Does Michael Gove have the support of the public?

[Machadaynu]

Michael Gove, Minister for Education, seems to me to be a liability.

If he isn't selling off playing fields and accidentally telling people he has sold much fewer than he actually has, he is introducing a dead number system into the maths syllabus, allowing private firms to run schools promoting their beliefs, allowing unqualified people to teach and making a string of other controversial decisions.

I am now at the point where the more I learn about him and his decisions, the less respect I have for him. He seems to me to be entirely out of his depth, and unable to take advice - admittedly this isn't a trait unique to him in this government.

Am I the only one? If he didn't have power he'd be funny.

He doesn't have mine, but it's whether he has the support of his own party which counts!

Was there ever a minister for education that did have the support of the public? I can't remember one...Ed Balls, Ruth Kelly, Alan Johnson??

The reality of our education system is that for most people there is all but no real choice. Very few people are able to vote with their feet and move their children elsewhere if the service provided fails to to meet an acceptable standard.

The problem I see with Michael Gove is no different from previous ministers. He is tampering with a system I dont believe he uses himself. Most politicians know to largely leave state health alone apart from tinkering round the edges. They use this system themselves when they or their family are in need.

Senior politicians are typically privately educated and the vast, vast majority privately educate their own children. They dont have to deal with the reality the rest of us have to deal with. They can indulge their desire for social engineering without having to experience the consequences themselves.

If you google Michael Gove's biography I think you would be surprised at his upbringing, and he does send his own children to state primary (as does David Cameron I think).

I think it is more a case of them having experienced first class private education themselves and wanting to replicate certain aspects of this in the state sector.

It's a case of him having absolutely no understanding of people who are not like him. He seems to think what was good for him will be what's best for everyone.

The only people I have encountered who think he is doing a good job are those who privately educate and have no knowledge of the state system.

Cameron ignored the outstanding local primaries and sends his kids to a church school behind Kensington High St. Don't know about Gove but he also worships at the same church. Gove's wife was reported to have sent the Au Pair to have competed in the mummy's race at sports day. Infra dig for her no doubt.

They both disgust me.

Actually I did google him which is why I said the majority are privately educated and privately educate rather than specifying him. He was state educated then went to private. I will be betting that when choosing schools for his DC he didnt have the Hobson's choice of 1 in-and-out-of-special measures school that I had for my DCs at both primary and secondary level.

This the reality. The town I live in has a number of mediocre primary schools and one well below average secondary. This isnt a sink school, there isnt a better school stealing the high achieving pupils. It is a badly managed town school. The surrounding towns are the same.

What I see in my area is incompetent management. Poor teachers arent removed until the damage has been done (I could give numerous examples). GCSE coursework gets lost by teachers, work isnt marked, able students are left to explain classwork to other pupils (repeatedly not as an improving exercise). This is all down to poor management - a bit crap becomes an acceptable standard.

Whenever a student leaves secondary education with poor literacy or numeracy skills the HT should be forced to account for why that has happened and what steps were taken to try to avoud this. Every single time, every single student. Ebacc is a waste of time where students are leaving school unable to demonstrably read, write and count in English.

Good state education isnt about whether or not you have grammar schools in your area. The education needs to be fit for purpose. All abilities should have their needs met. Producing excellent schools in a few leafy suburbs is not a satisfactory education policy.

Gnome - My comment was in response to you saying 'he is tampering with a system that I don't believe he uses himself' but wasn't meant to be antagonistic; I have seen many referring to him as posh etc on here and in rl so I myself was surprised when I read about his background.

I agree with what you say about state education, who wouldn't, but if it was easy to fix then it would have been done by now, by this government or the last.

I think that Academies and Free Schools are supposed to be a move towards improving the system by allowing these schools to have greater control over budgets, salaries, curriculum etc. Presumably these schools would find it easier to manage out the poor teachers to whom you refer, and to reward the outstanding teachers accordingly?

I'm not a fan particularly, but I do think that you need to balance the negative (free bibles etc) with those positive steps that clearly have good intentions and should ultimately raise standards - pupil premium, the education endownment fund, more superheads, more stringent Ofsted inspections, stopping excessive resits (for A level students and trainee teachers) etc.

Academies and Free Schools are the privatisation of education by the back door and an attempt to minimise the role of LAs with a view to eventually closing them. They are not generally viewed as a positive move by those in education. The pupil premium was due to the Lib Dems not the Tories.

What about the other negatives, the massive cuts to school budgets (forced academisation in a lot of cases) the cancelling of the Building Schools For The Future fund meaning a lot of school buildings are left in dire need of updating, the cancelling of the School Sports Partnership fund (big blunder given the Olympics) the utter confusion and turmoil caused by tinkering with exams, O-levels, U-turns and no one knowing what the hell is going on...just off the top of my head.

I have never had any time for Michael Gove. His suggestion that children learn Roman numerals is just the icing on the cake of incompetence. I mean there is a reason why the whole bloody world went to Arabic numerals, Mike!

No matter what his background, he seems determined to take us back to a 1950s rose-tinted view of what education 'ought to be' and is happy to ignore everything we have learned in the last 60 years about what works.

