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?

[edam]

Takin - I think the NHS also suffers from ministers holding press conferences to slag staff off.

Yes, Gove is an ignorant bastard, and as a school governor I object to him inflicting his stupid excuses for policies off, as well as holding press conferences to slag off both schools and we volunteers. I just think your comment about this being unique to schools, or that private sector employers who acted like shits would go under, was not entirely accurate.

[Talkinpeace]

edam
I did not mean it to be unique to schools : the joys of trying to nuance typing!
My work is with Local Government : I deal with P-P-Pickles pronouncements every week

But I do assert that any private sector employer who treated their staff with as much disdain as ministers treat the public sector staff would be rip for takeover in a matter of months.

[Yorkshirepuddingy]

I haven't read every post, but looking at some, I'd say a few of the anti- Govites are making rather feeble arguments at times.

1. It is patronising to dismiss the 'Daily Mail' crowd- they represent a large proportion of decent middle England, so why dismiss their views any more than , say, Guardian readers?
   

1. Children are burnt out at the end of term- hmm. Are they? Really? So why do most parents complain that school holidays are too long? Far more parents say this than parents clamouring for shorter school days or terms.
   

1. 'Exams are getting harder, children will have lower grades, employers will be confused.' ( to paraphrase something said by Noblegiraffe.) To counteract this, what about employers knowing that in 2014, the exam system changed, just the same as over the last 20 years exam grades have become inflated- leaving employers perhaps much more confused as to the value of those grades.
   

Many independent school have scrapped GCSEs anyway due to their limited value.

I began teaching in the 1970s. I retired not long ago, having taught in both private and state schools. On the whole, I feel that Gove is doing quite a lot of stuff that makes sense. I have despaired at how subjects have been dumbed down over the last 35 years- especially my own subject- English- so much that I was glad to leave the profession which bore no resemblance to when I entered it in terms of intellectual vigour. The 'rot' IMO began in the early 80s when the GCSE was introduced, and an academic curriculum was watered down so every student could take the exam, and no one could 'fail'. Then we have coursework which students could re-hash until it met an expected grade, then we had texts which were allowed into the exam room- annotated!.

The entire marking scheme has changed with less emphasis on grammar and spelling, and the texts studied have become easier- and in addition students rarely study an entire serious , lengthy novel.

Anything which turns back the clock and reinstates some intellectual challenges is IMO for the better.

[noblegiraffe]

So why do most parents complain that school holidays are too long

Usually because it is inconvenient for them to have to arrange childcare.

[Yorkshirepuddingy]

Are schools just a baby minding service for parents?

No- most parents complain because their child becomes bored.

[Feenie]

And that is my problem because.....?

[noblegiraffe]

That comes up too on the MN thread I've read about it. But others would argue that it's good for kids to be bored. Back in my day we'd be chucked out of the house with nothing but a reminder to be back for dinner etc etc. Nowadays parents feel obliged to entertain their kids.

Gove seems to think that parents are actually a bad influence on their kids and that as little time should be spent with them as possible.

[Feenie]

Come and visit any primary classroom before the end of term, YP - learning is much more fast-paced and intensive than in ever was when I was a child. Children work incredibly hard, and have had enough after 6 weeks.

[Wuldric]

1. I think other people are upset because he is making changes and all changes create upset as education professionals have a vested interest in the status quo. It is however unfortunate that his changes are in many cases changes for the worse, which has doubled and trebled the amount of noise. He doesn't seem to have a coherent strategy.
   

1. I'm not remotely upset. It hasn't really affected me. The DCs are doing a mix of IGCSEs and straight GCSEs. The straight GCSEs are frankly laughable, excerpt based learning for English is an abomination, but hopefully they will get exposed to more rigorous academic stuff via the IGCSE and later on at school - at A/S and A Level

[Maria33]

1. SPAG is the most insignificant measure of level 6 writing. Anyone who is focussing on that has no idea about how literacy is assessed. SPaG is the easy bit. Level six writing is sophisticated as is level 6 comprehension. I would refer you to the national standards agency but it no longer exists. I would post examples of level 6 marking but in between marking 33 2000 word essays analyzing how Browning and Shakespeare's convey emotion in language I'd like to see my children.
   

1. Schools are forced to convert to academy status whether they like it or not because once a number of schools in any given LA has converted, the services offered by the LA are so underfunded, that academy status is the only way if accessing funding.
   

1. Privatizing schools means that schools will now be paying for a curriculum they previously paid nothing for. It means that there is no joined up thinking between schools actually making the curriculum much less transparent for parents. Buying in services from profit making companies is going yo lower standards and be financially wasteful as it will not be properly regulated. There will also be no transparency or accountability as it is not being built in.
   

1. There are shit teachers but there are excellent practitioners working hard to raise levels if literacy despite the shit storm. They want to raise standards, they work in teaching because they care, they are well qualified in both their subject specialisms and teaching but Gove and people like hubba still think they know better.
   

1. Do your fucking research, spend done time working in schools and soup using your own paltry anecdotal experience as some kind of basis for knowing best. There is so much ignorance about what us actually happening. It's terrifying.

[Maria33]

Yeah yeah typos, missing commas etc . Phone typing. Big thumbs, small screen.

[Maria33]

Oh and for the record. I abhor excerpt based teaching if it means not reading the whole text. However, literature has always been 'excerpt based' to some extent as unless you are writing a 10,000 word thesis, you have to focus on excerpts...

[Maria33]

Or maybe we just want to go back to focussing on the story rather than language.. That is easier and what O-level English essentially did...

