Michael gove

I’m on the train back from doing Radio Four’s Any Questions – broadcast live from Derby, repeated at 1.10pm tomorrow – where I had a bust-up with Christine Blower of the NUT. CoffeeHousers may recall she was the star of a cover story we ran a few weeks back, about the campaign of bullying and intimidation levelled against headteachers who are trying to seek Academy status. She raised that article during recording, and things kinda kicked off. I told her she should be ashamed of the way her union thugs try to intimidate young teachers who seek to break away from local authority control and reach independence. She denied writing

Michael Gove has just been explaining in the Commons where the £7 billion for the fairness premium that Nick Clegg announced on Friday will come from. Revealingly, David Laws was present as Gove answered this urgent question. I understand that Laws was crucial to both the pupil premium being implemented at a decent level and the real-terms increase in the schools Budget.   Laws himself told John Pienaar’s show last night that “obviously I’ve talked to him [Nick Clegg] about some of the things that I’ve been associated with in the past, like the schools funding issue… because I was the schools spokesman in the last parliament”. I hear that

This morning’s papers announce that cuts to the defence budget will be considerably less than 10 percent, following an intervention from David Cameron. Liam Fox has fought a valiant rearguard to protect his budget; success has come at significant personal cost.  And that’s not all. The BBC has learnt that the schools budget is to receive a real terms spending increase when the Fairness Premium for the disadvantaged and the Pupil Premium are added to the final reckoning. This is politically interesting: education is the one issue where Labour’s opposition has been coherent. Michael Gove was eviscerated over his incompetent cancellation of the school building project and his free schools

This was the perhaps the lowest-octane speech David Cameron has ever given to the Tory conference. He didn’t need to give the speech of his life, for once – so he didn’t. He dutifully ran through all the various points of government policies, but there were too many of what Art Laffer calls MEGO figures (my eyes glaze over). It’s odd, because Cameron can speak so well when he needs to. Compared to the speeches we heard yesterday – from Gove and IDS – it was oddly uninspiring. He spoke about his government’s “beating, radical heart” with no real enthusiasm – as if he received the speech only recently, and

Michael Gove means business. His case is simple: standards have fallen; it is time to be radical. Under Labour, Britain fell from 4th to 14th for science, from 7th to 17th for literacy and from 8th to 24th for mathematics. With a fervour that was nothing short of zealous, Gove promised that the ‘injustice will end’. His ministerial career has had a difficult start – his message often lost under Ed Balls’ righteous indignation. Having faltered, he is beginning to re-direct his rhetorical emphasis to more fertile ground. Where once he wanted to empower parents, he now wants to empower teachers – no doubt to attract recalcitrant teaching unions to

Predictable lines from Ed Balls this afternoon. ‘DIY free schools’ are iniquitous; Michael Gove is like the child snatcher in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. Naturally, he made a pitch for the shadow chancellorship. Nick Clegg was his target and his pitch was avowedly left-wing: ‘It was Nick Clegg: the man whose own election leaflets said ’Vote Liberal Democrat or you’ll get a Tory government, who said ‘stop the Tory VAT bombshell, who said spending cuts now would be ‘reckless’ and put jobs and the recovery at risk. It was Nick Clegg who has given us: a Tory Prime Minister, a Tory Chancellor, a massive and unfair hike in VAT and a Budget

Michael Gove has announced that 32 schools will open as Academies at the start of the new term. More schools are set to open over the next academic year, but it is a disappointing figure. However, it could’ve been worse – I’ve heard rumours that as few as 10 schools would adopt Gove’s reforms. The figure of 32 is at the upper limit of recent estimates knocking around Westminster. Disappointing it may be, but slow progress is unsurprising. These are radical steps and teachers are hesitant in the face of change. Blair’s original academy reforms were frustrated in part by teachers and governors eager to preserve the status quo. However,

CoffeeHousers may like to see the full leaked letter (pasted below) to which I referred in The Spectator’s cover story this week. It shows how the NUT is using Freedom of Information to try and force school heads to hand over a list of names of anyone who might support a campaign to opt out of local authority control and become quasi-independent Academies. We have blacked out any information that may reveal the source. This letter helps explain why Michael Gove will have so few names next week, when he lists the list of schools who have succeeded in their fast-track application. Out of the 3,000 eligible, a few dozen

Today’s GCSE results demonstrate the tremendous success of City Academies, a hugely heartening trend given that this formula – which was so slowly rolled out under the Labour legislation which introduced them – can now be rapidly implemented under the new Academies Act. It’s always been a con to look at the absolute results of Academies, as under Labour the only schools given such status were schools that were doing poorly. What matters is improvement. Let’s take the three Academies groups and look at the ratio of  pupils winning five good GCSEs (i.e. A-C including English and Maths). In the The Harris Federation, which now runs nine schools, there was

Some eyecatching numbers in today’s FT about how many free schools we can expect, and when. According to Department of Education officials, there will be about 12 of the new schools in 2011, another 50 in 2012, and around 100 in 2013. The paper dwells on how this falls short of the Tories’ pre-election rhetoric. And it’s true: the original idea was for around 3,000 new schools across nine years. So, 162 schools across three years hardly looks like fluid progress towards that goal. This needn’t be a bad thing, of course. As so often, quality not quantity will determine the lasting success of this reform. But it’s still striking

The latest A-level results have been released and – surprise, surprise – success rates have risen. The proportion of papers marked at grade E or above increased to 97.6 percent from 97.5 percent last year. And 27 percent achieved an A or the new A* grade, with 8 percent at A* overall. So, naturally, and rightly, the usual arguments about “dumbing down” are out in force. The Tories used to love getting stuck into this debate, accusing the New Labour government of eroding exam standards. But it’s noteworthy that, now they’re in power, their rhetoric on the matter has become considerably less provocative. Speaking this morning about standards, David Willetts