To this it adds repeated demonstrations of the high level of care that the staff at Passmores School provide for children in distress: Sam the ‘rebel’ who has given up on maths and is taking out his frustration on Dean; Vinni who cannot control his rage; Ashley who has been ostracized by her friends; Brad who wants to smash up the boy now going out with his ex.

Leaders, teachers and support staff are clearly determined to keep students on task so that that they, and all their peers, can leave Year 11 with the qualifications they need if they are to take the next step in their lives.

In an early episode, the ubiquitous deputy head Stephen Drew worries that people watching the programme will think they are a ‘spineless’ bunch of idiots for not excluding difficult children. Predictably, the Daily Mail used an article on the programmes to call for the return of ‘firm discipline’, going on insultingly to suggest that the occasional four letter word muttered under their breath by teachers was a cause of their problems, rather than a reflection of the humanity they are seen repeatedly deploying to make an emotional connection to their charges.

The series opens with, and continuously returns to, scenes of Mr Drew standing at the door to greet students, confiscate hooded jackets, comment on inappropriate shoes, pick up on other infractions of the dress code and identify any children who are showing signs of going off the rails. It is a scene that will be familiar to many who work in secondary schools.

Mr Drew explains his stance as being intended to provide young people with ‘very strong guidance’. There is, he reflects, ‘a constant wish to treat young people as autonomous, to always give them opportunities to express their opinions, to always let them be able to make decisions’. This, though, he considers ‘detrimental’.

Such an approach is in line with the recommendations of Charlie Taylor’s behaviour checklists, recently published by the Department for Education. What struck me was the ritualistic nature of the infractions and the enormous amount of energy expended in responding to them. ‘If you choose to be very intent on these things,’ Mr Drew himself observes, ‘you have to accept that things are going to be quite relentless.’

I started to wonder whether the deputy head’s remorselessly revved up condition got in the way of evolving ways to achieve even more by doing much less: more specifically by building up the two things that seem to be missing from the world of the school as it is presented on the screen.

The first of these is recognition of the need to help distressed young people find the words that will enable them to describe the world from their perspective. Adults continuously tell them about the losses they have experienced and how this makes them feel – sometimes sparking further irritation. They then try vainly to persuade these young people to accept the given line. “I need you coming in with the right attitude and frame of mind,’ someone says to Luke, whose grief at the death of his grandfather stands powerfully in the way of him hearing this message.

Too often, it seems that adults fill with their own words the space created by the difficulty young people are having in understanding their feelings and finding a way to deal with them.
The second thing we never see is young people themselves being offered the opportunity to find better ways of sorting out the difficulties that some them are having. We know there are systems available for this, because Grace is stripped of the badges she wears as Peer Mentor, Peer Listener and Anti-bullying Counsellor after she has been found out sending vicious text messages to the head girl Gabriella – thereby powerfully communicating the uselessness of these systems. All responsibility for managing the school community, it seems, must lie with stressed, time-pressured and sometimes exhausted members of staff.

Many viewers of the programmes will believe with Education Secretary Michael Gove that teachers will be respected more if they are allocated greater ‘powers to punish’, and children are no longer treated ‘like adults’.

But there is another way: recognising that children’s capacity to take responsibility grows when they are given real responsibility, that respect grows much stronger through dialogue, and that it is much easier for people to abide by rules they feel they have had a role in shaping.

Some, of course, will see this blog as being in the same category: just another attempt to put forward the Antidote point of view. Here we are again talking about the need for a different sort of conversation between adults and children, one that will divert ugly disaffection towards positive and creative community building. Here we are again presenting the case for what we do in schools, and therefore know ‘works’.

For us, a riot is a form of communication. Its self-destructive futility is an indication of how inchoate is the distress hunting for expression. It’s no surprise that the rappers and masked perpetrators invited to appear in the media cannot offer clear explanations. The feelings that drive people to riot and loot lie beneath the surface, hunting for a way to be articulated and thought about..

