UK Education Policy : Give schools the freedom to teach ....

[TalkinPeace2]

EXACTLY the spelling tests Gove prescribes in the order he says and the detailed curriculum topics and in the terms he says.

For a free enterprise government committed to "localism" and "cutting red tape" they are sure getting busy over at the Dfe ...

Then again as academies do not have to teach the national curriculum
and he's getting all the schools to convert into academies
are they just going to tell him to stick it?

or will he make Ofsted then fail them and hand them to his sponsor chums ?

The new curriculum (already strongly criticised by one of the experts he commissioned to formulate it then ignored) looks like a stick to beat any schools that continue to be maintained ie still have to use the NC and another bribe to get schools to convert to become academies, so that they don't need to have anything to do with this drivel.

Bullying and bribery seem to be Gove's only strategies. He certainly doesn't know anything about, or seem to be interested in, improving education.

Academies do have to teach NC, I thought. Free schools don't; they just have to stick to broader headings (ie "Maths", "English", "RE"...).

Which isn't to say that Gove isn't a fucking loon who'll have all pupils wearing plus fours by 2015, nor that his policies aren't rather schizophrenic.

Oh, have Googled and I take that back (the bit about academies and the NC, not about Gove being a loon and compulsory plus fours).

but what are the bests on the last line of my opening post ....

Of course he will - using Ofsted to 'fail' schools then giving them to his and the cabinet's friends is bullying tactic number one.

Has met with a bit of resistance, so he's decided to use the NC reforms to create another stick.

Being pedantic: there is no such thing as a UK education policy. Education is a devolved matter, so whatever nonsense Gove utters Westminster policies don't apply in Scotland. Even before the Scottish Parliament was set up, the Scottish education system was quite different.

England and Scotland are moving in the opposite directions when it comes to curricular development. It'll be interesting to see the outcome over the next decade.

It will indeed be interesting :)

I'm still not 100% convinced by Curriculum for Excellence at the Secondary School level; no issues with it at primary as that is the way good primary teachers were planning their classes anyway (although I do have some issues with the Levels, which are so broad as to be meaningless).