Jeremy Corbyn might be bad for Labour, but is he good for politics? And does the "Corbage" factor say something about how we currently 'do' politics?

I reproduce below the full text of a piece that I've just written for the New Statesman and which appears on their website. You can view it on the New Statesman's site here, or you can just read on...

Okay, let’s start with my honestly declared position on this. I don’t think that a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn is likely to win in 2020, and winning in 2020 must be the absolute priority if we are to protect the most vulnerable in our society from what will, in effect, be a third Conservative government. Dismantling pubic services and institutions is easier than building them and a third Tory term would see the end of any local authority role in education, a decapitated NHS and the end of the welfare state as we know it. As Labour’s candidate in Hemel Hempstead at the general election and somebody who fought virtually a full-time campaign for the six months leading up to the election, I found no appetite on the doorstep for a profoundly more left wing proposition in precisely the kind of setting where Labour must win if it is to form a government with a decent majority again. A hearty conference speech may stir the souls of delegates but, for me, it doesn’t change this reality.

Nonetheless, all my instincts tell me that for those stunned by Corbyn’s election to simply fight much of what Labour’s new leader stands for, and that his election has delivered, would be utterly the wrong response. The ‘give us (nearly) the price of a pint’ and we’ll give you a vote’ approach to the leadership election was comic in its conception and execution and leads me to the conclusion that our party now has the best democracy that money can buy, but its consequence has produced, or at least could produce, unintended outcomes that stretch beyond the election of “Jezza”, and one of these could be good for politics, even if it is bad for Labour.

Whatever happens to our party over the next few years, Corbyn’s election is another manifestation of the same phenomenon that has given us Nigel Farage on the right, the rise of the SNP in Scotland, and Donald Trump in the US. Domestically, I’m tempted to call it the “Corbage Factor”, a combination of names that is likely to upset each of these arch political opponents in equal measure, but not a suggestion that they either agree on policy or on strategy. Whatever his failings – as judged by this self-confessed recovering Blairite who remains proud of much of what the Blair and Brown governments achieved - Corbyn is a man of integrity and sincerity with none of the nasty selfish nimbyism that is at the core of everything Farage stands for.

The Corbage Factor is not about a congruence of politics or motive; it is about a rejection of the mainstream, same-age, same-suit, production-line politicians that adorn both front benches. The supply lines that gave us John Prescott on the left and Ken Clarke on the right no longer exist; the ladders into modern politics – internship, PPE or something similar (usually at one of three or four elite universities), a post in a think tank and then, without a blink, a safe seat have given us our smartest, best qualified politicians ever, but our most unworldly and disconnected – identikit clones that look and sound the same and whose advisers have given us everything from the Tory’s “Pasty Tax” to Labour’s “Tombstone”. In popular culture, voting has never been more popular – think X-Factor, Strictly and Big Brother - but formal politics itself has never been less respected and, this time, the charge that “you’re all the same” has some truth, at least at first glance.

This is the terrain in which the Corbage Factor flourishes, even if the apparently working class heroes who give it it’s name are anything but that: a prep school boy and a city commodity broker. How ironic that the three SPAD-ish clones – for that is how they came across and are seen as - that Corbyn beat can genuinely claim just the kind of working class backgrounds that the victor might have romantically wanted for himself.

But there is good in this, and a real opportunity for our politics: an enormous number of people in party membership, a level of discussion in pubs and cafes about politics that I can’t previously remember (one that seems to still be flourishing several weeks after his election), a new youthfulness to many in these discussions and a promise to do politics differently. Of course, Cameron and Clegg promised something similar in the Rose Garden five years ago, but nobody expected these inauthentic production line leaders to deliver. With Corbyn they think that this serial rebel might just do so (even if the past few days have shown that he’s not quite sure how to deal with his own rebels). No more the ‘retail offer’ of what I have previously called the SPAD-ocracy. Corbyn’s attraction isn’t just his policy offer; indeed, it might not even be his policy offer - it is the way in which this offer is being made. Middle England might not buy his policy, but some will buy the compassion, kindness and honesty that he has pledged to bring with it.

