What has it got in its pockets?

Wishing to buy the Queen a yacht, having the self confidence to write a forward to the Bible and expressing a desire to have a portrait of himself hung in every Free School and Academy, it is becoming increasingly clear that Michael Gove is below contempt.

Unfortunately for him, the judiciary might think otherwise. The ever engaging Tom Watson has asked some rather awkward questions of the Secretary of State for Education which, as yet, have remained unanswered. Having abandoned a generation of children, Gove might have to waste some of his precious time once again up before a judge with more tenacity than Leveson.

Yes precious, illegality is Hobbit forming.

Child catcher

Ofsted have decided that 450,000 British school children need to disappear off the Special Educational Needs Register because they are too expensive to maintain. I do not think that this government can sink any lower. I might be wrong.

Quasi mondo

For those of us of a certain age, perhaps the happiest memory of far off school days is witnessing a falling out between the number one bully and the number two bully as they knocked lumps out of each other in the playground. The resultant disappointment of a spoil sport teacher separating them is now assuaged by the goings on at the Royal Courts of Justice.

As the net closes on those responsible for wrong doing at News International, only the most bone headed Flashman would be stupid enough not to realise that when fighting to maintain his position, the gloves would soon be off for Murdoch and the knives would be out for Cameron. The dirty digger takes no prisoners and we can be sure that the 163 pages of emails implicating government conspiracy in the BSkyB take over and released when the boy child was feeling the heat at Leveson, are just a tiny proportion of the dirt the digger can dish.

The Right Honourable Member for South West Surrey, former head boy of Charterhouse, Secretary of State for Culture and possibly the most accurate Spoonerism ever uttered might now be regretting his offer to hold the coats of the battling tyrants. Jeremy Hunt, in quasi-judicial mode, is deaf to the bells tolling his imminent plunge from the parapet of the Palace of Westminster. It would seem unfair to suggest that this inept, biased, incompetent, complete and utter bastard would sacrifice his “special” advisor Adam Smith to the wolves in order to save his own very thin skin. It might seem unfair, but it is, sadly, true.

Describing Hunt as that shifty looking bloke on the government front bench with flames billowing out of his trousers would not, at the moment, be terribly helpful. That portrayal could apply to the entire coalition of villains currently filling voluminous trouser pockets with cash as they systematically dismantle the state. Given that collusion between politicians and corporate vested interests is a tradition as old as even the oldest profession, Cameron`s assertion to the house that he can see no evidence of at least three breeches of the ministerial code rings hollow. Under the disgraceful passage of the Welfare Reform Bill into law, Cameron`s bogus deafness and blindness needs to be investigated by the unqualified, incompetent and profit led firm ATOS, currently removing benefits from the sick, the disabled and the terminally ill.

In a desperate attempt to buy time to burn the evidence, a Prime Minister who promised open, transparent, accountable and open government has now been caught with his pants down and it will not be long before foresters are summoned to the commons to chop off the legs of ministers to create fire breaks to prevent the wild fire of lies spreading from trouser to trouser. Leveson, it seems, will provide all the answers.

The tactic of handing the embarrassing, little inconvenience of Jeremy Hunt`s improper and possibly illegal activities to Mr Justice Leveson is really rather clever. The remit and mandate of the Leveson Inquiry is to investigate the probity, legality and ethical standards of the media. Finding any evidence of morality, particularly in the case of the Murdoch family and their minions, is understandably taking a very long time and when my noble lord finally publishes his findings, the blood bath of local elections will be long forgotten and we will all be enjoying 60 glorious years and an egg and spoon race in a locked down London sponsored by McDonalds.

Cameron is an expert on remits and mandates having failed to win an election and succeeded in destroying a nation. In is not within the duty of Leveson to rule on the impropriety of ministers, that is the role of the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister himself, so Hunt seems likely to take his place at the opening ceremony celebrating junk food, corporate greed, cheats and liars. The delicious irony of the Leveson inquiry, commissioned by David Cameron, is the fact that the noble Lord will present his findings to none other than the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport who, at the time of writing, remains employed and is currently yet to help the Metropolitan Police with their inquiries.

Hunt and Cameron have stated that all records of communication between government and News International that might or might not exist and might or might not have been accidentally lost or erased, will be made available to Leveson. If that is the case and if the inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice is now the only instrument of government scrutiny, will Michael Gove submit his private email traffic between his department and the corporate sharks making a bundle out of his disastrous academy programme? Will the repulsive Andrew Lansley publish his contacts and beneficial remuneration with private health care companies and the odious Richard Branson and the equally evil Serco regarding profiteering from the NHS sell off? Once it starts to flow, that is a tide that even Hameron and Cnut cannot stop.

All this is very unlikely, but, as Quasimodo might have observed: “The bells, the bells. Will these dreadful alarm bells ever stop ringing?”

Every picture tells a story

The rumour that a portrait of Michael Gove is to be prominently displayed in every Academy and Free School needs to be taken with an industrial strength pinch of salt. Such a preposterous idea could not possibly be true, could it?

The Secretary of State for Education has had to endure an extraordinary amount of name calling, not least from this humble blog. His dogged determination to impose his single, some would say narrow, minded vision for the future of education has resulted in outpourings of bile and invective usually reserved for paraplegics expecting the state to pay for a wheelchair, benefit cheats and swimmers who disrupt boat races. Perhaps it is time to show a little sympathy for Michael Gove.

Much has been made of his physical appearance. He might, admittedly, not be the thinking woman`s idea of George Clooney or Johnny Depp, but to challenge the credibility of the custodian of our children`s education because he looks a bit odd is as insidious as branding terminal cancer patients as scroungers and parents who question education policy as Trotskyites. A better way to understand current education policy is to understand the minister himself. It might be worth examining what made Michael the man he is today.

Born in the summer of love a few weeks after the release of Sgt. Pepper, some nastier observers have commented that Gove has a face that only a mother could love. Sadly for Michael, this was not the case. Given up for adoption at birth, the plot of his life is worthy of Dickens. At four months old he was taken in by a fish gutter and his kindly wife and by 1972 was attending a state primary school in the rougher end of Aberdeen. Margaret Thatcher was then Education Secretary and achieving notoriety by taking milk away from children as an inept government led by Edward Heath was ruining the economy and lying to the electorate. One can only imagine the isolation felt by studious little Michael and the taunts and bullying he suffered at the hands of vicious, inner city urchins in the cold, granite school halls of a cold, granite city.

His parents scrimped and saved and managed to afford to send him to the best private secondary school in Aberdeen, Robert Gordon`s College. The “Auld Hoose”, as RGC is known, is proud of its illustrious sporting alumni including Scottish Rugby internationals and Olympian athletes. Rugger, hockey and all things physical were, and are, important at Michael`s old alma mater. Having escaped from working class oiks, the poor boy must have found himself the butt of crude jokes and cruel humiliation in the showers from toffs, cads and bounders after a cross country run. It is little wonder that he now despises schools.

Seeking refuge in Virgil, Homer and Aristotle, young Michael plotted his revenge against the bullies and in 1985 entered Lady Margaret Hall, an Oxford college formerly the exclusive preserve of women. Earlier that year, Oxford dons had refused to grant an honorary doctorate to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher because of their concerns over education policy and funding. Michael Gove went on to become President of the Oxford Union.

Gove graduated in the summer of 1988 and without any qualification in teaching, pedagogy or educational psychology, embarked on a career in journalism, eventually becoming assistant editor of the Times and rather close to a certain Rupert Murdoch. With delicious serendipity, that summer saw Kenneth`s Baker`s Education Reform Act pass into law. Considered to be the most sweeping “reform” of education since the 1944 Butler Act, the Conservative legislation introduced the National Curriculum which was sold as a guarantor of an equitable education for every child in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland, including the granite city of Aberdeen, continues to set its own curriculum.

