Aibu to hate Michael Gove?

Where are you in the country, @Nepmarthiturn? How many schools do you have nearby? I don't recognise this picture from our local schools: "just not 30 of them in a room with shouting all day long and regular violence"

Schools round here are variable in quality and yes, they aren't perfect, but none of them have that extended level of violence and shouting all the time. Obviously if you're in the highlands of Scotland and it's your local school or bust that's different.

Schools are causing the mental health problems. They aren’t being asked to “solve” them. They’re being asked not to cause them, to previously happy children.

Yes, as I said in multiple posts the current school system is failing a very significant minority if not the majority of children because those for whom the current state school model would be appropriate can’t learn either because of the disruption from many children who should not be in that environment due to learning disabilities or behaviour problems, or children who simply are not academic and would thrive doing far more practical learning. Most children would benefit from there being a far wider range of schools set up to cater to different children’s needs and talents and learning styles, not just those with disabilities. Schools absolutely should be providing much more of a bespoke education with different learning environments available for different children (with disabilities or not) so that they can all learn to their potential. Surely this is obvious? Schools should be designed for children and what is best for them to learn well because that is the whole purpose of schools. Why would you think it appropriate to pretend that all children are the same and the same learning environment and curriculum will work for them all? Are all of the adults you meet the same, with the same interests, talents and abilities and focus and function well in the same environment?

EHCPs aren’t worth the paper they are written on because schools and LAs do not comply with them and they take YEARS of legal battles to get in place even before the LA decides to them underfund it and the school decides not to comply with it.

There needs to be sufficient funding, there need to be different schools to meet the needs of different children, and a proper regulator like in every other profession that actually enforces the law and prosecutes LAs and schools for unlawful behaviour, levies large fines (both personal and organisational), removal of professional qualifications and bans from working in the sector and — in cases of serious or repeated breaches — prison sentences. Just like in law/ medicine/ finance for similar statutory/ legal breaches. It is even more important that the regulation system and enforcement is robust when the profession involved is responsible for safeguarding of the most vulnerable people in society and is utterly disgusting that deliberate, systemic unlawful behaviour is seen as the norm and accepted and no action is taken. In NO other profession would this be tolerated. Significant penalties need to be put in place coming down on it like a ton of bricks to stamp it out, removing the financial incentives for schools and LAs to behave in this manner.

The problem is not what is written in the law, it is that the law is not complied with and nothing is done about it. We need to fund education properly - it should be the number 1 national priority after defence - and we need to replace OFSTED with an extremely robust regulator that does its job properly rather than leaving it to individual parents to enforce the law through tribunals when the deliberate illegal behaviour is systemic and structural. It would actually be far cheaper to have different schools set up for different children than to have to put in place “support” constantly to try to paper over the fact that mainstream state schools as set up currently are simply not appropriate for a very large number of children. It would also save a lot of money in the long term because our young people would enjoy school, be engaged with learning, thrive and develop their individual talents, i.e. higher growth and productivity, lower health costs, lower welfare costs, lower justice costs, high tax revenue.

The vast majority of state schools are NOT capable of supporting autistic children adequately, as the statistics in the research demonstrate, despite your “round our way” anecdata. Yes - the “support” in place currently is ineffective because it happens too late, and it is low quality because it is largely designed by SENCOs and idiotic LA staff until an EHCP is put in place and they have no idea what they are doing. It is also ineffective because in many cases it is the school environment itself that is the problem. The unchangeable aspects of the current structure (i.e. class sizes of 30, loud and disruptive and violent behaviour tolerated) that make it IMPOSSIBLE for some children like mine to attend regularly. You may think you know better but my children’s neurodevelopmental paediatricians, SALTs, psychiatrists, child therapists and THEIR SCHOOL all agree that no mainstream state school can meet their needs.

You don’t “think there is a case” for setting up a school that children like them can go to, despite the academic research showing that in 83% of cases where there is significant school distress leading to the child becoming to attend this is because the child is autistic and the school environment has caused them to develop severe mental health problems?

