I disagree along with your analysis of Gove’s “reform” stampede (“Some good school work, but must do better”, editorial).
Ever since Kenneth Baker’s regressive Education Reform Act (1988), Tory and New Labour governments have messed about with state education to make it fit a rightwing agenda.
I am a recently retired state secondary school teacher who couldn’t be described as a wild-eyed leftie. However, I totally reject the assumptions made from 1970s education. The idea that more “rigour”, facts (who decides them) and longer essays are going to remodel the life probabilities of working-class students will be laughable if it weren’t so intellectually vacuous. Teachers may be smiling through gritted teeth as this pantomime unfolds. Back to the 1950s with a vengeance.
Philip Wood
Kidlington, Oxon
I was pleased to determine that you just stressed the adaptation between Labour’s academies and people of Michael Gove. It’s also important to emphasise the actual motives which are driving Mr Gove.
An example of the issues that he’ll cause because he’s a person in a rush will soon emerge in his A-level reforms. These must be challenged urgently before Mr Gove achieves his true aim – leadership of the Conservative party and, he hopes, the premiership. One example is the rate at which he intends to introduce A-level exam reforms. Students starting AS- and A-levels in September 2013 will encounter only end-of-year exams. Students starting A-level exams in September 2015 and 2016 will begin a two-year course with only an exam on the end. These students wouldn’t have any experience of such exams because the new GCSE courses wouldn’t have any students completing them until 2017.
If Mr Gove was not in this type of rush to advance his political career, he would hearken to those that keep in mind that you should definitely prepare students for brand new exams by starting at a lower age. Students and their parents mustn’t ever be used simply so Mr Gove can prove that he’s “doing something” before he moves on and leaves behind the issues that he’ll have caused.
Martin Jeanneret
Newhaven, Sussex
When it involves assessment of education policy, the devil is usually inside the detail. You are saying that “the pupil premium shifts the funding system further to the good thing about schools with poor [your selection of words] intakes”, however the pupil premium isn’t ring-fenced. Because the DfE website states: “Schools decide the best way to use the funding, as they’re best placed to evaluate what additional provision their pupils need.”
As the Guardian reported last September, David Laws, the universities minister, had “admitted that using funds allocated under the government’s £1.25bn flagship “pupil premium” is “not adequate” after the education watchdog found that more had to be done to ensure the cash was getting used to assist poor children”. This implies it’s premature for the Observer to evaluate this policy as “a gem”. You assert that the academies “remain a small but significant presence”. The DfE website reports that there at the moment are 2,673 academies. Here’s greater than half all English secondary schools and that i would call that paradigm-shifting.
Roz Stevens
Lancaster
Your editorial and investigation into the activities of Gove’s special advisers lend credence to the generally held view inside the education service that “Gove moves in mysterious ways his blunders to accomplish” (to misquote William Cowper – who doesn’t appear in Gove’s new national curriculum).
Prof Colin Richards
Spark Bridge, Cumbria
