Nicky Morgan described the findings of Peter Clarke’s report into the Birmingham schools scandal as ‘disturbing’, and laid out how she plans to respond. listen to ‘Nicky Morgan’s statement on the Trojan Horse scandal report’ on Audioboo
Peter Clarke, a former counter-terror chief, has published a report today which reveals that an ‘aggressive Islamist agenda’ was pursued in ‘Trojan horse’ schools in Birmingham. He has found evidence of a coordinated plan to impose strict Islamic teaching on pupils. This piece by Douglas Murray was originally published in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 14 June 2014: Who’s up, who’s down? Who’s in, who’s out? While Westminster spent last week gossiping about which minister’s special adviser said what, in another city, not far away, a very different Britain was unveiled. On Monday, the Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, published his damning investigation into the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair. Ever since allegations
New Education Secretary Nicky Morgan wasted no time in stamping her mark on her department – sacking all three of Michael Gove’s special advisers on Friday morning. Friends tell Mr S that Henry Cook, Beth Armstrong and Jamie Martin were ‘keen to stay on in order to enable a smooth transition’, but it was not to be. While a reshuffle often results in ministers’ aides getting the bullet too, the way in which Morgan has conducted her clear out has raised eyebrows in Westminster. Morgan tasked senior civil servant Chris Wormald to do the dirty deed, expecting to be at the Chequers cabinet meeting on Friday morning. However, with the
Nicky Morgan came to parliament today to praise Michael Gove, not to bury him: ‘It is a privilege,’ she said, ‘to follow him in this role.’ Her first outing as Education Secretary was an unqualified success. She plodded amiably where Michael Gove had dazzled; but, nonetheless, she was effective. The Opposition launched a well-orchestrated attack on the issue of childcare costs and availability. Morgan repelled it with ease using a selection of statistics, studies and policy initiatives. She also sought to empathise with working parents. In response to a question about the availability of childcare from Labour’s Jamie Reed, Morgan said: ‘As a working parent, I sympathise’, and she went
Reading the papers over the last few days, you’d be forgiven for thinking that no teachers backed Michael Gove and his agenda. But a letter in The Sunday Times yesterday told a very different story. Signed by 76 people, most of them head teachers of outstanding schools in deprived areas, it praised him as ‘a man of great conviction’ and declared that his ‘passion to level the playing field has been unwavering.’ The letter is a reminder that many of the best heads in the country were in favour of the Gove agenda because they realised that the status quo was not good enough. Here’s the letter and the full list
I tried to reach Michael Gove on Tuesday shortly after the news broke that he’d been moved to the Whips’ Office. I’m quite relieved he never called back, because my intention was to offer my condolences, never a good idea when a friend suffers a setback. I know from experience that any expression of pity when some calamity befalls you only makes it ten times worse. ‘Oh Christ,’ you think. ‘Is it really that bad?’ In Gove’s case, I don’t think it is. He achieved more in his four years as Education Secretary than his predecessors did in 40. Given the hostility of the education establishment to even the mildest
‘There’s no shame in a cabinet to win the next election,’ declared an exasperated senior No. 10 figure on Tuesday night. This week’s reshuffle was not one for the purists: it was designed with campaigning, not governing, in mind. With less than ten months to go to polling day, politics trumps policy. This is why Michael Gove is moving from the Department for Education to become Chief Whip. The test of this shake-up will be whether the Tories win the next election or not. This reshuffle demonstrated that Tory modernisation is not about measures anymore but men — and women. The party has spent most of David Cameron’s leadership trying
Michael Gove‘s departure from the Department for Education is the biggest shock of this reshuffle. Tory MPs have been even more surprised by it than they were William Hague’s leaving the Foreign Office. Downing Street is keen to stress that the education reform agenda doesn’t leave the DfE with Gove. The changes to the junior ministerial line-up at the department bolsters this argument, Nick Gibb—no friend of the teaching unions—returns as Minister of State for schools and Nick Boles, a close ally of Gove and a man brave enough to take on vested interests wherever he finds them, takes over the Skills Brief. listen to ‘Gove: I could have stayed on as
In the Independent this week, Yvette Cooper suggested that British boys should grow up as ‘confident feminists’. They need to have lessons in feminism to help them learn how to treat women, she argued. But school shouldn’t be a place where you indoctrinate pupils to believe a particular ideology. And feminism, for all its admirable achievements in the 20th century, is an ideology. Compulsory sex education in which boys are taught to be feminists is beyond silly. By all means explain that they shouldn’t go round lifting up girls’ skirts for a peek, but it’s possible to do this without telling them they must call themselves feminists. They might not like
Michael Gove’s speech to today’s education reform conference is a robust defence of his reforms. He calls closing the attainment gap between rich and poor a ‘personal crusade for me’. But I suspect that the headlines will be grabbed by his claim that the teaching unions aren’t standing up for education but for their ‘own pay and pensions’. He says that the status quo isn’t good enough and ‘we mustn’t keep going backwards – and failing the poorest above all.’ What I found most striking, though, was Gove’s praise for how academy chains are turning round failing schools such as Downhills. Indeed, Gove clearly envisages a far greater role for
