Dear Ms Morgan
What a strange job you have. You’ve been playing God, endowed with the special knowledge that enables you to sit in your office and approve yet more free schools. You change the complexion of education in England on a street-by-street basis, often dividing communities up by faith, belief and outlook even though your party leaders talked about the “failure of multiculturalism”.
I’ve been in London, Leicester, Manchester and Bath last week, and the questions I hear from parents and teachers are: why has so much money gone into setting up a free school near us? Why isn’t the free school part of a locally worked out strategy to provide the best possible education for every single child in the area? Is it true that this free school is taking in fewer children who have English as a second language, or who are on free school meals or who are registered as having special needs than other local schools? What kind of teacher is an “unqualified” teacher? Why are the denigrated and sidelined local authorities being given the secret job of picking up the casualties of the academy system? With you approving or refusing the setting up of schools at the stroke of a Westminster pen, is this a democratic or fair way to plan the education of every single child?
This isn’t the only peculiar work you’ve been doing. At the party conference you did a juggling act, praising Caesar Gove even as you buried him. I was reminded of the peculiar way in which your party pretended that it wasn’t the Tories who dumped Margaret Thatcher. And look what’s happened to Michael? He was shredded on TV by Andrew Neil because he couldn’t make it seem that your leader’s promises to the nation have any connection with reality. Is this an education secretary’s career path these days?
Then again, someone behind the scenes must have told you that, as part of burying Gove, you had to do some nicey-nicey stuff to teachers. Do people in the backrooms of political parties come up with this rubbish as an “idea” or a “line”? Do they say, “Now Nicky, we’ve been doing some research and we’ve found that the majority of parents like their children’s teachers and think that the teachers are very hard pressed. Toxic Gove got that wrong. He was beastly to them. So we want you to be lovely. Go away and write a para or two about that. Practise it in front of the mirror and we’ll check you out in the morning …”
And then you stand up at the conference and reel out schmoozy nonsense like it’s going to convince anyone!
The teachers and parents I’ve met either didn’t notice or just shook their heads in disbelief. Apart from anything else, you made it very clear that you’re pressing on with everything that makes parents and teachers fed up anyway.
In your line of work, it struck me that even odder was a comment you made a few weeks ago about how nice it would be if grandparents read to their children. Does this sort of thing come in your brief too? Did the fact that the fickle finger of fate pointed at you in 2014 to take over the reins of education suddenly qualify you to tell England’s grandparents what to do with books?
There’s a serious issue here, as both Ofsted and your own research team have acknowledged. Ofsted’s Moving English Forward report (2012) asked your predecessor to take action to ensure that every school developed a policy on reading for enjoyment for all.
Nick Gibb, last time he was a schools minister, told me that your government wouldn’t do that as you weren’t in the business of sending out “directives” any more. I suspect he thought that particular report came from a branch of Ofsted that had gone native, and was part of the progressive agenda to deprive disadvantaged children of equal access to knowledge ... rather as the test-crazy failure-crazy high-stakes exam system does.
Less easy to sideline is Research Evidence on Reading for Pleasure (2012), produced by … your very own Education Standards Research Team. This excellent document makes it blatantly clear that leaving this matter to homilies about grandparents is woefully insufficient. It is not even good enough to leave it to the excellent work of non-governmental bodies such as Booktrust, the Reading Agency and the Literacy Trust.
Save the Children’s sudden arrival on the scene with a new reading campaign isn’t a “policy” either. A policy is something that implements universal provision in an identified area of need.
Meanwhile, you’ve been busy standing up at conference trying to put plasters on the wounds that your predecessor made.
Yours, Michael Rosen
