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.

I agree, but we also cannot ignore that overdiagnosis has coincided with the widespread adoption of digital technology for young children both in schools and at home.

It’s not just the learning environment that’s reduced the ability of children to cope.

Unpopular opinion with many, but the data is there. And yet we continue to ignore it because it doesn’t serve us.

My friend's very clever daughter is in year 6. She's been recently referred as possibly being adhd, because sometimes she's very distracted and then does all her work in 5 minutes.
She's been referred just before high school incase she needs help.
According to her class teacher, 90% of children are now referred for some reason or other.
Im assuming they meant just to give the high school teachers a heads up?
Very bizaare.
My freind's daughter needs zero help with schooling or her social life
Why on earth would she need to be referred?
Also, I've seen her maths work, and it's definitely key stage 3.
What's the point? It's not as if they'll do A levels in year 10!

I wasn’t saying they were written off. I was saying that is the rhetoric used by the left wing, the Labour Party, the Guardian readers and mumsnetters every time someone talks about selective education.

You can’t have a comprehensive system that results in bespoke pathways for every child in a fashion that’s affordable to tax payers without haivng 3000 pupil mega schools. And even in that case, I’m not sure it would work and people would be up in arms about sending their kid to such a big school.

The hatred for Gove in education is interesting as in every other department he led, he was actually really well liked and respected and managed to get things done. He arguably wasn’t wrong on pushing up standards or the focus on phonics in the early years. However, everyone can see there have been perverse effects in primary schools.

The reduction in play and the amount of kids who hate year 1 has to be a warning sign that something isn’t quite right. You shouldn’t really have a system where 5 year olds start complaining about not enough play. Some of the grammar exercises are just joyless quite frankly and don’t even really carry on into senior.

The year 6 curriculum seems to narrow significantly. I moved a child for year 5 to a prep due to the disruptive behaviour in her class. She was getting no learning done and was becoming highly anxious being in an environment with deregulated and aggressive boys. It was clear to see there wasn’t enough Sen support but also that it was nigh on impossible for everyone’s needs to be met.

The thing that has struck me is the wider curriculum. She is doing a lot of science, MfL and languages at a time where her old school seems to really narrow in on maths and grammar. Interestingly, when I was speaking to admissions for selective secondary schools- they said the kids from state generally came in with a high standard in maths, good reading and English language, poorer creative writing and needed catch-up for science and MFL.

Yes, but my point was that he’s made it unnecessarily complicated. My junior school taught English/grammar extremely well way back, but it was limited to nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, phrases and clauses - as far as I remember.
All of which were plenty at that stage.

Social media is already increasingly dominated by AI generated rubbish. Students who have studied English literature are much more likely to be able to identify what is good writing and what had been manufactured by a machine to manipulate them.

We clearly have such profoundly different views on what is useful and important for the development of a child’s brain that I don’t think there is much point in discussing any further.

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

Now whether Mr Gove is solely responsible I dispute but I could not agree more strongly with this. Fix schools and you will fix the SEN crisis and I do not mean segregating them in a Portacabin in the playground and calling that inclusion.

Totally agree. What he has done to reading and phonics should be considered a crime too. Children like my DS who can read fluently are held back because they don’t / can’t phonetically sound out each individual word. Bring back reading by sight. Fuck ‘Fred talk’.

Also, as an aside, listen to his podcast on The Rest is Politics. The man is a Zionist.

YABU for the Chatgpt post, OP.

He also totally fucked GCSE English- knock on effect no one wants to do A level any more.

The curriculum didn't change within the same timeframes in Scotland as it did in England and we are also seeing record number of kids being diagnosed as neurodiverse here so something else must be going on. I believe the waiting lists for CAHMS are significantly longer here too - 2.5 years for initial assessment last time I asked.

If you want to promote literacy and education, using AI generators to write for you is shooting yourself in the foot and undermines whatever point you were trying to make.

Yep which has also had a knock on effect in universities and arts and humanities courses are closing or being reduced. More to it than Gove but it’s basically being etitised so only kids who can access Russell groups will be able to study those courses.

Various reasons why people attend post 92s and because they’re more teaching intensive, the lecturers are generally more supportive and students tend to be happier in those institutions. I could go on about this but yes, Gove provided a nail in the coffin for we humanities academics hopelessly trying to save our disciplines.

Im Wales, the curriculum remains woefully
mediocre and child focused to an absurd degree. The Curriculum for Wales is whatever you want it to be - which means inconsistent.

we have the same increase in diagnosis and mental health issues.

The problem is underfunding and technology.

Absolutely spot on.

Layers of management in academies get paid six figures while they can't meet the needs of children. On paper, results are better but in reality, children are failed. Even the ones who do well academically are doing so in spite of school, not because of it.

Agree. Add forced academisation into the mix. Follow the money. Why is there no money for SEND now? It’s not because of ‘overdiagnosis’ it’s because of CEOs, consultants etc

Could not agree more and I am so pleased this view is getting more mainstream traction and people are aware of it. My own daughter, who is on paper exactly the sort of child that should love school, hates it and particularly maths. It’s really putting her off learning and affecting her self esteem. I stopped teaching just before these changes came in and I can’t believe how boring and stuffed the new curriculum is. Like PP have said, things I was teaching in Y4 are now being taught in Y2. And it’s so sad how little time they have for arts and play.

DD2 had no problems until secondary school. Many girls like her will be failed by her secondary school as my daughter was.

What decades did your education fall in out of interest? As I said up thread mine was the eighties and nineties, and my education was APPALLING. I have learned more through walking my kids through their education journey, than I did through my own. My mother on the other hand was educated in a bog standard south-east London school(s) in the 1950s and 60s and her SPAG is excellent.

YANBU, but please don't forget Nick Gibb, who introduced Gove to the idea of 'knowledge rich' education, and stayed in and around the DfE for pretty much the entire Tory government - 2010 to 2023. Gove took the fall for his ideas and it has deformed education irredeemably.

100%

School is actively damaging children's education at the moment. It's astonishing how badly its doing, almost impressive in a very depressing way.

As for 'diagnosis', ADHD and anxiety are apparently assumed to be universal, while children with genuine support needs don't get any. I suspect the diagnoses are being used as a reason to write children off, or pre explain poor results. Because they sure as fuck arent being used to provide support.

The irony is, this is exactly how we are teaching children to write in schools now. It's like they are just little writing machines.

I work in HE. Respectfully, I see no evidence of it.

Now that is completely true. My child’s school became an academy around five years ago and in that time a whole tier of employers were promoted to CEOs, CFOs etc. suddenly everyone started flexibly working from home, when they did appear the car was brand new with personalised number plates and the workplace moved away from the school after throwing a lot of money at an office conversion in the school.

As a result of the changes the school has lost traction, lost its Ofsted grading, people are pulling their kids out, as standards have slipped so far. It’s been an absolute fall from grace.