My worst nightmare would be if Michael Gove - a Dundee boy - decided to come home to Scotland. But he won't. He's having too much fun at Westminster. Since the coalition was set up and he became education minister, he has gone through the English education system like an attack of the runs, reforming this, abolishing that, setting up new exams, shutting down schools, etc. Hectoring teachers and head teachers. Yes, mostly that. Raising standards, Michael Gove calls it. Easy to trot that out when you see it all from the theoretical point of view, which he does: there's no evidence I can see that he has actually talked to teachers, parents, kids or head teachers.
Now he's moved in on the kids. They are to be graded at the age of 11 and told where they stand in a national league table. Soon a kid will know from tests where exactly they stand in an all-England ranking. And we all know tests are never wrong.
If you're a kid with a learning difficulty - say Asperger's or dyslexia - you'll probably be in the 'bottom' 20% in this ranking. I suppose it might be helpful to you and your parent(s) to know that, although I suspect they may already have worked out your learning difficulty is affecting your academic progress and they and your school have been trying hard since you were wee to give you the kind of support that will help make up for any deficit. Of course, if you're part of the poorest 20% described by that moron Katie Hopkins as the kids that come in late, disrupt classes, don't do homework and have parents that don't come to parents' evenings - well, I'm not sure what happens to you. You probably get expelled to hang around the streets and get recruited into gangs.
If you're a kid in the top 20% academically, on the other hand, there's every chance you don't have a learning difficulty and a good chance you're getting the kind of support you need from school and home. In other words, you'll probably do ok. As was always the case. You'll go to university as you always did and get a job at the end, although the way academic qualifications are being downgraded, you might not have the rosy future you were expecting. Ask today's graduates if you don't believe me.
The problem lies with the middle group: the huge group of middle of the range kids - 60% of the school population who are not academic high-flyers but don't have obvious learning 'challenges'. What's to become of them? I maintain we have always failed these kids. In the past, they were fodder for the mines, factories and building sites. Not many of these workplaces around now to punt these kids into, are there? Do the schools just contain them till they're 16, then unleash them on the world of non-existent work unqualified to do anything very much? No detail available on their fate from Michael Gove. No plan to encourage artisan training or modern apprenticeships or even basic vocational training.
It's not clear to me how different this is from the 11+ of old. And it may well be the next step will be to put kids into secondary schools according to their place in the national rankings. Back to the good old days (for some) of grammar schools and secondary moderns.
There's nothing up with testing kids. Believe me, they are used to being tested these days, but a test without a plan for what comes next in a kid's learning is a fraud. And I see no evidence of forward planning beyond the test here.
And one final question: if this is how easy it is to raise standards, why didn't we think of it before?
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