Gove's school reforms approach a tipping point

Tony_E

Dear Mr Nelson,
When you speak of competition and the encouragement of nearby schools to take up academy status you exclude a large sector of the population: Those who live in rural areas.

There is litte or no competition, and the ability of the unions to be able to thwart progress is therefore much higher. Pupils and teachers find it much more difficult to jump ship and go elsewhere, distances between schools can be easily 20-30 miles with little decent public transport and good schools will be full from their own catchments.

We must not let the rural pupil get left behind in this revolution.

Andre

Tony E. I live in a rural area of the west country. Competition between secondary schools, irrespective of distance, is fierce - fueled by plunging demographics - too few children for too many places. Parents, used to driving ten miles to a supermarket, to work, to a sporting event, think nothing of switching schools - even at primary level. However nearly all of our sec schools, in my view, are substandard academically. There is a clear case for free academies in the country; the sooner the better.

AndyLeeds

Brilliant news ! If it finally destroys the power of the LEA's and the bigotted Teaching Unions I'm all for it.

TomTom

Labour believed new buildings under BSF would improve the Comprehensive School; Conservatives believe changing the name and having direct-grant Comprehensives is the answer.

The delusion is that if the Academy is such a good system Eton and St Paul's would be joining Westminster as Academies; but they remain stubbornly wedded to the idea of Selection By Parental Income (SBPI) and oppose any other form of selective education.

Spend a few more billions tarting up Comprehensives but they will never compete with fee-paying schools because they cannot select on Parental Income or Academic Ability.

The ultimate insult is to apply Plato's Academy to the nomenclature of Non-Academic Education

Fatbloke on tour

Trevor

You talk some amount of tripe.

The "Free" school revolution you pushed so hard is a failing one trick pony. Never mind you can always jump horses and push the academy route.

Under TB/GB, the academy programme was a mechanism to improve failing schools. You are correct that it has been a success in that endeavour.

However it is intellectually false to expand this progressive educational measure to include the changes introduced by the "Smurf".

These are the educational equivalent of the "Enclosures" act where a public asset, a high performing school under state direction and control, is being removed from the common good and handed over to a small self selecting and re-generating clique who will work the system to the benefit of themselves and those who think and look like them to the exclusion of all others.

If you believe otherwise then you know nothing about the English middle class dynamic to hoover up the benefits and advantages that are available to the exclusion of all others no matter the fairness of it all.

Finally you have to admire the brass neck of the spawn of a RAF officer -

"civvy in uniform" / Monday to Friday 9-5'r / 5 star hotel or nothing, who worked the system to provide a MOD subsidised private education for his family -

telling the rest of us how the education system should be run.

I await with interest your analysis of the current underfunding of the armed forces and how the lack of corporation tax receipts from agressive tax avoiding media companies makes this situation worse.

michael

Michael Gove has just freed up those projects that Balls stomped on, but lets hope its a catalyst.

Ron Whitehand

Isn't it also good that Mr Gove is 'watching it happen' rather than 'managing it. This is how politicians should be acting. Set the programmes, set the goals, provide the support and the cash.
Great news.

StrongholdBarricades

My only concern about this programme is that Schools should be tied to libraries, and under the new scheme there will be diametrically opposed viewpoints and funding

Schools will be funded by central government and allowed to choose their educational path, but the libraries will be funded by local government and effectively cut out of that vital route.

I believe that there needs to be a joint approach as libraries are just as important, but also there are opportunites within schools to utilise their buildings and equipement to further benefit the wider community, and it might not be a bad thing if 6th formers as part of their "community service" or Duke of Edinburgh were enabled to run these facilities within school outside of normal schooling hours.

Jonn Elledge

"Free schools – i.e. ‘Academies’ which are independently run, yet within the state sector – now account for more than 10 percent of British secondaries"

You seem to have elided two completely different reform programmes here.

"Free schools" is the colloquially used name for new parent- or teacher-run schools opened on the same model as is used in Sweden or the US. A number of these should open in September, but to date the total stands at zero.

"Academies" were a Blairite programme, based on the earlier City Technology Colleges and embraced by Michael Gove.

All free schools will be academies, but not all academies are free schools.

Tony_E

@Andre
While I don't doubt that this is the situation you find in the West Country, it's not the situation we see much in East Anglia. I do travel 80 miles a day to my children's schools, but how long this is sustainable for depends very much on whether I can fund the cost of diesel, especially when work is becoming less and less profitable.

I want a good school where I live, and there is some pressure here from children moving from poor schools to better ones. However, the better ones soon closed their doors and retreated within catchment (quite reasonably) so the presure then purely comes from OFSTED.

