Fasten your seatbelts and brace for a U-turn: Michael Gove's making policy again. Shifting his focus from secondary schools, he's decided the country's weakest 200 primary schools will be placed under new management by 2012. He told BBC Breakfast:
"Sometimes, yes, the headteacher will go, but in other circumstances it will be the case that the staff will remain the same but the leadership that's provided by another school will help those who have been struggling for far too long to improve.
It's not intended to be anything other than a helping hand upwards for the staff in the school, but above all the children, who have to be our first concern."
Gove's pitch was somewhat queered by a Financial Times report of an accounting blunder by the Department of Education that has left many existing academies with more funding than they are entitled to. He's blaming mistakes by local authorities for the overpayments, which have seen some academies receive hundreds of thousands of pounds they're not entitled to.
Mostly, the twitterati are stifling yawns, particularly because all the interesting bits of Gove's speech to the National College of School Leadership were leaked ages ago. As @SchoolDuggery tweets:
"Am I the only one drifting off here? He does go on and on and on..."
Jessica Shepherd is just filing a new story - it'll be up on the site soon.
Education news from the Guardian
• Peter Hall, an Australian financier who has donated more than £450,000 to the Conservatives, provided money to set up AC Grayling's for-profit New College of the Humanities. As founding chairman, Hall says, he provided £200,000 to "breathe life into the idea".
"My personal view is that the public sector should not be involved in providing services.
All the best things in our world are not provided by public enterprise because public enterprises gets corrupted by bureaucracies. I think it's corrosive poison for this country to have public enterprises so deeply involved in providing services.
I am a great believer in the creative power of competition. Where there is competition, excellence becomes the norm. Where there is no competition, bureaucracy and mediocrity become the norm."
Grayling has written a detailed response in the Guardian to criticism of his project and what he calls "painful personal hostility" from some of his former colleagues at Birkbeck University.
"Regarding the point that we are "the vanguard of the coalition's assault on public education", with great respect, this is plain wrong. We are not sponsored by, encouraged by, or have any relation with, the government, the governing parties, or the opposition party. On informing the current minister for universities over a year ago of what we planned to do, we received an enthusiastic verbal response but nothing more; in planning this initiative we were emphatically neither prompted nor encouraged by government or its policy (indeed, there does not appear to be a policy, other than to cut higher education spending as much as possible).
The claim that we are in the "vanguard" of the marketisation of higher education is incorrect for a much more important reason than that, however. In fact, the claim itself is surprising in revealing what is, again with respect, apparent ignorance of what is happening around us. For we cannot be in the vanguard of what has long been happening.
The part-privatisation of the publicly funded universities has been going on for years, though it is now doing so at an accelerated rate. Many universities seek overseas students at full fee, and most of these are now requiring staff to recruit as many more overseas students as they can in a bid to supplement revenue."
• Jessica Shepherd reports that Welsh universities have been told they cannot charge higher tuition fees next year unless they rewrite their plans to encourage more poor teenagers to take up places.
"All 10 Welsh universities and four of the country's colleges want to charge annual fees of more than £4,000 by autumn 2012. But to do this, they had to submit plans to subsidise more low-income students. These plans had to be endorsed by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. However, the quango has told the 14 institutions their plans were not ambitious enough, and that they must rewrite them if they are to charge higher fees."
Meanwhile American universities are seeing a significant rise in the number of British students applying for places.
• The number of people employed in the public sector decreased by 24,000 in the first three months of this year. Polly Curtis tells us that half of those jobs were lost in education, as schools and colleges shed staff at the rate of 1,000 a week. Patrick Butler discusses the figures in his cuts blog. Please join our Cutswatch project to gather information on cuts in schools, and in colleges and universities.
• Chav or cherub? Fielding blogs about the horrors of streaming, from the 11+ of his own childhood to the primary school setting of today. Here's a flavour:
"We all got Thatchered and Blaired and measured and streamed. And now, if you can't get a C grade, you sink into low-stream classes, where your culture is trashed, your voice is denied and you are disappeared. You are superfluous to our post-industrial age.
