At the start of this government there was all that stuff about free schools, more academies and then the EMA and school re-building, with attendant u turns and gaffes. Things have settled down. That is a sign the minister has settled in. There are now signs also, that the minister has settled on what really needs to be done.
This is to sort out incoherent exams which fail to deliver evidence of knowledge which either universities or employers value. The appalling announcement today that most of the 400,000 jobs created in the private sector have gone to migrant workers in the last year, is not an indictment of our young people, but of the education process which has brought them to this rejection by prospective employers. Michael Gove is now re-introducing both method and rigour, which will mean a pass, or a grade, has value in the career market. No doubt the usual collection of unkempt and crackpot academics will do the media round with all sorts of reasons why not, but they will be ignored.
Next and epoch making, Gove has declared that the standard of education among teachers must improve. It would, I should have thought, been obvious to all but the silly, that you cannot educate if you are not educated, any more than you can train pilots if you cannot fly or teach doctors, if you know little or nothing of medicine. Yet we discover that prospective teachers are allowed to take numeracy and literacy tests as often as it takes for them to gain a pass. This is, quite literally, preposterous.
The minimum standard for a teacher of our children at any age and any level should be English and Maths A level A*- B, plus a 2.1 degree in a core subject, with the likes of social and media studies insufficient unless a post graduate ad-on to a core subject degree. If the teachers do not like it and the unions kick up, this is one area where we could import migrants, because the reason they have grabbed all the new jobs, is that they are better educated and, as one employer told me acidly, they speak and write better English.
This blog falls in behind you, Michael Gove! New Labour’s experiment in self-delusion in education is over.