to achieve their full potential. I am pleased that the white paper matches the ambition long shared by every teacher and school leader in the country.

“But to achieve this the government will need to step up with more than bold words. Headlines don’t educate children; professional teachers do that. I hope the ambition in the white paper will result in the support schools need. There has been a support deficit for far too long. Schools cannot do it alone.

“It also requires a focus on the policies that are likely to make the biggest difference to pupil outcomes. This is where the government’s white paper falls short. Commitment to adequate funding, access to support services or detail on how these bold ambitions will be achieved is sadly missing. Another round of talking big and supporting small will only cheat children and young people whilst damaging the country’s long-term prospects.

“The decision to focus on the length of the school day is a very strange one given that there is very little evidence to suggest that this will have any real impact on pupil outcomes. Not only that, but it’s a policy that virtually no-one seems to have been calling for, other than the DfE. If the government believes there are examples where schools are providing significantly less teaching time than the national average, then we would understand why they would want to explore this with them.

“However, the reality is that for many schools this will involve a significant amount of preparation and consultation for the sake of an extra five or ten minutes at the start or end of the day. The logistical and financial implications of changing the length of the school day could be significant for individual schools, and frankly that work will be an unnecessary distraction when it is likely to achieve so little. Schools need to concentrate on the urgent issues not the window dressing.

“The ambition to reform school structures is likely to be controversial. Successive government reforms have left us with an incoherent and messy school system – with different arrangements governing local authority schools and academies. But the ambition to tidy up the system risks being a distraction if the government fails to present a compelling case.

“Should the government resort to compulsion the ambition will become destructive. We cannot end up in another philosophical debate about academisation. It is incumbent upon the government to successfully answer the concerns of those schools and communities yet to see benefit in making the change. If the government wants to succeed in this the commitment to further engagement has to be meaningful. Working with the sector is the only way to design arrangements that will really benefit school improvement.

“The white paper provides no information on how many more School Trusts will be needed to achieve a fully-academised system, nor how many additional teachers and subject experts will be needed to staff them. Most importantly, it is not clear whether any assessment has been done on the impact that lifting the best staff out of school to take on new central roles will have on standards in the schools they leave behind. The capacity issues associated with this ambition cannot be ignored.

“Whilst future generations may be the winners from a unified school system, this generation of children may well find that they feel the brunt, not the benefit, of structural reform. Given the disruption to education over the last two years, parents and teachers alike may well be asking whether structural reform is really the answer, and more importantly, ‘why now?’

“Given the risks involved, it is welcome that government have reiterated their promise to work with the profession in developing plans further, to ensure they do indeed raise standards, not depress them.”