Michael gove

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Gove: the Tories are the party of state schooling

Apologies for my recent, extended absence, CoffeeHousers — Vietnam and my immune system just didn’t get on. But I’m back now, and firmly embedded in Manchester, where Michael Gove has just given his address to the Tory conference. Although, I must say, “address” doesn’t really cover it. This was more a political variety show, short on new policy (because Gove’s existing policy is going quite well enough, thank you very much), and big on spectacle and optimism. It started off with a video conversation between Gove and David Cameron, who was in a local school that is on the verge of becoming an academy. There was nothing surprising in what

Tuesday

James Forsyth

A revealing episode

The row about which email account special advisers use for which emails is, I suspect, of very little interest to anyone outside SW1. But today’s FT story certainly has set the cat amongst the Whitehall pigeons. At the risk of trying the patience of everyone who doesn’t work within a mile of the Palace of Westminster, I think there is something here worth noting about our political culture. Christopher Cook’s story in the FT this morning is about an email that Dominic Cummings, one of Michael Gove’s special advisers, sent urging various political people not to use his Department of Education email. In this case, the email was perfectly proper. Ministers

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Don’t mention education reform

A new rule seems to have been adopted at Lib Dem conference: don’t mention Academies. The coalition’s greatest single success story – something David Laws and Michael Gove agreed on before the election – is being airbrushed out. A favourable reference to Academies taking on kids from deprived backgrounds was proposed for a conference motion, but has been excised by the delegates. Lib Dem activists are heavily drawn from the ranks of local authority councilors, many of whom hate the way that schools have been given the power to break free from council control. Confronting them was a key part of Nick Clegg’s modernization programme. It seems that this has

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Miliband: We can’t spend our way to a new economy

David Cameron and IDS have been promoting the Work Programme this afternoon and they reiterated that jobseekers must learn English to claim benefits if their language difficulties are hampering their job applications. It’s another indication of the government’s radical approach to welfare reform. Aside from that, the main event in Westminster today was Ed Miliband’s speech to the TUC. Miliband was widely heckled by the Brothers, especially when he told them: “Let me just tell you about my experience of academies as I’ve got two academies in my own constituency. They have made a big difference to educational standards in my constituency and that is my local experience of that.” The Tories

Monday

James Forsyth

The breakdown of Clegg’s Cabinet alliances

There used to be a time when some of the most important relationships in the government were between Tory reformers and Nick Clegg. The Lib Dem leader, to his credit, tilted the scales in favour of radicalism in both education and welfare. But those reformist alliances are now pretty much over. Indeed, Ken Clarke – with his plans to put rehabilitation first in the justice system – is the only Tory Cabinet minister who remains in a strategic alliance with the Deputy Prime Minister. Iain Duncan-Smith’s relations with the Lib Dems have soured over the issue of family policy. On the education front, the Clegg-Gove axis is clearly at an

James Forsyth James Forsyth

School’s back, and a fight breaks out in the Westminster playground

Nick Clegg’s speech today on education has certainly garnered him some headlines. But it has also ruffled feathers in Whitehall. A senior Department for Education source told me earlier: “Clegg doesn’t understand that the 2010 Act means that Academies are the default mode for new schools, whether Local Authorities like them or not. His speech doesn’t change Free School policy or Academy policy generally. It was stupid of Richard Reeves to turn what should have been rare good news for the Government into a splits story, and it won’t help reverse public perceptions of Clegg as dishonest.” The striking thing about the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech today is the emphasis

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Clegg vs Clegg

As the Lib Dem conference approaches, we can expect some briefing from their spin doctors claiming to have “wrecked” all manner of Tory policies. It’s a petty and ugly phase of the coalition. Last year: nuptial bliss. This year: one partner throwing china at the other. The next phase is divorce, which is why I’m surprised to see the Lib Dems accelerating the process by today’s divisive briefings. Especially on something as self-defeating as school reform. We are told that “Nick Clegg defeats bid by Michael Gove to let free schools make profits”. This is nonsense. As I write in this week’s Spectator, Gove is not pushing for profit-seeking schools,

Friday

Fraser Nelson

The Swedish case for school profits

Should state schools be able to make a profit? We asked this of you on our Coffee House poll this week. 71 per cent of you said yes, and with good reason. Profit-seeking companies expand when demand is strong: that’s what you want good schools to do. But successful schools not seeking profit have no incentive to expand: it’s an easier life just to let the waiting list grow and jack up the fees. This month, 24 new ‘free schools’ will open – eventually able to educate 10,000 pupils. But to keep pace with the boom in primary school pupils, we’d need an extra 400 primaries alone. Will the ‘free

Thursday

James Forsyth

Getting tough on discipline

A fortnight ago, The Spectator asked if Cameron was fit to fight? We wondered if he had the gumption to use the political moment created by the riots to push through the radical reforms the country needs.  So, it’s only fair to note that the government has today actually done something—as opposed to just talking about—the excesses of the human rights culture. The Department for Education has stopped the implementation of new regulations that would require teachers to log every incident in which they ‘use force’ with children. These new rules would have made teachers record every time they had pulled apart two kids in a corridor or intervened to

