The curious case of Mrs Blurt: why Gove must go

Over the past few months, Michael Gove and his advisers have brought the Department for Education into disrepute through their use of private email for official government business. By neglecting to use their governmental email addresses, they had hoped to exploit a loophole which would prevent their correspondence being vulnerable to a Freedom of Information request.

In a scandal that is befitting of the cliched '-gate' suffix, Gove and his advisers have taken a number of measures to prevent the public from accessing this information.

The first was the choice to use their private email addresses in the first place. In the case of Michael Gove, this meant a bizarre pseudonym called 'Mrs Blurt'. It would be laughable were it not so corrupt. Ministers and advisers aren't prohibited from using private email, but they have to disclose doing so. They hoped this would automatically prevent valid FOI requests, but alas, their aim to avoid transparency in this way was foiled.

The second was to claim that it was 'party political business', which is not covered by the FOI act. Evidently, this claim was spurious and the Information Commissioner's Office duly dismissed it on the grounds that the emails led to departmental announcements.

The third and final way, and perhaps the most dubious, has been to reveal that these emails are not available because they have been deleted. We should see this for the deliberate obfuscation that it is. The DfE, wholly tainted by Gove's corrupt leadership, has made a few pronouncements on this subject which don't stand up to common sense.

A DfE tweet claimed that "The act of deleting emails is not evidence of wrong doing". The DfE spokesman stated that "government systems could not operate if every civil servant kept every email they send or received" and "all civil servants routinely delete or archive emails, taking account of their nature and content".

I'm afraid that deleting emails probably does indicate wrongdoing. Nowadays, people don't need to delete emails. A simple text email takes up a minute percentage of an email account's storage capacity. Therefore, one can receive an almost infinite number of these emails without exceeding the limit. As the DfE alluded to, you can archive an email rather than delete it, so that it does not clutter your inbox yet can be speedily retrieved. In no normal circumstance would anybody have a need to delete an email of any considerable importance. This is suspicious.

If the emails have merely been archived, they can be provided to the ICO easily. If they have been deleted, then this must have been co-ordinated. All of the senders and recipients of these emails would have had to have deleted them for this correspondence to be lost forever. Given that deleting emails is unusual, this would have to be a co-ordinated effort from the numerous people involved. Something is being withheld.

Perhaps the DfE spokesman was inadvertently spot-on. 'Taking into account' the sensitive 'nature and content' of the emails, they were intentionally deleted. After all, the emails were presumably about how to enforce academies and free schools on more unwilling or unsuspecting communities. Privatisation of education has no sound basis in educational research; the academies and free school movement is driven by mammon, not a desire for high educational standards. It is difficult to prove otherwise with sound statistical basis. As a result, Gove's DfE realise they can only get away with it by being sneaky.

The private email saga is another example that Michael Gove believes he can operate on a wholly undemocratic level, thinking himself accountable to nobody. This needs to be the figurative straw that breaks the Govian camel's back.

Look at his other shady dealings. His handling of the cuts to the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) project was judged an 'abuse of power'. He has undemocratically sacked the governors of a Haringey primary school who won't accept his top-down enforcement of academy status. He has dismissed and ignored another campaign from parents at a different school who also don't wish to be privatised. He has discussed the possibility of a Murdoch academy, run by his former employer, the media mogul who 8 years ago paid Gove an undisclosed advance for a book he still hasn't written.

As long as he is our Secretary of State for education, our school system will continue to suffer damage that will take decades to repair.

Gove is undemocratic, unaccountable, and incompetent. He MUST go

Thoughts on Michael Gove's speech today

Today Michael Gove made a lengthy speech at a recently-converted academy. The contents have already driven some tweeting teachers into despair. Michael Gove is a man whose mind is awash with dreadful ideas. As a result, his speeches are saturated with ludicrous fallacies which people with training in education regularly find difficult to stomach. Here are a few gems.

1) " I want to give inspirational teachers more freedom to do the job they love"

Most of his favourite policies seem to suggest otherwise. Strange.

2) "Children are failed in primary because their behaviour is not policed with proper boundaries and they are not taught how to read properly".

Really? Seems like a wild generalisation.Way to undermine everyone's confidence in education.

3) "We need to turn round the weakest schools, which are concentrated in our poorest areas, by ensuring nothing stands in the way of giving those children a quality education."

Probably best that Gove resigns then.

4) "And we need, restlessly and relentlessly, to challenge, everywhere and always, the culture of low expectations that condemns so many young people to a lifetime incarcerated in a prison house of ignorance".

Who are these people with low expectations? I can reassure anyone that it's not teachers.

I had written a post which was a lot longer than this, containing a lot more detail. It could have gone on forever, and a sense of despair was getting the better of me as I grappled with the implications of Gove's continuing stupidity. I thought it best to preserve my energy for the classroom.

Some thoughts on Gove's latest idiotic idea: judging schools by successful Oxbridge applications

Goodness knows how many daft ideas Michael Gove has in store for us. The well of ineptitude seems not to be running dry. The notions of both common sense and research-based policy could not be any further from Gove's brain than they currently appear to be.

This week, the Government announced plans to rank schools by the number of pupils which they send to Oxford or Cambridge. It is said that this policy will reveal which schools push pupils the furthest, and hold accountable those which do not.

The Telegraph describes the motivation behind it as this:

It comes amid fears that some schools and colleges are failing to encourage pupils to aspire to elite universities, allowing privately-educated students to dominate places.

