Gove does it again!

love your message headfairy! Good to read others think the harping back to good old days is tripe!

I can't believe people like Gove - he is just so mean! He wants to divide people, a nasty reactionery!

There - I feel better now!

The problem with these reports about the need for teachers to have masters degrees and to be the "top graduates" and for a demand for more professionalisation of the teaching profession, is that they imply that the current profession is not professional enough, not good enough and that the dumbing down and grade inflation is the fault of the teachers. It has nothing to do with the teachers, and everything to do with the New Labour politicians and the exam boards, but McKinsey probably won't recommend any changes there. Will there be a call for politicians to all have masters degrees and PhDs?

Gove, I seem to remember, wants all teachers to have a minimum 2:1 degree, but is this really necessary?

You don't need a masters degree to teach, you only need a masters degree if you are a management consultant who wants to preach.

Population of Singapore 5.5M
Population of Finland 5.5 M

Population of London 7.5 M

Population of England 51.5 M

Surely that will have an effect on educational policy and social and economic well-being (amongst many, many other things)?

MammaBrussels, I am sceptical od articles in the Economist, particularly if they mention McKinsey. There are so many experts, management consultants - Jacks of all trades, and master of none - offering us solutions on how things should be done. Teenage scribblers, PPEs from Oxford and MBAs from Harvard tell us the answers, but have never spent years in a classroom or on a hospital ward.

The Singaporeans and Finns don't need McKinsey to tell them how things should be done. They can save their money and spend it on books and teachers instead.

We already know where the conclusions of the experts will lead, more free schools that can ignore state school rules and education and hospitals that are privately rather than publicly run.

If you think current officials are dismissive of teachers, wait until the financial and cost accounting experts take charge.

If we want a world class education system we need to raise the status of teachers in society. The Economist ran this article a couple of years ago examining the strengths of the Finnish system. We need high quality teachers who are treated as PROFESSIONALS, they need continuing support and training. We need more money and support for students with AEN. How is going back to O levels going to help?

I can't see high quality graduates being attracted to teaching. Teachers are sadly treated like shit by parents and children and held in contempt by the government and right wing press. There are no resources for training. I'm not working in the UK now so I don't feel I can comment on AEN provision, let's just say I wouldn't be surprised if the cuts were hitting hardest in this area.

roTe learn

claig, you do make me laugh. mumsnet needs more people's poets...even ones who think that 'progressives' are the 'real' enemy of the people. Maybe especially those...

I feel the urge to write in verse.

Maybe Gove can make primary schoolchildren role learn my witterings.

I seriously think Gove has canned any credibility he may have had with this one.

where was the consultation? is this in response to some report? They have denied they are going to re-create grammar schools - so how is this going to work within comprehensives (bearing in mind minor difficulties like timetabling, resources, etc) ...some schools can only run one class for each GCSE! How can you run two or more?

the system isn't set up to support this!!

aside from the fact i think it represents a massive leap backwards in terms of equality of opportunity (as at least with GCSEs you got the same qualification - with A-C theoretically being O level equivalent and d-onwards being CSEs.)

We Don't Need another change of the System! Just fix the broken bits of the current system!!

although i agree totally that they have got easy, our local school still only gets 32% to get 5 grades A-C - that's a problem. Some kids no doubt start and finish the school illiterate and innumerate. That's a real problem. Mucking with the system again helps the teachers at that school not one tiny bit. especially as perhaps the one kid who could get an A will now have to take a totally different exam to the rest of the class for which they are unlikely to be prepared as it won't even be on the same Syllabus!!!

ARRRRRRRGGGGHHHH!

Oh yeah, the good old days. My dad looks back at ww2 with such affection. The camaraderie, the pulling together, the possibility of dying every night. The cricket on the green, picnics under oak trees and the rationing. The pollution, no NHS and the lack of opportunities for women, ethnic minorities, disabled people. Oh I do wish we could go back to the good old days when the elite rode roughshod over everyone else because we were just the ill educated unwashed and they were the elite because their families got rich on the slave trade

Remember, there is many a truth told in jest, and jokes about New Labour are always the best

yup. the good long suffering daily mail reader. i forgot about them. a true barometer of public feeling, the bell weather of revolutionary thought, in fact, the arbiter of all things the british really need, like warm beer and hot buns.

snort. love you claig, you've made me laugh a lot!!

