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.

It is so frightening that there are people who have the power to wreak such destruction with their back-of- the-envelope ideas.

Yeah. The guy’s a cretin.

omg is that where that myth came from!

I got sick of correcting people online that there was no such rule and it was fine to go out longer than an hour and copying and pasting gov webpages to prove it!

To add to this, I spot

A lot of “It’s not X. It’s Y.” (This is EVERYWHERE)

A lot of lists

A typical expression always used to be “And here’s the kicker.” In this case it’s “And here’s what really gets me.”

En dashes

I LOVE your examples!

Didn’t he also change the GCSEs from letters to numbers (whyyyyyy?) and start fining people for going on holiday?

Yes, this was a time when a particularly detrimental study 'found' that TAs add no value to education and could safely be phased out of classrooms.

Aided and abetted by his lieutenant at arms, one Dominic Cummings who also gave us Brexit and Boris Johnson thus trashing the economy and education in one fell swoop. My take at the time was that Gove had been bullied at school for being a swat and was getting his own petty revenge. Ruining the lives of tens of thousands of children.

OP is the most sensible thing I’ve read in a while on Mumsnet. So true.

I believe all the teachers on here saying how destructive Gove has been for education as I know they must say it for good reason.

In the case of a young child in my family though, I have seen how learning to read with phonics seems to have worked better than the earlier method of recognising the words as was the norm when their mother was at school. Also the maths seems to be trying to encourage a wider repertoire of methods for doing any given sum, in place of simply learning one method that works as we used to do.

He is the definition of snivelling. Currently apparently a firm backer of Kemi with sights on being back in no 10, pulling strings. Will not happen.

Spot on. And if bloody Reform have their way, things will get a whole lot worse.

Hmmm, well yes and no. I went to a high achieving ofsted outstanding primary school in the 90s and standards were quite low in many ways - it was fine, as the top table just worked through a text book and I found at secondary that I was a year ahead in maths, but there was really nothing for me, learned grammar from reading, zero guidance on how you might do creative writing, very low expectations really. And those on the lowest tables left school with 3s in their SATs, which was functionally not very literate at all for the next stage of education (I had mixed class in year 7 in a very mixed school and quite a high proportion of my classmates could not read well, let alone write well). And that low achievement culture does follow through - it was a shock getting to university when you’ve frankly been able to coast through and no one has ever given you feedback - the kids from the private schools were streets ahead in essay writing etc.

I don’t think fronted adverbials and all that stuff is necessary, but 90s education was not super either. There was also lots of crazy stuff and shouting back then too. In fact, as a chatty five year old who hadn’t finished her “work” in reception, I was yelled at and made to work in solitary confinement behind a screen in the classroom for a week (I never told my mum this until over a decade later as I thought it was my fault!) and people were made to sit in the corner facing the wall as punishment etc. There were masses of filler exercises like colouring in and worksheets in years 1 and 2 and I would lie and say I’d finished so I could go to the play corner as I realised that no one ever checked them and they were pointless - I was an engaged child who loved doing the reading and maths and it was quite tedious that there was so little of it for so long.

I have a four year old who I’d happily keep in a forest school type kindergarten until they reach 6 - I’m not arguing that kids should be pushed hard from 4. Frankly, if I could choose for him to be outside making bird boxes for two more years as in NZ or Finland I would. However, that wasn’t my childhood either and there was a lot of unproductive filler!

I also do want to point out that quite a lot of the educational establishment opposed phonics when it was introduced. I don’t agree with a lot of the Gove reforms, but I think that it would also be fair to say that unions do tend to oppose everything and could be more selective and constructive…..

Fronted adverbials. What the absolute fuck?? Fuck off you cunt Gove.

