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.

What exactly did they want watered down?
What sort of behaviour got worse?

The ability to relatively easily remove a kid from your class who was dicking about and disrupting the lesson.

The behaviour that got worse was an increase in kids dicking about and disrupting lessons.

I always think that education should be treated like interest rates (for those too young to remember, interest rates used to be set by politicians but that power was given the the Bank of England to stop it being used as a political football). The curriculum should be decided by experts and based on strong evidence reviewing best practice globally. It should not be subject to the whims of the latest politician to come through the revolving door.

This is an interesting thread. It is what I have been saying for years. I have worked as a TA in primary and secondary in every year group from year 1 to year 11.

What children are expected to learn in primary school now is beyond the abilities of most of the children. I watched each year group the number of children really understanding it get smaller and smaller. That they can achieve a "pass" without really understanding much of what they have been taught doesn't make it any better.

Someone upthread talked about a y6 child being taught KS3 maths. No they are not. They are being taught KS2 maths. Most of it gets taught again in KS3, presumably because so many children fail to really learn it in KS2. Unfortunately, by KS3 they have decided they are rubbish at maths because they couldn't do it in primary school and lessons have become something they endure (or disrupt) and not something they engage with.

One of my own children was in Y4 when the Gove curriculum was introduced. They went from 2 years ahead on the old curriculum to "expected" on the new one. Despite that all my children have thrived with the current curriculum because they are lucky enough to be bright and have supportive parents. I recognise that they are not representative of the majority of children though. And for those who struggle to learn it is soul destroying.

I love my job but the one thing that might drive me out is watching children being pushed through the system and forced to sit GCSEs that they will be lucky to get a 1 or 2 in or even that they know, and everyone knows, they are going to fail. Then we send these young people out into the world believing that they are stupid/failures when really their strengths may just lie elsewhere.

We don't need everyone to be highly academic. Look at the key workers, look at how many of them were people who did the jobs that don't require academic qualifications. Maybe the issue is that we don't value those people and their skills as much as we should. If we valued them more then there wouldn't be the stigma around doing alternative pathways for non-academic children.

I do agree politics should be taken out of education and the NHS.

Its nuts that the goal posts keep moving within both.

Both medicine and education are rife with political factions and opinions based on fashions of the day, without any input from politicians. The idea that removing actual politicians will reduce fads and politics is for the birds.

I 100 percent agree we have an overly academic and high pressure education system that suits only academic children.

I disagree that this is the sole cause of the problems you state, including poor MH in young people. There are many causes feeding into that and we all have a collective responsibility for it. Parents are over protective of children now who get very little (if any) freedom and responsibility without adult socialization which is really bad for developing a sense of capability and responsibility as well as co-operative social skills snd problem solving. And just relaxing.

We also have a society where it’s common for both parents to work full time leaving little time to spend with kids, and parents being more stressed.

As well as screens, early exposure to porn, divisive social media feeding negative measures. And ( I have to add) repeated messaging in school about the destruction of the world due to climate change which is freaking one of my kids out. Really pissed off at the school for that.

Yup. If anything politics might get worse, especially as the teaching unions seem to have forgotten that their purpose is the employment rights of their members, and now are obsessed with the latest social activism and trends.

Thank you for your thoughts and I agree you’ve raised some really interesting thoughts.

your point about schools and unions taking on causes and forgetting their main job is something I completely agree on. Schools are being asked to do the jobs that parents or the nhs or governments themselves should be doing regarding a lot of issues. I also agree schools can be a bit ‘soft’ in some of the behaviour management policies, and this is probably due to parental attitudes.

teaching unions do seem to revert to ‘get the teacher out with a settlement and agreed reference’ rather than pressuring schools to deal with the real issues too.

Fantastic OP but don’t forget his sidekick Dominic Cummings role in the education ‘reforms’. Once they’d broken education they moved on to breaking the economy with Brexit.

How anyone could side with people who make idiotic statements such as ‘everyone should be above average at maths’ and ‘the British people have had enough of experts’ is beyond me.

Yes - this rings true to me!
i went to a supposedly good junior school and I only learned any grammar at secondary school when I studied languages.
I am so impressed where DC is and what the school in a deprived inner city area has achieved.

I think this is really interesting. I hate Gove and his interference with a passion, but this doesn’t reflect my own experience. I have two DD, one of whom is not academic and has SPLD) but she didn’t really start to struggle until secondary. And also I work at a fairly high ranking university and the deterioration over the last 15 years amongst our students in maths, literacy and critical thinking when they arrive is very marked (as well as their resilience, independence and motivation). So any increased standards at primary are not following through to improved academic standards, even for the more able. COVID obviously didn’t help, but accelerated rather than started the trend. I think we also have to very much question what is happening at secondary level.