A few weeks ago, Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and Captain of the Praetorian Guard of Brownism, launched a stinging attack on low educational attainment in 638 secondary schools across the country. These schools failed to get even 30% of their pupils to achieve 5 decent GCSEs (ie at grades A*-C) including English and Maths – a basic standard in being able to participate in the modern world. The tone of the DCSF press release is all very constructive and moderate, but the way in which it was presented to the media, which they duly followed, was of ‘failing schools’ being presented with an ‘ultimatum’ to improve, or ‘be closed down’ (here, here and here, for example)

His attack caused fury (and not just metaphorically, but literally) from teachers who felt they were being unfairly attacked by someone who hadn’t really understood the problem. Even if Balls’ take on this situation is “right”, then in the short-term at least he significantly demotivated the very people he needs to taker action to address it. A week after the initial attack, the TES published figures giving some of the greater complexity of the position, and specifically pointing out that of the 638 schools, a quarter had actually been graded as “good schools” by the schools regulator, Ofsted, and a few even “excellent”, the very top grade.

So who is right here?

Well firstly let’s take a look at the raw figures. If you look at the statistics and see only 20-odd percent of pupils get 5 A*-Cs including Maths and English, it does indeed seem that there is be a difficult group of schools who stubbornly fail to provide a good basic GCSE-level education to even a third of their students. It’s very easy to say that This Simply Isn’t Good Enough and so Something Must Be Done. I find it very difficult not to have some sympathy initially with this position. This is the life prospects of our young people that we are talking about here (as well as the economic future of the nation, if that kind of language gets your juices flowing more) and we need to get it right, not fail large numbers of them, as these figures imply.

Balls, a very political Minister who really wants to be able to show that he has made a transformational difference in this job, wants to do something to tackle this. In the thinktank and economics world in which he spends a lot of time, shifting the actual numbers and results is what it’s all about, and much of what follows in the next paragraph just sounds like whinging and making excuses.

What does it look like from the other side? Well, firstly I don’t think many people in the education world would deny that among those 638, there are some schools which really are in a bad way and need some radical change. But for many others of them, the raw figures on attainment really don’t take into account some of the local factors affecting these schools. I’ve no doubt that some of what are claimed as “mitigating factors” may be little more than simple whinging. But some really aren’t – for example I don’t think anyone could sensibly dismiss factors such as many pupils having a very low command of the English language when they entered these schools, or only recently having entered the UK (in some cases after some appalling early life experiences in other parts of the world), or the quality of the education they received at primary level, still less the whole tangled web of issues around parental support and interest at home.

To dismiss factors such as these is not being robust with whinging excuses, but simply being blind.

And actually taking into account, rather than ignoring as the very raw figures do, these factors, goes a long way towards explaining the discrepancy.

To give one example, I know of a school which is guilty of falling below the 30% level for 5 A*-Cs including English and Maths. But a respected academic study of the kind of children actually entering the school suggests that if teaching and learning at the school is good, then it ought to expect to get a figure for attainment in a range in the mid-twenty percents. Attacking it for not attaining the “base level” of 30% is therefore blaming it for not attaining a level a good several points higher than anyone who has actually looked at the school would expect it to. And it is difficult to see how doing this helps it to achieve the kind of improvement which we would all like to see.

So there are two conclusions that I draw from this confrontation.

The first is that like all attempts to measure a situation with one just number, the percentage of children achieving 5 A*-Cs with Maths and English has its uses as a very rough ready reckoner – but that ultimately it can tell as many lies about a situation as it can the truth. The fact is that we have a regulator for school standards, the schools inspector Ofsted, and it is their job to look at schools and make a fully-informed judgement about their performance. I have certainly had my arguments with Ofsted, and no doubt there are ways their methodologies could continue to be improved, but the fact it is their job to make these kinds of assessments. Looking at exam results is one of the first things that they do, and however many difficulties they may have, I have a lot more trust in their carefully considered judgement on these and many other factors than I do in someone just looking at an attempt to sum up an entire organisation’s effectiveness in just one number.

So going back to the Balls attacks, the claim that 638 schools are quite simply failing because less than 30% achieve this particular level of qualification, is extremely tempting, but ultimately wrong – and certainly far less valuable than taking the results of proper inspections whose judgements are based on fundamental assumptions (the kind of factors listed above) which the mere casual glancer at a list of numbers is not in a position to do.

