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The Michael Gove File

I wonder if Mr Gove has any idea of the hostility he provokes, but when I suggest this to him he bats it away. ‘Education secretaries, for a host of reasons, tend to find themselves at the heart of controversies, more than some other ministers.’
 
frogwoman said:
I wonder if Mr Gove has any idea of the hostility he provokes, but when I suggest this to him he bats it away. ‘Education secretaries, for a host of reasons, tend to find themselves at the heart of controversies, more than some other ministers.’
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He's right though.
I've met him. I believe he believes in what he's saying, and believes that his route will improve the lot of working class kids.
I also agree with his move to knowledge rather than skills. I even think the national curriculum is better then the previous one.
He's ruining any good work here by introducing PRP and dividing schools.

I think education needs to get beyond the stale debate around structures (though on that debate, I disagree with Gove completely) and get on with debating the classroom more, though I recognise that might allow them to churn out more free schools in areas that don't need them.

The worst part is that Hunt seems to be aping the worst parts of Gove and throwing out any of the good curriculum stuff.
 
frogwoman said:
I wonder if Mr Gove has any idea of the hostility he provokes, but when I suggest this to him he bats it away. ‘Education secretaries, for a host of reasons, tend to find themselves at the heart of controversies, more than some other ministers.’
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As far as I can tell he is, but thinks it's a good thing by definition. Anyone who disagrees with him in any way is clearly some sort of trendy liberal marxist modernist dinosaur, so the more people who do, the better he's doing.:facepalm:
 
The knowledge over skills stuff is fucking useless for KS1 though. Down here it's ALL skills. The new curriculum has shit all with regards to appropriate levelling targets etc.
 
Balbi said:
The knowledge over skills stuff is fucking useless for KS1 though. Down here it's ALL skills. The new curriculum has shit all with regards to appropriate levelling targets etc.
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It's not brilliant for drama, either. Skills-based disciplines get a rough ride with Gove (all practical and creative subjects, basically.)
 
DotCommunist said:
he's one of those reactionary penii who believe coursework is some hobbycraft nonsense and we should all be leaning dates and monarchs, in fucking Latin
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It certainly sounds like that to hear him speak.

And I am unconvinced over the knowledge vs skills thing - while it certainly shouldn't be all one thing or the other, I do think that equipping people with the skills to research, inquire, and - in this age of Google - critically sift the facts from the dross should be more important than merely learning how to regurgitate facts by rote.

It seems to me that Gove is simply hankering back to some mythical golden age where, by some strange mechanism, learning jingoistic history and Ancient Italian somehow transmutes every child from a toerag into a budding pillar of society. The truth was more that the toerags were more invisible then (perhaps partly because there weren't docudramas made about them for TV?), and frequently sent off to die en masse in the making of further episodes of jingoistic history.
 
existentialist said:
And I am unconvinced over the knowledge vs skills thing - while it certainly shouldn't be all one thing or the other, I do think that equipping people with the skills to research, inquire, and - in this age of Google - critically sift the facts from the dross should be more important than merely learning how to regurgitate facts by rote.
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These whole ideas aren't new. They come from Rousseau. Gramsci took them apart.

Thankfully a book has just been published which in my view exposes these as myths:
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Myths-About-Education-Christodoulou/dp/0415746825

The most common response from critics of the book (when it was an ebook) was that these myths weren't exactly real (ie no-one believes them), but they are of course, as partly shown by your post.

Basically, you can't be a very good or discerning researcher without a schema of knowledge to know whether what you find is making sense.
No-one is saying that individual facts are very useful. Schemas are extremely useful though.

And a really brilliant paper for you: Kirschner, Sweller & Clark – Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching

Christina Ianelli's paper (can't find to link but it's in a Sociology journal) on the role of the curriculum in social mobility shows that when you strip out the impact of poverty (significant) and cultural capital, the most significant difference between grammar schools and other schools was the curriculum. And where there was a difference, this affects the students more significantly the older they get.

Maybe easier reading is Tom Bennett, secondary school teacher writing in the TES a couple of months ago. I agree with him entirely. Tom is an awesome and very funny writer:
http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6389557
 
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spanglechick said:
Oh god that was such a leadership bid. All that nauseating stuff at the end.
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Do you think? I have believed him when he has previously said he knows his place, partly because I think he's in the role he's most suited to, and (partly connected) because I don't think he's capable of the leadership.

The message about FSM students and top universities is one he's been banging on about for as long as I can remember.
 
Not sure what everyone is complaining about. Michael Gove seems like the best candidate for leading the Conservative Party in the 21st century.
 
Puddy_Tat said:
from the perspective of the conservative party or the labour party?
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I thought his leadership candidate was just a troll attempt of wannabe grandee types from the FT and that Gove as leader would diminish the credibility of modern politics so much that both Labour and the Tories would suffer.
 
treelover said:
Gove is going to have to deal with a major crisis very soon if the above is true, I wonder how he will respond?
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Ideally, this will take place in just over a year's time, bringing to bear Tucker's Law;



*Apologies for the doctored version; the original is deemed unsuitable for children for some reason and so blocked.
 