Then again, it is more likely that the good long-suffering Daily Mail reader has once again been tricked, and that the good old days may remain a distant memory.

The clue is in the name - the good old days, not the bad old days of New Labour. The good old days, that Daily Mail readers and the people in their droves speak about wistfully in pubs and clubs up and down the land. The days their parents told them about, and of which they listened to in awe, the days of Tory governments, warm beer and hot buns, the days whose return they have so patiently longed for.

Why revoution? Because a revolution ovethrows tyranny - the tyranny of dumbing down, the tyranny of mediocrity, the tyranny of the bad old days and their wrong and wicked ways.

The people had grown weary, they thought the good old days were never to return. All they could do was read about them in the pages of the Daily Mail. The progressives in their palaces, paid for from the public purse, surrounded by moats and duck houses, laughed at the public. They said "we have passed the tipping point", there will be no turning back, the 'catastrophic' dumbing down is here to stay, the good old days will never again see the light of day.

But like Icarus before them, they flew way too high, they thought they had saved the world and that they owned the sky, they gave the people little and greedily took the greatest share of the pie.

But they had counted their chickens before they had hatched, they thought they would never agains see the like of the Thatch. They counted their pennies and of them there were many, but they failed to count on one thing, that was a minister called Michael Gove, a secret Tory treasure trove. He strove to overturn injustice, he drove dragons from their den, Robin Hood pales into insignificance, to say nothing of his Merry Men.

Gove's motto is 'carpe diem', we don't yet know how all this will end, but we know that the Daily Mail reader is cheering, thinking that the good old days may yet return, the decades of dumbing down are about to end, and the country is on the mend.

loving claig. priceless.

find it difficult to understand how a return to good old days can be seen as revolutionary....

oh thanks for that Raven... very interesting. I didn't realise you could search for whole chunks of text on Google and check to see if it's been c&p from an online article.

Thinking about it more, plagiarism isn't a new thing, I used to do it all the time at Uni, only copying it from books instead. I'll hold my hands up, I was lazy :o That said, when you plagiarise someone else's work it does become pretty obvious soon enough when the person ie me is unable to support their argument because it's actually someone else's argument.

All well and good, and I wish him well. But why does that mean that other kids can't study more challenging O levels and achieve and meet their potential?

But that's ludicrous! What are you going to say - that blind pupils can't use scribes? I used to work with a person who was blind, he was very talented and had all sorts of gizmos to help him work - clearly if those were removed for a "level playing field" and he was just given a computer keyboard like the rest of us, he'd have been on the dole! But the point was what he could do - and it's the same with support for exams, surely?

@headfairy 'I know there are programmes that can detect work lifted directly from websites, but how many schools use them?'

That'd be google, then. Works fine. Only time I've ever had a plagiarised controlled assessment handed in (kid had cut & pasted an essay together, smuggled it in, & sat in CA conditions quietly copying it out from a print out on his lap), his mum tried to ask me if I'd checked it via 'PROPER plagiarism detecting software'.

She went rather quiet after I posted her a copy of her ds's work along with the links where she could find each paragraph.

Old style coursework, absolutely rampant plagiarism. The 'A* essay my girlfriend's sister's clever mate submitted four years ago' was a favourite technique. New controlled assessment, nope. It can only happen if a teacher fails to notice a crib sheet being used - exactly as in any other exam.

I'd love to see the reintroduction of Grammar schools. At least during that period there were a number of working class kids getting jobs that usually went to the kids of privately educated tories.

We need to realise that some kids are more academically brilliant than others.

Len McCluskey is very good on Question Time. He is the best union boss I have ever heard, as good as Bob Crowe, and much better than Sowotka and Tony Woodley, the ones they usually invite on.

sorry, champion of Conservative core values

Newsnight says that the Daily Mail called Gove the Cabinet's one true Tory. Gove is going to be the most popular Tory out there. With Gove, the Tories are back! He could single-handedly run every department. He is a modern marvel, a champion of Conservative values.

'What?s more, while raising the retirement age for 2.6 million of the country?s working women by up to two years, MPs have still not accepted proposals made last summer for their pension age to rise from 65 to 68.'

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2143896/MPs-stall-bid-pension-gold-plated-perk.html

oh yeah, cos George has got his economic predictions so right