And the schools came tumbling down

This week: the most incredible graphic in Tory party history; some notes on education secretaries past; and a fantasy rail map of London.

The most incredible thing, I think, is the infographic. “Most schools unaffected,” it warned, in the same cheerily patriotic red, white and blue design the government normally reserves for inane statements like “Exporting is great”.¹ 

Given that what we are talking about here is a scandal in which hundreds of primary schools could be at risk of collapse thanks to a decade-long failure to fund maintenance, this went down like, well, a large block of concrete on a classroom full of six year olds. “Most ocean liners unaffected by icebergs,” tweeted the comedian Matt Green; “Most beachgoers not eaten by big shark,” added the actual Labour party. The Critic’s Rob Hutton simply posted a picture of Steve Coogan as the pool supervisor from The Day Today. In most British primary schools, no one died.

Greyer, wiser heads – those who start from the entirely sane and rational position that if people on the internet believe something to be bad then it must, ipso facto, be good – defended the government. This was an important and necessary act of reassurance, they argued, to the vast majority of parents whose children’s schools were not about to collapse on the little darlings’ heads. If anyone was deserving of opprobrium here, then surely it was the Labour party, for treating a tragic crisis like this as an opportunity to damage the government.

The smaller reason that this is, quite obviously, bollocks is that the graphic wasn’t aimed at the parents who needed reassuring (who will have in any case been in contact with schools). Instead, it was aimed at the rest of us. It was a political message, which means that a) it’s fair game, and b) it sucks, because “Your kids are statistically fairly unlikely to be crushed to death in our schools” is an objectively terrible campaign message. “Our incompetence probably won’t get you killed. Don’t let Labour wreck it.”

The other reason the sensible, moderate, centrist types are not in fact being sensible and moderate at all here is that it is extremely hard to see how this is anything other than a massive government failure. In its first term in office this government scrapped Labour’s various school investment programmes and failed to properly replace them. It stripped local authorities of most of their powers to monitor schools, by turning them into academies, answerable to charitable trusts or the Department for Education. And then, as a senior civil servant went on the radio to explain, once the growing maintenance backlog and the dangers it presented became clear, the then chancellor and current Prime Minister slashed funding for maintenance yet further. It’s “utterly wrong” to blame Rishi Sunak for this, Rishi Sunak has said. He has not, that I’ve noticed, explained why. 

To be fair to the man, he’s far from the only one who shares the blame here. This crisis is a direct result of a decision to disrupt existing systems but then not properly replace them; of a failure, essentially, to govern. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan can whine all she likes that she’s only been here for 10 months and has been doing her best to fix a problem while unspecified third parties “sat on their arses” (way to blame your boss, Gill). But she represents the failing department, and under any sensible interpretation of the doctrine of individual ministerial responsibility which used to hold sway in British politics she would hang for it.

Perhaps she will. If she doesn’t, it’s unlikely to be because of her own competence, questions about which have surely been raised by Monday’s “hot mic” moment. The best reason Sunak has to keep her in post is that, if she stands down, there’ll be nothing to stop her talking about who actually cut that maintenance budget. 

Some notes on education secretaries

If you wanted one image to explain how the government got itself into this mess, you could do worse than this screenshot from the official GOV.UK website. It’s a simple list of the six men and three women who preceded Gillian Keegan as secretary of state for education since the Tories returned to office in 2010, and the terms of office they served – yet it tells a story of a government descending into chaos just as clearly as, say, a list of emperors from one of Rome’s civil war-y-er periods. Look:

That is, after all, 10 holders of one of the most important Cabinet jobs – not one of the great offices of state, but certainly the next level down – in just over 13 years. There must be a fairly good chance, given Keegan’s performance this week, that it’ll be 11 before the week is out. More damning even than that is that a government website would list three different education secretaries next to terms of office labelled “2022 to 2022”.

All of which seems an excellent excuse to think about the history of this highly important government post. So, let’s fire up the numbertron and away we go.

1. It’s 4,865 days since 12 May 2010, the date on which David Cameron appointed Michael Gove as his first education secretary. Dividing that by 10, that means the average tenure of an education secretary since the Tories came to power is just over 486 days: not far off 16 months.

2. The last Labour government lasted 13 years and 10 days, or 4,758 days. In all that time it ran through six education secretaries: one every 793 days, or 2 years, 2 months. That, at the time, felt a bit choppy. 

3. Compared to the Thatcher/Major government which preceded New Labour, to be fair, it was. That administration went through seven education secretaries, but lasted a little over 18 years (6,571 days), giving an average tenure of nearly 2 years, 7 months.

So, yes: to the surprise of nobody, this government has gone through an excessive number of education secretaries in the last 13 years. It would take a touching act of faith in the genius of the Conservative party to not draw a line between that and the mess England’s schools are currently in.

4. Actually, though, I’m being a bit unfair with those numbers.