I still don’t think that this will be enough to help us to win in places like Hemel – a town that by origin should, as I argued in a post-election piece for the New Statesman blog, be Labour to its core. To win in places like Hemel we need to capture the support of those who have been the very beneficiaries of the innovations of Labour governments of the past – free universal health care, comprehensive education, access to good quality social and private housing significantly before the onslaught of middle age – and we need to support the aspirations and hopes of those voters today. I don’t think that Corbyn’s policy offer does that, but his impact on our politics might be a fine legacy, one that none of the other candidates could have delivered.

In sport there is the notion of ‘taking a hit for the team’; in electing Jeremy Crobyn as leader – and through embracing the tens of thousands of predominantly young people previously un-attracted by our over-professionalised and managerialist politics – Labour may have risked consigning itself to opposition for the medium term, but if politics is re-energised in the process, Labour may just have taken a hit for democracy, and given it a boost that is long overdue.

Publication date announced for latest Breslin and Moores guide: Curriculum 2015: your guide to the new qualifications landscape

Today, again working in partnership with Cambridge University Press, Mike Moores and I signed-off the text for the third of the three guides that we are publishing this autumn with Cambridge University Press. Curriculum 2015: your guide to the new qualifications landscape is a professional development guide for school and college leaders, curriculum and pastoral managers, and classroom teachers in secondary and further education, and is now at the printers.

The publication of this latest guide follows the publication earlier this month of Starting A levels: your guide to exam success, the second of two student and parent guides. At the end of September we published the first student and parent guide, Starting GCSEs: your guide to exam success, making it three texts in a little over three weeks. Both are featured in a previous Breslin Public Policy blog.

Very broadly, the student and parent guides seek to provide a generic induction into examination study, an outline of how the exam system works, an explanation of the key principles behind the recent reforms, and guidance on study skills, revision techniques and exam room strategy, while the teacher guide focuses on the implications of the changes for practitioners in schools and colleges, and related changes to the inspection and funding frameworks and to school and college performance measures.

We are immensely grateful to Michael McGarvey and his team at CUP for commissioning the series and for supporting us throughout, and to members of our Expert Panel who have reviewed earlier drafts of the three publications. The guides mark the launch of CUP's new series of GCSE and A level texts, designed to support the new specifications published this year and emerging over the next three years. You can view their new texts here.

All three publications are available FREE to download, with the first two available now and the latest from Monday 2nd November. You can download Starting GCSEs here and Starting A levels here.

On a personal note, and as I said at the launch of the first two guides, I have loved working with Mike Moores on the books. Mike has been a mentor, guide and friend since the outset of my teaching career and, in writing these books and last year's summary of educational research and policy over the past 40 years for the British Educational Research Association (BERA): 40@40: a portrait of 40 years of educational research through 40 studies, we have fulfilled a longstanding plan to 'get a book out'. Indeed, with this series of three now being published, you could say Breslin and Moores authored books, are a bit like buses - you wait a long time for one, and then several come along at once!

You can download our earlier, and very positively reviewed, BERA text here and, for a limited period you can get hard copies from the BERA office. There are also a limited number of hard copies of our new guides available, but strictly on a 'first come - first served' basis.

We would welcome feedback on the guides and enquiries from schools and colleges willing to trial the texts; feel free to forward this note to friends and colleagues, especially if they have children starting GCSEs or A levels or if they work in secondary or further education!

Our new guides for GCSE and A level students, published by Cambridge University Press, are available to download FREE now!

Today, working in partnership with Cambridge University Press, we launch Starting A levels: your guide to exam success, the second of three publications to mark the launch of CUP's latest series of GCSE and A level text books. You can find out more about CUP's extensive range of educational resources at: https://www.cambridge.org/ukschools/. 

