David Reynolds: A ray of sunshine for progressive schooling

Last week, two remarkable, watershed events took place in national educational policy: ministers backed a Montessori-based approach to a disadvantaged primary school, and it was announced that a Rudolf Steiner school is poised to join the state sector as one of the flagship Academies.

If nothing else, these events show that, if a week is a long time in politics, then a couple of years are a veritable eternity. It is impossible to imagine David Blunkett, advised by his hammer-of-the-trendies Conor Ryan, presiding over these announcements. His belief was that the disadvantaged needed formality, structure - not the informality he associated with progressive methods.

Surprising or not, these new policies are interesting for two main reasons. First, they suggest that the state school sector is to become more and more varied and heterogeneous in future, with an increasing array of schools that are designed to be different in their structure, ideology and operation from one another. This is the embodiment of the much vaunted diversity of provision.

After the demise of the comprehensive school vision, in which young people were to be given largely the same entitlement to bind them together into a national community, now a variety of schools, such as parent-run schools, faith schools and, indeed, any schools that can achieve acceptable numbers, will be encouraged to exist. It is also well known that the Government wishes to expand greatly the numbers of schools that are directly run by the private sector.

Designing schools in this way has advantages. If parents are exposed to an increased range of schools, then they have an increased chance of getting something that reflects their own views and therefore of getting behind that something. Distinctive schools may be able to recruit distinctive, passionate and therefore highly effective teachers.

But the extent to which our increasingly variegated schools will cement pre-existing differences between the beliefs of different sets of pupils and their parents is unknown. The price to be paid for increased diversity may be that some unacceptable differences are unleashed, such as the attitudes to women in Muslim schools.

But it is the second policy announcement that is most intriguing: have progressive policies finally been disinterred from the grave into which New Labour put them to appeal to its new middle-Britain constituency in the mid-1990s? For some while one could sense that ministers and officials knew - but didn't quite know what to do about it - that the world's educationally most successful countries developed social competencies before they developed the academic ones, in marked contrast to the UK.

Ministers also knew - but didn't quite know what to do about it - that the lifelong learning agenda requires skills not dissimilar to those valued by "progressives" - self-direction, the capacity to work/learn on one's own and self-motivation, for example.

They knew, too - but didn't quite know what to do about it - that industry and commerce constantly harangue our schools for not delivering people to them who can work collaboratively, and who have well-developed social and interpersonal skills. Again, these are competencies beloved of progressives.

What has changed minds within the DfES? Most likely, it is the increased awareness of children and their needs, dictated by the new Children's Agenda, which is producing recognition of the fact that the "bottom 20 per cent" of the population may not have the competencies needed to succeed in public education that are possessed by the "other 80 per cent".

Also, the realisation may have dawned that the relentless and depressing failure to reach targets - all targets - may not be unconnected to social factors, which are imposing limits on what young people can do, and that action to improve social competencies is the way to deliver the academic ones.

Two swallows do not make an educational summer. The increased variety of schools may be in breadth, not depth. The return of progressive ideas from outer darkness may be just for the disadvantaged, rather than being infused throughout all forms of schooling, as rationality suggests.

But maybe, just maybe, these policy snippets are symptomatic of a more sane, more innovative and ultimately more successful set of national policies than we have been used to since 1997. Maybe a good educational summer is on the way.

The writer is professor of education at the University of Exeter