In England, success in life is bound up with where you went to school. In Wales, where I come from, the standard of education can be so miserable that you’d do better to get expelled. I did. I’d just spent three days in ‘isolation’ in my south Wales comprehensive — banished to a cubicle with a CCTV camera — for misbehaviour. As I left the grounds, I lit a cigarette. A teacher accosted me. I got lippy and she smacked me across the face. I was expelled soon after. Thank God. If you want good schooling in Wales, you’d be best to go private. If you’re taken ill, make sure
Thirty years ago, as editor of the Salisbury Review, I began to receive short articles from a Bradford headmaster, relating the dilemmas faced by those attempting to provide an English education to the children of Asian immigrants. Ray Honeyford’s case was simple. Children born and raised in Britain must be integrated into British society. Schools and teachers therefore had a duty, not merely to impart the English language and the English curriculum, but to ensure that children understood and adhered to the basic principles of the surrounding society, including racial and religious tolerance, sexual equality and the habit of settling conflicts by compromise and not by force. Honeyford complained of
The not-so-great charter David Cameron wants every child to be taught about Magna Carta. Some bits he might want to leave out: — ‘If one who has borrowed from the Jews any sum, great or small, die before that loan be repaid, the debt shall not bear interest while the heir is under age.’ — ‘No one shall be arrested or imprisoned upon the appeal of a woman, for the death of any other than her husband.’ Foul play Is there a correlation between bad behaviour from a country’s football team and violence in the country as a whole? WORST-BEHAVED TEAMS IN EUROPE Homicides per 100,000 people Ukraine 4.3 Romania
Generation Y – are they really a jilted generation, or do they have absolutely no reason to be complaining about their lot? This was the question posed at Tuesday night’s Spectator debate, with the motion: ‘Stop whining young people, you’ve never had it so good’, and chaired by Toby Young. It all kicked off with an introduction from Alan Warner, the investment director at Duncan Lawrie, who expressed his gratitude to Tony Blair for putting Islington – where Warner owned his first London home – on the map. It’s not just this generation who feels hard done by when it comes to property, he said. Every generation feels like it
I was surprised to discover this morning that Gordon Brown last night suggested the Scottish education system should be abolished and replaced by a new pan-UK curriculum and examination system. This would indeed be a bold thing to recommend three months before the independence referendum. A surprise too and the sort of thing you’d expect to be all over the news today if it weren’t, of course, the case that the press is irrevocably biased against the nationalists and determined to bury anything that might embarrass Unionists. Still, Gordon said it. He must have. Otherwise why would Kenny Gibson MSP say Gordon Brown “has endorsed the idea of a UK-wide education
Britain’s skills crisis was addressed by the country’s leading educationalists today at The Spectator’s half-day conference, Giving Britain the skills it needs. Matthew Hancock, Minister for Skills and Enterprise, delivered the key note speech. In it he outlined his plans for better preparing young people for employment. ‘I’m determined that apprenticeships become the established route for all school-leavers who don’t go to university; not as a second option,’ he said, before adding that ‘demanding higher standards of people isn’t setting them up for failure, as we’ve often heard from the left.’ Hancock’s speech focussed on the need to establish how technology must be used to ‘spread opportunity.’ Schools and colleges should
It doesn’t really matter whether Dominic Cummings’ Times interview was unhelpful to Michael Gove. Labour has just been about as helpful to the Education Secretary as it possibly could be without announcing that it supports everything he does, right down to the detail of the history curriculum. Education questions this afternoon was the perfect opportunity to exploit the gift of an interview in which Gove’s trusted former adviser attacked David Cameron and the Number 10 operation. But the attack never really came. Kevin Brennan asked about Cummings’ line that he signed into government departments and Number 10 as ‘Osama bin Laden’. Gove’s reply was, as predicted, ornate and beautifully defensive.
How can technology help British students to acquire the skills they need to succeed? This is the question that Matthew Hancock, Minister for Skills & Enterprise, addressed this morning at a Spectator forum on the importance of addressing Britain’s skills deficit. On the same day, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills released their response to a report they commissioned in a bid to embrace technological advances in further education. Modern technology has the ability to break down so many educational barriers, as Molly Guinness discovered in her interview with the scientist Sugata Mitra in May, who used a computer installed in a public wall to develop the Sole method of
There is much to enjoy in Dominic Cummings’ glorious attack on the ghastliness of Britain’s political system. It is a cri-de-coeur from a man who, whatever else may be said of him (and his enemies have plenty to say), has given the matter some thought. Westminster will swoon at the criticisms of Cameron (‘a sphinx without a riddle’), Ed Llewellyn (‘a classic third-rate suck-up-kick-down sycophant presiding over a shambolic court’) and Craig Oliver (‘just clueless’) but that’s just the gags, really. The substance is elsewhere. As in: “MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings. That’s also how No 10 works. It’s how
What is Nick Clegg up to? He held a press conference today to tell us that his party’s manifesto will be a Lib Dem manifesto, not a manifesto aimed at a partnership with Labour or the Tories. And he announced that his party will ring-fence education spending for two-to-19-year-olds in the next Parliament. The Liberal Democrat leader told the assembled hacks that Britain needed to move from ‘austerity to ambition’, another fortune cookie phrase presumably cooked up by whoever thought ‘Alarm Clock Britain’ made sense. Clegg said: ‘As we look towards 2015, it’s clear to me that Britain doesn’t want or need simply more of the same. The Conservative party
