With the polls showing a likely defeat for the Conservatives at the forthcoming general election, the party’s record in government is coming under scrutiny more than ever before.
During a period that came in the aftermath of the global financial crash, took in the Brexit referendum, a worldwide pandemic and the first war in Europe for a generation it has been a tumultuous period for the UK.
In the first of a series of pieces looking at the Conservatives’ record on since winning power in 2010, i examines how both education and health have fared after 14 years of Tory rule.
Education
Coming into the election in 2010, no policy area outside the economy was given as much prominence as the Tories’ plans for the education system.
As the self-proclaimed “heir to Blair”, it was fitting that Lord Cameron, at that time David Cameron, had identified schools as his party’s main focus of reform, following the former Labour prime minister’s mantra of “education, education, education”.
Led by one of the party’s great political reformers Michael Gove, the Conservatives sought to shake up the state schools system with a back to basics approach, that began by renaming the old Department for Children, Schools and Families the Department for Education taking the emphasis firmly away from the wider support services that were offered for children.
Mr Gove took a two-pronged approach to the reforms, simultaneously overhauling both the curriculum and the assessment system, while putting “rocket boosters” under the academies programme by encouraging state schools to convert to the status and move away from local authority control.
His department also promoted its free schools policy, which he promised would allow headteachers and parents to set up and run their own state-funded schools.
But how do those who were on the frontline implementing the reforms look back on the changes 14 years on?
Sam Freedman was a key member of Mr Gove’s team when the Tories were in opposition and was one of the midwives for the reforms in the Department for Education between 2010 and 2013, when he worked there as a civil servant.
He has since written a book due out next month called Broken State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It, which gives a clue to his thoughts on the last 14 years of a Conservative government.
“The curriculum and assessment reforms whilst obviously not perfect, have been broadly successful,” he said. “And I think if you look at our international rankings, if you look at how we perform versus Scotland, it’s quite hard to argue that we didn’t do the better job in terms of putting together a sort of curriculum and having an assessment model that held standards up.
“I think the academy programme is much more kind of like pluses and minuses. There are some amazing multi academy trusts doing amazing things with schools that were being persistently failed before 2010. But, equally, it’s not a very coherent system still.”
Mr Freedman said there was an expectation that there would be more policy reforms to come when it came to how schools were organised, but they never came, leaving a patchwork school system made up of local authority schools, multi-academy trusts and standalone academies.
But there was, he said, a bigger consequence from the reforms brought in, first by the Coalition and continued under the Cameron administration – cuts to children’s services.
“The thing that I really regret, and I think is now causing real problems is that we disengaged schools from the wider children services system deliberately because we wanted to focus on education, but didn’t take properly into account that the wider austerity agenda would kill a lot of those services and put a lot more kids into poverty.
“Perhaps we should have anticipated that would happen, and what’s happened as a result of that, schools are, in theory, not responsible for any of these problems, but in practice, they are having to soak up a lot of pressure from the failure of other services. That’s the biggest problem schools now have, it’s not on the academic side. It’s that, especially in disadvantaged areas, they’re having to deal with increased poverty, worsening mental health.”
Jonathan Simons, a partner and education specialist at political strategy firm Public First and a former civil servant, agreed with that verdict. He said that “empirically, standards have risen” going on both international league tables as well as exam results.
“Kids know more – the kind of knowledge-rich curriculum has led to kids understanding and knowing more. If you speak to school leaders who have been around a while, they will broadly say that teaching quality has gone up.”
Proof, he said, was visible by comparing England’s standards with those of Wales and particularly Scotland, which introduced drastically different curriculum reforms and saw its standards drop accordingly.
“But set against this are a list of problems that are all linked to the funding question, which is that while schools’ core funding has been reasonably protected, it’s not risen. It’s the same now as it was in 2010 in real terms. But everything around it has dissipated. So almost everything that school leaders now talk about being their main challenges, other than teacher recruitment retention, is actually not core school services. They talk about high needs budget, they talk about access to social services, they talk about the diminution of the welfare state.
“The big punt that the Coalition took in 2010 was that schools should focus on teaching and learning. I don’t know if they really went through the logical extent of that … because the core element of teaching and learning has got better, but everything else has sort of collapsed.”
Health
Not content with overhauling the education system, the Conservative-led Coalition also decided to instigate a massive reform agenda on the NHS led by the then health secretary Andrew Lansley.
As with the education reforms, the proposed changes to the health system preached the Tory mantra of utilising the power of market forces and bringing “competition” into the sector and handing far greater control over to GPs.
But unlike with Gove’s shake-up of the education system, the now Lord Lansley’s reforms were much less successful.
Stuart Hoddinott, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government, said the very fact the Lansley reforms are very rarely mentioned spoke volumes.
“To put it a bit bluntly, it was arguably an enormous waste of the government’s time and energy,” he added. “It was an incredibly technocratic approach to NHS reform that focused on reorganising structures and org charts and lines of accountability, and tried to bring increased competition and market mechanisms to the health system. I think the fact that there’s very little remaining of the Lansley reforms is probably quite telling.”
The job of unpicking the changes fell to Jeremy Hunt, who ran the Department for Health for more than six years, overseeing what he would argue was a sustained period of improved productivity in the health system.
But experts disagree, insisting that his decision to oversee drastic cuts to capital spending and a prolonged squeeze on health workers wages creating a demoralised workforce that was poorly prepared to handle the shock of a global pandemic.
Mr Hoddinott said the steady loss of GPs from the service since 2010 has heaped pressure on other parts of the health service, while heavy cuts to social care funding made it hard for people to secure the type of care that they required.
“The decisions made in the 2010s basically came home to roost in the early 2020s,” he said. “Performance was declining in the NHS for many years before the pandemic. The Government cut beds in hospitals throughout the 2010s. That had been happening for a long time before the 2010s but there’s really good evidence that it went too far in the 2010s and bed occupancy was consistently very, very high throughout that entire decade. That makes it very difficult to treat a lot of patients and to get, you know, to get flow going through hospitals.”
And he added: “I think that you can definitely say that the record elective waiting lists now, the record A&E wait times, all those sorts of things are the result of decisions taken in the 2010s, combined with a short, sharp shock of the pandemic.”
Asked to give the Government a report card for its performance in health, Mr Hoddinott awarded it a D grade.
Mr Freedman, who has written several policy reviews on the state of the health system, said the NHS was already in decline pre-pandemic.
“That was partly investment, partly poor governance. A big part of it was the disastrous Lansley reforms, which just created havoc for no benefit.
“The system was running basically at full capacity and creaking, and then you had a pandemic which completely blew it over capacity, and that’s why the effect has been so much worse here than elsewhere.”
He added that the efforts to improve the system have been misguided.
“They’ve put in a lot of staff into hospitals, but without the beds or the equipment or the social care capacity to actually flow patients through a hospital. It’s meant we’ve put up costs, but we haven’t got any more activity happening in hospitals. So there has been money put in, but it’s not necessarily been put into the right place. And so you’ve got a kind of combination of poor governance, under investment and low productivity.”
Trying to rebuild the health system back to where it was in 2010, Mr Freedman said, will be “an extraordinarily difficult thing to do”.