YANBU OP and well said 👏

Most of us are just much, much less articulate than this. Here's the evidence to me. (I am an AI product manager, so I spend a lot of time looking at this stuff):

1. Use of weapons-grade punctuation - most tell-tale here is the em-dash. But also the Oxford comma and the colon. I'd be surprised if you find another post using the colon like that here. It's just a bit sophisticated for everyday writing.
2. That teacher-like, I-am-the-expert-walking-you-though-this ("let’s connect the dots.") which makes it sound like a TED talk.
3. The sheer variety of sentence length and connectors
4. Light use of simile/metaphor is unusual (although having said that I now see I have used a metaphor)
5. The layering of desciptions/adjectives. Little groups of 3. I mean, again, who does that?
6. It is all very cerebral, an intellectual argument. Each point so carefully crafted and simply explained. So persuasive. 8)The emotions are so very refined, restrained and appropriate that it's not quite real. Most people run a bit messier than this, I think
7. Use of final, beautifully succinct 2 sentence summarisation of whole of the argument is a real tell.
8. But most of all, it is a very persuasive & well-crafted piece of writing, beyond the abilities of most of us but I think that is at odds with a somewhat simplistic premise.

I am far, far from being a Michael Gove fan. Fronted adverbials bring me out in hives. But there is no consideration here given to many other factors that could influence outcomes for our children: social media, Covid, changing social and family patterns, lack of effective sanction on children, growing gaps between rich and poor. If you could write this well, I think your argument would be more nuanced.

Op you wrote it so well - for all of those reasons and more, I can't stand the man.

Then the little snivelling rat also somehow got most of the country on his side for Brexit.

Horrible, horrible man, who makes me want to punch him every time I see his face.

Teachers said this at the time and tried to raise the alarm but no one seemed to care.

I'm find the posts on AI interesting. The texts I see at work which are written by AI are so long-winded. For example, they might include: "This report has the status of Not Yet Reviewed. It has been assigned to Rupert Smith and Demelza Jones. Rupert and Demelza will need to liaise with each other and manage their time effectively in order to complete the review in a timely manner."

NB - Rupert and Demelza are both directors and they review a lot of reports. I'm not sure they need a lecture on time management.

I’ve been shouting this with new sen reforms- it’s not good enough to have hubs etc for kids who are struggling- make the curriculum accessible to start with!!
Talk about ‘everyone above average’ - the average GCSE grade (of those who sat them, so immediately takes out kids taking alternative quals or not taking as many/any for whatever reason) is a 4. That means over half the population get a 4 or below, but the curriculum expectations teach to 7+. No wonder teens are anxious and disaffected.

its because the whole schooling system is designed as a factory @merrycola

When my dd’s both massively struggled with their GCSE content and asked me why they have to memorise 12 poems and reams of equations and formula that they just can’t keep in their heads, my answer has always been ‘because of Michael Gove’. Exams should be about how you apply information not memorising it in imo. Watching the stress and anxiety they go through and not be able to do anything about it is heartbreaking and makes me so angry at him for doing this to them. 😡

I think there's something about Education Secretaries that goes to their head, probably an extension of "I was at school so I know all about education". It becomes a playground for those who didn't make Home or Foreign Secretary; you only have to see how often the post holder moves on.
David Blunkett was pretty awful. I remember him saying that education had to focus on everything, the precursor of Gove's all pupils to be above average at maths. The other thing was the literacy hour, especially the bit where the government put up a whole bank of pretty good lessons, and then got all pissed off when teachers used them. The message is always do it yourself.

Same with OFSTED heads: Chris Woodhead, Michael Wilshaw. Both had active contempt for teachers. Woodhead was particularly venomous.
Having said that, Sir Keith Joseph introduced 100% coursework GCSEs which was a surprise coming from a Tory. I'm aware of how it could be and was fiddled, having taught and examined it, so it had to go.

Seeing the destruction wrought by Gove from the safe distance of Australia, I'm glad I got out to a (then) benign system (largely due to their not being able to organise a piss-up in a brewery).

I completely agree. Gove caused so much damage and set primary education along a path of no return. I look at my ds’s frazzled teachers and I think, “I wonder what you’d be like if you were allowed to teach in the same way my teachers taught us.”

Gove sucked all the pleasure out of education - both teaching and learning. There is so much more to life than SATS targets. He was a pathetic, narrow-minded little man who lacked true understanding and vision.

Hahahahaha that is priceless.

OP you are a genius to have put your finger on this.

Brilliant points all round. It’s about time the curriculum was reviewed and all this fronted adverbial rubbish removed.