As any CoffeeHouser knows, the Spectator enthusiastically supports Michael Gove’s
education reforms. But it’s always important to listen to opposing views – so we stepped outside our offices in Westminster to talk to some of the striking teachers.
Some of their points, it must be said, were a little peculiar. “It was wonderful under Balls, a golden age,” said one “we’d like to get back to that.” But others were more realistic in their concerns. For example, they criticised Michael Gove’s inconsistency: the official government policy is that modular exams will remain, but he appeared on television this weekend saying that he intended to remove modular exams by 2012. This changeability means that teachers spend months preparing for one measure, they say, and then have to adjust when another is introduced.
An English teacher teacher criticised Gove’s mishandling of school meals. He said that underfunded schools now had to feed kids with “buttered French sticks”, rather than decent nutritious meals. “Lunch in my school is now mostly piles of rice,” he explained, “for some kids this is the only hot meal they get – it should be crucial that it’s a good healthy meal. But Gove doesn’t seem to care.”
A head of maths at a secondary school says that, owing to the cuts, teaching assistants or “cover supervisors” are being asked to teach alone – often in subjects that they don’t understand or have no qualifications in. One went so far as to say, “It’s like having a police force run by community support officers.”
The overall impression was of a large number of rather different people with a large number of very different concerns. While some of them were clearly deluded about the deficit, many clearly felt that the government was oblivious to the smaller picture. It would be unwise for Gove to ignore them all.
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