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.

He’s gay which is I assume the reason for his divorce. There were some obviously staged pics of him with a woman in the tabloids not long after but he’s into men and (rumour has it) has some “interesting” proclivities involving sex and drugs.

And yes, he’s an absolute evil creep who f*cked up everything he touched.

He is old public school taught and should never been in charge of education. Everything must be exam based…this does not suit all pupils. The secondary school curriculum is outdated. What the kids have to learn by the end of primary is crazy with too much emphasis on testing.

My favourite Gove moment was when he announced on breakfast TV children if separated parents would have to pick one to stay with during covid- threw half the nation into an absolute panic -and inevitably had to backtrack by evening. Dangerous incompetence but hey ho the nation voted for it.

But kids won’t be using pen and paper in the workplace. They’ll be using IT, AI, social media. They need to know it. I’d rather my kids know how to code, build apps, use AI, and have a thorough grounding in sustainability as those are core future skills.

English lit. should be an option. It’s a ‘nice to have’ but how many times will your kids be asked about the relationship between Titania and Oberon in a job interview?

OP, if I remember correctly, wasn’t that gobshite Dominic Cummings Gove’s SPAD in the Department of Education at the time? He was central to driving those reforms that did so much damage. Everything he touches turns to shit.

Wow, haven’t even started the full thread and I am so shocked that’s the situation.
We should all absolutely know this, it seems really important

I have a child at an indy and do alot of peripatetic work at the same school.

I have NEVER heardd any teacher say anything good about Michael Gove. And it's been discussed extensively in my presence. (Mainly around the GCSE programme which is what I am involved with). Teachers hate him with a spitting helpless fury.

how many times will your kids be asked about the relationship between Titania and Oberon in a job interview

This is incredibly short-sighted and depressing and completely misses the point. The ability to understand, analyse and interpret complex texts is an extremely useful transferable skill, not to mention that an understanding of the nuances of human relationships is something that AI will likely never be able to do. The study of English literature is about what makes us human; it is not learning facts about the set texts.

I don’t know, when I did my degree in the early 2000’s I had to call my mum to ask for help on something and she told me she had covered it at a-level when she was at school in the 70’s. I think we’ve been dumbing down education to make it more accessible so that more of us could get to university but it’s been damaging to educational standards in the UK and it’s happened over decades. I looked at some of her old gcse textbooks once, mind blown about how difficult they were.

Many of us probably should not have been going to university if we are being honest and a lot of this is because we don’t value things like apprenticeships and learning on the job. You don’t need to have a degree to be an excellent accountant for example, many I know are now working and studying alongside that.

Hard agree, and no matter how you dress up the academies movement, it's just Gove made immaterial (and billions of pounds of value taken out of education). It will never be anything else.

Just because local authorities have withered and died around trust creation doesn't make academy trusts any less dodgy.

But that’s not the way it’s taught. English literature is a singularly turgid subject and most kids drag themselves through it with the help of Betts study guides. I’m not saying it should be removed from the curriculum completely; there’s no reason it can’t be available for those kids who like a bit of Macbeth or Jane Eyre, but it should not take precedence over skills and knowledge that will actually help kids get decent jobs.

It makes dar more sense to develop those transferable skills through texts which actually have relevance to many more people, such as books on politics, economics, psychology, science, history or geography - even philosophy. They’re not the preserve of English literature, and nor is the study of relationships.

I always hated him - mainly because of how he pushed Brexit.

Could he be sued for professional negligence/ misrepresentation/ fraud?

It’s especially ridiculous for a generation that can look up the entirety of the world’s knowledge on their phones at any time. What is the value in having to memorise quotes for English or formulae for Maths?

I fucking hate Gove. I’ve been teaching since 2000 and he ruined my subject - English. I was in mat leave when he became Ed Sec and when I returned the curriculum had changed for the worse. A decade and a half later I’m trying to get kids through GCSE and A-level Lit through memorising quotations. That’s not a skill - that’s just having a good memory. The skill is the ability to form and argument and apply the quotes.

I also see the horrors being a parent. DD is in Yr 10 and extremely bright but she hates English Lit despite having a love of reading. DS is in Yr 7 and has ASD. I look at him and I dread the GCSE years.

I’m quitting at the end of this year. Teaching is awful and quite frankly I’m bored and think anyone could get up and teach my rigid lessons.

Sir Keith Joseph began the rot…

Agree. Also there is an element of cultural capital that, in order to improve social mobility, children simply need to be exposed to.

one thing I do agree with gove on (am a teacher): scrapping AS levels. They were a disaster for education. Two year a level much better.

This comment is depressing! Why learn anything then? Why not just produce a generation of phone addicted, ignorant people?

I did 100% coursework Science GCSEs where you sat a paper each term. A bunch of the more academic children in my school realised that we had already gained A grades partway through year 11 and then sat the Foundation-level papers for the rest of the course without doing any revision - because it wouldn’t make any difference to our final grades. What a wasted opportunity for learning for all of us.

