It seems a wonderful offer… free one-on-one private tuition for any child needing to catch up with work they don’t understand. Parents worried about the apparent slowness of their child’s progression are being wooed with an offer which even the least institutionally-aware parent must question where the resources are to come from. And, if it is such a good idea, why didn’t government simply cut class sizes in the past so that pupils don’t get behind in any case?

Many secondary heads responded enthusiastically to the proposal, but with the important reservation that Ed Balls could not, and most certainly should not, simply conjure up a solution that merely overstretched an already over-stressed profession. Good for them, but they were batting on a safe wicket in assuming they were only dealing with two variables.

But education is never to do with just two variables. Only three weeks before John Dunsford, the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, had told the press that the most radical thing an incoming government could do would be simply to leave the schools alone. “Please don’t laden schools with any more shiny new initiatives. There are no quick wins in schools and frankly part of the problem has always been that politicians think they can make improvements rapidly.”

If Dunsford and the secondary heads thought carefully about why it is that so many children need extra tuition they would have been forced to realise that it has been the persistent underfunding of primary education that is the root cause of the problem. The explanation goes way back to Queen Victoria’s much quoted conclusion that “Little children should be seen and not heard”. By over-emphasising the social control element of primary education and the intellectual value of the secondary curriculum governments have persistently provided more funds for secondary schools than primaries. And that is just where they and the secondary heads who benefit from this are so very wrong. How a child performs in secondary school is more dependent on how he or she had been educated in the first 11 years of life, than it is upon the quality of the secondary school teacher. England persists in putting the cart before the educational horse.

If primary schools had a better opportunity to develop intellectual skills and emotional and social maturity of their pupils, then those youngsters would be ready for a very different kind of secondary education – an education more concerned with pupil learning, than it is with teachers teaching. That won’t happen until secondary schools (and I write as a former comprehensive head teacher) come together with the primary sector to agree how best all the resources should be pooled so that they can be reallocated and go to where they have the biggest impact… in the education of parents to the early years experience, to the nursery school, and into the junior years.

A generation or so of such a process, and then the secondary schools would be forced to change. May that day come soon.

This article is tagged: ed balls, Primary, private tuition, Secondary.