The three 'quick reference' guides - two for students and parents and one, published later this month, for teachers, curriculum and pastoral managers and school and college leaders - are written by Mike Moores and myself, and draw on our extensive experience as teachers and examiners. Copies of the latest guide and its earlier stablemate, Starting GCSEs: your guide to exam success, are available FREE to download.

You can get Starting GCSEs here and Starting A levels here. The third title in the series, our forthcoming teachers and school and college leaders' guide, Curriculum 2015: your guide to the new qualifications landscape, will be available through the Breslin and Cambridge University Press websites in due course.

We are grateful to Michael McGarvey and his team at CUP for commissioning us to produce the guides, and to members of our Expert Panel who have reviewed earlier drafts of the three publications.

On a personal note, as I said at the launch of the first guide last month, I have loved working with Mike Moores on these books. Mike has been a mentor, guide and friend since the outset of my teaching career and, in producing these texts and last year's summary of educational research and policy over the past 40 years for the British Educational Research Association (BERA): 40@40: a portrait of 40 years of educational research through 40 studies, we have fulfilled a longstanding plan to 'get a book out'. Indeed, with this series of three now being published, you could say Breslin and Moores authored books, are a bit like buses - you wait a long time for one, and then several come along at once!

You can download our earlier, and very positively reviewed, BERA text here and, for a limited period you can get hard copies from the BERA office.

We would welcome feedback on the guides; feel free to forward this note to friends and colleagues, especially if they have children starting GCSEs or A levels or if they work in secondary or further education!

Kids Company: a tale of what happens when charismatic leadership meets weak governance?

Whatever the actual story of the failure of children's charity, Kids Company, the truth is likely to be much more complex than the media fixation with the apparent failings of its erstwhile leader, Camila Batmanghelidjh. Batmanghelidjh is a tabloid editor's or TV producer's dream: forthright, articulate, and spectacularly flamboyant. Most charity CEOs can deliver on the first two of these qualities - they are invariably committed to their cause and knowledgeable about it; few can match Batmanghelidjh on the third: her style, her sheer presence, and her ability to be taken seriously because, rather than in spite of, her very visual refusal to follow the mainstream. 

And whatever, the current calamities, and Batmanghelidjh's role or otherwise in creating them, it worked: Kids Company quickly attracted a strong public profile and the kind of celebrity endorsement and 'high net worth donors' that most charities can only dream of, apparently delivering the reach and impact to match. With Batmanghelidjh for competition, many other charity leaders couldn't hope to force their way onto the breakfast TV couch, Newsnight or Question Time, or into No.10. Often, to their irritation, she could. 

But a series of problems typically result when organisations (be they charities or corporations, or pubic institutions such as schools or colleges) grow or change quickly, especially where a sole charismatic leader is the driving force. Herein is likely to lie the tale of the failure of a charity that, whatever its flaws, helped to change the landscape in its field, made a wider public much more aware of a set of vital issues around the care and wellbeing of young people, and did a lot of good for a lot of those young people along the way. 

Three of these problems are likely to be especially pertinent here: First, as is common when an organisation grows quickly, it fails to develop the systems or culture to support its own growth; second, when it does so under charismatic leadership, there is a tendency to think that no such systems are needed, both by the leader and many of those who follow - a state of affairs that is often almost impossible for insiders to challenge and in which effective succession planning is difficult to put in place; third, those with governance responsibility at Board level (and this is the case in companies, charities and educational institutions) find themselves in awe of the leader they are charged with holding to account. In short, the CEO (or head teacher or college principal) is insufficiently challenged by those with a governance responsibility, with a weakening, and sometimes a failure, of governance the inevitable result.

At this stage we do not know what happened between Camila Batmanghelidjh and her Board of Trustees, but the various issues now being aired in the media - concerns that range from financial mismanagement, to over-dependence on statutory funding, to child safety - are properly those that ought to have attracted Board scrutiny from the outset; the outcome - the charity's closure this week - would suggest any such scrutiny was insufficient. Certainly, this outcome cannot and should not simply be addressed through a narrative that distastefully celebrates the fall of a once-celebrated and quasi-celebrity leader. A failure of governance, and perhaps of a Board in awe of its charismatic leader might provide a more plausible explanation, or at least the starting point for a discussion in which many will find familiarities.

Time for a new approach to education, a long-promised 'great debate' on education and a focus on educational purpose?

An edited version of my piece on Labour's failure to offer a coherent narrative on education at Election 2015 has just been published on the website of Progress, the progressive think tank aligned to the Labour Party but not part of it. You can access the Progress website at www.progressonline.org.uk, but for ease I reproduce the full piece below:

“Directors of School Standards - I mean, is that it? Is that all Labour can offer on education?” Not my words but those of an experienced and exasperated headteacher at a secondary school in Hemel Hempstead, where I stood in May as Labour’s Parliamentary candidate. I was sitting in his office with the Conservative incumbent, Mike Penning - who was subsequently re-elected - and the candidates from the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP. It was about three weeks before the election and we were there to take part in a school ‘question time’ event for parents and the local community, organised by the school’s AS level Citizenship Studies students.

The head in question ought to have been a sympathiser, as should the senior staff members at two other Hemel schools who offered similar unsolicited appraisals of Labour’s education offer. In fairness, he gave us all a hard time; not so much “you’re all the same” as “prove to me, you’re not all the same”. And, in a world of homogenised politics and same-size politicians delivered to us through the slip stream of PPE, internship and a stint or two in the think tanks, it’s a fair challenge. Labour’s offer on education, and I say this as a teacher by profession who has spent thirty years in the system, was unimaginative to say the least, and all the poorer because we had had five years to think it up.

What sort of stuff did we put forward? No more than thirty in a class in primary schools, something that we’d pretty much delivered in the post 1997 years and which remains broadly in place, the afore mentioned school standards directors, qualified teacher status for all (surely, a given rather than a ground-breaking policy), a poorly explained Technical Baccalaureate that promised to reinforce rather than bridge the academic-vocational divide, an obligation to make students study English and Maths to 18, and a consumerist offer on childcare and student fees that did little to address how each system works - and its inequities. The foregoing ‘long’ campaign had seen reference to a clunky approach to teacher registration that felt like another device for policing the profession, the usual strategy-free platitudes on standards, a promise to stop the creation of new free schools, and to tweak the current A level reforms.

Talk of a new School Leadership Institute, support for the notion of a College for Teaching and plans for Master Teacher Status sounded like a direct rehash of three (good) post 1997 innovations - the National College for School Leadership, the General Teaching Council and Advanced Skills Teachers. Only the pledge to maintain education spending in real terms stood out, but, frankly, this wasn’t believed on the doorstep or in the staffroom: “Come on, you’re all going to cut spending, aren’t you?”

For many in education, politicians on all sides are starting in the wrong place. Educationalists at every level have had two generations of largely technocratic reforms - some good, some less so - but no discussion of why we do what we do, and no real attempt to involve professionals and parents - or students and their future employers - in any discussion.

From a Labour standpoint this is all the more galling because, in one of the most recognised addresses from a Labour premier, James Callaghan - speaking at Ruskin College, Oxford in October 1976 - had famously sparked calls for a “great debate” on the future of education”, although he never used the phrase itself. Almost twenty years ago, in the run-up to the 1997 election, I contributed a chapter to an Association of Teachers and Lecturers sponsored collection, Take Care, Mr Blunkett, entitled, Twenty years on – the great debate that never was. I could have given this piece almost the same title. Labour progressives should spark and lead that debate and do so now.