Responding to this form of expression by jumping to conclusions about what is being said and what needs to be done in response will not make anything better. The way we work in schools is to provide everyone in the community (adults as well as young people) with opportunities to describe their experience. We then help them turn these expressions of despair and hope into a coherent analysis of what is going on that they can all buy into, and a strategy for making things even better that everyone has a stake in implementing. The success of this work largely depends on our capacity to dissuade school leaders from dismissing what is being said as a ‘whinge’, jumping to conclusions about why people are saying what they are saying, and then rushing to implement ‘solutions’.

The problem with ‘commonsense solutions’ is not that they are all irrelevant or have no capacity to do good, it is simply that they cannot in themselves constitute an effective strategy for matching what is done to what is needed. Such a strategy needs to be built around systems that give everyone in the community ways of communicating what they are thinking and feeling, and then ways of listening hard to each other. This is what opens the way for two-way communication, for people’s discovery that they share certain forms or experience with others, and may be caught up in patterns of interaction with others that don’t work for either party.

Much of the response so far to what has taken place tells young people that the adult world is not interested in dialogue. The communication is ‘We already know what you are saying, and what we are going to do about it’. And a lot of it is even worse than that. Those who argue for long prison sentences, removing benefits and expelling people from social housing appear to think it will help to push those who are already alienated and disconnected further beyond the pale. By gushing oil on today’s embers, the source of future conflagrations is laid.

The real challenge, then, is to embed across our schools and communities ongoing ways of enabling children, young people and adults to have a shared conversation about what is happening for them and what can be done to make things even better. For that to happen, we have to recognise that the rioters are people like us, part of the communities to which we belong. From the evidence on display so far, that is the biggest challenge of all.

• Having warm and trusting relationships among students and staff;
• Encouraging participation by the whole school community;
• Supporting the autonomy and sense of responsibility of every individual;
• Establishing, sharing, communicating, and reinforcing a coherent set of values and expectations.

The Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) strategy was developed in the UK over the past decade with an understanding of the significance of these dimensions of school ethos. Yet, the extent to which this understanding has been carried through into schools’ implementation of SEAL is variable. As we look to the future of social and emotional learning in schools, we reflect on the opportunities – and the challenges – posed by a consideration of the whole-school processes that relate to school ethos.

Both Primary and Secondary SEAL involved the development of curriculum materials to help staff create ‘learning opportunities’ to promote social and emotional skills. These materials were accompanied by guidance, additional resources, and training for staff; indeed, in the case of secondary SEAL, guidance on key principles was the central driver. Particular emphasis was placed on building a supportive school ethos, with warm personal relationships, clear boundaries based on positive behavior management, engagement of all pupils, participation at all levels, the encouragement of autonomy, and clear leadership from the top. Thus, from the outset, the guidance pointed out the importance of school ethos and whole-school engagement in the delivery of the strategy, and also recognised the potential value of SEAL work in strengthening school ethos.

Given this likely bi-directional link between school ethos and the implementation of SEAL, an understanding of variation among schools becomes absolutely critical. In fact, SEAL guidance has from the beginning emphasised the need for flexibility in schools’ approach to promoting social and emotional skills in children and young people: “The SEAL resource is built on the premise that each school or setting should find its own way into, and use for, the materials” (p. 11 of Primary SEAL guidance).

In fact, the findings of two recent investigations of SEAL published last year (Banerjee, 2010; Humphrey et al., 2010) show exactly why attention to variations among schools is essential for probing the development of SEAL work across the UK. Across both studies, there was a clear convergence of data showing that the delivery of SEAL varied dramatically from school to school. This heterogeneity means that searching for overall conclusions about the impact of ‘being a SEAL school’ is likely to lead us to a dead end. Some schools may have started out with a strong ethos, and SEAL may have helped them to build an even stronger one within which pupils’ social and emotional skills could be effectively supported. Yet, we also know that other schools started with SEAL but found it very hard to sustain positive action to develop a coherent strategy, while others still have undertaken isolated or fragmented ‘SEAL’ activities without grasping the underlying whole-school principles that need to underpin such work.