[Crumbledwalnuts]

I think Michael Gove is great, but I suppose that isn't what you asked.

[Skinnywhippet]

He wants to remove universities from teacher training. Mistake.

[Crumbledwalnuts]

"the experts in education absolutely do not agree with you"

LadyLech I think you posted this. I saw your "experts in education" recently described as "the blob", complacent, left-wing, resistant to a more demanding curriculum, defensive of their own status, happy to see disadvantaged children suffer so long as their ideas remain unchallenged. No education secretary has managed to dislodge its control, hence herewith after many years, we have the standards bemoaned by employers and universities. Gove has a fight on his hands, I hope he wins.

[mummytime]

All the independent schools near me study for iGCSEs and GCSEs.
The state school my DC go to does not teach from "excerpts", I don't know one that does except from the news media or primary schools.
All children I know are exhausted at the endof term.
I never complain the holidays are too long, apart from the first few days when my DC try to kill each other they are too short. They certainly seem much shorter than when I was a child. Private schools have longer holidays.

Raising the end of education age offered a real chance to change the education system. Unfortunately Mr Gove was not the right person to do this, and he seems to have no real knowledge or care for what education is really about.

[noblegiraffe]

I saw your "experts in education" recently described as "the blob"

Yes, by Gove, who also whinged in a paranoid fashion about Marxists. The article in the Daily Mail in which he did this was truly bizarre.

[Crumbledwalnuts]

Maybe it was by Gove. I thought it was Melanie Phillips. More power to both of them I say.

[Maria33]

Crumbledwalnuts:

Comments like yours make me furious. Like many teachers, I work with disadvantaged kids everyday. They are not some faceless statistic: they are individuals with hopes, aspirations, needs, their own stories and issues that they tell me about. I work hard to build their self belief, make them believe that learning spellings, paragraphing, varying sentence structure and using commas correctly is meaningful to them. I engage them in Macbeth and Marvell despite their initial suspicion and fear. I know I do it well because they let me know and they get the results.

I work in state education because I want to do something meaningful to help raise children's aspirations. I passionately believe that education is directly linked to social mobility as does all the research.

Most teachers work hard and care deeply about the kids they teach. Most teachers will never be properly remunerated for their time or properly thanked by the ministers in charge for doing a fantastic jobs but we're not really doing it for that. You see, we're not blazing a trail to No 10, we just want to educate kids so that they have some sort of autonomy in their lives. This is what motivates us. Not money (clearly), not an easy life(obviously) and not national headlines. You could not really survive I'm teaching if you didn't care. A few don't but most do.

Your comment is offensive and if Gove gave a flying shit about education, he would have been in education not journalism.

He's a cynical fool and anyone who swallows his hype is just a fool.

[Feenie]

Yes - because we definitely need more childish, playground name-calling by government ministers in the press.

[Copthallresident]

Sorry YP but having been educated at a direct grant grammar and sat O levels and A levels in the seventies and with two teenage (actually one now post teenage) DCs I am at a loss to understand what great advantages my education had over my DCs, in fact I think it was a good deal less demanding and a far worse preparation for further study / demonstration of abilities relevant to the real world.

O levels were just an exercise in regurgitation, I certainly did my own version of excerpt learning for English, I learnt it all from Cole's notes, never did read the books and plays. A level was approaching what GCSE is now with a requirement to start introducing some structure and argument but really for A level English very little in the way of the skills in literary criticism that my DDs had to demonstrate for GCSE (a friend who has taught in the Asian and US systems says that the UK English Literature syllabus at GCSE/ IGCSE and A level require far more advanced skills in literary criticism than those of any other country she has taught in, and it is certainly my experience that undergrads coming from Asian countries face a steep learning curve in terms of acquiring the level of skills in literary skills shown by UK students.

In common with my A level subjects my DD has just sat AS English and History as well as two other subjects and the amount she had to learn and the depth to which she had to learn and understand it was far greater than was required of me. I arrived at uni with only the most basic skills in constructing an evidence based argument. Students arrive at my university with far superior skills in analysing sources and constructing an evidenced argument based on their own analysis of the issues. Above all they arrive with enthusiasm / passion, call it what you will for their subject, having already had a chance to engage with the fascination of in depth study. My passion for my subject was developed through Henry Treece and Jean Plaidy and was in spite of the boring irrelevant story that was crammed into me at school. The proposed History Curriculum with it's emphasis on His Story is in particular very poor preparation for further study of History in our universities.

Remember O levels were done away with by a Conservative because they weren't fit for purpose in the 80s, let alone the 21st century.

[Crumbledwalnuts]

I wouldn't get too upset about an internet forum Maria. My comment isn't offensive, it's different to your view, but I'm sure you don't believe in silencing different views, simply on the spurious accusation of "offensive".

He does care - you don't have a monopoly on that. He's seen too many children let down by child led "learning", play centred "learning", degrading of transmission of information and knowledge as a valuable principle.

[noblegiraffe]

I've just reread Gove's DM ramblings.

"That?s why it?s such a pity that, this week, Labour?s education spokesman Stephen Twigg chose to side with the Marxists and failed to condemn the unions who want to close successful schools"

What the hell is he talking about? For someone who argues that children should be able to write coherent essays, he's not exactly practising what he preaches.

[Crumbledwalnuts]

Is he talking about union opposition to academies and independent schools? I don't think it's quite a "what the hell" question. If you're a teacher and involved in education then you could say for example: actually that's wrong, unions don't ever want successful schools closed. You could deny it. But it's not exactly "what the hell?"

Stephen Twigg claimed there was a teacher shortage because of Mr Gove's policies. That's not even true, surely.