Why are people so upset with Mr Gove?

[nlondondad]

An invitation to people to give an explanation as we can take it as given that people ARE upset.

Note: Two kinds of possible answers to this question.

1. Why you think other people are upset

1. Why you are upset...

Answers which do not give reasons, will be marked down.

Now to go away for a bit, I wonder what will happen while I am gone?

Catherine, that is an extraordinary statement. If teachers were resistant to change they would still be caning dyslexics and promoting the cause of the 11+. Teachers change their professional practice all the time, to reflect the situation around them. It's completely disingenuous to argue otherwise.

In response to recent initiatives, the Head Teachers' Roundtable has put together a much more deeply thought through proposal for reforming credentialisation in UK schools, for example, which challenges the top 10% while supporting the bottom 10%. However Gove hasn't passed comment on this at all. Who is being contrary? Who is being arbitrary? Who is being wilfully obstructive? It ain't the head teachers, I can tell you that.

Head Teachers Roundtable Framework

Gove hasn't engaged with this initiative from the profession at all. He has not commented on its progress, not contributed in any useful way, not even acknowledged the existence of this group. Surely the NAHT conference gave him a golden opportunity to engage with Head Teachers about this very important matter? But he didn't take up the opportunity, because he would rather drone on at people like he did at Haberdashers', with refuseniks to his very particular brand of oratorial charm being branded Marxists.

Teachers have embraced change- what they get fed up about is the fact that it is changed again, before it has had long enough, and then changed again, and again, and again.
Gove doesn't even know his his own rules- a HT had to explain it to him!

Not only do teachers embrace change, sometimes they instigate it .

Dirty little presumptuous serfs.

This is actually Gove's manifesto stripped down, which is not unreasonable:

1. Improve people's spelling and grammar a bit so it's not as embarrassing for business.
2. Improve people's maths a bit so they are more use at work and in industry. Ditto computer coding.
3. Encourage people to keep learning modern foreign languages a year or two longer, to a slightly higher standard.
4. Make sure we don't forget the traditional side of education, as learning things like Shakespeare and about the Empire can develop children's thinking and appreciation of complex subjects in the context of daily life.
5. Don't forget that the top 10% of kids need pushing pretty hard so they make good leaders for the future.
6. Save money on education over the next 10-20 years because it's a massive slice of the public sector budget. Open public provision up to the private sector to run.

This is what we hear:

Enemies of Promise
Blob
Marxists
Island story
Must
Should
Fail
Force
George Elliot
Jade Goody

And this is why he comes across as rabid and irrational. But the first version doesn't get you elected does it? Unless you identify an 'enemy', you have to make more effort with the rationalism of the milder arguments, and if politicians started doing that, when would we all be?

Good post, Boffin.

And I agree that teachers love change. Even when I was left to teach the same spec for more than a couple of years (which has been rare over the last decade and hasn't happened in the last 5 years) I was constantly looking at changing and improving the way in which we delivered it both as a classroom teacher and a manager. I haven't met a teacher who hasn't asked, 'How could I do this better?' during every lesson.

The problem with change from Gove is that it is entirely imposed on teachers without consultation, without an evidence base and often on a whim. Why can't teachers ever be allowed to be involved in leading the change?

The removal of AS exams is such an obviously retrograde step, for example.

In this case how can teachers be expected to embrace a change that is a 100% U turn on a change they embraced 10 years ago? Both changes can't be right as they're in opposition and yet teachers are expected to simply accept both changes with enthusiasm. That's very disillusioning.

Ah, but FiveCandles, you are forgetting that they don't want TEACHERS, they want complaint education delivery TECHNICIANS. If teachers just sat nicely in Room 101 and submitted to the inevitable, it would be a lot less painful all round.

Boffinmum But that list of soundbites is NOT what has upset me about what Gove is doing. Although his love of the Daily Mail pleasing soundbite does upset me because it influences the way he goes about things.

What has upset me, as I set out nearer the start of the thread is that as a result of his way of going about things, his soundbite politics, he has repeatedly placed unfair and unjustified hurdles in my 17 year old daughters way. Somehow I suspect if Catherine's DC had her life chances unfairly and inconsistently affected by all the kneejerk change going on in the exam system she might get a bit upset, along with the rest of us parents, too.

Instead of implementing a plan to tackle grade inflation (and few didn't think it needed tackling) that had a stated end state and a fair and consistent plan to get there signed up to and understood by all the stakeholders, teachers, employers, universities, he applied political pressure to Ofqual and exam boards who responded with a knee jerk reaction. The GCSE (and indeed AS and A2) results last year were a fiasco. Pupils were at the random end of inconsistent and unfairly applied attempts to deflate results, depending what board and subjects you sat you could be immune to it or your chances of a job or place at university could be seriously affected. It has completely undermined the hard work teachers had put into building their pupils faith in their abilities and this year they are at a loss to advise pupils where the goalpost are. At my DDs indie they are shopping around to find the qualifications and boards most likely to be immune to Gove's interference. It also left universities struggling to understand whether their applicants had genuinely missed their grades or were the victims of the random deflation.

