Aibu to hate Michael Gove?

[merrycola]

AIBU to hate Michael Gove for single-handedly creating the “overdiagnosis” crisis he’s now nowhere near enough to answer for?
Because let’s connect the dots.
He made the curriculum harder, narrower, and more rigid. Ofsted built an inspection framework around it that treats children like data points. And now — years later — we’ve got CAMHS referrals through the roof, school avoidance at record levels, exclusion rates climbing, teachers quitting in droves, and a growing media narrative that too many children are being diagnosed and parents are being pushy.
But nobody seems to want to say the obvious thing: we didn’t suddenly produce a generation of broken children. We built a system that broke the environment around them and then pathologised the ones who couldn’t cope.
The strategies that actually help — clear instructions, sensory breaks, mutual respect, not shouting — aren’t special needs strategies. They’re just good teaching. But there’s no time for good teaching when you’re trying to force a curriculum designed by a man who apparently thinks childhood is an inefficiency to be optimised.

And here’s what really gets me. Every education secretary since could have undone it. But none of them have, because reversing course would mean admitting the whole framework was wrong and that it’s been harming children for over a decade. So instead we get headlines about overdiagnosis and parents wanting labels for benefits, while the man who lit the match is off doing whatever Michael Gove does now.

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

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

@DeafLeppardtotally agree

Could he possibly have meant "I want every child to be above what the current average is"??

Otherwise yes, what a half-wit!

What a mess though. I have not experienced it thankfully, as I live in France and my children were educated here.

YANBU at all to hate MG

With respect, I'm unsure whether you know what MG did with his 'knowledge based' curriculum. I'm a teacher - Head of Department. This concept of 'knowledge based' has translated into an incredibly bloated curriculum. I have to teach at a whip pace just to get through it and meet the terms of the exam board's specification - plus, OFSTED won't let you start GCSE before Y10 (although we all know most of us sneak some into Y9).

The thing is, knowledge is only valuable if you're able to use it / know how to deploy it. And there's the rub. I can get kids to learn facts by rote but that won't help them develop critical thinking skills, e.g. how to formulate an explanation. Correction, it won't help the kids who are working at 3, 4 or 5. What happens is that these kids really struggle to improve because just as they've got a handle on one thing, the next thing comes along and it's a whole other skillset they need to master to get a good grade at GCSE - we call these skillsets 'disciplinary knowledge' and they require the kids to understand 'second order concepts'. In my subject they have to master 13 completely different skillsets alongside 4 hefty textbooks of facts ...

Sounds reasonable in 2 years, which is 76 taught weeks, except that 8 of those weeks are mocks, so we're down to 68 weeks, and it's not even 2 years as the second year they're 'finished' by Easter (because they have to sit the actual exams), therefore, that's 14 less weeks of teaching, so we're down to 54 weeks (i.e. basically 1 calendar year) ...

Gove thought it was reasonable to get kids between the ages of 14 - 16 to memorise (in my subject) 4 massive textbooks of facts and be able to sit a series of exams where they have to write somewhere in the region of 1,500 words an hour to pass well.

^^ This doesn't feel like a recipe for teenagers wellbeing.

Strange memory given he never said that
He wanted all schools to be rated good. It was pointed out that the definition of good required a school's performance to be above the national average

I’m not a teacher but am very interested in these comments… my primary-aged children have found school terrible but this is mainly down to the environment. There are too many children in each class for them to cope (both autistic and one with ADHD - certainly not “overdiagnosis”: there is a long family history of these genetic conditions), too much noise and no enforcement of behaviour policies. As a result both now have very poor attendance (and one was off for 4 months entirely) and hate school.

They say the work is really boring and it seems to crush the creativity and curiosity out of them. What I don’t recognise from some of the comments is people saying the work is too hard: the work they are set seems ridiculously easy and is one of the reasons they are bored out of their minds. Their spellings, reading comprehension homework, maths and science homework etc are so easy it is a joke. Yet some posters seem to be saying that the curriculum difficulty is too high which I find baffling. Does anybody have any links to studies on this? I just cannot imagine how easy it would have been previously if children in their third year of school (YR2) being sent home with “spellings” to learn of three or four letter words that they can verbally spell back to you instantly is considered hard?

Absolutely agree about the lack of creativity though. Learning should not be boring and there seems to be very little differentiation by ability. All effort seems to go into getting the least able children to a minimum baseline in core subjects.

Phillipson is appalling in my opinion. What is missing is appropriate funding for better teaching materials, much smaller classes and proper SEN support. It’s not the law that’s the problem, it’s the non-compliance with the law. And different schools for different children. Shoving all children into one-size-fits all schools like clones obviously doesn’t work. Children with severe learning disabilities need SEN schools. Autistic children need quieter schools with small classes. Academically bright children need more academic school. It’s not “inclusive” to pretend they are all the same. She seems determined to double down on all of the mistakes and make everything even worse. Trying to remove EHCPs from children at secondary transfer is insanity. Removing children’s legal rights won’t make their disabilities go away and as for having SENCOs and teachers assess a child’s support needs when many seem to know little to nothing about their medical conditions (unsurprisingly given they aren’t doctors and are given pretty much zero training on this) is absurd in the extreme. I hope she is stopped otherwise children like mine will end up out of school entirely.

This is an interesting study showing the deliberate, systemic denial of education to autistic children. Phillipson does not seem to care whatsoever.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37810599/

What a load of nonsense OP!