These variations matter a great deal. The investigation reported by Banerjee (2010) last year showed that: a) pupils and staff rated their school ethos more highly where SEAL was implemented as it was intended – in a sustained way across the whole school with real leadership support, engagement of all staff, and universal provision for all pupils; and b) these patterns were correlated with key indicators of behaviour, attendance and attainment. These associations are only a starting point. More careful and systematic work is required in order to understand the complex range of factors that influence the implementation of SEAL work, and the diverse ways in which over time this has an impact on how staff and students interact with each other, as well as on the wider outcomes of behaviour, well-being, and learning.

And we should be clear that this might involve work over a long period of time. As noted above, schools have to work out their own way of implementing the principles provided by SEAL. They have to go at their own pace, build on their own history, respond to their own situation, and find effective ways of deploying their own resources. The full engagement of staff in delivering the programme has to be built up, sometimes against resistance and cynicism. So, in many schools, effects of such an evolving programme of activity, with such a potentially wide scope, may take a great deal of time to appear.

As we grapple with a whole raft of changes to our educational system, we inevitably – and rightly – scrutinize existing strategies, and look for things that work. Some people dismiss SEAL because they personally dislike the idea of taking part in such ‘lessons’, because they think those lessons don’t work, and/or because they assume that this work takes time away from the academic curriculum. Is it too risky to stick with an approach that leaves too much up to the school to decide for itself how to interpret the key principles and how to develop a whole-school approach? Should we instead be pushing for a strictly-defined set of ‘proven’ teaching resources, restricted to classroom-based scripted and manualised activities, and requiring fidelity to ‘the programme’?

In fact, these are not mutually exclusive options. In both primary and secondary phases, SEAL was never intended to just be a curriculum or collection of learning activities for teaching social and emotional skills in a set of dedicated lessons. Rather, from the beginning, SEAL was also presented as a set of key principles that provided a clear framework for action, incorporating its own materials but also allowing the flexibility to draw in other activities, resources, and programmes. And there clearly is a place for programmes that target particular needs, develop particular skills, or address particular problems. But SEAL offers the opportunity for such work to take place within a broader set of key principles and a framework that places social and emotional skills – and the relationships and values that embrace them – at the heart of the school community.

The benefits of social and emotional learning programmes cannot be said to be truly sustainable in school until the work is embedded within a supportive ethos that permeates the whole school community, rather than restricted to the knowledge and skill of particular members of staff who have been on the right training course. With this understanding, schools need to work actively to engage their staff – the resistant as well as the enthusiastic – their students, and the wider community in shaping warm relationships, providing opportunities for participation, stimulating autonomy and responsibility, and developing and communicating a shared set of values. Keeping sight of this bigger picture may be the most important platform for success in future efforts to promote pupils’ social and emotional learning.

One study showed a significant correlation between whole-school, universal implementation of SEAL, pupil/staff ratings of social and emotional ethos, and key indicators of behaviour, attendance and attainment. The other found that the programme failed to impact significantly on pupils’ social and emotional skills, general mental health difficulties, pro-social behaviour or behaviour problems.

The apparent contradiction between these two sets of results is alarming. If different research methodologies lead to wildly different results, how can one say anything meaningful about this sort of approach? If one report supports the arguments put forward by promoters of an emotionally literate approach to education, and the other supports their opponents, how we can ever escape sterile ding-dong arguments.

In reality, though, the fundamental difference between the two reports lies in the schools they were looking at.

Robin Banerjee, who is based at the University of Sussex, deliberately chose primary and secondary schools where there had been whole-school implementation of SEAL which was supervised by a SEAL Regional Adviser. These were schools that had a designated SEAL lead, one who put time, energy and resources into implementing the programme.

By contrast, the 22 secondary schools whose results were analysed by Neil Humphrey at Manchester University were often lacking in the ability to sustain interest in the programme. Many schools seem to have selected pockets of activity or development to focus on at the expense of the ‘bigger picture’. They reported difficulty sustaining the effort required to drive SEAL forward, especially in the face of competing pressures. They tended to become disillusioned when results did not come quickly.

Ultimately, then, the two reports do generate one clear message. This is that if a school takes on the development of an emotionally literate ethos as a whole-school, long-term enterprise, allocates adequate time and resources, leadership, skill and will, then the outcomes will be positive and beneficial. If, on the other hand, the approach is adopted piecemeal and without enthusiastic support from ‘the top’, the outcomes will be minimal, or even somewhat destabilizing to the ethos of the school.

