If This School is so Good, Why Doesn't Michael Gove Send his Daughter to it?

Journalists who care about education have grown weary of the pieties of Education Secretaries and other politicians (notably Jim Callaghan and Anthony Blair, but David Cameron and Lady Thatcher can also be included in this list) who have promised to put right the mess they have made of the schools, but refuse to address the real issue.

 

How many times have we been promised literacy, numeracy,  discipline, etc, by people who refuse to allow us the selection and the restoration of adult authority without which these things will never happen?

 

Currently, these promises issue forth from the mouth of Michael Gove,  though they might as well be dribbling from the lips of Mr Blair or Mr Blunkett, for all the good they will do, or all the difference they will make to those who most need help.

 

Note the redoubled calls to force Oxbridge to take more state school pupils who haven’t been educated well enough to benefit from them (so excluding private pupils who have) , a mad Procrustean scheme, but typical of the education establishment’s absolute refusal, at any cost,  to admit that the comprehensive experiment was a cataclysm.

 

Mr Gove’s latest oration can be found appended to this article

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/06/michael-goves-moral-mission/

 

Needless to say, I don’t share the author’s assessment of it( as explained above).

 

But I feel the need to comment on the sheer blazing nerve of the following passage :

 

‘Take one of my favourite schools – Burlington Danes Academy. If you want to see a model of autonomy and strong leadership in operation observe the head teacher Dame Sally Coates in action.

Every half term children are assessed across subject areas and also graded for their level of application, social contribution and sporting performance. They are told how well they’ve done. And they know that their performance at the end of the term will be re-assessed and published for every student and every parent to see. This rank order system is hugely popular with parents – and also with students. Both are given objective measures of performance – and clear goals to aim for. Parents who were in the past assured in vague airy and amiable terms that their child was a nice lad and doing perfectly well now have hard data to help them support their child’s performance. They know if their child is under-performing expectations, and in what way. Students also know which teachers are most likely to help them climb the rank order system and clamour to be taught by the most gifted professionals.

What Sally Coates has done is replace the harmful competitiveness of street culture – the contest over who is coolest, whose trainers are smartest, whose attitude is hardest, whose backchat is the most fly, with the competitiveness of academic culture – the competitiveness which will help these children win out in later life – who is hardest working, who is the most community-minded, who is most eager to learn, who is most determined to improve.

What Sally has done in Burlington Danes is not unique and incapable of replication – indeed she’s written a brilliant guide which outlines how to match her performance.’

 

Now, I have in the past pointed out that Mr Gove used to praise this school a lot.  I have pointed out that it is a very short walk indeed from Mr Gove’s modest London home. I have noted that it also suits his religious needs (he is a churchgoer, at a C of E church) ,  as it is a Church of England school.  And I have wondered why in that case his daughter will not be going there this autumn, but instead to the highly selective (though not of course by ability, that would never do) Grey Coat Hospital School, a single-sex former grammar school many miles from Mr Gove’s home.

 

Answer came there none (perhaps because so much of the media lazily accepted the spin that Mr Gove was the first Tory Education secretary to send a child to a state secondary, which missed the point that hardly any state secondaries are like Grey Coat Hospital, and in any case wasn’t actually correct (Gillian Shephard sent her children to a state secondary long years ago) . I wondered if perhaps Mr Gove had in some way gone off Burlington Danes. But no, here he is again praising it  and pointing out that the work of the head - Dame Sally Coates – is ‘not unique and incapable of replication’.  So we needn’t worry about what might happen if she leaves for another post, as I believe she plans to do.

 

I am sorry, but I think he needs to be asked until he answers, if Burlington Danes is so wonderful, why then does he not follow his own advice?  Should parents with children his daughter’s age do as Mr Gove says or do as he does? And will they in fact be able to do as he does?