In order to ensure an equitable education for every child in the nation, apart from the wee bairns north of the border, Key Stages and attendant testing for progress were imposed to verify equality and school league tables would allow parents to judge the performance of schools. The erroneous assumption, both then and now, is that children respond to learning at the same rate, with the same level of cognition and with the same level of language acquisition. They do not and, of all people, the current Secretary of State refuses to acknowledge this basic tenant of child development. Poor Michael.

Back in the 80`s, the government took a look round the crumbling school estate and it did not like what it saw. With all but derelict Victorian primaries and asbestos riddled 60`s comprehensives, the only thing the department saw was the repair bill. In a move of tactical genius, the Baker Act introduced Local Management of School or LMS, still referred to as “Hell of a Mess” in staff rooms across the nation. This wheeze devolved funding capital directly to head teachers. The message from government was clear: “It`s your money, you fix the roof. It`s not our problem anymore.”

The 1988 Act also gave us City Technology Colleges where the great unwashed were to be trained to use a hammer and then find work that suited their station. These seats of learning were later embraced by New Labour and rebranded as Academies and, at first, did quite well in improving standards and examination results. They did so well, in fact, that the current government is still using years old statistics to justify present day failing Academies. However, the headlong rush to privatise education continues unabated and is rapidly descending into chaos. Poor Michael.

Returning to the 1988 Education Reform Act, the jewel in the crown of the legislation was the creation of Grant Maintained Schools. The idea was to liberate schools from tyrannical local authority control and allow individuals to select pupils, control their own budgets funded directly from central government and basically do whatever they bloody well liked. It was a disaster of Titanic proportion. The scheme failed due to inept leadership, financial mismanagement and, in some cases, corrupt criminality. Now the GMS idea is back with knobs on in the form of Free Schools. Poor Michael.

Over the recent Easter weekend, overpaid, lazy, militant Marxist teachers spent a tiny fraction of their generous holiday entitlement to attend two union conferences. The media quite rightly reported that these anarchists are planning industrial action that will damage and possibly kill children. What went largely unreported is that the teaching unions intend to ignore an imposed reading test on six year olds which will condemn schools, parents and children as failures unless they understand the meaning of quantitative easing, the moral necessity of taxing the poor to reward the rich and the fact that Michael Gove is nothing short of a living god.

Similarly, teaching unions intend to simply ignore Ofsted which, under Gove and his rather sinister pal Sir Michael Wilshaw, has become a crude instrument to enforce crackpot government policy and has lost any credibility that it may once have possessed. Understandably, the Secretary of State sees no reason to take any notice of a gang of indolent, inept Trots. Michael doesn`t like teachers.

Nearly £340million has been spent on the Academies and Free Schools programme with more than 130 department officials pandering to Michael`s vanity project. Out of the 79 Free Schools due to open in September, 35 do not yet have a location or a building. All of the free 79 have yet to set out curriculum, admission criteria or any meaningful system of governance or accountability.

In those terrible childhood years of rejection, isolation, humiliation and incessant bullying, little Michael must have dreamed of this vengeful moment. Forget the research that indicates that victims of bullying become a bully given half a chance. Little Michael has caught a spider and is engrossed in pulling its legs off one by one.

Having written an introduction to a reprint of the King James Bible, Michael seems to have misinterpreted the story of Dorian Gray. In some Aberdonian attic, there is a portrait of Michael looking tall, noble, athletic, popular and even handsome. This is the picture that might be copied and hung in the halls of schools that have submitted to his will.

However, the flesh and blood Michael that walks the earth is presenting symptoms of quaint Victorian megalomania. He has suffered enough, and rather than unleashing our contempt, derision and invective towards this innocent victim currently destroying education, we should instead offer sympathy and support. As a civilised society, the very least we can give him is the very best of post traumatic stress counselling.

We can only hope that the portrait remains locked in the attic.

Pay day

School governors are an exotic and rare breed. Unsung, generally unloved and usually unnoticed, this endangered species is now under threat of extinction.

Buried within the growing manure heap of self-interest, insider dealing and corruption that masquerades as coalition government “reforms” is an astonishing piece of work by the new head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw. Regular readers of this humble blog might recall how this latest mandarin became the regulator of all things education and now the chief inspector of schools has come up with the marvellous idea of paying school governors. Now, before volunteer governors start throwing their hats into the air with joy, it might be best to pause and take a look at the wider strategy being imposed by the hopeless Michael Gove.

School governors freely give their time, expertise, commitment and dedication for the good of individual schools. They can expect employers to allow time off work for the business of governance and can claim legitimate expenses. In reality, the most a governor gets in return for their important role is a cup of tea and, if they are very lucky, an occasional biscuit. Michael, you can call me Sir, Wilshaw wants to change all that.

He told a commons committee:
“My view is that when a school is doing poorly, we need to think about paid governance. And my view is if a school goes into a requirement to improve category, on the first occasion, the secretary of state should intervene and think about paid governance there.”

The secretary of state, the aforementioned Michael Gove, has publicly stated on many occasions that he intends to make every state school in the country an Academy or a Free School. Here`s the interesting bit. Under the current legislation, there is no compulsion for Academies or Free Schools to have parent, staff or local authority representation. Indeed, the term “governor” will disappear to be replaced with the term “trustee”. Much is made of the new freedoms being given to governing bodies and reassurances given about a “transition period”, but with a Chair of Trustees given the power to appoint and dismiss trustees, it is not difficult to see where this is going.

Governance in sponsored Academies is undertaken by trustees appointed by the sponsor and are usually employees of the private company or Academy trust. Converted Academies can appoint whoever they like and Free Schools seem to be above the law. Given Wilshaw`s plan, the door is open to trustees being paid to turn up and approve whatever Michael Gove demands.

The sublime beauty of this strategy is twofold. Firstly, it gets rid of those troublesome governors who for years and without financial gain have put the interests of schools and children before the egos and ambitions of deluded politicians. Secondly, it allows the minions of megalomaniacs to scoff a bit more wonga from the trough.

In his address to MP`s, Sir Michael Wilshaw expresses the boredom he experienced when reading the latest Ofsted annual report. He said:
“I just think we need to present the data differently and the judgements differently, and I`m in discussion with the executive board at Ofsted about changing the format of the annual report to make it easier to read”.

It is, of course, entirely coincidental that the data previously used to justify the bullying of head teachers and governing bodies is now showing that Academies are not doing as well as Gove and his pals in the Department of Education keep telling us. So, the data will be quietly dropped because it is too hard to understand. Strange then, that the Department is still demanding an improvement in standards of literacy and numeracy. You can read more of this rubbish here.

All this is clearly the work of the hand of Gove, possibly the most inept education secretary since Sir Keith Joseph. Ed Balls was useless in the job, as was Ruth Kelly and Charles Clarke. In recent years, only Alan Johnson, David Blunkett and Estelle Morris came anywhere near competency and they did not last long. Compared to Gove, however, these lightweights have the authority of Aristotle.

Gove rampages through education, lying, cheating and bullying, blaming failing schools, inadequate teachers, incompetent heads and “Trot” governing bodies in the hope that people will not notice a failing, inadequate, incompetent and extremist secretary of state. This pathetic excuse of a man is harming children.

Gove, having been judged to have acted unlawfully over the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future programme, would now probably not receive a clean CRB check and so, technically, be forbidden from entering a school. Little Michael has thought of this and has decided to do away with the red tape of checking people who are able to come into contact with children.

Gove`s unlawful activity, though, might just come back to haunt him. The former News International journalist used a private email account with the wonderful alias “Mrs Blurt” to conduct government business. Incriminating evidence, it is alleged, has been deleted and Gove might find himself, once again, up before the bench.

One can only hope that Sir Michael Wilshaw will join Gove in the dock. Until then, they will continue to join each other at the trough.