The second conclusion I draw is that quite clearly a very major factor in absolute levels of educational attainment, are the other factors in the children’s lives which make it more difficult for them to achieve. The Liberal Democrat initiative to compensate for that by providing additional resources to children for whom this is an issue, through the ‘pupil premium’ proposal, copying some other countries where this is done, seems to me to be an important part of successfully tackling these problems.

This seems to me to address the actual problem much more promisingly than other claimed solutions, such as academies, which seem to me to be the wrong way of trying to help especially pupils with other challenges to their lives and learning - the very group in the schools not achieving 30% 5 A*-Cs.

Now, the word ‘academies’ does not bring me out, as it does some in the education world, in a cold sweat just hearing it.

But fundamentally the academies solution shares with some other past initiatives the fact that it is an attempt to create an elite, bringing together some pupils to do better – for example by taking them out of normal local schools admissions procedures. The problem with this approach is that it ineluctably implies leaving behind some others to do worse – for example by those whom are not selected by any selective local school.

It’s easy to see how this kind of solution often appeals to those with a background in the private sector, which is generally good at working with high-achieving people, but often doesn’t comprehend the challenge of universality, of having to provide a good service to all. (I am not saying, by the way, that the private sector should not at all be involved in providing services to the public – far from it. I simply say those with a private sector background often tend to look at solutions which work well for one part of the spectrum, at the cost of universality).

But the problem with using this kind of approach specifically to this problem, is that the problem of a minority of schools under-achieving, is that it is precisely a problem of the relatively low-achieving minority.

In other words, even if academies are a good way of structuring high-achieving schools, they are specifically not a solution appropriate for those at the other end of the spectrum.

The academies project is too much the result, like too many government initiatives (from governments of all parties) of thinking which says, broadly “this is a serious problem – so we must do something radical” and therefore says “this is something radical - so we must do it”.

There is a very heated but largely pointless debate about whether the evidence shows that academies do better or worse than non-academies. Since many academies have become academies precisely because they have been forced to do so after many years after low exam results, and those results are the outcome of eleven years of formal education, it is surely hardly surprising that only a year or two after emerging from the chrysalis, their exam results have not been transformed overnight. It will, however, be somewhat astonishing if over a longer period of time they do not produce better exam outcomes than non-academies, given the advantages the government is rumoured to be giving them (I’ve heard tales of everything from large budgets for paying off under-performing staff, which are not available to other schools, to being exempt from normal requirements to accept pupils who have been excluded from other schools. These are all things which can hardly fail to affect attainment).

Academies are indeed flavour of the month at the moment – with the Labour and Conservative parties falling over each other each to promise more new academies than the other (rather like targets for new housing in the 1950s and 1960s). But I have a feeling that it will not be long before they suffer the fate of almost all government proposals to take key local services that they happen to be focussing on for the moment, out of local authority control.

For there is a well-established life-cycle for such policy areas. The first stage is that government decides that local authorities are failing in this area and what is needed is a new structure. So they take them away from councils and create new independent structures to run them instead. After a couple of years being proclaimed as the solution to all previous problems, these new structures slowly have to come to terms with the practical challenges that local authorities always had to face with them, before slowly moving back towards them and eventual merger, perhaps between 5 and 8 years after being externalised. This has happened across a range of organisations (remember independent School Organisation Committees, or Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships, anyone?), and it seems likely to me that academies are now well into the second half of this cycle.

Now, it’s easy to become too cynical about this, and make it into an argument for never trying to change anything. We certainly shouldn’t have that response – but we should also be conscious of past attempts at reform, and learn from them.

So, back to Ed Balls - is he right to name and shame 638 schools, and threaten to turn them into academies? No, he isn’t. While he is obviously right to seek to improve standards in schools which don’t provide an education as good it should and could be, we should actually base judgements on which schools those are, on real and informed data, not just a casual glance at one statistic about a school. And as for academies, they may not be wholly evil as a concept – but I have yet to understand how an approach precisely based on creaming off an elite of children, can specifically address the problem of those who will not be creamed off. The Liberal Democrat approach of actually targetting the solution on the children who are actually underperforming, to help them perform to their ability, rather than on to those who do perform relatively well, seems to me to target help much more accurately at the problem.