Yes, there needs to be a lot of change in the state system in terms of improving what is achieved, but Gove's way is not the answer. The answer is to look at what really good state schools in difficult areas are doing, study it thoroughly and then put systems in place to roll it out.

And in tandem with this, we need to do some serious work on ironing out the socio-economic inequalities that still dog UK society. Households without books, parents who can't or won't give a shit, children who come to school hungry - it's not as simple as throwing money at the problem, but it is as simple as all parties admitting that it is a problem. The current lot's method of blaming all poverty and deprivation on the poor and deprived achieves nothing. We should look at more equal societies like those in the Scandinavian countries and taking a leaf out of their book - though that would mean giving up rampant capitalism, of course.

Aaaaargh this is not good for my blood pressure.

Gove is rubbish, I have never met anyone who supports his views. He seems to have two guiding principles, that the market will deliver and that if it was standard in the 1950s it must be good. He clearly doesn't believe of finding and using evidence of good practice, because most of what he is doing is known to not have any substantive beneficial effects.

This coupled with Cable's mission to destroy higher education is a serious threat to all our DC.

Sorry, fair comment adeucalione. However I do still doubt that he is truly experiencing what the rest of us have to live with and also guess that his DCs will land up in the type of lovely secondary school strangely unavailable to the rest of us.

The problem though in my opinion is quite a basic one - poor management in schools. What schools need are managers, recruited and trained for the job. Line management skills ensuring that poor performance by staff is managed up or out and all staff are well motivated. Proper resource management to achieve value for money etc etc.

The problem with Gove and all his predecessors is that they all want a 'big bang, quick fix' solution to the problem. It doesnt matter whether it is phonics or MFL, fiddling around doesnt help. This is micro management which Gove et al shouldnt be dealing with. Their job should be strategy not worrying about whether my DCs are learning languages to a prescribed level.

Michael Gove hates teache s and they hate him....I know I am generalising but hey!?

Where did my r go?
teachers!

It is strange that he wants to drag us back to the 1950s as this is not a decade he will remember as he is the same academic year as me. He reminds me just a little bit of my brother who attended the same comp as me and yet is convinced we had 'masters' not teachers.

I guess that the problem for Gove (and all previous education ministers) is that having been educated he thinks he knows how to 'do' education.

I have worked in adult training for a number of years and come across this attitude a lot where people think that because they have experienced training they know how to set up training. This all based on their opinion of what worked for them.

You dont get the same attitude to medicine. Very few people think 'I've had appendicitis so I now know how to operate on it!'

The Instinct or Reason report from 2010 shows how educational policy is formed - i found it interesting anyway.

I am very pleased that he has chosen to look at the evidence on synthetic phonics and push that in our schools. It is about time.

I was a teacher in the state system, went to a state school and send my children to a state school. I do not dislike him, or think he is a fool.

A minor point, but there is nothing wrong with learning Roman Numerals. I have always taught it to my classes if at an appropriate age. Why shouldn't children know this?

::waves at Humphrey::

I don't see why suggesting learning Roman numerals makes him incompetent. We learnt base 2 (binary) when I was about 8. I don't suppose anyone thought it would turn us into budding computer programmers - it was about learning a new system of counting and thinking -and it seems to me that Roman numerals could have similar benefits. And it's interesting. DD has just started noticing the dates at the ends of films and tv programmes.

he doesn't have my support, not for anything. But then, I'm a teacher!

it is not a given though overthemill, I am a teacher too

There is nothing wrong with learning Roman numerals. There is a problem with shoe-horning it into a primary maths curriculum which needs the time to improve the numeracy of children, which there are many concerns about. And no, learning to count up to 1000 in Roman numerals will not help with this.

Part of the reason I feel sorry for him is that everyone seems to think they know what he believes, and often they are wrong. There was a wonderful bit on a BBC radio programme a couple of years ago that (for reasons I don't recall) had him and Mark Steel talking about strikes and picketing. Mark Steel said something to the effect of "oh well, of course, as a Tory you disapprove of people joining unions", to which Michael Gove pointed out that he'd been a member of the NUJ and was happy for anyone voluntarily to join a union, as long as they weren't compelled to join when they didn't want to. (I have tried but failed to find a clip of this on Youtube).

Do people really believe that he spends his time sticking pins into effigies of the NUT leadership?

humphrey, of course not. However, as he is not a teacher or education professional/researcher he doesn't know his stuff and from time to time he is obviously poorly briefed. He strikes me as a well meaning member of government who doesn't quite understand the intricacies of what he suggests. It is my belief that one should evidence what you say, not find evidence for what you have said and certainly not adopt a policy on the hoof approach which is apparent what many Coalition ministers are apt to do.

fwiw, i have no objection to an evidence based approach to a discussion between educationalists and policy makers about what best serves children. And I speak as a former Whitehall civil servant briefing ministers and writing policy who retrained in education! (and i've also been a politician...)

Quite, noblegiraffe. I'm not advocating pointless Roman stunts; it just seems to be that there may be circumstances where dealing with numbers in Roman form might indeed help improve numeracy.

He's not an education professional. He shouldn't be tampering with the curriculum at all himself.