Aibu to hate Michael Gove?

The curriculum didn't change within the same timeframes in Scotland as it did in England and we are also seeing record number of kids being diagnosed as neurodiverse here so something else must be going on. I believe the waiting lists for CAHMS are significantly longer here too - 2.5 years for initial assessment last time I asked.

He also totally fucked GCSE English- knock on effect no one wants to do A level any more.

YABU for the Chatgpt post, OP.

Totally agree. What he has done to reading and phonics should be considered a crime too. Children like my DS who can read fluently are held back because they don’t / can’t phonetically sound out each individual word. Bring back reading by sight. Fuck ‘Fred talk’.

Also, as an aside, listen to his podcast on The Rest is Politics. The man is a Zionist.

We didn’t get an overdiagnosis crisis. We got a system that can’t admit it failed, so it diagnosed the kids instead.

Now whether Mr Gove is solely responsible I dispute but I could not agree more strongly with this. Fix schools and you will fix the SEN crisis and I do not mean segregating them in a Portacabin in the playground and calling that inclusion.

Social media is already increasingly dominated by AI generated rubbish. Students who have studied English literature are much more likely to be able to identify what is good writing and what had been manufactured by a machine to manipulate them.

We clearly have such profoundly different views on what is useful and important for the development of a child’s brain that I don’t think there is much point in discussing any further.

Yes, but my point was that he’s made it unnecessarily complicated. My junior school taught English/grammar extremely well way back, but it was limited to nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, phrases and clauses - as far as I remember.
All of which were plenty at that stage.

The hatred for Gove in education is interesting as in every other department he led, he was actually really well liked and respected and managed to get things done. He arguably wasn’t wrong on pushing up standards or the focus on phonics in the early years. However, everyone can see there have been perverse effects in primary schools.

The reduction in play and the amount of kids who hate year 1 has to be a warning sign that something isn’t quite right. You shouldn’t really have a system where 5 year olds start complaining about not enough play. Some of the grammar exercises are just joyless quite frankly and don’t even really carry on into senior.

The year 6 curriculum seems to narrow significantly. I moved a child for year 5 to a prep due to the disruptive behaviour in her class. She was getting no learning done and was becoming highly anxious being in an environment with deregulated and aggressive boys. It was clear to see there wasn’t enough Sen support but also that it was nigh on impossible for everyone’s needs to be met.

The thing that has struck me is the wider curriculum. She is doing a lot of science, MfL and languages at a time where her old school seems to really narrow in on maths and grammar. Interestingly, when I was speaking to admissions for selective secondary schools- they said the kids from state generally came in with a high standard in maths, good reading and English language, poorer creative writing and needed catch-up for science and MFL.

I wasn’t saying they were written off. I was saying that is the rhetoric used by the left wing, the Labour Party, the Guardian readers and mumsnetters every time someone talks about selective education.

You can’t have a comprehensive system that results in bespoke pathways for every child in a fashion that’s affordable to tax payers without haivng 3000 pupil mega schools. And even in that case, I’m not sure it would work and people would be up in arms about sending their kid to such a big school.

I agree, but we also cannot ignore that overdiagnosis has coincided with the widespread adoption of digital technology for young children both in schools and at home.

It’s not just the learning environment that’s reduced the ability of children to cope.

Unpopular opinion with many, but the data is there. And yet we continue to ignore it because it doesn’t serve us.

My friend's very clever daughter is in year 6. She's been recently referred as possibly being adhd, because sometimes she's very distracted and then does all her work in 5 minutes.
She's been referred just before high school incase she needs help.
According to her class teacher, 90% of children are now referred for some reason or other.
Im assuming they meant just to give the high school teachers a heads up?
Very bizaare.
My freind's daughter needs zero help with schooling or her social life
Why on earth would she need to be referred?
Also, I've seen her maths work, and it's definitely key stage 3.
What's the point? It's not as if they'll do A levels in year 10!

My nephew was a "failure" at school due to undiagnosed dyslexia.
He didn't even have English and Maths GCSE when he left.
He started as a trolley boy for one of the big supermarkets and over 12 years has steadily worked his way up to store manager and now regional manager.
With no degree debt.
It's testimony to his spirit that he didn't let the lack of success at school define him, it would have been easy for this really bright and ambitious young lad to have ended up on the scrap heap.

Sue Palmer's book Toxic Childhood also speaks about the 'schoolification of childhood'. And this has got so much worse since she published in 2004.

Purely going by comments on here diagnosis takes about 3 years in England.
We would have been over 5 years if DS had made it to the end. GP put the referral in February half-term 2019 to it was Summer 2024 before DS was near the top of the list.

Makes me wonder if thats keeping the diagnosis rates artificially low in Scotland

This should be shared far and wide. What an insightful and amazing post, I wish the government would listen.

On MN, this always boils itself down to an argument about English Lit because there are a core of haters on here. But it's not English Lit the majority of kids hate. It's the English sodding Language GCSE which is by far the dullest thing one could ever encounter.