They don't miss a trick to keep you down and out. They'll invent free schools or Ebacc exams, which you'll fail, because as Chris Woodhead, I'm sorry, Sir Chris Woodhead, once said: "The middle classes have better genes." Marvellous.
You get demonised. Othered. You are 'feral' and a 'chav'."
Education news from around the web
• Senior academics in the UCU lecturers' union have said they fear expansion of for-profit universities could damage the reputation of higher education in the UK, the BBC reports. Of 506 professors who responded to an online survey of union members, 85% thought for-profit universities would be of lower quality than public ones.
• The Independent has a hair-raising take on post-exam student binges in holiday resorts. It's yet another American tradition set to terrify locals, this time around Pembrey in Wales, the venue for Beach Break Live 2011, a four-day extravaganza, that "owes much to the similarly debauched American tradition of spring breaks where students in their "reading" weeks do anything but as they let off steam on beaches in Miami, Palm Springs or over the border in Cancun".
• Could this be the end of education's greatest romance? Katharine Birbalsingh is starting to see tiny faults in the man she once thought was perfect - like his insistance that all schools get half their pupils producing five good GCSEs. Her Telegraph blog declares:
"I'm Michael Gove's biggest fan. But when the support systems around schools are flawed, when Ofsted encourages schools to do the wrong things, when local authorities tie the hands of schools, when the NUT prevents schools from seeking academy status in order to release the control of local authorities over them, when some schools are left to wallow in dire chaos, how can the government possibly set an arbitrary target of 50% and leave it at that?"
• Here's a great story in the Telegraph: Academics from Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf have carried out a detailed analysis of the 700 head injuries suffered by characters in the Asterix comic books. The German scientists say the "plucky little Gaul" and his sidekick Obelix were responsible for causing more than half of the wounds, "under the influence of a doping agent called the magic potion", with Roman soldiers their most common victims - though none appear to die:
"The favourable outcome is astonishing, since outcome of traumatic brain injury in the ancient world is believed to have been worse than today and also since no diagnostic or therapeutic procedures were performed."
Guardian Education Centre seminars for teachers
This half-day conference for primary school teachers will help you inspire students to read with pleasure and maintain the reading habit. Andy Stanton, author of the Mr Gum series, will be joined by Julia Eccleshare, Guardian children's books editor, and reading development experts.
Time: 1 July, 9.15-12.45.
Cost: £48, including refreshments and resources.
Insight into Journalism: investigative and features journalism
This seminar, part of our popular Insight into Journalism series, gives secondary school teachers and college tutors the chance to spend a day at the Guardian. You'll meet specialist journalists from the investigations team, find out from writers what makes a good features article and learn about commissioning, editing and interview techniques.
Time: 8 July, 9.15-4.30.
Cost: £72, including lunch and resources.
Education seminars from Guardian Professional
Distinctiveness and branding in higher education
Higher education institutions will struggle in the marketplace unless they stand out from competitors and make sense to stakeholders. The Guardian's half-day seminar in partnership with the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education will explore what it takes to develop and maintain a distinctive brand that attracts students, staff and funders. Participants will hear from experts, examine case studies and have the opportunity to network with peers.
28 June, London.
Making the most of media opportunities to enhance your school's profile
Whether it's sharing good news or handling a crisis, headteachers and school management teams need to be able to handle the media in all of its forms. This one-day seminar in association with the NAHT is essential for new and aspiring heads as well as established school leaders who wish to update their knowledge. It includes a session on social media.
20 September, London.
Find us on the Guardian website
All today's EducationGuardian stories
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook
EducationGuardian resources
The Guardian University Guide 2011
The Guardian Postgraduate Guide 2011
The world's top 100 universities
Updating table of university fee announcements for 2012
From Guardian Professional
The Higher Education Network for university professionals
Free online classroom resources on the Teacher Network
More about Cribsheet
Sign up to get Cribsheet as a daily email
To advertise in the Cribsheet email, contact Sunita Gordon on 0203 353 2447 or email sunita.gordon@guardian.co.uk
Subscribe to get Cribsheet as an RSS feed
Interested in social policy too? Sign up for Society Daily
