Michael gove

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Labour’s War on Literacy

Don’t take my word for it just ask Iain Gray, Labour’s leader at the Scottish Parliament. This is from a leaflet sent to voters in Edinburgh by Labour: Aye, well, there you go. Ye ken noo. Depressingly, Scottish schools now exist as a kind of control group against which we may measure the success of the English school reforms instigated by Lord Adonis and continued by Michael Gove. I hope the English win. Meanwhile, in other depressing election-leaflet news, I’ve yet to receive anything from the Jacobite Party who stood (manfully) and fell (equally manfully) in these parts last year. Surely they can’t have given it up as a Lost

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Reinforcing the schools revolution

There is extraordinary news today, suggesting that the Academies revolution is continuing apace. What was a trickle under the Labour years is turning into a flood. This time last year just 1 in 16 state secondaries had ‘Academy’ status: that is, operationally independent within the state sector. Now, it is 1 in 6. By Christmas, it should be 1 in 3. And by the next election, the majority of state secondary schools in Britain — about 1,600 — should have turned into Academies. Had Gove suggested such an expansion before the election, he would have been laughed at. The last time the Conservatives sought to give state schools independence was

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The consequences of political abuse

Nick Clegg’s interview with Jemima Khan (née Goldsmith), in which he admits to crying regularly to music, is already coming in for predictable mockery. But the point that Clegg makes about how his job is affecting his kids is worth dwelling on.   Clegg is not the only coalition minister to fret about this. Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, wrote earlier this year about how she worried about the psychological effect on her children of people verbally assaulting her husband in front of them. During the Labour leadership contest, Ed Balls, for all his faults, spoke movingly about his concern over how he would protect his kids from what was

Jonathan Jones

Grammar schools aren’t an answer to the social mobility problem

With all the talk about social mobility, it was inevitable that those who believe grammar schools were the doorway to opportunity would wade into the debate. The most prominent of these interventions came yesterday from David Davis, who said: “The hard data shows that the post-war improvement in social mobility, and its subsequent decline, coincided exactly with the arrival, and then the destruction, of the grammar school system. This is the clearest example of the unintended consequence of a purportedly egalitarian policy we have seen in modern times.” The “hard data” Davis refers to is this 2005 study by Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin for the LSE and the Sutton Trust.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Does Davis have a point about grammar schools?

David Davis has been relatively quiet for the past couple of months, perhaps nursing a hangover after this. But he’s back making a seismic racket today, with an article on the coalition’s social mobility report for PoliticsHome. He dwells on the education side of things, and his argument amounts to this: that the government’s school reforms — from free schools to the pupil premium — will not do much to improve social mobility, and may actually make the situation worse. Michael Gove may be praised as “intelligent, dedicated and wholly admirable,” but there is enough gelignite elsewhere in the piece to ruffle some coalition feathers. I thought CoffeeHousers may have

Peter Hoskin

Your five-point guide to the coalition’s social mobility report

The government’s new report into social mobility is, it tells us, all about “opening doors” and “breaking barriers” — but it’s probably taxing attention spans too. 89 pages of text and graphs, offset by the same pea soup shade of green that’s used for all these coalition documents. To save you from wading through it all, here’s our quick five-point summary: 1) The same story… Much of the report, as James suggested earlier, is familiar territory. After all, the coalition’s two most developed policy areas — welfare and education — are precisely designed to improve opportunities for the least well-off; so here they are again, restated and slightly reframed. The

Monday

James Forsyth

Another phase in Gove’s revolution

Michael Gove has just finished announcing to the Commons his proposed replacement for Educational Maintenance Allowance. The new scheme is more targeted than the old one that went to 45 percent of those who stayed in education post-16. Interestingly, it will be administered by the schools and colleges themselves. Gove’s argument is that it is these institutions that are best equipped to know which student needs how much money to support them staying in education. This drew predictable opposition from the Labour benches which wanted a top down, national scheme. On top of this discretionary fund, every student who is receiving income support will receive £1,200 a year. This new

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

The grade inflation scam

Today’s OECD Economic Survey of the UK (download the complete pdf here ) contains some devastating passages about our education system. As it’s 148 pages in size, we thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate some highlights. Here’s your starter for ten: “Despite sharply rising school spending per pupil during the last ten years, improvements in schooling outcomes have been limited in the United Kingdom.” This is rather a staggering indictment of Tony Blair’s “education, education, education” policy. But what about the ever improving exam results that we hear about each summer? Again, the OECD:   “Official test scores and grades in England show systematically and significantly better performance than international and independent

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The pace of the schools revolution

What a difference a year makes. When Michael Gove spoke at a Spectator conference on schools reform twelve months ago, his policy ideas were just that: ideas, to be deployed should the Tories reach government. Today, at a follow-up conference, they are being put into practice in the fiery crucible of state — and doing quite well, at that. As tweeted by Andrew Neil, Gove has announced that the number of academies — existing state schools that have seized on the independence being offered to them — now stands at 465. That’s some way up on the 203 academies there were last year. And it’s even a significant rise on

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron caught in the middle

Need a bestiary to tell the hawks from the doves? Then this article (£) in the Times should serve your purpose. It’s an account of Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting on Libya, and the differences of opinion that transpired. Michael Gove, we are told, was “messianic” in his call for a tougher stance against Gaddafi. William Hague, for his part, was considerably more cautious. A graphic alongside the article puts George Osborne, Liam Fox and Andrew Mitchell in the Gove camp, and Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander with Hague. David Cameron, chairman of this diverse board, is said to be “caught in the middle”. The government has since denied that the Cabinet

