Old Gove is at it again

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

So Gove finally comes clean that education isn't about empowering kids, it's about doing what employers want. Why force kids to continue to study something if they don't have an aptitude in it?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/pupils-who-fail-english-or-maths-gcses-will-be-forced-to-stay-on-at-school-and-resit-their-exams-8793614.html

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Saw this on BBC site. I think he's gonna go down as one fo the most loathed education secretaries ever. Hoping in vain that the education system gets better before my boys have to enlist in a few years time

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

Saw this on BBC site. I think he's gonna go down as one fo the most loathed education secretaries ever. Hoping in vain that the education system gets better before my boys have to enlist in a few years time

I'm pretty sure he already is the most loathed ever, he's had votes of no confidence from all the major teachers' unions and every teacher/lecturer i know pretty much viscerally hates him, even some of the ones who are pretty right-leaning. He's an arrogant, ignorant, bullying prick imo.

[brigadista]

has he got over his hissy fit after the syria vote then?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

he's gonna be, ultimately, my boss. :(

I know education is about the kids, not the teachers, but how are we meant to feel when he suggests we don't work long enough, have too long holidays and have a gold-plated pension, when research shows that on average, teachers work a 50 hour week, and on average, teachers who do not rise above classroom teacher level at retirement live on average 1 year after retirement, just 1 fucking year from all the hard work and stress! (Trades Union figures, I believe).

He's also eroded automatic pay rises so that, whilst teachers do start on relatively generous salaries of 20-27k, they will probably not be given any rise now unless they become a school leader, which obviously is the minority.

And after all this, he expects teachers to somehow deliver a better education? It really is a joke, and a typical example of some Johnny know-it-all coming in and telling a profession of experts that they're not doing their jobs right, having never actually taken the time to either do their job for a day in his life, or even to listen to them before attempting to drag them through the mud.

It's just a shame, because this will all end up damaging the education and prospects of a lot of state-school kids in the medium-term, all for the sake of one guy's ideological agenda.

[TaylorS]

Sounds like The UK is going down the same degeneration of the education system that has occurred here in the US. :(

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

he's gonna be, ultimately, my boss. :(

I know education is about the kids, not the teachers, but how are we meant to feel when he suggests we don't work long enough, have too long holidays and have a gold-plated pension, when research shows that on average, teachers work a 50 hour week, and on average, teachers who do not rise above classroom teacher level at retirement live on average 1 year after retirement, just 1 fucking year from all the hard work and stress! (Trades Union figures, I believe).

He's also eroded automatic pay rises so that, whilst teachers do start on relatively generous salaries of 20-27k, they will probably not be given any rise now unless they become a school leader, which obviously is the minority.

And after all this, he expects teachers to somehow deliver a better education? It really is a joke, and a typical example of some Johnny know-it-all coming in and telling a profession of experts that they're not doing their jobs right, having never actually taken the time to either do their job for a day in his life, or even to listen to them before attempting to drag them through the mud.

It's just a shame, because this will all end up damaging the education and prospects of a lot of state-school kids in the medium-term, all for the sake of one guy's ideological agenda.

His hard-on for "free schools" is pretty worrying as well for a whole heap of reasons. I think one very pertinent one that isn't touched on so much in the media is that afaik you don't have to be a qualified teacher to work there - and obviously its not necessary to pay an unqualified worker the same wage as a qualified teacher, so in the interests of running these "free schools" as profitably as possible it is inevitable that many of the posts in these places will be held by non-teachers. Also furthering Govey's agenda, they won't be able to join Teachers' unions either, so its a real coup for him.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I've already said this a couple of times, but I actually think in principle the free school idea is fundamentally sound in some ways, and something that we could tentatively support as socialists, if it was implemented differently.

The idea of devolving the decision to open a school, to build a school, to run a school to a local level would actually be quite a good one. The problem is that, under Gove's current framework, they operate in a vacuum - they need to be brought more in line with national standards for teaching and learning, national curricula, national employment standards for teachers and national funding structures, as well as being part of a national strategy for what we want to achieve with education. Otherwise they're just going to obviously become a bloated mess.

But if we could create a school system where there was a broad curriculum that gave enough freedom to schools, national funding structures and national guidelines for teaching and learning and for the employment of teachers, then it would make perfect sense to devolve decisions on individual schools' running - at the school level - (so, y'know, the particular specialism of the school, its ethos, its particular teaching and learning methods etc.) then that would surely be beneficial in allowing children to explore their creativity within that particular localised socio-cultural context.