Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. An unexpected kindness, a burst of late summer sunshine, a cheerful snippet of news; things that are never going to change the world, but lift the mood a bit. For teachers braced for the return to school this week, the news that Ofsted’s dreaded one-word grades – potentially career-ending labels, from “outstanding” to “inadequate”, which ended up being all anyone really remembered of an often more nuanced inspection report – will be scrapped with immediate effect may well fall into this category. It’s hardly a revolutionary change, since schools that would have been judged to be failing under the old regime will still face immediate intervention. But it gives teachers just a bit more room to breathe.
It’s a small, human way of recognising the pressures they’ve been under and the depth of feeling triggered last year by the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry, after her primary school was abruptly downgraded to inadequate over errors in its safeguarding paperwork. (An inquest later ruled that the sometimes “rude and intimidating” inspection had played a part in Perry’s deteriorating mental health.) Better still, the announcement by the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, comes ahead of a more substantial longer-term review of what teachers are actually being asked to teach, which is expected to examine complaints that the Michael Gove-era curriculum had become impossibly overstuffed (do primary schoolchildren really need to know what a fronted adverbial is?) and badly in need of a little joy injected back into it.
And it’s joy, to be blunt, that this young government is currently lacking. With the glorious exception of Angela Rayner – caught raving it up in a DJ booth in Ibiza on a school night – Labour has marked its landslide victory by having the very opposite of a brat summer. Weeks of clearing out Whitehall’s closets has produced a string of stern, buzz-killing pronouncements about how things are probably only going to get worse before they get better – including from Phillipson, who last week warned that the promised Tory rollout of free childcare places for toddlers will go ahead this autumn but may not deliver everything parents wanted.
In other news, a revolt over chancellor Rachel Reeves’ plan to means-test the winter fuel payment for better off pensioners is brewing. Some who voted Labour hoping Keir Starmer didn’t really mean all that austere-sounding stuff are now worrying they’ve ousted the Conservatives only to end up with roughly more of the same, while others who voted Labour hoping fervently that he did mean it will have been unnerved by weeks of hysterical speculation about an autumn budget supposedly full of middle-class tax rises not mentioned in the manifesto.
The polls were always going to narrow once the nation came down off its post-election high, so Starmer’s tumbling approval ratings are no great cause for panic yet. But there’s a limit to how long a government sitting on a huge majority can keep wailing that these aren’t the decisions it really wanted to make without starting to look faintly helpless. All of which makes this back-to-school week at Westminster a crucial one, aiming to pierce the gloom by showing Labour beginning to deliver on some of its bigger promises – like legislating to take railways back into national ownership, or lower fuel bills for the long term by setting up the green investment vehicle it calls Great British Energy – while offering some early reasons to be cheerful in the short term.
Rayner has the rare gift in this cabinet of looking as if she’s actually having fun, which can be more useful than it sounds (ask Kamala Harris, whose exuberance has brought the US presidential race alive). But in the end it’s policy, not force of personality, that counts. When not out clubbing, Rayner has been touting new rights to request a four-day week in a push towards making flexible working the norm. It’s not the radical cut in national working hours some wanted – she’s talking about compressed working, which is essentially fitting five days’ worth of a job into four longer days to gain a free weekday off – and it may not suit parents anxious to be home early enough for children’s bed and bath time.
But they’re not the only people desperate for a bit more time to themselves, and unlike the traditional option of going part-time, compressed hours is a way of carving out space for a three-day weekend that crucially doesn’t require the kind of pay cut many people can’t afford. It makes flexible working look less like a middle-class professional luxury, and it is potentially also more father-friendly, given it’s one of the few forms of flexible working that is more popular with men than women.
Like Phillipson’s rethink of Ofsted, expanding ideas about who does and doesn’t get to have a healthy work-life balance is a small policy that’s potentially capable of stirring bigger emotions. The same is true of this autumn’s water regulation bill, if it ends up making swimmers and surfers feel safe to go back in the water. The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has also promised to investigate the miserly Ticketmaster-style surge pricing tactics which saw Oasis reunion tickets double in price while fans were stuck in the queue to buy them – another much-needed boost of optimism. All of these look for ways, even in tough times, to make everyday life a fraction easier, less stressful; happier, even. In a country ground down by what’s sometimes called a “happiness recession”, that’s not nothing.
British teenagers are now the most miserable in Europe, according to a new analysis by the Children’s Society, while the measure of national wellbeing published by the Office for National Statistics this summer showed adults feeling more anxious and less satisfied with their lives than in 2019. That official measure, it should be said, only exists thanks to David Cameron’s short-lived passion for using government to try to boost national happiness – a project seen as helping to ease the gloom of the austerity years that fizzled out rather awkwardly when it became obvious how much it might cost. Though money can’t buy happiness, it doesn’t half help, and Cameron’s half-hearted early experiment serves as a warning that there’s a limit to what this government will be able to do on the cheap.
But he was right that it isn’t woolly minded or frivolous for politicians to prioritise the pursuit of happiness. This country faces a long, hard road back to prosperity, and at times it’s evidently going to be a miserable one. Starmer needs to help us take our fleeting pleasures where we can.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
