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With opinion polls showing the Conservative Party is likely to lose the upcoming general election, its performance in government is coming under greater scrutiny than ever before.
It has been a tumultuous time for Britain, with the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the Brexit referendum, a global pandemic and the first war in Europe for a generation.
This is the first in a series of articles examining the Conservative Party’s performance since coming to power in 2010. I We look at how education and health have developed after 14 years of Conservative government.
education
In the run up to the 2010 election, no policy area outside the economy was more prominent than the Conservative Party’s plans for the education system.
As the self-proclaimed “successor to Blair”, it was fitting that Lord Cameron (then David Cameron) followed the former Labour prime minister’s slogan “education, education, education” and made schools a key focus of his party’s reforms.
Led by one of the Conservative party’s great political reformers, Michael Gove, the Conservative government has attempted to reform the public school system with a back-to-basics approach, starting with a complete shift away from the broad range of support services that were provided to children and renaming the former Department for Children, Schools and Families the Department for Education.
Mr Gove took a two-pronged approach to reform, simultaneously overhauling both the curriculum and the assessment system, as well as giving a “rocket booster” to the academy programme by encouraging state schools to move towards academy status and away from local authority control.
The ministry also promised to push ahead with a free schools policy, allowing principals and parents to set up and run their own state schools.
But how do those who were at the forefront of the reforms look back on those changes 14 years on?
Sam Freedman was a key member of Gove’s team when the Conservative Party was in opposition and was one of the driving forces behind reforms at the Department for Education when he worked as a civil servant from 2010 to 2013.
He then wrote a book that is due to be published next month. Broken: Why nothing works and how to fix itThis suggests his thoughts on the past 14 years of Conservative government.
“The curriculum and assessment reforms have been largely successful, although of course they’re not perfect,” he said. “And if you look at our international rankings and look at how we’re doing relative to Scotland, I think it’s pretty hard to argue that we haven’t done a better job of putting together some kind of curriculum and having an assessment model that meets standards.”
“I think there are more positive and negative aspects to academies. There are some fantastic multi-academy trusts that are doing fantastic work with schools that were failing before 2010. But at the same time, it’s still not a very coherent system.”
Mr Freedman said it had been expected there would be further policy reforms to how schools are organised but that none had happened, leaving a patchwork school system of local authority schools, multi-academy associations and independent academies.
But he said reforms first introduced by the Coalition government and continued under Cameron had the larger consequence of cutting child welfare services.
“What I really regret, and what I think is causing real problems now, is that we deliberately separated schools from the whole child welfare system because we wanted to focus on education, but we didn’t properly consider that wider austerity measures would result in the abolition of many of those services, and many more children would fall into poverty.
“Perhaps we should have expected this to happen. The result is that while in theory schools are not responsible for any of these problems, in practice they have to absorb huge pressures from the failure of other services. That’s the biggest problem schools have right now, and it’s not academic. It’s schools having to deal with rising poverty and poor mental health, particularly in disadvantaged areas.”
That assessment was echoed by Jonathan Simmons, a partner at political strategy firm Public First, an education expert and former civil servant, who said “empirically standards are rising” in both international rankings and exam results.
“Children know more. They understand more and know more because of the knowledge-rich curriculum. If you talk to leaders who have been in schools for many years, they will generally say the quality of education has improved.”
The evidence, he said, was clear when comparing standards in England with those in Wales and especially Scotland, where vastly different curriculum reforms were introduced and standards fell accordingly.
“But in contrast to this, there’s a whole set of issues around funding issues, which is that core school funding has been reasonably protected but not increased. In effect, it’s the same now as it was in 2010. But everything around it has disappeared. So, apart from teacher recruitment and retention, almost everything that school leaders are talking about now as their main challenge is not actually a core school service. They talk about high needs budgets, they talk about access to social services, they talk about the rollback of the welfare state.”
“The big bet the coalition government took in 2010 was that schools should be focused on teaching and learning. I’m not sure they really overstepped that logical bound, because while they improved the core elements of teaching and learning, everything else fell apart.”
health
Not content with reforming the education system, the Conservative-led coalition government, under the direction of the then Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, decided to push ahead with plans for major reform of the NHS.
Like the education reforms, the proposed health reforms preach the Conservative belief in harnessing market forces, bringing “competition” to the medical sector and giving far greater powers to general practitioners.
But unlike Gove’s education reforms, Lord Lansley’s current reforms have not been as successful.
Stuart Hoddinott, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Government, said the fact that the Lansley reforms were barely mentioned spoke volumes.
“I would say frankly that it was a colossal waste of government time and energy,” he added. “It was an incredibly technocratic approach to NHS reform, focusing on reorganising structures and organisational charts and accountabilities, and trying to bring competition and market mechanisms into the health system. I think the fact that very little remains of the Lansley reforms is probably quite significant.”
The job of unraveling these changes fell to Jeremy Hunt, who during his six years at the Department of Health oversaw a period of sustained productivity growth in the health system.
But experts disagree, arguing that his decisions to oversee deep cuts in capital spending and a long-term squeeze on health care worker wages have created a demoralized workforce ill-prepared to deal with the shock of a global pandemic.
Mr Hoddinott said a steady decline in GP practices since 2010 had put strain on other parts of the health service, while major cuts to the social care budget had made it harder for people to get the kind of healthcare they needed.
“Decisions made in the 2010s are basically paying the price in the early 2020s,” he said. “Even before the pandemic, the NHS had been performing poorly for years. Governments cut hospital bed numbers throughout the 2010s. That’s been going on for a long time before the 2010s, but there’s really good evidence that they went too far in the 2010s, and bed occupancy rates were consistently very high throughout that decade. So it’s making it very difficult to treat a lot of patients and keep hospitals diverting patients.”
And he added: “I think we can make the case that the current record waiting lists for elective care, the record wait times in emergency departments, all of these are the result of decisions made in the 2010s combined with the short-term, intense shock of the pandemic.”
Asked to provide a report card on the Government’s performance in the health sector, Mr Hoddinott gave the Government a D grade.
Mr Freedman, who has written several policy reviews on health system decline, said the NHS was already in decline before the pandemic.
“That’s partly down to poor investment and partly to poor governance. A big part of it was the disastrous Lansley reforms, which created chaos without any benefit.”
“The system was basically running at full capacity and creaking, and then the pandemic hit and it was completely over capacity, so the impact is much worse here than it is in other places.”
He added that efforts to improve the system are misguided.
“They put a lot of staff into the hospitals but they didn’t have the beds, the equipment or the social care capacity to actually get patients into the hospitals. So costs have gone up but there’s not been any more activity going on in the hospitals. So money has been put into them but it’s not necessarily been put into the right places. So you have a combination of weak governance, underinvestment and low productivity.”
Friedman said it would be “extremely difficult” to return the health care system to where it was in 2010.