He has done exactly the same again this year in terms of extra time provision (another favourite Daily Mail target). There is no evidence that there was widespread abuse of the system, some anecdotal evidence of a few rogue schools / ed psychs, but more that increasing numbers of pupils with genuine problems are being diagnosed though it remains an uphill battle for Specific Learning Difficulties to be recognised and addressed, especially if parents don't have the money or resources. However under more political pressure, aimed at creating soundbites, the exam boards have introduced a system that will not give extra time to pupils whose processing and working memory score are not below average, regardless of ability. This is complete at odds with the definition of a SpLDs and with the way it is assessed in universities. However the exam system now places a hurdle in the way of bright pupils which may prevent them ever getting to university, let alone the one their ability would enable them to access. As it happens my DD has got extra time but I am upset for all the others, and the needless last minute implementation which left pupils anxious, and in some cases, deprived of the extra time they were used to having with just weeks to go and little time to develop coping strategies

It isn't just the associations with Island Story that have upset Historians like me either but I have rattled on about that enough already .

I totally agree Copthall and such seemingly ad hoc changes continue without consultation or preparation and without an apparent understanding of the ramifications. So, in English last year we had the widely documented and grossly unfair shifting of grade boundaries last year and next year the weighting of the exam vs controlled assessment has been shifted such that speaking and listening no longer counts at all towards the English GCSE (yet you still have to do it) and the exam is going to be worth 60% of the GCSE. Now, again, there may be some good reasons for such a change but to do it all at once in this manner such that there is no parity between the same exam from one year to the next is unfair. Another reason why people are jumping ship to IGCSE where speaking and listening still counts.

Boffin, you forgot in your Goveifesto

1. Write off the less academic

What needs to be remembered about Gove is the whole Gove-level fiasco that really showed his true colours.

I remember waking up one morning to the headline that O-levels were to return. Gove's department had leaked the plans to the press (the Daily Mail to be precise), behind the back of his own party, and behind the back of the Lib Dems. Anyone with an interest in education was completely thrown and there were lots of questions flying around, which no one seemed to have the answers for. Totally unprofessional.

The proposals were for an entirely new qualification to replace GCSEs. This, in itself, isn't a bad idea. Draw a line in the sand etc.

Except they were only to be in certain academic subjects. Who knew what was going to happen to the rest of the curriculum, because Gove wasn't answering.

They were to be introduced in 2015, because it's election year. Anyone who knows anything about education knows this is a ridiculous timetable.

They weren't going to be piloted. Because introducing a new set of qualifications to the entire country's 16 year olds and potentially ruining their future if it turns out to be shit is a great idea.

All students who were capable of it were expected to sit the same exam with no tiers. Because getting the less able to sit for hours in front of an exam they can't access is just great for their self esteem.

The exam was thought to be beyond the reach of 20% of students. Instead of sitting any qualifications, they would leave school with an attendance certificate. Which would be essentially worthless.

Thank fuck he finally had to back down on this. It was utterly outrageous.

I hear they've also made payment for exam remarks obligatory (whether the score on the remark is higher or lower than the original grade). This is another nail in the coffin for the less well-off, as they won't be able to afford resubsmission (@£50 a paper??)
A friend's daughter just got a B grade remarked to A*. How can that happen?

Great post Boffinmum - the Govifesto points 1-5 look pretty reasonable put like that. It's the execution which is so inept, confrontational and demoralising. He is clearly personally obsessed with history the battleground because he has already axed the D&T curriculum which was criticised for dumbing down.

On point 5 he has not had an honest debate about the hidden cost of creating a market out of an essential service and the impact on quality. He knows many of the Blair academies have failed but instead of addressing that failure he used that model to justify spending £1 billion to throw all the outstanding schools into the market. He's ignored reports like the evaluation of the City Challenge scheme which did have private companies working in school improvement or even managing education services on behalf of an LA without needing to take schools out of LA control.

mum Yes, he knows many of the Blair academies have failed but instead of addressing that failure he used that model to justify spending£1 billion to throw all the outstanding schools into the market Other schools are being thrown at chain sponsors. Many of these chain groups, such as the AET haven't supported their existing academies, many have failed or are not showing significant improvement. This has become so much of a problem that even the DFE have been forced to take action and ban the AET from expanding further until they have improved the academies they already control.

www.changingschools.org.uk/academiesfolder/complete%20report.pdf

I meant he has been dishonest about point 6, by the way. Right wing thinktanks did not miss the opportunity to point out the use of equivalents by academies to game the system (see Civitas 2009) and as Gove co-founded the Policy Exchange he would know that very well. Rachel Wolf, Gove's former adviser and also of the Policy Exchange (which advocated profit-making), recently said to the public accounts committee that the quality bar for sponsors was higher for free schools than sponsored academies and she expected converter academies to act as sponsors. Well that's not even an option for forced academies - the brokers impose the chain preferred for that particular week.

