The conclusion of Wednesday’s editorial is that the new education secretary “must listen to what she’s told” (Back to the drawing board: Nicky Morgan reinvents the wheel, 4 November).
If Morgan had had the slightest intention of basing her policies on evidence and detached professional advice, she would never have advanced so utterly stupid a set of proposals in the first place.
There is not nor ever has been the slightest evidence to justify the expansion of the academies programme. There is no reason to suppose that so-called free schools will be any less of a disaster here than they have been in Sweden; sending hit squads of “high-flying” teachers into areas with poor educational standards is a crassly simplistic idea, dreamed up by people with no understanding of how children learn. Most stupid of all, for reasons which your editorial well explains, is the proposal to reinstate formal testing for seven-year-olds.
Morgan is, however, merely the latest in a long line of education secretaries, Labour and Conservative, who have ignored both evidence and professional advice, preferring to base policy upon prejudice and the perceived need to protect vested interests. Indeed, the last education secretary of real ability and integrity was the late Keith Joseph who, having seen the evidence, changed his mind and introduced the GCSE. Sadly for our children there seems little chance of anyone of such stature holding the post these days.
Michael Pyke
Campaign for State Education
• If the education secretary wishes to compare the performance of schools in different parts of the country she should have no need to access the performance of individual pupils. Performance should be aggregated and, if an indication of spread is needed, anonymised. Nor need the individual performance of pupils be disclosed to the pupils themselves or to their parents, who should be reassured that how individuals perform in the tests is not important to their education and that it is the school’s performance that is being monitored, not the children’s.
Steve Loveman
Sheffield
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