Aibu to hate Michael Gove?

I think this is really interesting. I hate Gove and his interference with a passion, but this doesn’t reflect my own experience. I have two DD, one of whom is not academic and has SPLD) but she didn’t really start to struggle until secondary. And also I work at a fairly high ranking university and the deterioration over the last 15 years amongst our students in maths, literacy and critical thinking when they arrive is very marked (as well as their resilience, independence and motivation). So any increased standards at primary are not following through to improved academic standards, even for the more able. COVID obviously didn’t help, but accelerated rather than started the trend. I think we also have to very much question what is happening at secondary level.

Yes - this rings true to me!
i went to a supposedly good junior school and I only learned any grammar at secondary school when I studied languages.
I am so impressed where DC is and what the school in a deprived inner city area has achieved.

Fantastic OP but don’t forget his sidekick Dominic Cummings role in the education ‘reforms’. Once they’d broken education they moved on to breaking the economy with Brexit.

How anyone could side with people who make idiotic statements such as ‘everyone should be above average at maths’ and ‘the British people have had enough of experts’ is beyond me.

Yup. If anything politics might get worse, especially as the teaching unions seem to have forgotten that their purpose is the employment rights of their members, and now are obsessed with the latest social activism and trends.

I 100 percent agree we have an overly academic and high pressure education system that suits only academic children.

I disagree that this is the sole cause of the problems you state, including poor MH in young people. There are many causes feeding into that and we all have a collective responsibility for it. Parents are over protective of children now who get very little (if any) freedom and responsibility without adult socialization which is really bad for developing a sense of capability and responsibility as well as co-operative social skills snd problem solving. And just relaxing.

We also have a society where it’s common for both parents to work full time leaving little time to spend with kids, and parents being more stressed.

As well as screens, early exposure to porn, divisive social media feeding negative measures. And ( I have to add) repeated messaging in school about the destruction of the world due to climate change which is freaking one of my kids out. Really pissed off at the school for that.

Both medicine and education are rife with political factions and opinions based on fashions of the day, without any input from politicians. The idea that removing actual politicians will reduce fads and politics is for the birds.

I do agree politics should be taken out of education and the NHS.

Its nuts that the goal posts keep moving within both.

I always think that education should be treated like interest rates (for those too young to remember, interest rates used to be set by politicians but that power was given the the Bank of England to stop it being used as a political football). The curriculum should be decided by experts and based on strong evidence reviewing best practice globally. It should not be subject to the whims of the latest politician to come through the revolving door.

This is an interesting thread. It is what I have been saying for years. I have worked as a TA in primary and secondary in every year group from year 1 to year 11.

What children are expected to learn in primary school now is beyond the abilities of most of the children. I watched each year group the number of children really understanding it get smaller and smaller. That they can achieve a "pass" without really understanding much of what they have been taught doesn't make it any better.

Someone upthread talked about a y6 child being taught KS3 maths. No they are not. They are being taught KS2 maths. Most of it gets taught again in KS3, presumably because so many children fail to really learn it in KS2. Unfortunately, by KS3 they have decided they are rubbish at maths because they couldn't do it in primary school and lessons have become something they endure (or disrupt) and not something they engage with.

One of my own children was in Y4 when the Gove curriculum was introduced. They went from 2 years ahead on the old curriculum to "expected" on the new one. Despite that all my children have thrived with the current curriculum because they are lucky enough to be bright and have supportive parents. I recognise that they are not representative of the majority of children though. And for those who struggle to learn it is soul destroying.

I love my job but the one thing that might drive me out is watching children being pushed through the system and forced to sit GCSEs that they will be lucky to get a 1 or 2 in or even that they know, and everyone knows, they are going to fail. Then we send these young people out into the world believing that they are stupid/failures when really their strengths may just lie elsewhere.

We don't need everyone to be highly academic. Look at the key workers, look at how many of them were people who did the jobs that don't require academic qualifications. Maybe the issue is that we don't value those people and their skills as much as we should. If we valued them more then there wouldn't be the stigma around doing alternative pathways for non-academic children.

The ability to relatively easily remove a kid from your class who was dicking about and disrupting the lesson.

The behaviour that got worse was an increase in kids dicking about and disrupting lessons.

What exactly did they want watered down?
What sort of behaviour got worse?

My school had a reasonable behaviour policy. That didn't stop a large group of parents kicking off massively about it. The policy was watered down and behaviour has got much worse. Well done them.

Depends on what people mean by "behaviour being strictly addressed"

Secondary schools especially seem to want to display discipline by dictating that children wear blazers ALL the time, no consideration that some kids run hotter than others.
Sitting boiling in a classroom with a stiff blazer on really can't be productive for any child.

Look at the threads about schools where poor behaviour is strictly addressed. Not popular.

The vast majority of high achieving autistic children just need the poor behaviour by fellow pupils to be addressed. Is this really too much to ask? That they can sit in a classroom without screeching classmates lashing out, destroying children’s work, throwing things around and hitting people. It’s not too much to ask for a classroom environment where teachers teach and pupils learn, is it? 90% of the class would thrive in this environment in a was that they’re not able to thrive now.

