Michaela Keeps Winning. The DfE Keeps Looking Away.

Nearly 70% A*/A at a state school in one of London's poorest boroughs should be a national case study. Instead, ministers who can't explain their own grading system treat it as an inconvenience.

Few aspects of the Labour government are more dispiriting than its unchanging ideological dogma in education. You would hope that, at the very least, a Secretary of State would seek to ensure that our schools achieve the very highest academic outcomes possible. Where excellence flourishes, politicians and their SPADs should seek to understand why it works, and whether its lessons can be applied elsewhere. The science of learning, articulated very clearly by, among others, Carl Hendrick, should be at the core of everything the Department for Education does.

Regrettably, this was not the case under Keir Starmer, and it remains distinctly absent under Andy Burnham. In certain areas Labour’s policies remain resistant to changing trends and demands. And no government department appears more thoroughly gripped by political ideology than the Department for Education. Indeed, in Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell, the department has seen two consecutive Secretaries of State who lack the ambition, curiosity, and intellectual heft you would think are essential to the office. It is not obvious that the recent occupants of the corner office in Sanctuary Buildings are at all interested in ideas that might challenge their essentially statist view of schooling. Take two obvious examples.

First, independent schools. Even the most severe critics of the sector would grudgingly admit that England has some of the finest schools in the world. We might debate funding per pupil, resources, or admissions policies, but these institutions consistently produce leaders in their fields. The economy, sport, and the creative arts all benefit from a pipeline of talented young people coming through these schools.

None of this seems to interest the Department for Education. At no point has any recent minister shown genuine curiosity about what these schools achieve and how they do it. What harm would there be in visiting, say, Wellington College or Dulwich College to understand how they have expanded so successfully overseas; or in examining how hundreds of independent schools work with local state schools; or in listening to school leaders on how they are innovating in technology, curriculum design, and pastoral care? All this expertise is ignored. I cannot think of another department so indifferent, if not outright hostile, to a leading part of its own brief.

Second, consider Michaela Community School, led by Katharine Birbalsingh. This year, once again, the school posted astonishing results, with nearly 70 per cent of A-level entries awarded A* or A grades, which is more than double the national average. Yet if you visit Michaela, you will not find the joyless exam factory its critics often claim it to be; instead, you will be struck by the pupils’ evident pride in their school and a palpable culture of optimism and ambition in every classroom. In a rational educational system, such life-changing achievement would be studied and celebrated. Instead, it is met with ambivalence, silence, or open hostility from officials at the DfE.

Why is this? Part of the answer, inevitably, is that Michaela exposes the fragility of the assumptions underpinning Labour’s current approach to schools. The scrapping of the Latin Excellence Programme, and the withdrawal of funding for schools offering the International Baccalaureate, suggest a government uncomfortable with anything that looks like academic rigour pursued for its own sake - as if they want to punish excellence rather than reward it.

Birbalsingh possesses a clear vision, formidable competence, and an uncompromising drive for standards. By contrast, ministers seem out of their depth, unable to cope with their new briefs (an inevitable consequence, no doubt, of the rapid turnover of Prime Ministers). As former Ofqual chief regulator Amanda Spielman pointed out in a withering critique, Powell appears to misunderstand both the mechanics of GCSE grading and the fundamental purpose of qualifications. Such misunderstandings produce bad policy and erode trust among professionals who expect a Secretary of State to be in command of her brief.

But there is more to it than that, because Michaela - its philosophy, its success, its explicit promotion of fundamental British values, knowledge-rich curricula, and strict rules consistently applied - is anathema to many who identify as liberal or progressive. It seems that the left (which once set great store by academic success and social mobility) has become the opposite of what it once was, captured, perhaps, by a desire to be “kind” and empathetic, rather than competitive and ambitious. This dislike of rules and high academic standards is deeply entrenched in the left: it was there in the 1990s in its opposition to Sir Michael Wilshaw’s tenure as head of Mossbourne Academy, and in the hostility shown to Sir Chris Woodhead during his time in charge of Ofsted.

As someone who teaches in both the state and independent sectors, I sense little hope or trust in the Department for Education as the new academic year begins, despite the Prime Minister’s regular talk of restoring hope to a country bereft of optimism. In place of intellectual curiosity, there remains a familiar suspicion of excellence and a dogmatic insistence that only one school model (the non-selective comprehensive) is morally qualified to teach the country’s children. Policy appears far more concerned with correcting perceived social grievances than with raising academic standards.

A genuinely ambitious government would be doing the reverse: it would search relentlessly for what works across academies, free schools, independent schools, further education, and the wider state sector. That does not mean assuming any single model can be uncritically replicated because context always matters. But it does require the intellectual self-confidence to learn from those with whom one might otherwise disagree, putting children’s prospects ahead of doctrine. Until Sanctuary Buildings embraces that mindset, genuine educational hope will remain elusive.