This quote is revealing of the Government's approach to education, and particularly that of Michael Gove. They are of the opinion that state schools, through their failings, "allow" privately-educated students an unfair advantage in the higher education application process.

This Government, and to an extent the one before that, have endeavoured to blame the education system for all inequality of opportunity. If pupils from a deprived background do not achieve as high as those from a privileged background, their teachers are 'failing' them and are not having high enough expectations. Never mind the fact that privately educated children were taught in far smaller classes and at institutions with far greater financial resources. Never mind the fact that privileged children were more likely given greater support with their academic development at home. Never mind the fact that private schools have the resources and connections to prime their pupils to ease through the Oxbridge interview process (meritocratic though it often is).

If schools in deprived areas do not match this, despite vastly inferior resources and parents who cannot always provide their children with the same home education, then the teachers are burdened with the blame. Apparently, it has nothing to do with the failure of consecutive governments to tackle the causes of the inequality which leave some children years behind before they've even reached primary school.

Alongside this harmful notion exists another great flaw with the daft idea; it reveals a horrendously elitist view that getting to Oxbridge is the supreme result of a successful schooling system. It fails to consider what pupils themselves might wish to do. Moreover, it perpetuates the last government's myth that academic education is a superior form of education to a vocational one such as an apprenticeship. Academia should not, in any way, carry more prestige than a trade.

This proposal fails in every respect. The proportion of a school's pupils going to Oxbridge do not measure how successfully it is being run, and a school which sends a high amount of pupils to Oxbridge should not assume that it is doing a splendid job. Of course, it should be no harder for a pupil from a deprived background to get to Oxbridge (if they wish) than a privileged pupil, but if that is the case (as I'm certain it is), I think it would be more prudent to look at how the government is failing poorer families than how the teachers are failing their pupils.

Just more evidence, as if we needed it, that Gove has to go.
-

Meanwhile, a reminder that an e-petition is currently being run which calls for Michael Gove to be ousted. Do sign it if you've not already. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/5646

Also, to keep fully up to date on the damage Michael Gove is doing to the UK education system, consider following the 'govemustgo' hashtag on Twitter. http://twitter.com/search?q=#GoveMUSTgo

"Meddling Gove must do better for teachers" (Tom Richmond, Yorkshire Post)

I've just read a splendid column from a journalist named Tom Richmond, who is in the employ of the Yorkshire Post. Rarely for someone outside of teaching, he summarises exactly how a sizeable chunk of the profession feel about their overall boss. It contains the following gems (but I heartily advise that you read the original article):

• Gove "needs some lessons in common sense before he causes even more damage to education policy".
• "Too many teachers have become alienated by years of political interference – and Gove appears to be a master of this unhelpful trait"
• "You’re hardly likely to volunteer to stand in front of a class of 30 pupils each day" if you have to "contend with rowdy youngsters, meddling Ministers and a diminished pension".

I could not have put it better myself.

Gove develops some self-loathing

Let's be fair to Michael Gove. It's hard work being Michael Gove. He spends a lot of time coming up with his daft ideological policies. He puts some effort into inventing tenuous reasons why they would be beneficial for education. All these pesky professionals, with their knowledge of pedagogy and research to support their criticisms, just won't leave him be. All he wants to do, if he could merely be allowed to get on with his job, is destroy state education. Poor, poor Michael Gove.

It's understandable, then, that he should have developed a degree of self-loathing. Why else would he be heading to one of the schools whose BSF contract he cancelled last year? He presumably wants people to punch him in the face so that he can feel some catharsis for knowing what a lousy Minister for Education he is. The article above holds hope that he is going there to announce that he's changed his mind.

This won't have much effect on the 700 other projects which were scrapped in Gove's demolition of BSF, which was labelled an "abuse of power" by the High Court no less.

Perhaps he's starting to realise that, for his good as well as ours, GOVE MUST GO*.

*I'm not seriously arguing that he regrets any of the malicious things he's doing to the prospects of children. He's never shown any sincere signs of being that bothered by the dreadfulness of his work.

Amidst all Gove's other daft ideas, he has a NEW daft idea

Michael Gove is keeping up his record of spewing forth ideologically-driven educational nonsense with a new idea of his: the 'vast majority' of pupils should study maths to the age of 18.

In his endless pedagogical wisdom*, he has stated that children should learn algebra and calculus from a younger age, claiming that there are "strong arguments for introducing concepts earlier". I suppose this stems from the famous and indisputable fact that a sound knowledge of calculus can solve all of society's issues.

With every pronouncement he makes, he further demonstrates his belief that any old idiot with their ridiculous views is capable of expressing a wise opinion on pedagogy. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And 0 out of 10 for effort.

GOVE. MUST. GO.

*I meant "In his infinite feckless ignorance".

Gove speaks to the Commons. They reluctantly endure it.

Today Michael Gove spoke to the House of Commons to make clear his desire that anyone with a CRB check should try to keep classes running on Thursday. He also said this:

Nothing can replace the great teaching offered by gifted professionals... The current generation of teachers in our schools are the best ever, and I want to see them properly supported.

I happen to agree with those facts and this all sounds wonderful, but then again, nothing Michael Gove has ever done supports the notion that he actually believes either of those two statements. Nearly all of his pronouncements and policies completely undermine teachers. Instead of having us exercise our professional expertise, he'd much rather we created his twisted vision of education which he has based on nothing but his own warped imagination.

If he wants us supported properly, the best thing he can do is to resign. Teachers have been quite clear on this. Gove must go.