Michael Gove’s love of a good scrap sometimes leads him up blind alleys

Michael Gove is right about almost everything, but like most know-it-alls, he has a habit of putting people’s backs up when telling them he’s right. That’s the theme of a piece I’ve written for the Telegraph today about the Education Secretary’s desire to meddle not just with what goes on in the classroom but also in what children get up to when they’re at home. You can read his full speech on this which is, as always, very interesting and lively, at the bottom of this post. The opening section, in which he asked parents whether they’d rather see their children reading Twilight or Middlemarch, playing Angry Birds, or coding when they’re at home, displays his know-it-all tendency. But the problem with a know-it-all is that at the bottom of all the bluster, they’re generally right.

The rest of Gove’s speech focused on low expectations of children embedded not just in the current national curriculum, but also in the way teachers choose to bring that curriculum to life in schools.