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COMING OUT OF THE SHADOWS What would a Conservative victory mean for UK teacher’s? How will Michael Gove’s plans for education be received in the classroom? By Jessica Moore
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n 5 November, Michael Gove, the Conservative shadow schools secretary, spelled out his party’s education policies for the first time. In a speech at the rightwing Centre for Policy Studies thinktank, Gove made a number of promises. Some were controversial. Some were well received. Let’s look at Gove’s Brave New School World. First, Gove promises that the Tories, if successful in the next general election, will narrow the achievement gap between the poorest and the wealthiest children. Indeed, he pledges to make schools “the engines of social mobility”. “A Conservative government will give every child the kind of education that is currently only available to the well-off: safe classrooms, talented and specialist teachers, access to the best curriculum and exams, and smaller schools where teachers know the children’s names,” Gove said. On to proposal two. Gove pledges to make exams and the curriculum “more rigorous”. He will “dismantle the power of a centralised bureaucracy, radically reform qualifications and slim down the curriculum”. As an example of what he sees as a failing in the current system, Gove says that pupils currently taking GCSEs in modern languages do not have to sit translation exams, and that there is no compulsory literature element in some A-level language syllabuses. Proposal three is directed at trainee teachers: the Tories will refuse to fund teacher training for graduates who do not have at least a 2:2 degree. Primary school teachers will come from the top one-third of graduates, rather than the current top two-thirds, and would-be teachers would only be allowed to resit literacy and numeracy tests to gain entry to teacher training courses once. Next on the agenda are academies. Gove says all schools – including primaries – will be encouraged to become academies, or “quasi-independent state schools”. These will “act as a goad and a spur to improvement in neighbouring schools,” he said. “We will break up the bureaucratic monopoly on school provision, which denies parents choice and introduce competition specifically to help drive up standards.” Gove’s final major proposal is to tighten up inspection. Under a Conservative government, Ofsted will be allowed to make inspections of schools where there were serious behaviour problems without giving notice. So what does this all mean for teachers? In July, Gove gave a similar speech at the Royal Society for the encouragement of
Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). In his blog, matthewtaylorsblog.com/thersa, Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, consequently commented “I am fascinated by the gap between the rhetorical attractiveness of the Gove agenda and its less convincing basis in concrete policy”. The residing schools minister, Vernon Coaker, goes further. He says “the rhetoric of Michael Gove’s speech does not match the reality of the Conservative party’s policies, which would take us back to a two-tier education system.” He also claims the attainment gap between the poorest and the wealthiest children is already narrowing under Labour: “While the Tories try to do down the state education system, the truth is that schools in the poorest areas have seen the biggest rises in results over the last decade. All this progress would be set back by Tory plans to cut spending on schools”. Alex Moore, emeritus professor in the faculty of culture and pedagogy at the Institute of Education (IoE), says: “I think the real danger of policies like Gove’s is they imply that teachers and schools alone are to blame for underachievement. That takes away from politicians responsibilities to address the situation beyond the classroom. I don’t think it’s possible to address the achievement gap without narrowing the poverty gap. That means more money is put into giving poorer families the quality of support outside school that a lot of middle class families get. Not everyone has the same facilities at home; not everyone has the same faith that the system is actually going to work for them.”
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More immediately, however, Gove’s proposals have directly antagonised many teachers. “The implication of his proposals to provide ‘safe classrooms’ and ‘talented’ teachers for children of all family incomes is that state schools are currently unsafe and employ substandard teachers”, says Justine Callow, who teaches English at a state comprehensive. “This is not only inaccurate, it is actually very offensive to those of us who work night and day to give young people the best possible education and school experience. It’s simply scaremongering”. Callow also scoffs at the charge that some teachers don’t know the names of the children they teach. “There isn’t a single teacher in my department who doesn’t know every student they work with,” she says. Moore agrees. “I’d be very surprised if any teachers don’t know their kids’ names”, he says. As for Gove’s belief in the need for more stringent testing in schools, forget it, says the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL). Mind you, the ATL believes that Labour and Conservative are as bad as each other in this respect. In response to a report by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) Select Committee, the ATL’s general secretary, Dr Mary Bousted, said in November: “The government must consider the impact of over-testing on the education of Britain’s children, and the view of ATL that high stakes national testing at all key stages should now be withdrawn. What matters most is children’s progress.” “We are a nation obsessed with testing”,
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agrees Callow. “It does no one any good. The children are under too much pressure and stress, and teachers spend more time marking and ‘teaching to the test’ than they do educating. Neither Labour nor the Tories are listening to teachers, who have been saying for years that we need fewer tests, not more”. And what of Gove’s teacher training proposals? “I think they’re highly problematic”, says Moore, who spent 10 years in initial teacher education before focusing on curriculum studies. “I can’t speak on behalf of the IoE – but, in my experience, some of my best teachers ever had a Third Class or Lower Second honours degrees. That’s because the knowledge you need to get a top university degree is not necessarily the knowledge you need to succeed in the classroom. Teachers have to be able to get on with kids, to communicate knowledge, to be organized, to enthuse people. So I was always happy to take people not just on the basis of what they got in their degree, but on the skills they were able to communicate at interview. To say that children are not doing well because teachers don’t have a top degree is very simplistic. Teaching is not just a matter of transmitting subject knowledge; learning is a very active meaning-making process.” Moore feels that Gove’s ideas about teacher training are a “complete misunderstanding of what it takes to be a good teacher. We could be cutting out a lot of potentially excellent teachers if we follow these policies.” Moore adds that in his experience only a very small number of teachers with less than a 2.2 apply for teacher training schemes anyway. “If that’s so, the policy is implying a situation that barely exists, and then saying that it will improve matters by remedying it. It is creating a myth in which education is plagued by large numbers of ‘poorly qualified’ teachers, and in which it is this that is maintaining the ‘achievement gap’ between rich and poor children. It’s also implying that the judgments of highly experienced HEIs in recruiting and selecting trainee teachers is suspect. It’s a world where rhetoric is more important than evidence.’ Overall, Gove has done little to befriend the teaching community this year. At the Conservative conference, he enraged many teachers by accusing the educational establishment of defeatism, political correctness, and a culture of “dumbing down”. “It’s a kick in the teeth, isn’t it?” says Callow. “Gove’s plans seem to focus on criticising teachers and a return to chalkand-talk teaching methods. The Tories talk of narrowing the wealth divide and raising standards, but their policies don’t stand up to scrutiny. Then again, neither to Labour’s. It’s time both political parties started listening to teachers and educators”.
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