We would criticise a developing country for not providing a school for all children, yet you think it’s acceptable for NO SCHOOL THAT THE CHILD CAN ATTEND AT ALL to be provided for some children in the UK? Why is that? It is an internationally recognised human right for all children to be able to access education per the Human Rights Act 1998, as well as being enshrined in law in the UK in the Education Act 1989.

What is your solution then? Children like mine should just not get to go to school at all because they are autistic?

I used to teach KS2. For me it was the volume rather than difficulty of the learning that was the killer. Kids either got it pretty much straight away or didn't. Then you had to move on. No time to actually teach the material.

The only decent lesson was streamed maths once per week. You could really get stuck into that whichever of the groups you had.

@noblegiraffe I see you did answer some comments from the OP after I posted this but you haven’t responded to me. I have seen you for years very active on education threads, so I would be very grateful if you would answer this post when you have time to do so.

Where are children like mine meant to go to school in the state system? SEN specialist schools state they can’t meet their needs as do mainstream schools.

Where am I meant to send them?

I am a lone parent and work full time to provide for them, so home-schooling isn’t an option. When I had to do this for 4 months for my daughter because she became suicidal because of school - aged 5 - I had to care for/ educate her during the day and do my job at night and sleep for 2-3 hours per day which has led to an incurable cardiac condition so I cannot do that again. ETOAS is not an option either as both of them are sociable and want to be with peers (just not 30 of them in a room with shouting all day long and regular violence) and it is their legal right to attend school and have an appropriate education they can access just like children who are not autistic. They cannot do that in any of the schools that the state provides currently. So where should they go?

Do you agree that appropriate schools for children like them should be set up? Research shows that they are very far from alone in their predicament. As children with IQs well into the top 1% who are keen to learn, presumably their legal right to go to school should be upheld? Either they will be provided with an appropriate education without being traumatised further and likely become very productive members of society and high contributors to tax revenue, or the school system can continue deliberately traumatising them until they cannot attend at all and they will probably then become a net beneficiary of the state for life, so even if nobody in the Department for Education/ LA/ working in schools cares about their welfare it is a pretty goddamn stupid thing to do to children like this from a societal perspective.

You write on the education threads here very outspokenly and have done for years so I would be grateful to hear what your proposal would be for my children to be provided with an adequate education per the law; whether you agree with me that the Education Secretary’s proposals completely ignore children like them; and whether you will be making such points in response to the consultation.

This is literally the case for every primary school near here. With the exception of ICT lessons, pretty much everything is done on pencil and paper. In part because getting out the laptops wastes too much time!

Schools should not be solving mental health or other medical problems. EHCPs desperately need reform - many of them aren’t worth the paper they are written on and are nigh on impossible to deliver with multiple EHCPs that are supposed to be delivered in one classroom contradicting each other (multiple children needing to be in the front seat, one child needing movement breaks whilst their neighbour needs uninterrupted quiet). On top of that, the evidence base for many interventions is low quality and expert consensus often outruns evidence.

So despite ever increasing amounts of money being poured into SEN education via EHCPs and specialist school places (which are increasing), outcomes for this cohort are declining.

Schools are also not here to provide bespoke education for anyone. The idea that somehow a lovely special school will be set up solely to meet the needs of quiet academic SEN children - well, many other kids might benefit from that too. The majority of state schools round our way are more than capable of supporting academically capable ADHD and autistic children in mainstream with necessary adaptions. It is clear that from some posters on this thread, that is not the case everywhere -but the answer is not setting up special schools for ever smaller cohorts of children. There is absolutely a case for specialist provision, but I don’t think this is it.

For better or worse, this country has decided that we aren’t going to select on academics for children, and I don’t think there is any desire to go back on that.

I do get that, but certainly for primary school I'd keep everything pen and paper. Consolidate learning the basics. It's so much easier to learn by writing than scrolling. And then introduce tech slowly but not at the expense of using written books etc, so screen use still in moderation in schools.
That said, I am aware that this a somewhat old fashioned view, I know it's not one held by many these days.

If you look at the research I have posted a link to several times on the thread, and quoted in my post at 12:28 yesterday (page 13 of the thread) you will see that research has shown 92.1% of those suffering school distress and severe mental health difficulties resulting from school are neurodivergent, with 83.4% being autistic.

The “semh diagnoses” are the effect of the utter failure of the system to provide a suitable school environment for these children. In the vast majority of cases the mental health issues are the symptom of the problem which is the inappropriate school environment. What we need to do is address the cause of the problem i.e. change the school environment itself.

The purpose of school is for children, purportedly, is it not? This is not work/ employment where people must bend to the needs of the employer/ their role. In this case the children are the customer around whom the product/ service should be designed. Schools exist for the purpose of enabling children to learn so it should be obvious that the school system needs to be designed around children, not around what is most convenient for adults and forcing children into an environment that often makes them unable to learn much (i.e. the school is not fulfilling its purpose at all) as well as so miserable they’d meet an “semh” diagnosis threshold: surely there could not possibly be a clearer indication that the system has utterly failed and needs scrapping and redesigning from scratch.

The system as it is designed is clearly not working for a very significant minority of children, if not the majority because of the knock on impacts of that. Therefore, it is obvious that it needs a complete overhaul, not another initiative about how to shoehorn them all, with different abilities, talents and needs, into one environment that doesn’t work for a large proportion of them because that makes it easier for adults and then label this as being “inclusive” and for children’s benefit.

As an adult you get to choose a work environment that suits you where you can be around like-minded people. What on earth made anybody think that shoving all children together all day just because they were born in the same year and making them all do the same like little clones was ever going to work?

It was appalling wasn’t it?

I learned grammar by proxy by learning foreign languages and then extrapolating the grammar from that back to English with the various differences in structure explained only later by the foreign languages teaching, never in English lessons at school in the UK!

At least there is some academic education now in schools. The teaching methods and environment and structure of it all, and presence of numerous children who have no intention of learning or letting anybody else do so, however, still makes it impossible for many children to attend regularly or learn much.

One of my children was so traumatised by school (in early primary school) that she was off school for 4 months. I had to do my full time job at night and home school her during the day. We covered the school’s curriculum in 1-1.5 hours per day.

They’d be better off having each child in for only 2 hours per day in groups of 10 than groups of 30 for 6 hours and wasting 4 or 5 of those hours, leaving the children miserable and exhausted and totally disengaged.

Respond to the consultation to reject the Education Secretary’s catastophic proposed reforms.

Write to MPs demanding that they stop cutting the education budget. Before the recent spike in inflation it was due to be cut by 4% by the end of the Parliament in real-terms. Now, that will be closer to 6-7% unless departmental spending budget allocations are changed. If the Education Secretary’s reforms are passed on top - removing EHCPs from most children who would currently receive them and all of the additional funding that comes with each EHCP to fund the provision set out in it, and instead this is meant to be met by school budgets directly - then you’re looking at somewhere in the region of a 15-20% cut in total school funding, with the same needs to meet.

Demand that MPs set up different schools to meet the different needs of different children rather than shoving them all into mainstream state schools and calling it “inclusivity” and wondering why nobody is learning to their potential. We need academic schools for academically able children, more creative schools for children with creative talents (plus core subjects), schools focusing on more practical work for children who thrive with hands-on work (plus core subjects), schools focused on sports (plus core subjects) for children with sporting talent so that many sports are impossible for anybody without enormous family funding to access, schools that are more sensory and nature focused for children with learning disabilities rather than forcing them to attend mainstream schools with a curriculum that they will never be capable of accessing, schools with much smaller classes and a low-arousal environment for autistic children who cannot attend sustainably with classes of 30+ and need a calm and quiet environment, schools with very strict behaviour rules and appropriately trained staff to deal with violent and disruptive pupils so that the rest of the children (and staff) aren’t subjected to it and prevented from learning/ being safe at school.