I teach film - and the kids get genuinely excited at the opportunity to analyse texts and to write creatively. They never get to write creatively in many schools post about year 8 - except 'descriptive' colour by numbers writing under exam conditions. I don't teach English any more. I fell out of love. It has become OBSESSED with assessments (along with most subjects now). Sadly this looks externally to many people (especially at secondary level) like 'better teaching'. I mainly blame Gove and his ideological stance about coursework , creativity, end point exams and what teaching is (and free schools): but also the importing of pedagogical theory under New Labour from the USA charter school movement. And the application of 'direct instructions' to all subjects as if they all suit it. That's post Gove. A lot of what is blamed on Gove is also / actually Blunkett ,. amongst others

I loathe him . But need to correct a few myths. Having been educated myself in Scotland, much of what he imported and believed is actaully based on the Scottish system in the 70s and 80s which was quite rigid and very exam focused (great for people with the 'right' kind of mind like Gove, and me) . This is also where the numbers came from (but he reversed them, much to the annoyance of any Scot who has to explain their 1 in English is the highest grade!) I am surprised he didn't combine English and Eng lit into one subject actaully, as per Scotland. I wish he had actually. The AS followed by A2 was an attempt to ape Highers followed by CSYS.

Also, he is not especially public school boy privileged. He went to private school, yes : but not a very grand one (I am sure lots of his life has been about trying to mask this and climb upwards : I read a brilliant book about the Oxford set of that era once and it speaks of Gove. It's name will come to me at some point!) Gove is also adopted. He was born into considerable poverty to a single mother . I think because life worked for him , he believes in meritocracy pretty uncritically.

It came to me - the brilliant book is called Chums.

As a teacher friend of mine said in her twenty year career, "the hoops we have to jump through have got progressively smaller and higher". I feel for teachers - it is an amazingly stressful job and parents often don't help either so yes you are being a bit unreasonable to land it all on Michael Gove.

You haven’t made that sound any simpler. They do need to memorise lines from the poem to use in their analysis and what it means and they do get an unseen poem that they have to compare to another poem they’ve learnt and they don’t know which poems are going to relate to the one they get. I’ve tried to encourage mine to only learn some of them with a variety of themes and their English Tutor (who is also an English teacher) told them they needed to learn them all. So that’s where the anxiety stems from.

I think this is going off topic slightly. The OP was about the harm done to children by trying to fit them into an education system that doesn't work for them. Sure everybody needs to do things that are good for them, some will enjoy the challenge, some won't. Some will be harmed by the trying.
Somehow we need to figure out a way of making the school years work for all children, so that they leave with a sense of who they are, what they are good at and how they can best engage with society. We all learn best when we are feeling positive, not stressed.

Agree. You’re not allowed to fine parents for taking holidays etc in Scotland and it just brings a general attitude that school doesn’t matter. At least a quarter of my child’s classmates are trailing up the road after I have dropped my child off.

In some of the highers they don’t much care what you write as long as you set it out in the proscribed way. There is zero respect for actual knowledge. It’s appalling.

I agree with much of what you say but the point you are missing is that autistic children could cope with the system before MG made it more rigid and inflexible. Some of them got to adulthood before they were diagnosed. The harsh system coupled with stripping money from schools created an environment where they could no longer cope.

Ive been teaching for almost 30 years and I remember the changes being brought in by Give and it was horrifying.

Part way through Year 11, he scrapped the 20% speaking and listening element in English. My class had already done 2 of the 3 assessments and suddenly we were told these did not count and the extra. 20% was lumped into the exam. Utter madness!

GCSE History went from 2 units and coursework to 4 massive topics - all exam. It’s almost impossible to complete the course in KS4. It’s just cramming lots of facts int kids and Hopi g some stick as there’s no time for revision.

I suddenly found I was teaching A level stuff at GCSE and then at A level teaching things from my degree. A level history coursework is like its own course - another teacher said it was its own EPQ!

Why have practical subjects like Media now with so much exam assessment, rather than coursework? No one working in media is sitting exams but instead working on projects over time.

Gove did all this and more. A truly odious little man.

You should look at how the Swiss do it. University is excellent and cheap but is only for a few. There is big weeding out of students at the end of the 1st year of uni. Many other pathways are on offer, and apprenticeships are excellent and a respected route to a career. When I first came to live here, the young man who helped me open my account was a 16 year old banking apprentice. He has been working his way up in the bank ever since. In the UK you'd need a degree in finance and a mountain of student debt to do what that 16 year old was doing very competently. He had deliberately chosen not to go the uni route as he just wanted to get out and work.

If you look at the job market and AI, it is middle management positions that are likely to go and practical hands on jobs which will thrive. To develop fine motor skills, planning, critical thinking, team work and applied knowledge of chemicals etc all very important. The education system should be thinking about how to train the next construction worker, plumber, hairdresser, chef, care worker as much as the next doctor/engineeer/pharmacist/lawyer, right from the start. For those self employed, basic accountancy and tax skills are really important as well as financial awareness. So I think pathways from year 9 would be the best. Most kids know by year 9 whether they are going to be able to do A levels or not. It is already in the GCSE sets mostly,

I couldn’t agree more OP. He sent teaching back to the 18th century, endless fact based memorising and bloody SAT’s. So many children simply can’t cope with the environment he created. Every teacher I know hates the curriculum and the fact it has no flex to work with the kids you have. It’s all targets.