Indeed! Was including teachers in my comment!

I never mentioned class or AI in my response so not sure why you made these points? I have worked in education for 40 years and my maxim in life is 'education is never wasted' However education does not necessarily mean studying for a degree.
I do think the standard of learning at most so called universities ( there are a few exceptions) is shocking. Universities are self regulated so do not have to answer to OFQUAL and there is a huge difference in the learning provision between one and another. So I stand by my saying some degrees are worthless because they have little academic rigour, have a very poor student entry system (they accept students who do not have the necessary qualifications just to get 'bums on seats' ) and generally deliver a dumbed down poor experience, at the end of which the graduate is left with £100,000 worth of debt.
It simply isn't logical to believe that the majority of people are capable of studying at a higher level. This is nothing to do with class, and totally agree attendance at university should be based only on academic merit.
My point is that the current system is based on young people getting into massive debt (which will only be wiped out if they haven't managed to pay it back after 40 years!) gaining a qualification that often doesn't help them advance in a career and they end up unemployed with a reluctance to even do any work they feel is beneath them 'because they have a degree'. Meanwhile we have a record shortage of employees in the trade and service industry while paying millions in job seekers allowance...
Therefore the ideology that everyone should get a degree is clearly not working..

Teachers were ignored too. Nobody ever considers the views of the actual experts who deliver the curriculum day in day out.

I’ve taught in two. Their curriculum is absolutely controlled by the Gove curriculum which is so stuffed it doesn’t leave room for ‘around and beyond’ for the vast majority.

A huge number of educational experts advised how children learn maths and English when the national curriculum 2014 was being devised. Their advice was ignored.

Private schools go ahead of and around the gcse curriculum, as well as getting the children ready for the exams; and they offer a lot of extra curricular outlets too. The classes are smaller and less noisy which is what some pp are saying would help their autistic dc.

No. Gove’s curriculum affects all children including those at independent schools because it controls exam specifications.
(Plus private education is only open to a small minority and price rises in the sector have been massive anyway over the last few years).

If you want to hate Muchael Gove for his schools reforms, do you also hate Rachel Reeves and Bridget Phillipson for making private education so much more unaffordable for these same children who could benefit so much from small class sizes, calm environments individual attention? Parents tend to be willing to do a lot of heavy lifting to support their SEND or ND children. Rather than slapping on VAT and ending ECHP, a means-tested grant to help cover fees in mainstream private schools to keep those pupils in education and safeguard their mental wellbeing would almost certainly have saved money for the state education system and supported better outcomes for the children.

@Nepmarthiturn

The academic and calm children who want to learn and are neurotypical get on very well with my children and they need a school with those children, with smaller classes.

I don't think you can legally make 'calm' an entry criteria. Academic ability would be grammar schools but they certainly don't have smaller classes. Children who are academically able are generally expected to cope in larger classes.

Children with violence and behaviour issues need a school just for them with appropriately trained staff and proper boundaries.

These exist - PRUs. The threshold for being sent to one is extremely high though. We also need more of them.

Children with learning disabilities need enough SEN school places to go to as they cannot access the national curriculum

Certainly we need more special school places for pupils who cannot, despite best efforts, access the national curriculum.

Children with various other non-academic talents should be able to go to schools with specialist teaching in these areas while doing core subjects so that they don’t have their self-esteem crushed and are not made to feel worthless and can actually develop their equally valuable non-academic skills

This suggestion comes up a lot. It's the old grammar schools for the able, vocational schools for the less able system which was abandoned because it didn't actually do what it said on the tin. It's implied that children who are 'less academic' have 'other talents'. And that academic children do not have those 'other talents'. Whereas in reality there are children who are academically able also are good at sport, or drama or product design or whatever, and many children who are not amazing at maths or science are also not amazing at the other subjects. You also get kids who are great at maths and crap at English. Are they academically able or are they doomed to the 'other talents' school where their ability in maths is reduced to 'practical maths'?
And at what age would these 'other talents' be identified and kids filtered off into their appropriate schools? This was tried a few years ago with the UTC model where kids went off to 'more vocational' schools aged 14. The vast majority of UTCs were failures and closed very quickly with dreadful results.

Labour also tried the 'specialist school' thing pre-2010 with schools identifying a specialism and being awarded extra money for teaching it. There were schools with a language specialism, a sports specialism, a science specialism. That was mainly crap and also abandoned. At aged 11 kids mostly don't stand out in any clearly defined area and parents don't want to send them miles away to the 'sports school'. They want to send their kid to the local school where they can discover their talents and try a whole load of stuff out.

An “autism unit” in a mainstream state school will not help my children in any way. Will subject specialists teachers come to the “unit” and teach them in small groups like they need? No. It will be the same as now at primary

I've got a friend who teaches at a school with an autism unit and they didn't describe it like you think it is at all.

Reforms were needed to the education system.

if the teachers union had worked with the government rather than oppose every suggestion it might have worked better