I WORRY ABOUT MICHAEL GOVE

The thing that worries me about the Tory shadow education secretary, is how little he appears to understand state education.

Whether it’s suggesting that all secondary teachers have first class degrees or that the most successful schools should ‘opt out’ to become academies, he shows clear misunderstanding of how the system works and how it is experienced by those using it.

He has been rightly pilloried regarding the degrees. Good teachers combine academic knowledge, the ability to enthuse, rapport with and respect for their pupils, with emotional awareness of what is going on in the classroom, for themselves, the class and individual students.

About 4 years into my own teaching career I realised that what inspired my pupils at secondary level was not the subject, but my relationship with them & the fact that my empathy, & understanding of them as individuals was at least as important as my ability to stretch their minds and transmit knowledge. It was this awareness that led me to train as a psychotherapist.

Now many people at the pinnacle of academic achievement do not share the above qualities, and would not therefore prosper in the environment of a state school – where they would also need to establish firm boundaries & a strong sense of order & discipline. Helped always if your charges know that you respect and like them ! You have to be prepared to be tough, to know who the likely miscreants are & you have to be able to second guess the kinds of behaviour that are likely to happen – all the time, every minute of the day, wherever you are in school.

Needless to say, those who go into the profession need to be able to handle stress – and I want to be quite clear that being a parliamentary candidate is much less stressful & onerous than teaching in a modern comprehensive !

The above qualifications cannot be squashed neatly into the box labelled first class degree. They are character based. And it’s usually more accurately the case that the less academic are the more well liked by their charges.

State education will not improve by being modelled in the form of private education in terms of degree level or in terms of school type – because the service users are different. What we do need is the same kind of resourcing, both to employ the best teachers in the hardest to reach schools (funding that will follow the pupil, as in the Lib Dems’ Pupil Premium) and to provide the relevant environments for good quality learning experience.

But with the cuts in real terms currently being proposed by the Conservatives, I can’t see that happening. Neither can I see the currently proposed powers to give parents and charities the opportunity to create their own schools – in many ways an excellent idea – being any more than a way of siphoning off money from the majority, a form of grant maintained foundation trust. We must be very careful of half-baked ideas which are based upon ideology rather than a real knowledge of the facts. As Polly Toynbee has correctly noted (Guardian 6.3.10) “Through social ignorance they assume the newsworthy 2% living profoundly dysfunctional lives, represent all the poor.”

A report which claimed – 3 times - that more than half of teenage girls get pregnant in poor areas (real figure 5.4 %) exposes what Toynbee rightly calls the “social cluelessness among those who would govern a country unknown to them”.

She’s so right I will almost give her the last word – “The chasm yawns between [Cameron’s] critique and his remedies – marriage, a few small schools and volunteers.” The possibility of Michael Gove gaining control of our state education system should set the alarm bells ringing. I welcome the freedom offered to parents and the educational advantages to be offered by small schools – but it is not enough.