Take note Labour: this is what parents really want from schools

Education has been, to varying degrees, a major electoral battleground for the past several decades. It’s sometimes a very top-tier issue (“education, education, education” in ’97, and Michael Gove’s academisation plans in 2010), and sometimes a little less so. But it’s always there, or thereabouts.

Sometimes it’s about standards and results (as it was when Blair swept to power) and sometimes it’s about something very tangible (the coalition’s cuts to school funding made a big difference in 2017 when Jeremy Corbyn so nearly dethroned Theresa May). But even when it’s not a frontline issue (as in, say, 2019), there will still be 14 million parent voters in England alone.

And that’s one of the reasons why it’s both important and interesting to know how close the parties’ priorities on schools policy are to those who are most likely to see the issue as important when they get to the ballot box.

And that is also why the firm where I work, together with trade unions Unison and NAHT, decided to find out what it is exactly that voter-parents want from primary education right now, and what they might correspondingly want from frontline politicians as we march towards 2024 and the next electoral test.

To get an answer, we carried out a major exercise in testing public opinion, using focus groups and polling. And because they’re so electorally salient, we had a special focus on Red Wall areas, chatting to voters in seats that turned Blue in Boris Johnson’s landslide in 2019.

So what did we find?

Perhaps the most important conclusion we came to does not easily lend itself to 48-point headlines in tabloid newspapers: it was that broadly, most parents are genuinely happy with the primary education being received by their offspring. Correspondingly, we found that most voters respect their kids’ teachers, think they work too hard and probably deserve better pay.

Politicians who want to go to war with school staff and their unions this winter, really ought to take note of what this dad from Stoke said: “Teacher pay has stayed the same for years. And the TAs have always been minimum wage as well. And these are people that are all very valuable to our children’s future. So, they should be paid more.”

What should and shouldn’t be taught in the classroom is rarely far from the front of politicians’ minds, and so we are fascinated to find that parents are remarkably sensible on this subject. They do want a sharp focus on traditional subjects such as English and maths (very much Blair’s focus straight after his first landslide), but they also definitely want more than is currently being offered in terms of life skills and extra-curricular activities.

Not unreasonably they are worried that a lot of this stuff – art, music, sport and life skills such as cooking – was being eroded before and during Covid and has been slow to return. This is not new news, to be honest, and parents are not completely wrong in their analysis of what is going on in the classroom, broadly through no fault of heads and teachers.

Perhaps that should be provided by a stronger “wrap-around” offer from schools (think breakfast and after-school clubs). But these are only popular if they are better organised than they are currently and only if they focus on these extra-curricular activities rather than just more teaching. Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson, who announced a funding commitment for more breakfast clubs at the Labour conference earlier this year, would do well to take note.

If parents have a bona fide complaint, it’s that communication with them could be more reliable, more consistent and more regular. They do not want teaching and learning to be put in the black box it was in before Covid – they want to hear more and understand more. This is something I’ve heard in other focus groups too. I do think it’s important.

This is how one dad from Doncaster put it: “I would say the only thing I can see for improvement is the communication side of the school. It could do with being… more accurate and on time. And then other times we get bombarded with the same texts over and over again.”

With that in mind, what of Ofsted, the independent schools inspectorate that has never successfully kept itself out of the political firmament for long? There was strong parental support for its inspectors carrying out external scrutiny, but there was a willingness to think about the inspections being lighter touch and having fewer cliff-edge repercussions. There is clearly space here for politicians to discuss reform – they should not just assume that parents unthinkingly back the current shape of Ofsted.

Nor however (please take note Jeremy Corbyn) is there any popular backing for the suggestion that Ofsted should be abolished.

One final thought. Normal parents couldn’t give two proverbials about the structure of the schools system. No politician in their right mind should think about advocating for reversing academisation or some such. Again, here’s looking at you, Corbynites.

So if we were trying to find out what voters want from education policy and politicians, then that rather begs the question: which of the parties would come nearest to winning over their support in an election?

It’s very early to say, but Labour (shorn of Corbyn and his silly excesses) seems to be the party most closely aligned with what voters want from schools policy just now. But Starmer and his people had best keep listening because voters have been known to change their minds… and it’s a long way to 2024.