I know it is de rigeur in some circles to curse the name of Gove. Two of the teachers at my children’s school danced a little jig together when they had heard he had been given the push in the reshuffle from the Department of Education. But I don’t share their delight.This was, of course, Michael Gove’s problem. Not since John Patten’s tenure at the department has a Secretary of State for Education found himself quite so disliked by the profession – and I tell the strange story of Patten and the start of league tables in my book Broke.
I didn’t think that Gove got the emphasis right on everything, by any means, and it is bizarre the way that the paradoxes of education policy have been pushed to the same kind of extreme as the West Lothian Question.
Why are the only schools to have their curriculum prescribed the local authority ones? Especially if the main objection to local authority schools is their inflexibility. Why have local authorities been given so little leaway to find new school places, especially in areas where population is rising fastest?
But let’s leave all that on one side. Because Gove has been one of those rare things: a thinking, thoughtful, radical politician, and – as radicals ought to be – in constant conflict with the establishment. He needed to have cultivated more allies, in retrospect, but I still wish there were more like him.
The irony is that the elements of Goveism that most irritated the teachers – the emphasis on testing, the puritanism, the punitive approach to parents, the dour utilitarianism – may have had his approval, but were no more than extensions of the prevailing policy of his department for many governments past.
It was a dour, utilitarian place under Labour and it remained a dour, utilitarian place, with half the staff, under the coalition, but despite Gove. It was his misfortune that the department managed to shift the blame for this onto their Secretary of State.
But Gove was absolutely right on three issues, and these were not utilitarian at all.
He was right to emphasise the importance of diversity in education, right to champion the involvement of parents in starting schools and right to turbo-charge free schools. He was wrong to centralise their control and quite wrong to take them out of the local authority co-ordinating umbrella, but the basics of the free schools was overwhelmingly correct and overwhelmingly Liberal in the best sense – it can still be about diversity, self-help and non-conformity.
He was absolutely right in his emphasis on chronology in history teaching, and right to rescue history from the boulderised backwater where pupils have to study Hitler over and over again. You might choose different dates, but chronology is important to get across a sense of history and Gove was the scourge of the utilitarians here too.
He stood up against the alliance between the educational establishment and the online billionaires who believe that somehow you can have education without content. You don’t want the dull recitation of facts, but equally you can’t make education work without something to teach – relying on children to look things up on the iPads which the Pupil Premium has delivered them in such unnecessary numbers.
There are educationalists who think that education is just about process. They are wrong, and without radicals and thinkers like Gove, the fear is we will also have government without content, the besetting sin of the British establishment in all ages.
But let’s leave all that on one side. Because Gove has been one of those rare things: a thinking, thoughtful, radical politician, and – as radicals ought to be – in constant conflict with the establishment. He needed to have cultivated more allies, in retrospect, but I still wish there were more like him.
The irony is that the elements of Goveism that most irritated the teachers – the emphasis on testing, the puritanism, the punitive approach to parents, the dour utilitarianism – may have had his approval, but were no more than extensions of the prevailing policy of his department for many governments past.
It was a dour, utilitarian place under Labour and it remained a dour, utilitarian place, with half the staff, under the coalition, but despite Gove. It was his misfortune that the department managed to shift the blame for this onto their Secretary of State.
But Gove was absolutely right on three issues, and these were not utilitarian at all.
He was right to emphasise the importance of diversity in education, right to champion the involvement of parents in starting schools and right to turbo-charge free schools. He was wrong to centralise their control and quite wrong to take them out of the local authority co-ordinating umbrella, but the basics of the free schools was overwhelmingly correct and overwhelmingly Liberal in the best sense – it can still be about diversity, self-help and non-conformity.
He was absolutely right in his emphasis on chronology in history teaching, and right to rescue history from the boulderised backwater where pupils have to study Hitler over and over again. You might choose different dates, but chronology is important to get across a sense of history and Gove was the scourge of the utilitarians here too.
He stood up against the alliance between the educational establishment and the online billionaires who believe that somehow you can have education without content. You don’t want the dull recitation of facts, but equally you can’t make education work without something to teach – relying on children to look things up on the iPads which the Pupil Premium has delivered them in such unnecessary numbers.
There are educationalists who think that education is just about process. They are wrong, and without radicals and thinkers like Gove, the fear is we will also have government without content, the besetting sin of the British establishment in all ages.
It wasn’t just that Gove was colourful and more interesting than the bland ranks of Conservatives (though he is). It was that he believed something and believed that, by sheer willpower, he could make it happen.
But there is a third reason too. He was rightly enraged by the failure of the secondary system a generation ago to lift children out of poverty.
Say what you like about league tables, and I do, they did reveal for the first time how schools were failing children. What the tables showed when they appeared for the first time in 1992 was that the national average of five passes at GCSE stood at only 38 per cent. Southwark Borough Council was bottom of the league, with 15 per cent (before the Lib Dems took over).
The most revealing comment of all at the time came from the head teacher of a school in Leeds where only two pupils had managed to scrape together five GCSEs: ‘We have a dreadful problem with truancy and discipline,” he said. “We have intrusions like motorbikes being ridden into school during the day while lessons are being taught.’
The very honesty seemed to demonstrate the scale of the problem, especially as he added that they were the best rugby league school on the country. So that’s alright then. Find out more about this in Broke.
I wouldn’t be surprised if pupils of that period didn’t bring a class action against their local education authorities. They certainly ought to.
Those days have gone in most parts of the country, though the league tables have become a kind of tyranny of their own. Even so, Gove has been fierce in his determination to drive standards for the poorest. That is why he’s such a loss to the Conservatives.
But there is a third reason too. He was rightly enraged by the failure of the secondary system a generation ago to lift children out of poverty.
Say what you like about league tables, and I do, they did reveal for the first time how schools were failing children. What the tables showed when they appeared for the first time in 1992 was that the national average of five passes at GCSE stood at only 38 per cent. Southwark Borough Council was bottom of the league, with 15 per cent (before the Lib Dems took over).
The most revealing comment of all at the time came from the head teacher of a school in Leeds where only two pupils had managed to scrape together five GCSEs: ‘We have a dreadful problem with truancy and discipline,” he said. “We have intrusions like motorbikes being ridden into school during the day while lessons are being taught.’
The very honesty seemed to demonstrate the scale of the problem, especially as he added that they were the best rugby league school on the country. So that’s alright then. Find out more about this in Broke.
I wouldn’t be surprised if pupils of that period didn’t bring a class action against their local education authorities. They certainly ought to.
Those days have gone in most parts of the country, though the league tables have become a kind of tyranny of their own. Even so, Gove has been fierce in his determination to drive standards for the poorest. That is why he’s such a loss to the Conservatives.
Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the words blog subscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com.
When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe.