Aibu to hate Michael Gove?

@DeafLeppardtotally agree

I think there is tension between teachers who are valuing "learning for learning's sake" and a profession that is being held to increasing account on whether or not children can read, write and have basic social and cultural knowledge. And I think "learning for learning's sake" is absolutely a luxury belief (for the record I absolutely am all for learning for learning's sake) when you are dealing with some of the social problems that schools are being forced to deal with.

And I think there are a huge number of teachers who are ideologically opposed to anything Michael Gove or the Conservative party say, even if phonics and times tables make a measureable difference to children's achievement. The whole point of the reforms is to give everyone as far as possible, the same baseline. Not so that nice middle class children at a nice middle class school get access to maypole dancing and the Romans and Goodnight Mr Tom and how to use an apostrophe correctly so your CV won't go straight in the bin when a Mumsnetter reads it and judges you, because they have a nice middle class teacher, but to expect all schools, no matter what your demographic, to deliver this.

And I see this in my profession - we have huge scandals brewing because medics and surgeons refused to be held to account for their outcomes, because we're the professionals and we know best but what do you mean the data shows we killed or seriously harmed 800 children over the past decade?

Please send this full thread to the education secretary. You are so right!

Try looking instead at screens - the Norwegians are just reversing what they did with some of their oil money. They gave every 5 year old an iPad for “learning”. Functional illiteracy has rocketed all my with behavioural issues and now they are reintroducing books. In my kids’ independent, using screens is entirely optional - you can drill your kids on TTRS to your heart’s content if that’s your vibe, but mandatory homework (which is grammar, maths and reading, all accessible and appropriately accessible solo for a bright kid and with parental support for all kids) is on paper.

personally, I’d have preferred school under the gove reforms. I got to Oxbridge without ever finding a challenge and then was surrounded by lots of grammar and private school kids who had been stretched. But the reforms that suited me were obviously not suitable for the children in my year 7 mixed ability class who couldn’t read - those children needed better basics and an accessible practical vocational route. Frankly, if even some of them had learned trades, they would have outearned many of the 50 per cent who went to university and been of more value from a skills gap perspective.

People on here are often quite resistant to streamed vocational vs academic routes, but I think that’s not sustainable if you want a system that can work for all. There needs to be a route back for academic late bloomers, but frankly those kids at 13 who can’t read and process well enough to access the more academic parts of the curriculum due to classroom learning not suiting them or missing out on basic foundations are not generally magically going to do so with another 5 years of only classroom based learning.

If you want evidence based education, then you're going to be teaching phonics. And a phonics check then identifies those children who haven't made progess using phonics. Phonics is the evidence-based answer to getting as many children as posisble reading. Yes, you need interventions for those who for whatever reason don't manage to read with phonics, but to argue against phonics is like arguing against widescale vaccination because some children are allergic to vaccines.

Have a look at the disaster that's going on in the US - the majority of states don't use phonics based approaches and there's loads of articles as the understanding emerges that "look and say" methods were an absolute disaster.

The thing is, they don't. I believed that until DD2 went to secondary school.

I still remember the horror that was my Year 3 DSs English lessons in lockdown. It all seemed very advanced for the age of the children. Lots of tricky punctuation and comprehensions that required inference. Not long after we moved to Northern Ireland where my son spent most of his primary years being very bored having already covered a lot of the material (or at least having a solid grounding) and not being stretched.

Your well-reasoned post is just one of many, many reasons to hate Michael Gove. I consider it a public duty. The man is an utter wanker and encapsulates everything that is wrong with politics in the UK.

I agree with you here. Ex-primary teacher (still do loads of supply but not been a class teacher for years) and children absolutely can enjoy Shakespeare.

There was a project in my area where schools were supported to introduce children to a rather obscure (and on the face of it, not particularly child-friendly) opera. This was donkeys years ago now. The resources we were given to teach it were really fun and engaging, loads of drama, storytelling and hands-on music activities. Every single child I taught who participated in that project loved it and went and watched the entire opera at the end aged 9-10, and they enjoyed it because they spent the show picking out things they’d learnt in our lessons.

The crucial thing that made it enjoyable was that we weren’t measuring the outcomes- it was learning for learning’s sake. In my opinion, the primary curriculum needs more of that.

Totally agree: my Dc are AuDHD it is clear upon subsequent personal diagnosis of myself that I and DH are too. As are my siblings and, likely, my parents were too. We managed school, usually teen angst and peer dynamics notwithstanding. In fact we thrived because it was a safe, nurturing space with engaged teachers who had space and time to indulge and encourage our idiosyncrasies and specialist passions.

School was my safe space away from a dysfunctional home and led me to multiple degrees. For my DH’s school was a supportive encouraging place filled with friends and lots of access to sport - both in the curriculum and in the break times where he learned social skills and ran off the excess energy enabling him to focus back in class.

My children aren’t broken - the system that we now call education is.

No open forum is going to have everyone agreeing on the solutions and some of your summaries are based on assumptions (Singapore and China top PISA, do we emulate their approaches), but there are also many teachers on this thread who are agreeing with the OP.

Are you suggesting that they are misrepresenting the current system and that we should disregard what they’re saying?

Gove isn't responsible for the fact that a large chunk of secondary schools students have tiny attention spans and can't concentrate on reading a book for more than two minutes.

Well neither are/were irrelevant. But old school TV was only broadcast in real time,not all content was available 24 hours a day and we only had a handful of channels. Things obviously changed a bit with videos and DVDs and SKY channels, but even then it was pretty anodyne and harmless compared to now.