There will never be one school set-up or curriculum appropriate for all children because children are not all the same. There’s not even an economic argument for not funding education properly: the long-term costs of not doing so are enormous, as you can tell already from our declining GDP per capita. There will be higher health costs, higher welfare costs, lower tax revenue, higher justice costs etc. if we do not urgently redirect a significant proportion of our public spending from the old to the young. Over 50% of public spending currently is spent on over 65s who are 15% of the population and the wealthiest cohort in society, while many children grow up in poverty and are utterly failed by the education system so also have all doors that might provide a way out to a better life slammed in their faces. It cannot go on if there is to be any hope for future prosperity or rising living standards.

SATs are a maths and English test aged 11?

I think fewer exams being taken could be a start, as well as ending SATs, or at least only having a maths and English test at aged 11.

No one should be taking ten or more GCSEs this summer.

HNRTFT but I completely agree. I also hate him because at the end of the Brown government they’d commissioned a report by experts in education to look at our system and make recommendations. They had the misfortune to publish it after the tories got in, and Gove looked at it- work done based on experience, data, understanding of pedagogy and child development- and dismissed it as work done by “the blob”. People whose skill and knowledge he could not hope to ever come close to, “the blob”. He’s a disgrace (and Labour should absolutely reverse what he did, in fact I think they may be trying to right some of the wrongs) and has done untold damage. None of which he has ever admitted or paid for.

Mind you, he was part of a series of terrible, disgraceful governments who did untold damage to our whole society, none of which the people in charge of have admitted or paid for, and never will.

@Placeoftides Please don’t put yourself down by saying you only work in a school kitchen. I’m almost 60 and still remember the lovely women who gave us dinner at my middle school. They were so kind, I was having an awful time at home as my Mother was widowed and lost the plot for a couple of years, my sanctuary. God it’s made me cry thinking about them, any member of school staff can make a difference to a child life, teachers were great as well I must add.

Very interesting point op and thanks for posting something so thought provoking.

So the next question has to be, how do they fix it, without being accused of dumbing it down?

I don't agree with the OP that Michael Gove's reforms are the sole cause, though I am sure they made a contribution. If only by driving more good teachers out of the profession.

As for subsequent education secretaries, Gavin Williamson was even worse. He must have some serious dirt on some people to have even been considered.

Poor DS was totally let down by school. He got very poor results because it wasnt geared up to support him and his strengths at all. He's 43 now.
He did however manage to get into university to do fine arts eventually and is now quite a famous artist. Sorry I cant name him he dislikes social media and would be cross with me. He doesnt need to advertise.
School completely crushed him.

Yes! I think those programs taught me English. I’ve just shown my kids the, ‘Tracy is a loner’ episode and we’ve all laughed far too much 🤣

I hate him because he de-valued design and technology from the curriculum.

Is that with Wordee and Magic Magic E? Geordie Racer?

I’ve just found the programme. It was Look and Read - Dark Towers. Honestly it’s so funny to watch the episodes. We had to say the phrase - Tracey is a loner. Then we had to spell it and write it 😆

Our kids will be lucky to get state pension.
1 in 3 currently stop work with ill heath.
Push retirement age up that number has to increase.

I just had a memory of an English video we used to watch from the top-loading VHS recorder. Some spooky thing with a creepy house and a character with a nose like Pinocchio. I’ve unlocked a memory. I’m going to go and look it up as I reckon it was SPAG.

I remember in the early ‘90s, as the National Curriculum was being introduced,
seeing a hippyish style male primary school teacher on the television complaining, and saying no body actually needs to be able to do maths.

Some of the worst problems probably set in in the 70s and 80s though no doubt there must have been some good aspects.

Honestly I don’t remember being taught anything aside from spellings and basic punctuation. My kids will talk about homophones and synonyms and I’m clueless. Equally they’ll rattle out maths language like quotients and numerator/deniminator, integer, inverse and obviously those mean something to me now, but the first time I heard any of that language was in my forties.

i cabsider my state education a travesty.