The Tories' simple moral purpose

Kevyn Bodman

Set parents free to choose schools, set schools free to teach what they want.

The ensuing market would drive up standards quicker than anything else.

All the rest is details, but the best currently achievable way of doing this is an unrestricted voucher system.

Chuck Unsworth

Yep, five years will have to pass before any results of this proposal will be demonstrable. So Gove and his colleagues must hit the ground running. Let's hope that he's managed (or will manage) to get the cretinous, reactionary, teachers unions to understand that he's not going to be messed about.

My fear is that the Left is so deeply embedded within them that they will regard opposition to these plans as their only opportunity (even duty!) to fight a rearguard action. But Cameron's obvious desire to raise the status of teaching and teachers may go some way towards weakening their resolve.

If/when the Tories get in they're going to have to take giant strides in a matter of weeks.

A Carapiet

I have a lot of time for Gove and I am pleased that he made a good showing at the official launch of the policy. But earlier, he allowed this important policy initiative to get lost in a debate about funding on the Today programme.

It isn't enough to have good ideas, or even to have a moral compass; the message has to be delivered clearly without a damaging commentary. Its the job of the media to ask difficult questions, I just wish the Conservatives were as well prepared as Labour because at the moment they just don't come close.

Mark Demmen

All very good. But it makes their policy on the NHS even more perverse. How are they going to justify two completely different approaches to the two main public services? Do they think most people won't notice the inconsistency?

Colin

Yes, great.

Shall we just gloss over the fact that his conduct in relation to his expenses makes him unfit for office?

Sorry to be the wet blanket, but...

BrianSJ

Shame it won't be happening in Scotland, home of producer capture.

Chuck Unsworth

@ Colin

Well I'd be happy to ignore his vicissitudes just as long as he is a damn sight more competent than the present loonies. Mind you that would not be difficult at all.

London Calling

The qualities good teaching requires is knowledge, the personality to teach and most importantly the nurturing skills to inspire pupils to learn individually as well as collectively.

Knowledge comes in many forms, life’s experiences, debate and philosophy, subject matter, stimulation through interaction and the most importantly the art of teaching.
None of these skills are necessarily achieved with a 2:1s degree, as David Blackburn pointed out in his earlier post on the subject:

“What will this entail? Well, holders of degrees of less than a 2:2 will not receive funding for teacher training. Maths and science graduates with firsts or 2:1s from the 25 top universities will have their student loans paid off if they go into teaching”

If as a commenter (Colin) posted on David B’s post highlighted that 95% of existing teachers already meet Cameron's criteria of having a 2:2 or above, if true, I fail to understand the purpose of DC’s proposal, unless he’s slipped on his own Banana skin again.

I feel passionately about our education system and what needs to be done to improve standards, I am not convinced as yet that a new system has been explored to consider the options to create a vision for all. Elitism has Marxist undertones, not welcoming to all who have much to bring to the educational table …

charles hercock

Gove is a star.We will win

welease woger

Get rid of all party political school governors.

Ensure that over half of the governors are parents at the school.

Allow governing bodies to reward good teachers.

Allow heads/governors to sack poor teachers.

Allow governing bodies to sack bad heads (poor schools are not just down to bad teachers but often bad management).

Stepney

Make a bonfire of the Initiatives - set the schools free. Spend the money saved on resources and teachers.

Watch the progress.

DZ

Vouchers. Let the market and parents decide.

David Lindsay

Not a word about grammar schools. Well, of course not.

I leave it to others to judge whether someone with a Third could deliver an A-level course, but I would take an awful lot of convincing (and I have some experience of appointing teaching staff in schools) that they could not teach at all.

As with all the effusions from the present "Opposition" about education, this is the dilettante musing of those whose knowledge, never mind understanding, of state schools is absolutely nil.

Yet these are their only distinctive policies, and arguably their old policies of any kind. They are never going to happen. The civil servants, councillors (including Tories), local government officers and trade union officials will run rings around these Little Lord Fauntleroys and the swivel-eyed neocon Crazy whom they have given Education in order to keep him out of the way. So it is not worth voting for the people who have nothing to say on any other topic.

2trueblue

'If you think education is expensive, try ignorance'. I don't know who said it but very true. We need the to aspire to the best. My father said 'aim for the stars and you might hit a lapmpost!'

Being aspirational has got to breed some success. Labour have spent 13yrs dumping empty initiative after empty initiative, with no delivery, and they have got away with it. There has to be some delivery.

djw2009

It is almost in desperation that the Spectator continue to highlight education as the one positive area of the Conservative manifesto, and yet it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Gove has said he would free only 400-600 schools with nearly all schools remaining as at present under the National Curriculum. Cameron has unveiled a policy to require teachers to have a 2:2 degree - but nearly all of them do so at present anyway, and the state of higher education is such that a 2:2 degree is meaningless anyway.

Where is this vaunted conservative education policy you keep talking about?

Dennis Sewell

@djw2009

Gove has indicated that he will cut back the National Curriculum to focus on essentials. All schools will benefit from this.

Schools will also benefit from the extra funding that will come from stripping out the local education bureaucracy.

