Gove’s education bill – indignant spluttering and rage

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

If a focus group made up of pensioners who regularly read the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph was brought together to write an Education Bill, what they produced in terms of indignant spluttering and rage would not be far removed from the proposals which Michael Gove has just published. This is a piece of legislation designed to satisfy a group of people who have little or no understanding of today’s schools or of education.

Why make that assertion? First of all, there is a great deal of tilting at windmills which simply do not exist and much putting right of imaginary wrongs. Secondly, there is precious little mention of teaching or learning. It is a hotchpotch of back of the envelope scribbles and dinner table conversations turned into a parliamentary bill.

So, there is stuff about giving teachers more right to discipline people as if that is a sensible aim of schooling. It might be best to try and limit the need to discipline people but, putting that aside, what it proposes is a recipe for disaster. Teachers can now search pupils for dangerous and harmful objects including, bizarrely, pornography and mobile phones as if year nine pupils still have copies of ‘Playboy’ tucked away in their satchels. In fact, schools can search for anything which they have banned.

This is so many steps away from the real world that it is laughable. It might have been possible in the 1950s to line up the and frisk them for fags but with today’s concerns for child protection and the touching of children, the law on common assault as interpreted by the police and a greater public awareness of the possibilities of litigation, all teachers, including headteachers, would be mad to get involved in anything which could be misconstrued as inappropriate touching. And, let’s face it, frisking an angry 16-year-old girl for a very small mobile phone would almost certainly be inappropriate on one count or another.

Funnily enough that might be all right now if you were the teacher involved, because, following some high profile cases, teachers are to be given the right to anonymity when accusations against them are made. The logic of this is that if the accusations are false then they will be protected but the converse is that if the accusations are true they will have been kept secret for a long period of investigation which has exposed more children – inevitably – to risk. As a measure to help innocent teachers it is also futile. School communities are small and news travels fast so if a teacher is suspended it will quickly be public knowledge anyway. There is a need for more common sense in this area but this proposal won’t help.

If the accusation is false and the deceitful pupil is excluded, the local appeals panel will no longer be allowed to insist on reinstatement. In other words, if the pupil wins the case he or she will still be punished and will probably have a good case for compensation against the local authority or the school. All suspensions are a pain for schools and, in the vast majority of cases, are a last resort. Back in the 1950s, if you were expelled from school then that was it, but now there is a right to continuing education so one school’s cavalier expulsion is a problem for another in the area. Dealing with difficult children from damaged families and communities is not easy but this isn’t going to help schools get on with the job.

At first sight, it might look as if the changes to OFSTED inspection could do this. Outstanding schools (possibly very good and well led but, equally possibly, located in prosperous areas and averagely led) will not be inspected and other schools will be judged on fewer criteria. Simply put, these are how good the examination results are, how good the teachers are; how good the leadership team is and, of course, pupil behaviour. The trouble with these is that it will be very hard to score well on any of the other categories if your examination results don’t match up. Can you have good teaching and poor results?

The change overlooks the fact that the biggest correlation between schools and examination results is the local community and the socio-economic background of the pupils – schools cannot compensate for society although schools, quite rightly, make every effort to do so. The outcome of imposing these categories will be that good schools will no longer be identified in disadvantaged areas and the amazing work that they do will be ignored.

The examinations that their pupils fail will now be benchmarked against rote learning tests from around the world. Sadly, whenever Michael Gove finds a good example of these to wave around, the education minister from that country jumps in to say that he or she is much more concerned with teaching children skills and the capacity for lifelong learning. However, that doesn’t stop the assertion that examinations must be made more difficult and comparable – as if they aren’t already.

A sneaky clause in this area of the bill condemns vocational education to the sidelines again. The offer of a specific diploma (there are around ten of them) will no longer be an entitlement so schools will not have to work together to provide them. The good school (the one with pushy professional parents in socially advantageous areas) will no longer have to offer any subjects which bear any relation to the real world of business, technology and manufacturing. Instead, all of the bright pupils can do French, History and Geography quite forgetting the lesson of history that when this was previously the case people wondered why so many graduates were unemployed and the economy was in the doldrums. ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ as they say in the outstanding schools and ‘it’s the rich what gets the pleasure and the poor what gets the blame’ as they say everywhere else.