Michael gove

Profit and education are still two words that should only be put together with caution. The coalition has long-accepted this is a toxic area, as typified by Nick Clegg in September when he proclaimed: ‘Yes to greater diversity; yes to more choice for parents. But no to running schools for a profit; not in our state-funded education sector.’ But as Fraser argued last year, we need profit-making schools to spread the benefits of Michael Gove’s reforms to the most deprived children. To straddle this divide, Policy Exchange has proposed a halfway solution today: social enterprise schools. Similar to a private company, the proposed model has full financial transparency and a duty to reinvest

Michael Gove’s latest prognosis for schools was delivered at a lunch in Westminster yesterday, but it’s important enough to repeat the morning after. The Independent has a full report here, but the key quotation is this: ’Education is like trying to run up a down escalator. There are some uncomfortable decisions that will have to be taken. There will be years when, because we are going to make exams tougher, the number of people passing will fall. There are headteachers who have been peddling the wrong sort of approach to teaching for too long, who are going to lose their jobs.’ Just read that bit again: ‘the number of people

Iain Martin has flagged upan article from the latest Times Educational Supplement, in which a Norfolk sixth-form teacher bemoans overenthusiastic pupils. Yes — you read that right. In the article, Jonny Griffiths highlights the ‘other aggravation’ in a teachers’ life: ‘Sometimes ambitious children need to slow down. It is 4pm. My weary colleagues and I are slowly unwinding in the maths office, when there is a knock on the door. Could I have a quick word with Jonny, please?” says Michael in a bright, nervous voice. I don’t sigh, but inwardly I think, “Is that my ‘quick’ or yours?”’ And that’s just a fraction of it. The subsequent passage about Cambridge and Bangor is

It seems most of the public agrees with the need to improve our schools. A YouGov poll out this morning shows that 53 per cent think education standards have deteriorated over the past 10 years, while only 12 per cent think they’ve got better. 48 per cent think exams are too easy; just 28 per cent say they’re ‘about right’ and a mere 3 per cent think they’re too hard. And when it comes to discipline, the consensus of inadequacy is especially strong: 83 per cent say schools are ‘not strict enough’, while 0 per cent say they’re ‘too strict’. You don’t see 0 per cent in response to questions

Any CoffeeHousers with a taste for schadenfreude should read David Miliband’s article in the New Statesman. We have to move beyond big government, he declares. We need a growth strategy. I’m not sure if any Labour leader has ever argued otherwise: maybe, as Miliband implies, it has found one now. But, as I ask in my Daily Telegraph column today, what’s worse: a party that’s stuck in 1983, or a modernising movement that’s aiming for 1987? But talk to any Tory, and it’s hard to find any who think the 2015 election is in the bag. Four factors should prevent us from writing off Labour’s chances: 1) David Cameron is

It has been quite a few days for transparency in Westminster. First, Ben Gummer’s ten minute rule bill for tax transparency — which would see every taxpayer in the country receive a statement detailing what they owe and what the money’s being spent on — earned itself a second reading in the House. And now, today, the Department for Education releases its new ‘performance tables’ for secondary schools. You can sift through them here, and I’d recommend you spend at least a couple of minutes doing just that. They reveal finer detail about schools and results than has been made public before, such as about how ‘disadvantaged children’ (those on free school meals

ARK Schools, one of the leading City Academy providers, has just released another amazing set of results with GCSE passes 11 percentage points higher last year than were achieved in 2010. This is staggering progress, given that these schools are serving the same neighbourhoods with the same demographics as the council-run schools which they replaced. It is also a reminder that the City Academy programme, started by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis and expanded by Michael Gove, can claim to be the most rapidly-vindicated social experiments in recent history. The results of ARK’s schools speak best for themselves: ARK’s formula clearly works, and I’d like to see it applied to many more

Speaking on the new Sunday Politics Show, Michael Gove said that it would take a decade for his reforms to change education in this country. Pressed by Andrew Neil on whether he would be able to reverse England’s fall in the PISA rankings, Gove remarked that it would take ten years before we can see whether his reforms have worked in reversing England’s educational decline in comparison to other OECD economies. Interestingly, Gove suggested that one of the measures of the success of his reforms was whether private schools started entering the state sector. He also defended his decision to force some schools to become academies. He argued that he

Michael Gove’s giving a robust defence of his plans to make it quicker and easier for schools to sack bad teachers. ‘You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or an underperforming midwife at your child’s birth,’ he says in the Mail. ‘Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?’ And he was similarly forceful in an interview on the Today programme, the full transcript of which we’ve got here. Gove is emphatic about how important this is. ‘The evidence is quite clear,’ he says. ‘If you’re with a bad teacher, you can go back a year; if you’re with a good teacher you can