Education

The Labour Party has a problem with education. On the one hand, it recognises that the academies programme which it inaugurated is very popular with parents. But on the other hand, it knows that the unions, upon which it depends financially, are opposed to reform. This creates tension where policy is concerned: how can the party satisfy voters and the unions? This tension is embodied by the reform-minded shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg (a driving force behind the original adoption of academies), who appeared on Andrew Neil’s Sunday Politics earlier this morning. His words (and there were a lot of them) speak volumes about the party’s difficulty with the word

Nick Clegg wants to make social mobility his big theme in office. This is an ambitious target and one unlikely to be motivated by electoral consideration given that visible progress on this front is unlike to be achieved by 2015. The publication of the former Labour minister Alan Milburn’s report, commissioned by the coalition, into the professions and social mobility takes us to the heart of the debate: when can most be done to aid social mobility. Personally, I think the emphasis should be on education reform and family policy. Others, argue that more can — and should — be done later. Politically, as the row over the appointment of

Garlands from all quarters for Michael Gove’s performance at the Leveson Inquiry this afternoon (well, not quite all quarters) — but the most significant thing that the Education Secretary said wasn’t actually related to the media, but to his ministerial brief. When asked about the prospect of profit-making free schools, he replied that they ‘could’ happen ‘when we come to that bridge’. It’s probably the clearest statement that Gove has made, on record, to demonstrate that he’s not averse to introducing the sort of profit arrangements that could give his agenda an almighty boost. The question is: when will he get to that bridge, then? My understanding is that it’s

The Education Secretary gave a very pugnacious speech this morning on the need to improve the country’s state schools. ‘It is remarkable,’ Michael Gove said at independent school Brighton College, ‘how many of the positions of wealth, influence, celebrity and power in our society are held by individuals who were privately educated’. He cited the various professions — politics, law, medicine — where private schools are ‘handsomely represented’. That’s certainly not a new observation. Gove could have, if he’d wanted to, cited the Sutton Trust’s statistics (below) showing the proportion of judges, Lords and CEOs who come from independent schools. Instead, he chose a more novel — and effective — way

I was a panellist on Radio Four’s Any Questions last night, in Bedworth outside Coventry. At the reception afterwards, I got talking to the pupils, teachers and even the local vicar of the school where the show was recorded. With so much gloom (and shambles) in Westminster, it was a heartening reminder of what is going right in Britain, aided by David Cameron’s government. I thought I’d share it with CoffeeHousers. Not so long ago, Ash Green School was seeing a pathetic 3 per cent of its pupils achieve what is now called ‘Five Good GCSEs’ (5 GCSEs at A-Cs, including English & Maths). Now it’s 65 per cent. Success has

Is it possible to set schools free while demanding a beefed up teaching of our nation’s history? Both are topics close to the heart of the Education Secretary but eventually, he’s going to have to choose one over the other. Top-down orders on the History curriculum will undermine attempts to give schools and teachers more control over what they do. Tristram Hunt threw this curveball in this weeks magazine, where he states it is a example of the classic Tory struggle between liberalism and conservatism: ‘The self-inflicted challenge comes with delivering this national narrative of Britishness. Because at the crux of Gove’s schools revolution is the dismantling of national provision.

I counted five issues which the NUT conference suggested that teachers might strike over. But in a conference full of the usual bluster, the most noteworthy threat was not to cooperate with Ofsted inspections. Ever since the new chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw — who was hugely successful as the head of Mossbourne academy — announced that a merely satisfactory grade would no longer be regarded as good enough, the teaching unions have taken agin him. But not cooperating with Oftsed would be unlawful. Anyone who tried to block an inspection would be liable to prosecution and a fine. Another issue exercising the unions is George Osborne’s proposals for regional

It may be a sleepy day in Westminster, but Michael Gove and his school reforms have lost none of their brilliant urgency. The schools secretary has today written to Ofqual — the body in charge of regulating the exams system — to ask that universities be allowed to involve themselves, much more closely than ever before, in designing and implementing A-levels. In the letter he sums up his plans thus: ‘I want to see new arrangements that allow Awarding Organisations to work with universities to develop qualifications in a way that is unconstrained — as far as possible — by centrally determined criterion.’ And he adds that this process should

After last August’s riots the debate became quickly polarised. Were socio-economic factors like unemployment to blame, or was it all down to the individual choices of the rioters? David Cameron and other Conservative ministers knew which side of this debate they wanted to be on. They had been taken by surprise by the riots, initially failing to realise how serious things were, but when they got back from their holidays they set out a clear and confident line, brushing off most questions about links to the state of the economy or youth attitudes, and condemning the riots as ‘criminality pure and simple’. The soundbite was deliberately simplistic; Conservative ministers’ actual