Andy H

Hello Fat Bloke.
Your low self esteem is coming out again - you seem to be completely unable to remember peoples names correctly, or put a coherent argument together.
What is it about being middle class that annoys you so much, and apart from aspiration, what is it you use to define this. I sense that you need to prolong these definitions to give your warped sense of reality some meaning?

stephen barker

Hi Fraser

why no facebook share button on your blog.

Stephen

Fatbloke on tour

Preparation "H" @ 10.44

Read my post you muppet.

My argument is there, just a case that you do not want to read it.

We are heading back to Edwardian times with the upper middle classes / kid on aristocracy in control and a large middle class booster club hoovering up the spoils.

The rest of us, the middle income group, the traditional working class well, the poor and the unemployed / sick, well you are on your own. The only help will be the parish run by the great and the good.

The only question is whether or not Dave the Rave will split the Tory party before he ruins the country.

100 years of progress destroyed in a 100 days.

John

Criterion!

Tiberius

The best news since Cameron won the election, and since it is you reporting, Fraser, I have total confidence in the stats and your interpretation of where this project is heading.

The name or categorization of the school is unimportant if it educates our kids better than the failing comps.

Mr Swilling Lager on the Back Seat of the Coach: I have no problem with you airing your views or taking the Michael, but please stop calling Fraser Trevor.

an ex-tory voter

I do not know whether or not Michael Gove is succeeding. But, I do know that when Fatbloke bothers to rear his ugly head, there is a good chance that socialism is getting a kicking. So, on that basis I suspect Michael Gove is indeed gaining some welcome traction in his drive to revive the non-existent education system.

Sam

Er, what? There are only two types of school, Academy and council? What about foundation schools, trust schools, voluntary aided schools - all different to Academies but also not controlled by the council.

Dale Bassett

"the genie of choice seems to have been yanked out of the bottle"

Fraser, whilst the rapid increase in the number of academies is to be applauded, it has nothing to do with "choice".

Choice is about parents being able to send their child to whichever school they like, which free schools and a putative national per-pupil funding formula should help to make possible.

Academies are about reducing bureaucracy, regulation and restriction to allow schools to run themselves better.

Both are necessary, but they should not be confused!

Dale Bassett
Research Director
Reform

David Lindsay

So, ninety per cent of them have not become Gove Academies.

Without powerful Local Education Authorities, there can never again be a bipartite or tripartite secondary system. That is the real reason for wanting to abolish what remains of LEAs. Including by means of this, in any case manifestly failed, scheme.

Andy H

Hello Fatbloke.

I feel very sorry for you when I read your posts. Clearly you are a tormented soul very ill at ease with yourself. Have you tried counselling?

I would suggest that you stop your maniacal rantings and try presenting your view point in a more sober way - that may make people to take it seriously.
Also, as suggested previously, I suggest you stop trying to create nicknames that clearly are not either funny or apt.

I am slightly puzzled why you have an issue with people trying to improve themselves. I am aware of the socialist tendency to drive everything down to the lowest denominator, but to see such a vitriolic reaction from you surprises me. If we take your logic to the ultimate conclusion, that of everyone should not make best use of their environments to better themselves (especially the middle classes for some reason) then why is it that you are fat if there are people starving in the world?

Does your deranged ramblings only apply to the middle classes and education?

yank

"This is a Labour and Conservative triumph."

.

That seems a true statement, although (arguably) the only consonant in this blogpost. As here, your Establishment seems pretty much united in pushing this latest buzzword... "academies". So, not surprising that Dave and his NuLab soulmates would be on the same page here. But don't confuse their monolithic approach with lower case "c" conservatism (or liberalism for that matter, because they don't seem to be leaping to a truly liberal educational model, either).

Here, the jury is still out on the "academy" model. Break it down, and academies are public schools, with new branding. Most of us in the private sector have seen frantic reorgs aplenty, always accompanied by the latest buzzwords and jargon. We remain skeptical, and we know enough to do so.

Public education is mostly a state and local issue here, and even amongst local school districts which permit the "academy" model, students are still often forced into schools within the district in which they reside, often failing districts.

Now, years ago, the State of Michigan passed legislation to allow parents to select schools outside their resident district, with the state allotment money following them. BOOM. Parents abandoned failing districts (Detroit, for example), and flocked to nearby healthy districts and schools, which their kids immediately benefited from. And the state money followed them.

Poor kids. Single or no parent kids. Kids in some of the rottenest neighborhoods imaginable. Now able to attend functional, untainted schools. In an instant, at the stroke of a pen, we've impacted their lives, many to the good, we would hope.

