Afternoon:
15°c
Goodbye then to the Department for Children, Schools and Families; hello (again) to the Department of Education. Michael Gove's first act on taking residence in Great Smith Street was to kick out the last vestiges of Ed Balls's mission creep.
Gove wants to restore the “core purpose of supporting teaching and learning”. The orotund voice of the Scottish Enlightenment cries proud among us.
“About time too,” reply many of the nation's parents, exhausted by the attempt to wring sense out of a Labour pledge that left very few of us with any real options in local schools at all.
Gove is in the enticing position of a man who now has the power to make the changes he wants: the creation of new schools, refocusing on a canon of classically taught subjects, and the distraction of a threatened change to the A-level system.
Alas, he also inherits the mission at a time when his department faces cuts to be imposed by Lib-Dem axe-wielder David Laws at the Treasury.
In other circumstances, Laws could have run education, an area where he shone as an innovator in the “Orange Book” era of Lib-Dem thinking in the 1990s. Ideas like the pupil premium transfer to encourage good schools to take poorer pupils were originally imported by him, as previously was Nick Clegg, from the Netherlands.
But as George Osborne and Laws this week survey the dereliction of the public finances bequeathed to them, they might well be grateful they are in the role of cutters, rather than the more testing job of trying to introduce reforms on parsimonious budgets.
Gove will enjoy paring down quangos. Tories, even those nice modernising ones, do not instinctively mourn a diminution in departmental staff. He must ensure, however, that a tendency to rolling rhetoric does not ring empty when it encounters the stringencies of life in 2010.
As enticing as his commitment to allowing parents to set up their own schools is, I suspect many of us will judge the new Government's abilities by whether it can raise standards in existing ones.
And here there is some distance between the two parties. Gove has taken with him Nick Gibb, a strongly traditional minister who espouses the central imposition of rigorous teaching and antipathy to experimental methods. How will he sit with his new colleague, Sarah Teather, who adheres to the Lib-Dem position that schools should be left to teach as they see fit?
Both Clegg and Cameron saw the importance of putting a commitment to schooling at the heart of their election messages, but their emphases were widely different and so are their personal approaches. The Liberal Democrats promised a whopping £2.5 billion pupil premium for the poorest. Gove has never specified how much will be spent on a Tory equivalent, but it is unlikely to be anything like that.
Liberal Democrats are lukewarm about independent academies in the state sector and have proposed “sponsored” schools that would be responsible to local education authorities. The New Tories believe Ed Balls “watered down” the independence of academies and aim to remove schools as far as possible from local council control.
Note too that the Lib-Dems are committed to widening access to faith schools. This sounds fine but usually ends up with the schools forfeiting some of their autonomy, where the Tory preference is to increase it.
It's not just the remnants of the Clegg manifesto that linger awkwardly. The pupil premium, which transfers funding towards the poor, is a good intention everyone signed up to in better times. There are, however, insistent doubts about its efficiency that will nag away as Gove and his team try to scratch together money to spend on it.
Many headteachers who run schools with a social mix of pupils are not driven solely by the prospect of some pupils being worth more than others in terms of funding. “If you ask whether I'd take a well-prepared kid with less funding or more children who could be problematic, I wouldn't automatically opt for the extra money, ” says one inner-London head.
Expectations in London are particularly acute. The city suffers from areas of very poor educational attainment where both fairness and compassion dictate that more resources should be targeted. But it is not unreasonable to ask where the motivated middle class can expect to gain from a change of government to the centre-Right — and schools are one area in which the mildly well off hanker for better service from the state.
In Opposition, Gove's attachment to his Swedish model was intense. True to his word, there will be measures to make it easier for parents to open schools. My doubt is that the impact of small schools will be too minor to be much help. Government can encourage us to be schools entrepreneurs but it cannot reliably say how many new school places will be delivered. Wider transformation will come by pushing better-trained and more able teachers into the system — and that requires money.
Liberals and Conservatives are different beasts when it comes to schooling. I know few Liberals who like testing: hence their faith in teacher assessment. Gove relishes certainties and has shifted position to defend the ill-loved Sats exams on the grounds that too much accountability is better than too little.
That's before we've even got to university, where the Lib-Dems are stuck with a pledge to resist tuition fee rises while the Conservatives know that only by raising the cap can the excellence of our universities be guaranteed.
Of course, Gove has the advantage of the confidence of the Prime Minister, who has remade the Conservative Party as a force he wants to be trusted with state schooling, not just a preserve of the privately educated elites.
But look at the toll tuition fees, the academies row and the final showdown over trust schools exacted on New Labour, let alone the abiding outrage over Cameron's abandonment of grammar schools. Education has a habit of crystallising dissent inside parties, let alone between them. Gove likes a bit of drama. I suspect he's going to get it.
Reader views (3)
Will Michael Gove have any control over Cafcass or Ofsted?
There are now far too many complaints regarding Cafcass methodology, many suggesting Cafcass caseworkers systematically lie in reports they submit to the Family courts.
One would have hoped with Court Officials routinely perjuring themselves, this would have been a high priority.
Unfortunately with the recent revelations of Lianne Smith (a child protection worker from Cumbria), being arrested and held by the police custody in the Costa Brava for allegedly murdering her own children.
I fear the alarming concerns regarding Cafcass failings may now be pushed to the back burner.
Michael Gove if you are listening and still want to make a difference! Please, please, please review the methodology Cafcass adheres to?
Please think of all the children’s lives the systematically destroy.
- Human Without Any Rights (AKA a Father, Surrey Heath, 20/05/2010 14:07
Report abuse
Will Michael Gove have any control over Cafcass or Ofsted?
There are now far too many complaints regarding Cafcass methodology, many suggesting Cafcass caseworkers systematically lie in reports they submit to the Family courts.
One would have hoped with Court Officials routinely perjuring themselves, this would have been a high priority.
Unfortunately with the recent revelations of Lianne Smith (a child protection worker from Cumbria), being arrested and held by the police custody in the Costa Brava for allegedly murdering her own children.
I fear the alarming concerns regarding Cafcass failings may now be pushed to the back burner.
Michael Gove if you are listening and still want to make a difference! Please, please, please review the methodology Cafcass adheres to?
Please think of all the children’s lives the systematically destroy.
- Human Without Any Rights (AKA a Father, Surrey Heath, 20/05/2010 14:06
Report abuse
If you look at the Liberal front bench, all but one attended private or selective schools. Most of the old Labour cabinet were similarly benefactors of priviliged educations. In fact, as you well know, most of the media, metropolitan elite share this back ground. Our schools are becoming ever more socially and ethnically segregated. even the socialists, such as Harman, Cruddas, and Miliband, avoid their local communities and multi-cultural schools for segregated schools. The only way to change things would be to make MPs live in their constituencies and send their children to local schools.
- Dennis, N London, 19/05/2010 17:32
Report abuse