The Scottish education system is completely separate from England. The curriculum of Excellence centres on child-centered learning, health and wellbeing and focusing on those with additional support needs. It was designed to close the attainment gap.

And guess what? There’s no difference is diagnosis rates for Scotland and England!!!

As if one man is responsible in England, for what is being seen in many Western countries and certainly all over the UK where there are completely different education systems.

I'm a leftwing republican primary school teacher.
I don't hate Gove.
There are a lot of good points made here about changes to the curriculum- I'd agree most with the joy being taken out of learning, and the amount of coverage. However I do agree with the focus on higher standards in education.

Also as someone affected by the cladding crisis, Gove was a very effective Housing Secretary. He prevented leaseholders shouldering the bills for poor building work and shoddy governement regulations post Grenfell.

I think the verdict is nuanced. 'Hate' is personal and oversimplistic.

This has F all to do with Gove and everything to do with mobile phones everywhere. They destroy human happiness and create anxiety in everyone. We are never ever bored, and therefore we are always anxious.

Mental health is being destroyed by so called convenience.

Yes there is a huge amount of data supporting this.

I agree completely. The maybe 30-40% of children for whom the current mainstream state school model would be appropriate (concentrating on basic literacy and maths) cannot even do that because so many are there who shouldn’t be: children who should be in a far more academic school, children who should be in a school with a focus on art or sports or practical skills with core subjects alongside (so each child can develop their own talents and have a good grounding in basics), children who need much smaller classes and a calm environment e.g. autistic children, children with learning disabilities who need SEN schools and as they could never access the curriculum in a mainstream school, children with behavioural issues who are disruptive and violent who should be removed to a specialist school catering for that.

One reason my children often cannot go to school (aside from learning little when they are there and getting so overwhelmed by the noise and boredom that they often have to come home) is because absolutely nothing is done about violence and disgusting behaviour like children throwing furniture across the classroom or hitting people. Why should they have to tolerate that when if someone did that to me at work they’d be fired and arrested?

While my aversion to Michael Gove is well-documented on MN, I am extremely concerned that there's a thread rushing to agree with the OP that schools are now shit with the implicit agreement that this had led to an 'over-diagnosis' in autism and ADHD.

1. Correlation does not equal causation

2. Increase in diagnosis does not mean over-diagnosis.

A trite, AI-generated post conflating both these things should not be universally welcomed as a useful contribution to an extremely fraught and complicated discussion.

But everyone hates Gove, so YAY I TOTALLY AGREE OP.

Having a child on the assessment pathway for ADHD, I was about to flame you when I saw the title...I'm diagnosed myself and it's a condition not for the faint hearted. But having read your post in full you are absolutely correct.

He is in a primary where you don't need a diagnosis to access movement breaks, sensory breaks, adjusted methods of working to allow for individual ways to succeed ( my 10 year old DS can play two instruments, and has a reading age of 14....but still can't form his letters correctly for example. He is allowed to type his work instead with no drama, and no frustration, ) they have OPAL in the playground, and most importantly he is treated with the respect that the teachers expect themselves. And boy do they get it from him. They have turned his ADHD Traits into a source of power, and he pushes through the things he finds hard because he knows that if he really really can't, he will be heard.

He arrived there in year three from a small old fashioned Catholic school, with school trauma and separation anxiety. His experience there was horrific, and he was shouted at multiple times daily, and punished for things he could not control.

If the high school is as inclusive and forward thinking as his primary ( huge amount of feedback to say it is ) then my son won't need a diagnosis. That said, he is still going down the assessment route, simply because of the fear he will go through his first three years again 😔

We need more schools to adopt the approach of his, move away from Neurodivergence being a " disability" and closer to understanding that we are all simply unique, and will only thrive if treated as such. 🤷🏼‍♀️

i have been slated for using ai but it’s just a writing editing tool. Why not use what is available?

on your points - I’m not saying anything about autism and adhd diagnoses and whether they’re real or not. I’m saying so many children need them now compared to before because the curriculum has become inaccessible and through that, causes psychological distress in many children, which leads to the mental health crisis. Gove’s curriculum treats children like products on the production line and the ones that don’t meet the standards are given a diagnosis which makes them seem like the ‘problem’ rather than facing facts the curriculum is harming the kids.

more facts. When gove took over, labour had already been working to overhaul the curriculum. There were two reviews, the Rose and the Cambridge. Teachers had met and consulted. Experts from subjects too. Gove ignored the lot of them based on some vanity project.

AI didn’t come up with the ideas. My experiences and conclusions i drew from the data did. These problems were there pre-2015 but not to this extent. You can’t just blame it all on iPads.

We did a similar project. The children
loved it. When we first introduced it we had no idea it would be so successful. Even now, we have children come back and say it was one of the most enjoyable parts they remember at primary school. It was shelved, because there is no time to go off curriculum and the school bought into the local authority literacy planning.

This is the problem in a nutshell.

It is exactly how we are teaching children to.write - like little writing machines. Creativity in writing is very limited certainly in primary school.

The problem is, children aren't learning to be effective writers or writers.

They're being taught to use 'features' - grammar, punctuation and devices but writing the is very mechanical. It feels forced.

And, just because they're being taught it doesn't mean they're learning it. There's so much to cover and it's so intensive that there is little opportunity to develop as writers in any capacity.

Even opportunities for 'immersion' are structured and restricted on time when they should be opportunities to explore.

Makes me wonder who’s going to be working and paying taxes to fund the state pensions of the future. Best to start a private pension at a young age.