Sir Michael Wilshaw has called for a radical shakeup of education for those who do not go on to university, using his last speech as chief inspector of schools in England to warn of a skills gap threatening the country’s prosperity.
The inspector and former headteacher said further education was a “Cinderella” sector overlooked by policymakers, and queried whether class prejudice was the reason. “Is that because this is a sector that educates other people’s children?” Wilshaw said.
“Each year, around 100,000 16-year-olds enrol at a further education college to do technical or vocational courses. How many of them are the children of the powers that be, of national politicians and the commentariat?”
Noting that £7bn was spent on further education each year, Wilshaw said: “We can no longer afford to accept mediocrity on such a grand scale. We cannot allow this state of affairs to continue. Things have got to change.”
He attacked the government’s review of further education provision, which will see underperforming colleges merge in many parts of the country. “Merging two poor colleges to create one even larger college is unlikely to improve them and may well make them worse,” he said.
Asked if the poor quality of schooling contributed to the vote to leave the EU, Wilshaw said: “I’m sure people didn’t go to the polling booth and think, my son or daughter goes to a terrible school, that’s why I’m going to vote to leave the European Union.
“But it leads to a sense that they are not getting a crack of the whip. People living in the north can read league tables as well as anyone else ... and they sense that somehow their children are not going to get as good a deal as youngsters in the south of England.”
Speaking at the launch of Ofsted’s annual report on schools, Wilshaw said there had been a vast improvement overall since he began his career. “I taught in some terrible schools in the 1970s. There were schools that were shockingly bad, where there was pupil violence, disruption was the norm and the rest of it. Schools are far better places now,” he said.
“People were leaving in their droves in inner London in those decades. And I’m not sure that’s the case now.”
But the former headteacher of Mossbourne academy in east London said some parents needed to be pushed to do more: “Good heads challenge those parents and say to them, directly, you are not supportive of your children, you are a bad parent, and that’s why your children are failing.”
Wilshaw noted that 1.8 million more children were attending good or outstanding schools in England compared with August 2010, saying there had been significant improvements in many parts of the country.
“In 2012 when I was appointed I criticised the poor performance of primary schools in Coventry, which was at the bottom of the primary league table which was published in my first report.
“Thanks to the focus and hard work of the local authority and school leaders, the city has turned things around. The proportion of children attending a good or outstanding primary school in Coventry has now more than doubled, from 42% of pupils to 93%.”
The Local Government Association said Ofsted’s latest statistics showed that councils still had a vital role to play in school improvement.
“With 89% of all council-maintained schools rated as good or outstanding by Ofsted, it is now vital that government recognises councils as their education improvement partners,” said Richard Watts, the chair of the LGA’s children and young people board.
Speaking to an audience of school leaders and educationalists in London, including the former education secretaries Nicky Morgan and Kenneth Baker, Wilshaw said stereotypes of state schools were “out of date and frankly wrong”.
“I don’t think the many critics of our education system appreciate just how much has changed,” Wilshaw said. “If they did, perhaps they wouldn’t be so dismissive of a system that has delivered so much to so many over the last number of years.
“Nor would they blithely advocate turning the clock back to a time when the top few percent went to grammar schools and the rest were left with a very threadbare education.”
Wilshaw said the government was failing in its duty to supply enough teachers: “Everywhere I go, headteachers – particularly secondary heads − tell me how difficult they are finding it to appoint high-calibre teachers.”
His comments came as the Department for Education admitted it was scrapping plans for a national teaching service to recruit teachers to struggling schools.
A freedom of information request by the TES found that the scheme had placed just 24 teachers, having hoped to recruit 1,500 eventually. A DfE spokesperson confirmed the scheme had been shelved.
Wilshaw also said too many parents were opting out of mainstream education for religious or cultural reasons, and called for local authorities to do more to monitor the proliferation of small private schools.
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