The focus of our conversation should not be on how GCSEs, AS and A levels are structured, whether fees are reduced or how many we have in a class, or even how we feel about performance tables and Ofsted. This is absolutely vital stuff but it should flow from our debate, not precede it.

 Critically, discussion should start with a focus, as Callaghan did almost forty years ago, on educational purpose and it should involve education’s many stakeholders asactive participants. We should start by asking, “what do we want”, in the phraseology of the great British educationalist Richard Pring, “the educated 19 year old to look like?” Whatever their perceived ability, what qualities, skills, knowledge and values do they need to prosper as individuals, and what characteristics do weneed them to have to prosper as a society? Literacy and numeracy, yes. But what about physical and mental wellbeing, self-confidence and citizenship, creativity and compassion, drama and dance, enthusiasm and enterprise, an appreciation of the arts and humanities, an exposure to professional and vocational learning? And if we can’t deliver all of this, let’s discuss priorities, and how we can be creative in our approach to these.

 And, finally, let’s wonder aloud about the kinds of schools, colleges, training providers and universities – and the kinds of professional – that we need to deliver our agreed priorities. Education, Education, Education? Yes, emphatically. But more than this: what kind of education, when, where, for whom, and with what purpose?

So, what is great leadership? Some thoughts inspired by the Windsor Leadership Trust

I've just responded to an e-mail from the Windsor Leadership Trust (http://www.windsorleadership.org.uk/windsor-programme) who are marking their 20th anniversary by compiling a series of essays and shorter pieces on leadership to be published later this year.

It's a really valuable initiative from a great organisation. I've responded to their invitation to talk about leadership in 200 words. Go on, why don't you do likewise, whether you consider yourself a leader or not? And if you don't fancy 200 words, you can offer your thoughts in 20!

Here is my 200 word submission:

Leadership is lonely but collaborative, charismatic but systematic, strategic but opportunistic. Leadership is about being in control but having the confidence to let go, about taking risks while ensuring the wellbeing of others, about the crossroads between courage and commonsense. Leadership means understanding the tensions and contradictions in leadership itself, rather than seeking to airbrush these from existence.  Most of all, leadership is untidy and messy, utterly refusing to accept the order and structure of the textbooks sold in its name, but always willing to learn from these sources, and every other.

Great leadership is about creating independence rather than requiring dependence, about enabling people to fulfill their potential but as part of a more widely shared dream, about building teams that pull together rather than fall apart, about sharing success without always getting the deserved credit for it. It’s about the ability to respond to challenges while maintaining direction, about the willingness to consider alternatives, about doing the dull stuff too.

Maybe we should stop seeking great leaders – a search destined to end in disappointment and disabling to us all. Maybe we should focus on acknowledging great acts of leadership. Maybe we are all capable of such acts. Maybe.

So, where did it all go wrong? My reflections on being Labour's candidate in Hemel Hempstead

It is almost a year since I've posted on the Breslin Public Policy blog, but with the election behind us, the business about to be relaunched and my adventure as Labour's candidate in Hemel Hempstead complete, if ultimately unsuccessful, I thought that I'd share my thoughts on the campaign, as published on the New Statesman website yesterday. You can read the full piece here: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/candidates-lessons-hemel-hempstead

In it I offer a candidate’s eye view of the challenges facing Labour in the wake of our May 7^th defeat. As a former CEO at the education and participation charity the Citizenship Foundation, I connect arguments about the rebuilding of Labour as a mass party with the broader issue of renewing democracy. In particular, I explore the thorny issue of how Labour combines a message about challenging inequality and poverty with one that is positive about supporting the aspirations of many who should or could be Labour supporters. Set in the specific context of a post war new town, one in which Labour has had recent electoral success, I pose questions about how Labour has lost the ‘affluent worker’ and how it might re-win this group, and constituencies like Hemel Hempstead, in the years ahead. 

Enjoy the read, and welcome back to the Breslin Public Policy blog - the long silence is over!