The new Swedish-style free schools will force other schools in their areas to sharpen up their acts. They will also give parents a real choice.

These are pretty substantial changes.

David Lindsay

People who want to abolish or further downgrade LEAs (we need to bring back proper ones instead of having them in with Social Services) are quite beyond naive about how the state education system, serving ninety-seven per cent of children, actually works. But then, we knew that about the Tories, anyway.

And without LEAs, there is no way of making a bipartite or tripartite secondary system work. No LEAs, no grammar schools. They become logistically impossible.

Not a single "free school" will ever be set up. Gove can say what he likes now, but by the time that any leislation comes before Parliament, never mind by the time that it has been througgh both Houses, local council consent will be required for the creation of any such institution, and that will be that. From Tory as much as from any other councils, the answer will always be No, if anyone ever even wastes their time asking the question.

In any case, there is going to be a hung Parliament. And whatever coalition programme emerges, it certainly won't include anything like this. Such a coalition is unlikely to include Gove at all. His only real interest is in his cranky, discredited foreign and "security" policies, which is why he is being kept as far away as possible from those areas.

The Tories have no other distinctive, if any, policy on anything else. So it is simply not worth voting for them.

Holly ......

Balls...Gove...Gove...Balls?
Decisions, decisions.
Gove across the dispatch box to Balls comparing Balls to Jordan is a must see on you tube.

Chuck Unsworth

Another slew of the customary David Lindsay pejorative terms:

"dilettante musing of those whose knowledge, never mind understanding, of state schools is absolutely nil."

Perhaps you believe this, but would you say that Balls has (or any of his NuLab predecessors have) any better 'understanding'?

"The civil servants, councillors (including Tories), local government officers and trade union officials will run rings around these Little Lord Fauntleroys and the swivel-eyed neocon Crazy whom they have given Education in order to keep him out of the way."

Perhaps the Class Warrior and obvious supporter of these assorted left-wingers and the client electorate can give an explanation as to why Balls was 'given Education' then?

Education is simple enough. If the product of the education 'System' is inadequate then that 'System' has failed - which is exactly where we are right now. Thirteen years of unremitting relentless NuLab tinkering and profligacy has done nothing to improve standards at all - in education and everything else.

David Lindsay

Really, Chuck Unsworth! It only started in 1997? I must therefore assume that you cannot name the Education Secretary who closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled. I'll give you a clue: she was also the Prime Minister who introduced the National Curriculum and who replaced O-levels with GCSEs.

Grammar schools are impossible without LEAs, and that is why the HQs of all three parties hate LEAs. But abolition would be toxic for them because so many of any major party’s activists are bound to be councillors. Any Education Secretary who tried to abolish LEAs would probably be deselected by his own local party. Sitting MP or no sitting MP, Cabinet Minister or no Cabinet Minister, he would be lucky to be shortlisted by, after all, a committee full of LEA members and their mates.

You can like or dislike civil servants, councillors (including Tory ones), local government officers or trade union officials. But they will have David Cameron and Michael Gove, not for breakfast, but before they even start to make their breakfast. Don't hold your breath for this ban on people with Thirds from teaching (as enough of them did in the O-level days, when most primary teachers didn't have degrees at all). And be in no doubt, not a single "free school" will ever be set up.

John Moss

Fund parents, not schools.

Have schools employ teachers, not LEAs. (Close LEA's other than a resdiual responsibility to act for children in care.)

Legislate to mandate planning authorities to grant change of use or new build consent for any new educational establishment.

1,000 new schools by 2015. In converted offices, in barns, in portakabins in fields, in old schools, in new schools, on the web!

Only a statist like David Lindsay sees the opening of a "school" in terms of the current design of "school". Set parents free and you set our schools free.

David Belchamber

I don't think that it will be possible to engage Mr Lindsay in rational debate about education, judging by his first two posts, but it might be worth pointing out that independent schools educate over 6% of our young people (thereby saving the taxpayer about £2.5bn a year), so state schools therefore do not educate 97%.
Also, until Tony Blair ceased them in 1997, the parents of about 1100 schools opted to become grant maintained schools, thus escaping the dead hand of their LEAs. Having ceased them, Tony Blair reinvented them in the form of academies (of which after 12 years of this government there are only relatively few to date).
Needless to say, GM schools prospered as a result of their independence from state interference, though I do agree with Mr Linday's comment on grammar schools.

Liberty

To make an immediate, irreversible and beneficial change that the teachers and their unions will object to immediately but accept in double quick time Gove should do all he plans to but allow schools to select as they see fit. He does not have to say or do anything initially, just not enforce or investigate instances of selection at the same time as paying vouchers to schools who take those rejected by all others far, far more per head. To give schools every freedom except the most important is folly because it would become starkly obvious that it is the one freedom that must be granted.
The reason is that selection is unavoidable. All oversubscribed schools select, they have no choice so government attempts to abolish it are dishonest and doomed to failure. Now selection is by residence, religion, entrance exam or even random but it is all selection. Then, with the freedom to select it would dawn on schools that they do not need to have the disruptive elements, they will try to attract better behaved children, compete with others and with their income dependent on filling up places they will do their best to make their schools attractive and avoid the drop. The more attractive schools would be swamped, initially, but those who took their overflow would be nearly as good and will let everyone know about it. Some schools would specialise in the difficult rejects, get more money for it and develop their own, specialised and effective regimes.
But the teachers would soon accept when they found that they were autonomous, free to choose, their competitive urges would come out as they discovered the joys of teaching more autonomous groups with no disruptive elements or those too thick for their school. Not that the less able would be left out, selection is good for all abilities. But ability is normally distributed with a few at the top, a few at the bottom and special schools with most in the middle where most of us are with little to choose between them.