By comparison, in terms of the enormous potential for damage to young children's brain development, sensory overload, anxiety, ability to concentrate, communicate, socialise and behave normally and the lieklihood of addiction developing, the ipad is to TV what an unlimited supply of heroin and crack is, to a sneaky cigarette behind the bike sheds twice a week.

There's no small irony in including phrases like "And here’s what really gets me" in a post entirely generated by ChatGPT.

I understand people find it useful for feedback/refining, but please don't just generate the whole thing with ChatGPT and pass it off as your own thoughts. It's weird.

Hmm, not sure. There are so many reasons people dislike MG that there's perhaps a tendency to blame him for things that aren't his fault whilst overlooking his successes.
I'm not an Education professional so bow to the expertise of those who are. But MG was EdSec 15 years ago and during those 15 intervening years so many other factors have been at play, many of which have been harmful to children and childhood.
Gove's drive to improve standards was egalitarian at heart. There are young people in really hard-pressed urban areas receiving an education that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago- the 62 Oxbridge places won at London Academy of Excellence for example. Breaking the grip of Local Authorities over schools, introduction of Free Schools etc created opportunities to do Education differently, and clearly some good has come from that. And wasn't it Gove who created Teach First? Getting brilliant new graduates to consider teaching and putting them in the most challenged inner city schools was impactful, wasn't it?

As an adopted child himself, he did great work improving the adoption system so more children would benefit from loving and supportive adoptive families, as he had.

MG had a keen sense that he had benefitted from certain opportunities that some of his more traditionally-privileged Cabinet colleagues took for granted. He wanted to make these available to all children, and central to this was the idea that the better outcomes achieved by independent and grammar schools are created by rigour. He saw the mainstream state provision as lacking rigour and essentially being lazy and complacent, so that educational attainment was determined by chance rather than policy. Mathematics is probably the prime example of this, but another would be his enthusiasm for Latin as an academic subject.

I don't have experience of SEND and can't claim any expertise on this. But I do think there's a general trend towards diagnosis for any problems in life, and I don't think Gove can be responsible for that. Social media and digital tech has shortened attention spans and I can see that this could be an uncomfortable fit with Goveian rigour.

I've always been conflicted about Michael Gove. I worked for him in a different Govt department and found him receptive to advice and respectful of expertise. He was immensely courteous (which made a nice change). He exhibited levels of liberalism in penal policy that only a Tory right-winger could get away with and stands out in my mind as one of the most humane Justice Secretaries I've known. He also had some attitudes that were alarming and within the course of a single day I could think both 'I would walk over hot coals for you' and 'I hope the PM sacks you today'. He had a hatred of Theresa May when she was Home Sec, that played out in the politics of the two Departments, which was both childish and destructive. What I really can't forgive him for is providing the political and intellectual veneer of respectability for the Brexit campaign, without which I don't believe Leave would have won the Referendum.

Michael Gove was a conviction politician of the Right with a genuine drive to change public services for what he believed would be better. We currently have a conviction politician of the Left with what I have to assume is a genuine drive to change public services for what she believes will be better. Unfortunately politics are a pendulum whereas professonal policy development generally inhabits centre ground. I've yet to see a determined reform programme in any Government department that is welcomed and supported by its practitioners. Dept of Health over decades illustrates this. Actually, in Justice, Gove came closer than most.

He has acquired a sort of pantomime villain persona in the public consciousness that underplays what a consequential figure he has been. If the Brexit Referendum hadn't come along, with all that followed, we might have seen Gove become a great Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary and today he'd be Chancellor of Oxford University instead of William Hague.

I agree that the German system is so much better. But I’m unsure if parents in the UK would want the same thing. People in the UK hate the idea of any sort of academic selection (unless their child is top set). I think it’s the primary school teachers in Germany who suggest a pathway rather than students sitting an exam. Gesamtschule mean they can move around but mixed ability seems popular in the UK. Personally a good decent vocational system would be a big improvement & some students would thrive that are currently sat rigidly in classrooms & being told off every day & sent to reset room for more sitting quietly. They would learn so much more if they could access subjects they enjoy.

I remember that quote and saying he clearly wasn’t “above average” at maths himself 😉

Yes curriculum is too
narrow. It also punishes people who cannot pass faces maths and English by forcing consistent retakes which also adds to poor MH. I don’t disagree a basic level of English and maths is desirable but there are other routes and other ways that aren’t gcse.

True. But that genie is out of the bag. It would be good if education could be evolved to work with this, but policy makers seem intent on making the same outdated decisions that are serving very few.

Why has AI to write your post?

It’s coming your way, very soon. But perhaps by working in HE, you presumably don’t get the kids who leave school with no GCSEs. Nor the ones who are dropping the curriculum at 15 so that they can concentrate on just Maths and English.

My DS’s cohort were the Year 2s who had the experience of the big changes to the KS2 curriculum just as they were about to enter KS2. 7 year olds who were now expected to do the same work that 9 year olds had been doing previously.

His cohort were then the forgotten Year 7s in the first COVID lockdown. The ones who had just started finding their feet in secondary school for it to be whipped away. The year group that were in no way a priority during the COVID years.

They are now Year 13. It will be interesting to see what you think @RosesAndHelleboresover the next few years.

We really seem to have gone backwards, and no one wants to address that.

@DeafLeppard KS3 is an appropriate time. It's hard in KS2 in an area where many of the class haven't ever seen more than McDonalds at the local medium sized town. I'm all for expanding minds, just at the right time.

Any education system that works "for society as a whole" is going to categorize children by achievement and potential. And society as a whole has to buy into it and do their part, not expect schools to fulfill the parents' role.

That's brilliant
Reminds of Tony Blair's "I don't predict things and I never will", or words to that effect

When I was young it was "do you think kids watching so much TV is irrelevant"???