SLK said:
What do people following this thread make of the Policy Exchange report suggestions for OFSTED?
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I think it might be well meant but it will make teaching conditions worse. At the moment I waste a good couple of hourse every day purely generating evidence for ofsted. Data is everything. Kids must reach their flight path targets (plus one, in my school). Data rules.

If the emphasis shifts more that way, i'll spend even less time being a good teacher.




I'm more interested in what the fuck is going to happen after the abolition of levels. From this september's year seven, there won't be levels. There'll be a year six mark from 1-9, or possibly 10. Then *apparently*, we don't test, assess or grade them til they sit their gcses, when they'll get another number from 1-9, or possibly 10. And we won't be told what the gcse syllabuses will contain, until after the kids have finished KS3. And it's just entirely fucking WTF?

I went to a meeting (unpaid, of course), of all the HoDs in my academy chain the other evening. and here we all were, hundreds of well-informed, experienced teachers, plus one of gove's principal toadies (given a knighthood last summer for his services to buggering education), and not a single one of us could work out what the fuck is going to happen in september. In fact for core subjects, they have to start this shit from this september's year nines for first gcse assessment in 2017!

Fu-cking nora...
 
spanglechick said:
I think it might be well meant but it will make teaching conditions worse. At the moment I waste a good couple of hourse every day purely generating evidence for ofsted. Data is everything. Kids must reach their flight path targets (plus one, in my school). Data rules.

If the emphasis shifts more that way, i'll spend even less time being a good teacher.

I'm more interested in what the fuck is going to happen after the abolition of levels. From this september's year seven, there won't be levels. There'll be a year six mark from 1-9, or possibly 10. Then *apparently*, we don't test, assess or grade them til they sit their gcses, when they'll get another number from 1-9, or possibly 10. And we won't be told what the gcse syllabuses will contain, until after the kids have finished KS3. And it's just entirely fucking WTF?

I went to a meeting (unpaid, of course), of all the HoDs in my academy chain the other evening. and here we all were, hundreds of well-informed, experienced teachers, plus one of gove's principal toadies (given a knighthood last summer for his services to buggering education), and not a single one of us could work out what the fuck is going to happen in september. In fact for core subjects, they have to start this shit from this september's year nines for first gcse assessment in 2017!

Fu-cking nora...
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I think that the report is excellent. It reflects the evidence that you can't reliably or validly judge teacher quality in a one off lesson, let alone a 20 minute one. It means in the majority of inspections teachers at the chalkface won't see OFSTED at all. I think the idea of a Tailored Inspection is not terrible, though I think that should also not include observations. Sadly, it sounds like it will. I

I think data is everything. Sorry! What are we doing if we aren't getting the kids to learn? This doesn't justify the abuse of data that comes from SLTs.

I totally accept that teachers are asked to produce spurious data. One of the issues with this is that levels have been terrible. The same piece of work can get a different level on a different day from the same teacher... the reason is levels were never designed to assess pieces of work, or to be sublevelled, or anything like the abomination we have now!

Levels have gone already though (correctly in my view). So as you say, 2019's performance measures are not clear. I quite like the proposals for 2016. I suspect a standardised Year 6 test is coming very soon. I do like the opportunity we have to sort out assessment without the abomination that is levels.

Not sure what you're saying about 2017, progress 8 (from levels) is pretty clear, isn't it? I'd like to know which academy chain you work for making you go to meetings outside of directed time (or have they ditched that?)
 
SLK said:
I think that the report is excellent. It reflects the evidence that you can't reliably or validly judge teacher quality in a one off lesson, let alone a 20 minute one. It means in the majority of inspections teachers at the chalkface won't see OFSTED at all. I think the idea of a Tailored Inspection is not terrible, though I think that should also not include observations. Sadly, it sounds like it will. I

I think data is everything. What are we doing if we aren't getting the kids to learn?

I totally accept that teachers are asked to produce spurious data. One of the issues with this is that levels have been terrible. The same piece of work can get a different level on a different day from the same teacher... the reason is levels were never designed to assess pieces of work, or to be sublevelled, or anything like the abomination we have now!

Levels have gone already though (correctly in my view). So as you say, 2019's performance measures are not clear. I quite like the proposals for 2016. I suspect a standardised Year 6 test is coming very soon. I do like the opportunity we have to sort out assessment without the abomination that is levels.
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are you a teacher?
 
And do you believe that the straight-line flight paths of '4 levels of progress' is a sensible way to judge a teacher. Taking into no account what has come before or what is happening outside?
 
spanglechick said:
And do you believe that the straight-line flight paths of '4 levels of progress' is a sensible way to judge a teacher. Taking into no account what has come before or what is happening outside?
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I think data is a more valid way to judge a school than unreliable and invalid observations of lessons, yes. I don't believe it's appropriate for individual students, no - but I do believe that schools should ensure their kids make progress. I utterly believe that "taking into account what happens outside" is lowering expectations. I think Amanda Ripley's book The Smartest Kids in the World is great on this, but I've also seen it in practice. Lowest quintile on every measure of educational disadvantage, including a Year 11 that left having had 292 kids (154 finished), such was the churn. Above average results nationally and incredible results on progress. Amazing happy school. Kids with "stuff" going on are dragged through to enhance life chances. Not quite as good as KIPP in America.
 
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