Three years ago, Dennis Sewell wrote a Spectator piece about the real enemy awaiting Michael Gove: ‘The Blob’. Carla Millar illustrated the point (below). Today in the Mail on Sunday, the Education Secretary extends the metaphor further:
‘School reformers in the past often complained about what was called TheBlob – the network of educational gurus in and around our universities who praised each others’ research, sat on committees that drafted politically correct curricula, drew gifted young teachers away from their vocation and instead directed them towards ideologically driven theory.
‘Some wonder if past reformers were exaggerating the problem in university education departments. Thanks to the not-so-Independent 100 we can see that, if anything, they were underplaying the problem.
‘In the past The Blob tended to operate by stealth, using its influence to control the quangos and committees which shaped policy. But The Blob has broken cover in the letters pages of the broadsheets because this Government is taking it on.
‘We have abolished the quangos they controlled. We have given a majority of secondary schools academy status so they are free from the influence of The Blob’s allies in local government. We are moving teacher training away from university departments and into our best schools. And we are reforming our curriculum and exams to restore the rigour they abandoned.’
Are things going as as well as he suggests? We at The Spectator are holding a one-day schools conference to find out, and we have an all-star lineup. Tickets are on sale now (click here) and here’s a sample of who we’ll be hearing from, in order of their picture above.
Michael Gove himself will be giving the keynote address, and will take questions afterwards. Is his ‘blob’ analogy is accurate? If so how much progress he is making? Yes, secondary schools may convert to ‘Academy’ status but there have been pitifully new ‘new schools’ — fewer than 100 so far, and Gove would need 400 a year just to keep pace with the surge in school numbers.
Fiona Millar is a passionate and articulate opponent of the Gove agenda. She believes that we ought to fix, rather than dismantle, the state secondary system and has grave reservations about what we have seen so far. We’ll also be hearing from Melissa Benn who outlined her concerns about the Gove project in her influential book, School Wars.
Andrew Adonis, the architect of the Academies agenda, will be speaking about why private schools have done so little to help. Britain has the best private schools on the planet, according to the PISA international league tables that Gove is so fond of citing. So why can’t they do more? Why aren’t they opening chains of Academies and extending their very successful formula to the wider community? Lord Adonis (whose title Charles Moore once unfairly described as bearing resemblance to ‘a dubious card pinned up in a telephone box’) has recently written a brilliant book saying England got into this mess: Education, Education, Education.
Toby Young has done something very rare for a journalist: rather than just write about the problem, he’s done something to fix it. His West London Free School is a great success, but why – even now – does it stand out? He should be one in hundreds of school entrepreneurs. He’ll be speaking about battles fought and lessons learned.
There are many other brilliant speakers (full list here) and the day will be devoted to the most important questions in school reform. For example
- After Gove, then what? To what extent is this his personal mission, dependent on his patronage?
- Why are there so few free schools – are there still obstacles to their creation? Or might it be that, as critics first suggested, parents don’t have the time to set up these schools.
- Whither the curriculum? After Michael Gove had to withdraw his plans for an eBacc, does this prove that (as a Labour Secretary of State once said) the “minister knows nowt about curriculum“?
Comments