For those schools that can maintain enthusiasm and energy through time, the prize is significant. Banerjee finds that strong whole-school universal ratings of SEAL implementation and better ratings of social and emotional ethos are associated with better Ofsted ratings of behaviour, lower levels of persistent absence and better Key Stage 2 SATs and GCSE results.

A striking finding is that attainment results show a direct link with ratings of how well schools integrate SEAL into learning. The report estimates that 49.8% of school-level variance in the attainment results could be accounted for by differences in the social and emotional ethos and implementation ratings. It also shows that Ofsted ratings of behaviour, pupil/staff ratings of social and emotional ethos and Regional Adviser ratings of SEAL implementation all independently predict attainment results. This shows a direct relationship between school ethos and attainment alongside an indirect connection with attainment via the link with positive behaviour.

She was speaking at the annual gathering of the authority’s headteachers in Poole’s magnificent Sandbanks Hotel. I was last there to give a presentation on emotional literacy to Hampshire’s educational psychologists. On this occasion, my role was to answer any questions that people might have about Antidote’s display on PROGRESS; so I had to resist the temptation to jump up and down as a way of calling Claire’s attention to my presence in the room.

What headteachers have to deal with nowadays, she said, are ‘wicked problems’. You cannot take a plan down from your bookshelf, or dream one up through solitary reflection while driving home from work. That’s because ‘wicked’ problems don’t have ‘solutions’ as such. What you should be aiming to develop is a shared route through the traps and opportunities that arise.

The first step in addressing a ‘wicked’ problem, Claire said, is to come up with useful ‘open’ questions. To do that, you need to start with an accurate diagnosis of the situation you are in, and a clear sense of where you want to be heading. That will only happen if you bring together a good group of people – including those who think differently from you – to shape those open questions.

You then need to ensure that you take everyone with you; so time spent on building, maintaining and strengthening relationships is key. They ensure there is the collective and individual resilience needed to negotiate the storms that will inevitably arise. And, as you set out, you need to have a firm eye on the things that are important to you, to keep scanning the horizon for the unintended consequences of your actions and to listen to the experience of everyone in your community.

Every point that Claire made highlighted another aspect of what PROGRESS facilitates. Unfortunately, the headteachers in the room were too busy discussing the challenges they face to spend much time at the Antidote stall.

Still, I left Dorset more than ever committed to ensuring that one day they and others will discover how PROGRESS can help them provide young people with the best possible opportunities to learn and grow.

This weekend I attended a conference in Brasov, Rumania, to talk about PROGRESS and explore its potential value for educators in that country.

The event was billed as an opportunity to look at ways of preventing violence in schools. This is not, of course, how we bill PROGRESS. We do, though, recognise  that giving people a democratic voice is the best way of defusing aggression.

My preference for promoting positives rather than reducing negatives was a habit I shared with the other delegate from England, Colin Moorhouse of the Metropolitan Police, who spoke before me, about the strategies being adopted across Europe to promote ‘safer schools’.

Many came up after our joint workshop to say how much they enjoyed, valued or were excited by what we had said. But when two of them described the proceedings later in a plenary session, their repeated references to ‘preventing violence’ suggested a disconnect between what we had said and what they had heard.

I found myself wondering why violence was people’s main preoccupation here. Was it a response to a few dreadful incidents, or was violence rather an undercurrent that ran through their everyday experience of school? What links, if any, were there to the violence of the Ceasescu era that ended in 1989, or their more recent exposure to batterings from the market economy?

A researcher from the Institute of Educational Sciences in Bucharest observed that many aspects of how schools are organized can stimulate aggressive feelings and actions. Another speaker talked about how teachers themselves provoke violent acts by their own aggression, and it was tempting to wonder how much aggression on the part teachers derived from the lack of status reflected in their already miserable salaries, which have recently been cut.

But, given the theme of the conference, it was intriguing that almost the only reference to actual violence came from a local gendarme as he described the shocking behaviour of Liverpool football fans on a recent visit to Bucharest. It felt as if the real issues around violence in Rumanian schools were too raw for anyone to properly address them.  ‘We don’t have a problem with violence here’, said the Principal of a High School we visited before the conference. ‘Our interest in the subject is purely preventative.’ I found myself wondering why he could not be more honest.

In the space between the sessions, I talked to teachers about the extreme pressures on young people that come from their being regularly graded by their teachers, both on academic performance and behaviour. A consistent low grade on the latter apparently rules out a job in the police or the military – a strangely self-defeating rule.

The teachers in our workshop were intrigued to hear that our comprehensive system means students with widely different abilities are educated in the same place. How did teachers manage a class? they asked. What did a typical lesson look like? In Rumania, students are segregated on the basis of their grade performance over three years.

Like teachers in France, Romanians are very focused on their subject specialisms. The Chief Inspector for Brasov said it was difficult to develop a curriculum that felt relevant to students, because teachers prefer sticking to the subjects they know, not finding out what and how they students want to learn. Those trained during the dictatorship find it particularly difficult to embrace notions around student voice and interactive forms of pedagogy.

Another intriguing discovery was that headteacher in Rumania have very little scope to develop a team of teachers; jobs are assigned through a complex points system, and headships are generally political appointments. But someone remarked that heads did have freedom, it’s just that they are not generally disposed to use it.

Some insight into their key preoccupations can be gleaned from the questions they hoped that Colin and I could help them answer:

• What aspects of the British system would you recommend for Romania?
• What are the most important motivations for teachers?
• How can we impress on politicians the impact that teachers have society?
• What do teachers in England do to recharge their energy?
• How long does it take for teachers participating in Antidote’s PROGRESS Programme to have a positive attitude to collaborating with each other?
• How can you persuade headteachers to admit there is a violence problem in their schools?
• What has the most powerful impact – work between children, or work between children and adults?

As the conference went on, I became increasingly convinced that PROGRESS had a great deal to contribute in Romanian schools, but less clear about where it might find a foothold. Then, at the final lunch of the conference, the person responsible for inviting me suggested he might ask schools in his own region of TImisoara if they were interested in  trying out PROGRESS. When he saw how enthusiastic I was, he said he could also propose it also to schools in Hungary, Serbia, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

So watch this space to see if PROGRESS finds a foothold in Central Europe.

Every Teacher Matters, the latest report from centre-right think-tank Reform, is not a statement of government policy. However, its thinking feels sufficiently aligned with Michael Gove’s to make the exercise of spotting its non-sequiturs as good a way as any of identifying where the learning from Antidote’s PROGRESS Programme might assist the current regime.

We wholeheartedly agree with the report’s central message – that teaching improves when teachers have the freedom to learn from and with each other. The statement that ‘the schools that are most successful have an open culture’ could have come from marketing material for the PROGRESS Programme, as could its recognition of culture’s role in determining whether teachers are as good as they can be.

To us, though, the idea that an ‘open culture’ can most usefully be defined as one where senior leaders are ‘always informally popping into classrooms’ is almost as bizarre as thinking that the best way to improve a school’s culture is by putting a few teachers through capability proceedings: what Antidote has developed is a way of engaging the whole school community in a positive conversation, informed by data, that leads to teaching and learning becoming as good as they can be.

Even odder is the report’s argument that the best way to ‘strengthen the accountability of schools’ is by ‘stripping back the accountability regime’ and removing all restrictions on the setting up of free schools. This is where ideology fills the space created by the absence of any evidence. As the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed only last week, the biggest impact of parental choice is to boost ‘traditional’ teaching and expenditure on marketing.

Antidote’s argument in Freeing Schools: Shaping the Big Society is that the real ‘consumers’ of education are students: it is their choices, not those of their parents, that need to impact upon teaching in the classroom. The Reform report, though, never once alludes to the work that has gone on over the past 15 years to develop student voice as a way of informing even better teaching.

The enthusiasm for ‘full deregulation’ leads to another blindspot. After having hacked away at the ‘central bureaucratic apparatus’ so as to put the improvement of teaching totally in the hands of headteachers, no opportunities remain for external agencies to disseminate good practice or facilitate creative thinking.

And while the report talks about ‘stripping down’ Ofsted, it proposes that we leave in its hands responsibility for monitoring teacher quality, thus failing to recognise that  school inspections carried out with reference to one agency’s idea of what a ‘good lesson’ looks like are currently the biggest constraint on the freedom of those teachers the authors say they seek to liberate.

1. It would transform something that looks new-fangled into something that has its roots in the oldest traditions of education, as witness the fact that it was studied by the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition at university.

2. It might help to calm those who fill the postbags of MPs with their fears that the PSHE is an opportunity to encourage sexual freedom, drug abuse and licentiousness by making it easier to present the subject as being about the conditions for human flourishing, living the ‘good life’, realising our positive potential.

3. Any government that was serious about creating a ‘Big Society’ would want to provide opportunities for children and young people to think deeply about themselves, their relationships to others and the responsibilities they have to their various communities, and to do so in ways that might lead to changes in their position achieved through discussion and dialogue.

4. Even more than history and geography, philosophy is an activity that students engage in. While it might be possible to reduce the subject to facts (bullet-pointed lists of the big philosophers’ big ideas), that’s a pretty silly way of doing things when Roger and his colleagues at SAPERE have shown with Philosophy for Children (P4C) how powerful it can be to get children as young as four ‘doing philosophy’.

5. The study of philosophy invites students to draw on all their knowledge, opening the door not only to cross-curricular thinking but also to exploring what it means to think, learn and know. And even ministers who fret about students being diverted into such activities rather than acquiring ‘knowledge’, (by which they mean facts) might be willing to allocate some sequestrated time to a topic with such a venerable tradition.

6. If there was any doubt in ministers’ minds about the value of children doing philosophy, it should not be hard to persuade them by taking them along to witness a Year 4 class in action, and then giving them an opportunity to take part in a session themselves. It might take a while for a hard-bitten political combatant to enter the sort of reflective, dialogic space that makes a philosophy session work well, but that would be part of the learning in itself.

So, if anybody has any ideas about how to persuade Michael Gove, Nick Gibb and Sara Teather to take part in a philosophy for children session – anytime, any place – I am more than happy to arrange it.

Clearly, this result will delight those who dismiss the importance of what they call ‘therapeutic education’, and will make it yet more difficult to persuade government ministers who are anyway more inclined to see teachers as transmitters of knowledge than as facilitators of learning to allow scarce time and money to go into developing  social and emotional learning.

There is some comfort to be found in the researchers’ insistence that ‘the findings of this evaluation in no way undermine the promotion of social and emotional learning.’ ‘There is clear evidence’, they say, ‘that social and emotional learning programmes can impact upon a variety of key outcomes for children and young people. However, as delivered by the schools involved in our evaluation, the SEAL programme did not follow this trend.’

The report argues that SEAL provided schools with too loose a framework for generating the change it sought to bring about. Teachers tended to focus on particular groups of students, rather than on addressing the ‘bigger picture’. Initial bursts of enthusiasm tended to wither under the weight of other curriculum pressures. Pockets of resistance among teachers were not addressed, and insufficient resources were available for training and development. For each school, SEAL was what they decided it should be, rather than evidence-based practice.

The authors of the report suggest that the way for schools to go is towards more structured programmes like PATHS and Second Step. These provide teachers with a ‘coherent, structured and explicit model to follow from the outset in order to maximize outcomes.’ It was the prescriptive nature of these US programme that led to the last government’s decision to develop SEAL, rather than simply recommending their implementation across UK schools.  There was a feeling that, even with substantial adaptation, they would not be owned by teachers, and therefore that any impact they achieved would not be sustainable.

Antidote’s approach is to provide in the PROGRESS Programme a structured and sustained way of addressing the cultural issues that the report attests got in the way of SEAL being implemented successfully. It recognizes that staff and students do need to be going in the same direction, working together to create an ethos that allows emotional understanding to grow in a way that contributes to improved attainment.

Our experience is that it is much harder in secondaries than in primaries to bring about the sort of shift that leads to a more learning-friendly culture. There tends to be more resistance to hearing what students and staff have to say; more fundamental disagreements across the staff body that have to be addressed; more hard messages for staff and students that need to be delivered and negotiated.

Given these difficulties, it is perhaps no surprise that secondary SEAL does not seem to have succeeded quite in the way primary SEAL did.  But the fact that bringing about culture change is hard, does not mean we should give up attempting it.

As I follow the latest news coming out of the Department for Education (DfE), and scan the occasional speech by Michael Gove or one of his junior ministers, I find myself wondering what ministers think is the chain of causation that will lead from their strategies to an improved education system. While I understand that, in reality, there’s actually nothing rational or logical about the policy-making process, I feel there must be some story that ministers and civil servants tell themselves to explain the course on which they are embarked.

As readers of our latest report, Freeing Schools: Shaping the Big Society, will know, Antidote agrees that teachers and headteachers need the freedom to innovate if they are to respond effectively to the learning needs of their students. We agree too that the endless flow of initiatives from the last government tended to constrict that freedom.

So we appreciate the enthusiasm for freeing schools from ‘bureaucratic’ burdens and prescriptive requirements, even where the rush to ‘scrap’ the new primary curriculum and ‘abolish’ the self-evaluation form (the SEF – never meant to be anything other than a resource which headteachers could use or not, as they saw fit) suggests a stronger desire to prescribe what is okay, and what is not, than the rhetoric otherwise suggests.

The argument for ‘freeing’ schools from local authority control was clearly overstated by ministers: only Tory MPs who haven’t engaged with the reality on the ground could talk about schools finding themselves in an LA ‘straitjacket’. However, I can see there’s something to be said for giving schools the freedom to go wherever they like for advice, support and services – even if that does weaken the power of local authorities to bring about school improvement. (I also accept that Antidote’s position on this issue is not entirely disinterested.)

The idea behind Free Schools is, as I understand it, that being given carte blanche to do anything and try anything – unqualified teachers, compulsory Latin or whatever else – will lead to innovations that are so successful they trickle through into the mainstream, and that the success of the new schools creates competition that will galvanize everyone else’s performance.

In a way, the intention of this government is little different from that of the last when it set up Education Action Zones and the Children’s Fund, saying, ‘here’s some money to try out some new ideas in your area and see if they work’. The problem for Labour was not only that a lot of things actually didn’t work, but that there was no obvious mechanism for rolling out what did. I cannot see how it is going to be different this time: some free schools (and academies) will be good, some will be bad; many of their innovations will be idiosyncratic and their impact dependent on contingent factors. In the area where my daughter goes to school, there are already Jewish, Islamic, Christian and low-budget private alternatives on offer; and I don’t think anything they are doing either has an impact on her large maintained primary or affects my decision to keep her there.

What then of the traditionalist agenda, the call for a return to a knowledge-based curriculum, ‘strong’ discipline and teachers in suits? What happens if this is something more than rhetoric tossed out for the party’s base; that the next move is a requirement for teachers to abandon their interest in motivating young people to learn, to stop building relationships that enable their students to feel valued and cared for and to wear clothes that are entirely inappropriate to supervising a PE lesson? The answer, of course, is that the inconsistencies of the government’s position will become glaringly apparent to everyone, as was memorably suggested by the civil servant who was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that Michael Gove’s policy was to keep schools ‘at arm’s length, with one foot on their throats’.

Many people have already asked why, if ‘freedom’ is so valuable, it is only being offered to new establishments or those that chose conversion to academies. It was, after all, the policy of the liberal democrat part of the coalition to extend academy-style freedoms to all schools. And I do wonder how much passion is going to go into the development of a National Curriculum, when the government is trying to free as many schools as possible from its yoke. If it is not intended as a minimum requirement for all schools, then what’s the point of having it in the first place?

The impression I’m left with is of a government going in two directions at the same time, giving astonishing levels of freedom to one set of schools, tightening controls on the rest. It looks like a big social experiment – comparing schools with too much freedom to schools with too little – and the government’s own arguments seem to indicate this cannot work. This is the bit I really cannot work out. Can anyone out there tell me why it might work?