Choice. That is the only innovation that will work. The bad fail, and the good prosper, and we then would have data that firmly identifies each. Next, we target heavier-handed reforms onto those schools/districts which are truly failing.

And it's all a data driven process. Actual user data, and not some bureaucrat's imaginations. What a concept.

The federal establishment here is seeding some of that choice, to bribe individual states to enact enabling legislation and reform, but even that can have only limited effect. The truest reforms can only be driven by those who consume education resources, and any mechanism that rewards failure, as any top-down construct will inevitably do, is doomed to fail itself.

The Establishment is established, afterall. Those who seek to manipulate it to advantage are well positioned to do so. If you want to take that advantage out of the manipulators' hands, you have to take choice out of the Establishment's hands, and put it into parents' hands.

Being a pure marketeer, Dave's good with the rebranding efforts, same as his soulmate Blair. But again, don't confuse successful rebranding with success, and don't confuse any of this rebranding with conservatism. A conservative path would be far simpler than all this.

"Big Society", you say? How about we start that all off in the only manner in which it could actually mean something: Choice and accountability, with funding shackled to both.

Oh there'd be a cacophony, no doubt. We have it in 50 individual states here, and I guess you all would have one great one. But it'd be worth the effort, so put in your ear plugs and persevere, because without that effort, pretty soon society will put in earplugs to block out all the rebranding and marketeering blather. They've seen hapless reorgs, too.

Wily Trout

Beat the Local Authorities and you will beat the unions. They are indivisible, from the top down. Most of the teaching and support staff union convenors are full-time county council employees.

Will J

You're right Fraser: without a profit motive to facilitate private investment this amounts to little more than an expansion of Adonis's Academy programme to non-failing schools. Worthy but not spectacular.

Iftikhar Ahmad

Almost all children now believe they go to school to pass exams. The idea that they may be there for an education is irrelevant. State schools have become exam factories, interested only in A to C Grades. They do not educate children. Exam results do not reflect a candidate’s innate ability. Employers have moaned for years that too many employees cannot read or write properly. According to a survey, school-leavers and even graduates lack basic literacy and numeracy skills. More and more companies are having to provide remedial training to new staff, who can’t write clear instructions, do simple maths, or solve problems. Both graduates and school-leavers were also criticised for their sloppy time-keeping, ignorance of basic customer service and lack of self-discipline.

Bilingual Muslims children have a right, as much as any other faith group, to be taught their culture, languages and faith alongside a mainstream curriculum. More faith schools will be opened under sweeping reforms of the education system in England. There is a dire need for the growth of state funded Muslim schools to meet the growing needs and demands of the Muslim parents and children. Now the time has come that parents and community should take over the running of their local schools. Parent-run schools will give the diversity, the choice and the competition that the wealthy have in the private sector. Parents can perform a better job than the Local Authority because parents have a genuine vested interest. The Local Authority simply cannot be trusted.

The British Government is planning to make it easier to schools to “opt out” from the Local Authorities. Muslim children in state schools feel isolated and confused about who they are. This can cause dissatisfaction and lead them into criminality, and the lack of a true understanding of Islam can ultimately make them more susceptible to the teachings of fundamentalists like Christians during the middle ages and Jews in recent times in Palestine. Fundamentalism is nothing to do with Islam and Muslim; you are either a Muslim or a non-Muslim.

There are hundreds of state primary and secondary schools where Muslim pupils are in majority. In my opinion all such schools may be opted out to become Muslim Academies. This mean the Muslim children will get a decent education. Muslim schools turned out balanced citizens, more tolerant of others and less likely to succumb to criminality or extremism. Muslim schools give young people confidence in who they are and an understanding of Islam’s teaching of tolerance and respect which prepares them for a positive and fulfilling role in society. Muslim schools are attractive to Muslim parents because they have better discipline and teaching Islamic values. Children like discipline, structure and boundaries. Bilingual Muslim children need Bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods, who understand their needs and demands.

None of the British Muslims convicted following the riots in Bradford and Oldham in 2001 or any of those linked to the London bombings had been to Islamic schools. An American Think Tank studied the educational back ground of 300 Jihadists; none of them were educated in Pakistani Madrasas. They were all Western educated by non-Muslim teachers. Bilingual Muslim children need bilingual Muslim teachers as role models. A Cambridge University study found that single-sex classes could make a big difference for boys. They perform better in single-sex classes. The research is promising because male students in the study saw noticeable gains in the grades. The study confirms the Islamic notion that academic achievement is better in single-sex classes.
Iftikhar Ahmad
htt://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk