Gove Has Been Busy

Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, is really earning his corn at the moment. There is barely a day that goes by when he doesn't come up with a new idea to "improve" education in the UK. But, stop press, because he's actually come up with a reasonable idea:

Unify all the exam boards at GCSE level to avoid "dumbing down" as the different exam boards attempt to get schools' business by setting easier papers and therefore better grades for your school.

This is a superb idea, and one that many teachers have been shouting about for a while. The fact is that in this results driven business, schools understandably shop around for the "easiest" board. They can't change every year because that would be too expensive, but every 10 years they can probably afford it, and this can't give employers a huge amount of confidence in the calibre of the potential recruits wandering through their doors with C grades oozing out of every orifice.

The problem is that Gove wants to take education back to the 1970s by reintroducing the O-Level and CSE system at the same time, which is a two-tier system, although apparently not in the opinion of the government who must have chosen an exceptionally easy Maths GCSE exam board as they clearly can't count to two. I'm not sure of the point of this policy - the GCSE would be fine once there was only one board. Also, those sitting the CSE will automatically know that they have been labelled as "thick", which is hardly a motivating factor for them.

Govestill  maintains that academy status is the way forward for schools, but continually fails to give any concrete reasons for this. The actual reason is that it is in order to save government money, and potentially allow schools, or the companies who run them, to make money out of education. Not even public schools like Eton and Harrow do this as they have charitable status and therefore are not allowed to make a profit - everything they get in has to be spent eventually. One year's surplus goes on improving facilities, as it should be. Academies do have feedom from the national curriculum though, which suggests that the government penned national curriculum is rubbish. But there's the other point here, all the kids have to take the same exams at the end of day, so there's no incentive to do that either. He neglects to mention that schools originally went for academy status because they got a golden handshake, but now there is no extra money.

What it boils down to is the following:

Michael Gove is a pompous arse with an unfathomable desire to turn back the educational clock 40 years, but every now and then one of his extensive, and probably expensive team of advisors has a reasonable idea.