Anti-Individual Education

Cultivating that 'sense of belonging'

I'll be so alone without you / Maybe you'll be lonesome too, and blue
Fly the ocean in a silver plane / See the jungle when it's wet with rain
Just remember till you're home again / You belong to me

-Chilton Price, Pee Wee King, Redd Stewart

The Labour government currently running the UK largely comprises mediocrities. Among them, one mediocrity in particular truly - if this is not an oxymoron - stands out. This is Bridget Phillipson, the person who calls herself the Secretary of State for Education. Phillipson is in all respects unremarkable - the kind of figure who might do a reasonable job as the assistant head teacher of a provincial primary school. That she has risen to Cabinet office is itself indicative of the extent to which the UK’s governing classes have deteriorated in quality. But she is also important as a symbol of a wider phenomenon: our current government is not just made up of mediocrities, but is defined by the operationalisation of mediocrity throughout society as a ruling strategy. It is, in other words, dominated by what Michael Oakeshott called ‘anti-individuals’, who govern precisely by cultivating passivity and enervation among the population in order to make themselves appear to be necessary.

This project starts young, and Phillipson laid it out for us in a recent speech given to the Conference of the Confederation of Schools Trusts. This, ostensibly, was an announcement of an opportunity to reboot the broad thrust of education policy in England, which had under successive Conservative governments successfully improved standards by focusing on improving literacy and numeracy, making exams tougher, emphasising the learning of facts over ‘skills’, and deploying rote learning. This has taken England to fourth in the world rankings for literacy and 11th for maths, after having languished in the doldrums for some decades.

But Phillipson is worried about all this focus on achievement and excellence. She rather wants children to have ‘a sense of power and purpose’, to be ‘happy’ and, above all, to feel as though they ‘belong’. Phillipson, you see, is big on ‘belonging’. When she was at school, she says, she ‘felt’ that she ‘belonged’. She had teachers who helped her and her classmates ‘know we belonged in the school’. And this, she believes, helped her to get to the position she now occupies: the fact that she ‘belonged in her community’ and ‘belonged at school’.

And she offers us a chilling warning in this regard. There is, she tells us, a ‘crisis’ of ‘belonging’ affecting the children of the land. The ‘precious relationship between schools, families and communities’ has ‘broken down’, and the result is an ‘absence epidemic’ that is the ‘the canary in the coalmine for belonging in our country’. What we need to do, then, is nothing less than ‘to rebuild belonging, through partnership and responsibility’. We need to imbue in children a ‘sense of wellbeing and belonging’ so that we can give them ‘the very best life chances’. Only then can we ensure that our ‘children achieve great things – and [that] they are happy as they do it’.

You will have noticed that this is all embarrassing drivel. You will also notice, if you read the speech, that Phillipson makes no mention whatsoever of school closures during the lockdowns in 2020-21, which have caused the school absence rate in the country to be persistently double what it was in 2019 and which she was herself banging the drum for all the way through that period. Naive readers of the speech might have been expecting her to reflect on her role in fostering the ‘belonging crisis’ which she purports to exist - chance would be a fine thing, of course.

But I want to focus here on something more fundamental, which is this strange idea Phillipson has - which would I think have been alien to anybody living before the turn of the millennium - that it is the government’s job to take responsibility not just for providing children with the opportunity to go to school, but for the sense of belonging, wellbeing, and even happiness of every child in the land.