Wednesday

Dale Bassett

Reforming schools: choice and autonomy

Last week Reform published its 2011 scorecard of the coalition government’s public service reform programme. Following on from articles on the health and welfare reforms, Dale Bassett, Research Director at Reform, explains why the coalition’s school reforms are not as radical as they appear.   The government is pursuing a dual agenda in education reform, altering structures (to increase decentralisation and autonomy) and centralising standards (to increase rigour and central accountability). Key government reforms include giving all schools the right to convert to academy status and allowing charities and groups of parents or teachers to establish new, independent, state-funded schools with the same freedoms as academies.  Yet key features of

Monday

James Forsyth

Labour tries to reheat the Building Schools for the Future row

It was predictable that Labour would use the outcome of the judicial review last Friday to try and re-heat the Building Schools for the Future row. Andy Burnham was in florid form in the House of Commons on the subject. He demanded that ‘Michael Gove apologise to the communities who suffered from the devastating effects of his disastrous decision making.’ Burnham is now writing to the PM to demand that Gove recuse himself from the judge required review of six BSF projects. In truth, most of Gove’s problems in cancelling BSF projects have been a result of the shambolic and wasteful way in which the programme was run. As Gove

Friday

James Forsyth

Overall, a win for Gove

Michael Gove has won on the substance in the judicial reviews of his decisions on Building Schools for the Future. The judge has rejected the claim that Gove acted irrationally and found that he has the authority to make the decisions he did. There will have to be reviews of six of the decisions because of a failure to consult fully and a full equalities assessment will have to be done – yet another example of one of the traps that Labour has left behind and that the coalition needs to scrap as soon as possible. But this is hardly the victory that it is being portrayed as by some.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Burnham’s slide to the left

One of the more depressing sights in politics at the moment is how Andy Burnham is leading the Labour party back to its comfort zone on education. Burnham, who The Spectator once named minister to watch, seems to have jettisoned all of his Blairite reforming instincts. He now wants to draw as many dividing lines as possible and side with the vested interests and the status quo at every turn. In last night’s education debate, Barry Sheerman, who chaired the education select committee during the Labour years, pointed out that Gove’s education plans are building on the last government’s incomplete reforms. As Sheerman put it, “I am going to be

Sunday

Daniel Korski

A good team with good policies

When the Tories were in opposition, non-aligned friends used to complain to me that the party’s front bench was unimpressive. Labour politicians had walked the political stage for more than a decade; many were household names, while the Tories were unknown. But eight months in and Labour’s top team is a largely unknown entity, with even its few ex-Ministers looking decidedly smaller without their briefcases, officials and government-issued cars. The Tory front bench, meanwhile, is the one looking serious and worthy of power. There is William Hague, a brilliant parliamentarian and that even rarer beast: a well-liked politician. Though currently suffering from a little newspaper criticism, he is seen as

Friday

James Forsyth

Gove entrenches his reforms

In another sign of how the pace of Gove’s reforms is quickening, the education secretary has told local authorities that all new schools should be free schools or academies. This is a big step towards changing the default nature of the system from state-funded and state-run to state-funded but independent.   Local authorities will not be able to open a bureaucrat-controlled school unless they can satisfy the Secretary of State that there is no free school or academy provider willing to step in.   Gove has always argued that once free schools and academies become a significant part of the system it’ll be no more politically possible to abolish them

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Brutal Bigotry of Low Expectations

Bagehot has a properly righteous post lambasting teachers who complain that it’s too difficult to teach their charges to read and write and count properly. A week later, a BBC Radio 4 phone-in programme, Any Answers, featured a pair of state school teachers, both with 30 years of experience, again pouring scorn on the dangerously “academic” bent of the English baccalaureate, and Mr Gove’s related desire to see a more rigorous syllabus in history, involving such things as learning a framework of important dates and events to give children a sense of the essential chronology of British and world history. Such history is never going to be relevant to many

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Using a politician’s spouse to attack him is below the belt, Andy Burnham should apologise

Andy Burnham crossed a line today in using Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, to take a pop at the Education Secretary. Burnham, mockingly citing a recent Vine column, argued that the fact that the Goves have a cleaner ‘raises further questions about whether he is living in the same world as the rest of us.’ Now, by this logic I suspect that the majority of his shadow Cabinet colleagues are not living in what Burnham thinks of as ‘the same world as the rest of us’. This ungallant attack seems particularly unpleasant when you consider that Sarah Vine came to Frankie Burnham’s defence when she was attacked for the outfit she wore

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Gove raises the spectre of an electoral pact

Michael Gove has reignited talk of a Tory Lib Dem pact by urging people in Hull to vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out at the local elections. Gove’s intervention was not planned but it does reveal how he thinks. Gove’s department is the most coalitionised. Not only is there a Lib Dem minister there in Sarah Teather, tellingly the only Lib Dem minister not to moan to the Telegraph’s undercover reporters about her colleagues. But there is also David Laws, who is acting as an unofficial adviser to Gove. Anthony Wells’ thorough analysis of an electoral pact suggests that it could do well in the seats where it matters. 

Peter Hoskin

Is it worth paying young people to stay on at school?

Today’s political news is brought to you by the letters E, M and A. Eeeema. While the political establishment debates the abolition of EMA – the Educational Maintenance Allowance – inside Parliament, campaigners will be protesting against it on the streets outside. The police, who are used to these things by now, have already set up the barricades. Behind all the fuss and froth, the argument is really this: is EMA good value? The coalition claim that paying 16-18 year-olds up to £30 a week to stay on at school is not only expensive, but also wasteful. Labour – who introduced this allowance in the first place – claim that