Dennis Sewell

@ David Lindsay

quite beyond naive about how the state education system, serving ninety-seven per cent of children, actually works.

With a bit of luck, after 5-10 years, there will be no 'state schools' or 'state system'.

djw2009

David Lindsay, you have been writing your socialist guff on LEAs on the DT site too. LEAs are just a job creation scheme for politically motivated spongers. In the 19th century nearly all children were enrolled in school even before state education (see the chapter in the book The Welfare State We're In for the details). Just give people vouchers and privatise the entire school system, and let people choose their own schools the same way they choose bread from a supermarket. They can top up the vouchers if they want.

It doesn't even need to be a legal requirement for children to go to school. Most schooling is just a drilling in political correctness anyway. Maybe parents would be less willing to access political indoctrination if they are choosing their own schools and have the power of the purse themselves.

Your argument that grammar schools require LEAs is as much sense as to say a free market in bread requires communism to work. Parents find their own schools in a free market. the poorest just use the vouchers. The rest can top up. The schools decide the curriculum. All LEAs and the naitonal Dept of Education: closed down. All school inspection ceased. The govt maintains a tiny office monitoring the exam standards - we shouldn't inspect the schools, we should just make sure the exams are testing. Then if the schools teach in such a way that all the children fail, their customers, the parents, will take them to task. In the end, the teachers will have to drop lesbian fiction and teach Shakespeare if we control the exams such that a knowledge of 5 Shakespeare plays is required to pass the exams. All the teaching colleges are closed down. Parents sue the schools if the teachers actively sabotage their children's education (eg by not using "phonics" to teach literary). Sex education is criminalised. The promotion of multiculturalism in school is criminalised. And it is left to the parents to sue the schools in the courts to enforce it.

Chuck Unsworth

@ David Lindsay

I'm amazed.

You say: "Really, Chuck Unsworth! It only started in 1997?"

When it started is irrelevant. The question is why has it continued unabated throughout these thirteen years? Why after countless changes of Minister are we in such a mess - or is it actually because of these constant upheavals?

Your point seems to be that former governments may have got it wrong, so it's OK if this one does as well. In which case why bother with elections, anyway? Your position seems to be that nothing will change, so don't bother. Well, that's your choice, others quite obviously differ.

As to LEAs, my dislike and distrust of them arises from their gross incompetences and shambolic interferences in schools - largely as instigated by central government.

Stephen

This man is such a great asset to the Tories natural gravitas unlike "Boy George" and our Dave on a bad day.

The Tories have a natural hate figure to attack in Balls why not let Gove get on with the job and keep boy George on the bench as the willy Brown and Darling duo so often outflank him he still does not have the street cred particularly in the City!

Cogito Ergosum

Regardless of the Spectator's opinion of "Wonder Man Gove", these education policies are doomed to fail without grammar schools.

Sam Armstrong

Is this the Swedish model?

Not buying it, ta.

Michael Booth

It's not hard to see why our schools are struggling. New Labour have not only tinkered incessantly with the curriculum, they have imposed national strategies which prescribed how things should be taught; imposed health and safety regulations; racial equality regulations; gender equality regulations and regulations for special needs, gifted and talented pupils, looked-after children, bullying, social inclusion, community cohesion and Healthy Schools. Teachers no longer just teach, they are expected to be social workers, councellors, outreach workers and - in short - social engineers.

Patricia Shaw

Gove is one of the worst culprits in the recent MP expenses scandal, an acknowledgd embarasment to Cameron and an outspoken Zionist, whose inclusion of all elements of the UK population in school reforms will sit uncomfortably with his extreme religious views. Morally and racially, this is not the man to help the Conservatives do anything of value whatsoever.

ancien prof

Michael Booth has fingered some of the culprits. Add to those the closure of special schools (not a Labour idea, but they did nothing to reverse it), the interference in school governance which means disruptive pupils can't be excluded (they need to be sent somewhere where they can be taught self discipline so they can be properly educated without spoiling the life chances of the rest), the rights culture at the expense of responsibilities, and there you have the recipe for the disaster we've got at the moment. I'm highly qualified in my subject, but I spent more of my time policing and acting as a surrogate parent/social worker than teaching - when I wasn't bogged down in admin. Would I go back? Not unless all that was changed and teachers were given some authority and status again.

Dave B

A video of Mr Gove's speech is now available.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2010/01/watch-michael-goves-moral-mission-to-restart-social-mobility.html