The weirdest thing about this ferocious marketisation of education is that it has gone hand in hand with an expansion of religious influence over schools. So it is easier for LAs working with a diocese to create a new voluntary aided school without prior approval by the Secretary of State - but it's also the only way. Added to that you have the Catholic Church following the CofE's lead and getting geared up to take over converter academies as sponsor, and a large proportion of free schools with a religious character and/or restricted admissions (half of the first three waves, and 25% of the latest wave). So this time round you are getting e.g. new CofE schools near to where Muslim or Sikh schools were approved last year. So much for community cohesion - and little or no debate among elected representatives.

The fact is that many free schools have been set up in areas with either divisive religious schools or sponsored academies with a poor reputation. So Gove has cynically exploited existing tensions to create a new market without a democratic debate. We can look at what has been happening in Stockholm to see if more religious schools and profit-making has created social harmony there.

Another example of Gove's lack of honesty - the success of community schools in Tower Hamlets in which schools are outperforming many affluent areas. This was an area helped by the City Challenge scheme which Michael Wishaw also praised. Not a mention from Gove because it runs counter to his privatising agenda. Instead, always the DfE spokesperson's dead-eyed mantra:

'We are clear but cannot give you any evidence for and are cagey about the reasons why the best way forward for an underperforming school is to become an academy with the support of a strong sponsor but we will impose one and not consult parents and are paying academy brokers £250,00 per year to force this to happen.'

Not just to headteachers and parents who vote against forced academisation and cannot see the benefit, but also to Conservative council leaders and Ofsted inspectors.

It's not £1b, that is just the overspend. He has spent £8.35b over two years on the academies programme. See this blog post, and then feel free to froth a bit.

How much? The cost of converting schools to academies

Yes, I knew the £1 billion was 'just' overspend.

I had been thinking that Labour probably also wasted money on its academies - considering not all were successful. But in comparison with the money spent by Gove on schools that didn't need fixing it wasn't as bad as I had thought. Labour had spent £1.3 billion by 2006 for 46 schools and £5 billion by 2010 for 200 academies. That figure included full rebuilds, not just money wasted on insurance, websites, legal fees, etc.

And £1.7 billion has been spent as capital expenditure on 24,500 free school places, the equivalent of about 25 secondary schools, plus £200,000 extra in start-up costs per school. So Gove's new schools may have had more money spent on them in these recessionary times, many in areas of surplus capacity. And existing schools have had the most money wasted on them - because it is the cost of creating a 'market' to attract new profit-making operators when some converter and many existing sponsor-led academies are callously allowed to fail. For which Gove will blame Labour despite having set up the market and consequent market failure himself.

Meanwhile my school has a budget deficit.

Mine too, 100k deficit meant we laid off a lot of teachers and TAs. Now we have bigger class sizes, less support for those struggling and fewer resources. My classroom has holes in the walls and the windows leak. But the government finds money for the Free School in Newham that never opened, or the one in Bradford that had to be put back a year at the last minute due to not enough interest, or the woefully undersubscribed one in Beccles.

LOL ! Interesting that he wants longer terms and shorter holidays, citing that the existing school calendar works around old- fashioned necessities of kids being needed at home in the summer weeks to help bring in the harvest. Does this mean that he's going to review MPs' long summer break, which is some might also view as an outmoded tradition?

Apologies, noblegiraffe, my LOL was in response to an earlier message where someone asked if the contributor was Mrs Gove.

It's interesting, isn't it? I wonder how many traditional Tory voters will no longer be voting for the Conservatives because of their strong anti- Gove sentiments...

Did you see his anti Milliband article in the Telegraph today? He was incredibly petty in it, and slightly unhinged.

Thank you boffin. It nearly brought tears to my eyes!

As regards the first bonkerooney paragraph: did no-one tell him that Mr Cameron is in Ibiza? Will he be the last to know?

Also loved the link to Simon Schama's talk at the Hay Festival about the new history curriculum!
Simon Schama on the new history curriculum!

David Cameron in Ibiza and not in the UK 'making the NHS more efficient and compassionate' or 'freeing millions from dictatorship'.

Actually, I felt sorry for David Cameron, when Gove undermined him so blatantly on official European policy. In any case I doubt that UKIP supporters will run back to the party to embrace his brand of cronyism, lack of honesty and elitism. On Question Time last night the UKIP woman slammed most government policy including on the NHS.

Simon Schama in great form there.

Yes, the comments about Cameron read very strangely given that everyone knows he has been on holiday this week.

I think it's all imploding for Gove, frankly. I understand the party is pretty dismayed he has hacked off the head teachers, who are a reasonably moderate bunch.