But then the knee jerk reaction was to entirely remove coursework from a lot of courses, which wasn’t any good either, and really caused issues during Covid when trying to calculate the Teacher Assessed Grades.

I do think it's important not to be misty eyed about education in the 80s and 90s though. At my rural schools the standards were appalling, there was loads of shouting and bullying of kids by teachers (including that throwback classic of board rubber throwing!) and maths was almost entirely self taught through those SPMG books (I used to skip huge chunks and no one checked). Safeguarding was rubbish. Phonics does work better for most kids (I've got one who it doesn't work for so don't @ me).

I'm not a fan of Gove's reforms. The curriculum is way too dense and fast. But e.g. Singapore maths is a much better way to understand number because you understand conceptually instead of just performing an operation, which allows you to apply different skills to a problem.

I'd like to see the reforms keep some of the better bits and our understanding about newer ways of teaching subjects. Pipe dream though. One of my children is dyslexic and I have to keep telling myself they are only behind against the current curriculum, it's not a life sentence.

Then the problem is not the subject but the way it is taught.

If taught properly, it does provide the skills and knowledge that will help students get decent jobs. You’ve listed off a load of different subjects which, I agree, children should also have the opportunity to study, but none of them are better or more relevant than English. And I note none of them were mentioned in your first post, which seemed to suggest that kids should be studying social media.

Why are people on this thread continually comparing to the 90s? No one in education considers that a golden age for education either. The Gove curriculum came in in September 2015. We were teaching phonics and different methods for maths problems for a decade before that - he did not introduce them.

My mum and most of her education friends (all teachers, head teachers) detest Gove with a passion. I think hate is a bit of a harsh word. But can see why he inspires this in some.

My mum hates these too. Got a campaign up to get rid of these. Didn’t work.

I don’t think that you can put the issue of more diagnosis on him.

The NHS was very rigid about diagnosing ASD and ADHD hence was always thought of as the Gold Standard. The right to choose has increasingly changed all that. I speak as a parent who has a son with ASD NHS diagnosed now aged 22. Despite having having NHS OT and SALT diagnosed SPD and severe SLI ( results 1st percentile and below - pragmatic on .75 percentile) our Consultant kept rabbiting on about a Venn diagram and DS had bits of everything so just a complex nejrodevelopment disorder. ( He was unable to swallow for 3 years and had prolonged fits (Valium up backside requiring until aged 6). NHS SALT even said it’s ASD ring Consultant to confirm diagnosis. In reality it made little difference in that he still needed full time PA support in secondary and he still got DSA ( due to the severity of all the diagnoses issues as he presented as disabled whatever it was - he would rock in sports days, flap at PE and spin etc)

To this day he is significantly disabled and although at university has 50 hours PA support weekly funded by university and council.

Nowadays under right to choose this would have been resolved in 6 months and not when my son turned 18 when a new NHS consultant took one look and said ‘you do realise that your son has ASD’ and arranged an immediate emergency ADOS.

The issues with schools are that classes are too big. There is too much going on. People have to fight for PA support since the PA reforms ( which none of you have mentioned ) when an educational expert said that high quality teaching would make up for lack of PA cover ( how does that help a child with motor coordination who can’t write?) Schools now are vast impersonal large multi school academies where the Head has no idea who his or her pupils are. Schools are run as large businesses and there is little flexibility, SEN school that are equipped for normal intelligent but significantly disabled kids are almost non existent. The means of teaching disabled kids are not properly distilled to all teaching staff who don’t have the time in any event.

Also the internet has also encouraged more to seek a diagnosis as well as the proliferation of people encouraging others to self diagnose. This means that less severe cases are being pushed for diagnosis whereas you pretty much had to be extreme ( not remotely an invisible illness ) 20 years ago. My daughter recently got a diagnosis of ADHD as an adult and I don’t know whether to feel guilt that I never spotted it or confusion that I never spotted it. Hiwever compared to the severe needs of her brother it was lost.

I think that there have been too many factors to blame Grove entirely. Also if that was the case there would be more diagnoses in the Far East eg places like China where education is very curriculum intense etc. The issue we have is that we have to compete on education internationally and we are not. The issue is why are we falling behind places like Singapore etc.

This just isn’t true for primary education. Primary education has just got harder and harder and harder. To be working at an expected level in Year 2 now, the things you have to do when you write are ridiculous for a six year old. It just isn’t true that it’s been ‘dumbed down’. What’s been damaging to educational standards is the fact that masses of schools feel as though they have to just fluff the data because the children cannot possibly achieve these things and the staff and school leaders feel intense pressure to claim they they can.

Whilst we’re on the subject of hated politicians, Jacob Rees-Mogg! Ugh! He’s MP for DB’s PIL’s and has helped them a bit so they have to grudgingly admit he’s ok.