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Whitehall leaks

The Department of Education is remarkably unbothered by yesterday’s Guardian splash about free schools. Why? Because they have known for months that the emails on which it was based had gone missing. Indeed, the only thing that surprised them about the story was that it did not appear three months ago in the Financial Times. Email security in Whitehall is notoriously bad. Ministers and special advisers often don’t realise that civil servants have access to their email accounts. This access provides ample opportunity for those hostile to the government’s political agenda to leak out stories. (Most ministers in both this and the last government use secret squirrel email addresses to

Thursday

James Forsyth

Beating Labour’s education legacy

If it is GCSE results day, there must be a row about government education policy. True to form, the NASUWT — a union whose role often appears to be to make the NUT look moderate by comparison — has come out with a comically hyperbolic statement accusing the coalition of a ‘betrayal of young people’ because of its decision to reform the educational maintenance allowance. What the NASUWT statement ignores is that the real betrayal of young people has been pushing them into doing courses and qualifications that condemn them to a life of low-skilled labour at best. Last year, only 16 per cent of pupils achieved a C or

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The schools revolution in action

Harris Academies, one of the best-known new chains of state secondaries, have today posted an  extraordinary set of results. It’s worth studying because it shows how a change of management can transform education for pupils in deprived areas. Pour in money if you like, but the way a school is run is the key determinant. This is the idea behind City Academies, perhaps Labour’s single best (and most rapidly-vindicated) policy. The notion is rejected by teaching unions, who loathe the idea that some teachers are better than others. Bad schools are kept bad by the idea that their performance is due to deeply-ingrained social problems, etc. Harris has produced a table showing

Thursday

David Blackburn

The annual A-levels helter-skelter

The Gap Year has been declared dead. It’s A-levels day today, and the annual scramble for university places has been intensified ahead of next year’s tuition fees rise. According to this morning’s Times (£), the last count had 669,956 pupils sprinting after 470,000 vacancies. An estimated 50,000 students with adequate grades will not enter higher education this year as many universities have raised entry requirements to manage increased demand. This means that competition during clearance will be even more stiff than usual, particularly as universities will offer many fewer clearing places according to various surveys. Needless to say, UCAS’ website appears to have collapsed under the weight of this unparalleled

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Gove versus Harman

The Guardian’s Nick Watt already has a detailed and insightful post on last night’s Newsnight bout between Michael Gove and Harriet Harman. Here’s the video, so CoffeeHousers can watch it for themselves:

Friday

David Blackburn

Long-term problems

It is fashionable to say that the nation is divided: the North and South, the haves and have nots, the politically engaged and the apathetic. Educational attainment has been added to that list, following yesterday’s apocalyptic report from the University and College Union (UCU), which found that there are more people without qualifications in one impoverished part of the East Midlands than there are in ten other affluent constituencies across the country. The report concludes that those from the poorest backgrounds have been “short-changed for generations”. What’s so striking about this report is that it follows hot on the heels of an OECD investigation into grade inflation under the previous

David Blackburn

Fiona Millar to the Commons…

Richard Kay’s column in the Mail contains the news, as expected, that Fiona Millar (AKA Mrs Alistair Campbell) is a shoo-in to replace Glenda Jackson as Labour’s candidate for the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency. The seat is very marginal: Jackson scraped in by just 42 votes last time round. But, if Millar were to win the nomination and subsequent election, she’s being tipped for immediate promotion. Kay reports that a ‘senior party figure’ told him that Millar would become Education Secretary ‘within a year’, assuming Labour was in government. Millar founded the Local Schools Network as a bulwark to protect comprehensive education and she is an impassioned and determined critic of

Monday

Jonathan Jones

A victory for common sense

For years, teachers have been increasingly reluctant to restrain unruly pupils — for fear of being slapped with a lawsuit. But now, it seems, the government is trying to ease those concerns. Its guidance today may not change any laws, but it does encourage schools to change their approach. Among the directions is that “schools should not have a ‘no touch’ policy”: teachers can use reasonable force to restrain pupils, remove disruptive children from the classroom or prevent them from leaving the classroom when they shouldn’t. However, the guidance does stress that there are limits on the use of force, making it clear that “it is always unlawful to use

Thursday

Grace Palmer

It’s not just pensions, say teachers

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

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Our politicians need to look beyond Europe

In Britain, public sector strikes always bring with them the whiff of national decline. They are a reminder of a time when the country was becoming less and less competitive and the civil service regarded its job as the management of decline, a mindset only broken by the Thatcher government.   But today Britain faces a choice almost as acute as the one it faced in the late 1970s. Is this country content with declining slightly less quickly than the continent of Europe as a whole, or does it want to equip itself for a new world in which economic power is moving east?   It is in this context

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Gove gets mathematical

Go go Gove, still trying to pack in the initiatives before summer recess. The focus today is on maths and the sciences, where the Education Secretary feels our students are falling behind. In a speech earlier, he set out a number of measures to help ameliorate the situation, including adding his name to City AM’s appeal for bankers to donate to the Further Maths Support Programme charity. But, really, it was his more general remarks that caught the ear. He emphasised, for instance, the growing gap between us and the Asian nations: “At school, British 15-year-olds’ maths skills are now more than two whole academic years behind 15-year-olds in China.