When it came to the Advanced British Standard, I was initially guilty of judging a policy book by its cover. My first impression of the ABS was that it sounded too much like IBS to become a compelling brand. I then wondered about the ‘B’; given our devolved education system, what would be British about it?
However, having read the DfE documents, I’ve been surprised and disheartened by people’s general snootiness about the whole idea. So many responses from across the political spectrum seemed to suggest that the government should focus only on more immediate issues, from teacher shortages to funding crises to mental health. The message was ‘fix the present problems before worrying about anything else’. This feels like a blinkered attitude to me. Any education leader, whether in a school or a government department, needs to adopt what Valerie Hannon describes as a ‘split screen’ approach – an eye to meeting immediate priorities and an eye to a future vision that might go beyond current realities. People have frequently argued that governments need a much longer-term vision for education, but the moment the DfE made one attempt at this, it was shot down from all sides.
I’d suggest anyone who thinks that 16-19 education is anything but perfect ignores the cynicism and gets involved with the consultation. Get beyond some of the hubris (in the original document, they claim to have ‘levelled up school standards’ and talk about ‘ensuring the continued success of our EBacc reforms’, and you’ll find a compelling paper with a good degree of humility around the faults of the current system and an open approach to solving them. Some serious civil servants have done some deep and rapid thinking, perhaps less constrained by the ideological and evidence-light bias that has infected other recent policy papers (in particular those proposing a fully academised system).
