Category: Education

The comments made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 9 September 2010.

For many years our education system has failed properly to value practical education, choosing to give far greater emphasis to purely academic achievements. This has left a gap in the country’s skills base and, as a result, a shortage of appropriately trained and educated young people to fulfil the needs of our employers. To help support our economic recovery, we need to ensure this position does not continue and that in future we are able to meet the needs of our labour market.

To enable us to achieve this long-term aim, we are currently developing a new approach to qualifications, considering all routes which are available to young people, to ensure the qualifications they study for are rigorous, relevant and bear comparison with the best in the world.

Professor Wolf is highly experienced in this field and has all the credentials required to lead this review.

The comments made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 13 June 2010.

For too long, too many children in our country have suffered the misery of being bullied on a daily basis.

The numbers of children being bullied is declining – but last year as many as a quarter of children were still victims at least once.

And it’s simply unacceptable for even one child to be victimised, whether it’s in or out of school, or via text messages or social networking sites.

That’s why I have made tackling bullying and bad classroom discipline top priorities.

We can’t allow any young person to go to school dreading the treatment they will get.

When a bullied child is brave enough to speak out, we must support them – not the bully.

We can be proud of the vast majority of young people. But when bullies are identified, we can’t just suspend them for a couple of days – and then allow them to saunter back into school, to torment their victims all over again. Yet in 2008 just 90 children were expelled for bullying.

Our Education and Children’s Bill in the autumn will put heads and teachers back in control, giving them a range of tough new powers to deal with bullies and the most disruptive pupils. Heads will be able to take a zero-tolerance approach and will have the final say.

I’ll also give teachers the right to remove disruptive children from the classroom without fear of legal action. They will be able to search pupils for weapons, and items like iPods and mobile phones, and confiscate them.

We trust that headteachers will use these powers. But there will be no-notice inspections for schools where behaviour is out of control.

These are the measures that will put heads and teachers back in control so they can enforce discipline in their schools and tackle bullying.

The comments made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 26 July 2010.

Schools should be engines of social mobility. They should provide the knowledge, and the tools, to enable talented young people to overcome accidents of birth and an inheritance of disadvantage in order to enjoy greater opportunities.

Children from poorer backgrounds, who are currently doing less well at school, are falling further and further behind in the qualifications race every year – and that in turn means that they are effectively condemned to ever poorer employment prospects, narrower social and cultural horizons, less by way of resources to invest in their own children – and thus a cycle of disadvantage and inequality is made worse with every year that passes. Last year of the 80,000 pupils who had been on free school meals just 45 made it to Oxbridge. Just 2 out of 57 countries now have a wider attainment gap between the highest and lowest achieving pupils.

This is not good enough and addressing this disparity is a top priority of the coalition government. It is for this reason that we are implementing a pupil premium, to ensure that extra funding is targeted at those deprived pupils that most need it.

The article written by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 12 July 2010.

I know that pupils, parents, schools and communities across the West Midlands will have been understandably distressed and concerned by the confusion following my decision to end the last government’s school rebuilding programme.

I wish in particular to apologise to people in Sandwell, who are doing such a great job, where schools were wrongly informed their rebuilding would proceed under Building Schools for the Future when, sadly, it will not.

When I met the leaders of Sandwell Council on Thursday, I promised to visit the area soon and to meet with the pupils, parents, headteachers and teachers who have been affected. I look forward to doing so and top of my agenda will be the future of school building.

Because the end of the Building Schools for the Future scheme doesn’t mean the end of investing in our schools. As I explained to the councillors, I am still absolutely committed to rebuilding and refurbishing schools. I don’t want to see any pupils learning in classrooms which are not up to standard and there are schools, including many in the West Midlands, that do desperately need to be repaired. What I also said was that I don’t believe that the Building Schools for the Future programme was spending taxpayers’ money anywhere near efficiently enough – and money wasted on this is money that can’t go on training great teachers or keeping class sizes down. That was why I want to review all of the different ways in which we build schools to ensure that money is allocated quicker, more efficiently and, most importantly, more fairly. The Building Schools for the Future scheme has been characterised by massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy. Even the President of the Royal Institute of British Architects called the programme “wasteful and bureaucratic” and said we could do more for less. Before any project is approved, local councils have to navigate their way through over 60 official documents. It is no surprise that it can take almost 3 years before a single brick is laid and some councils have only just started building new schools despite starting the process 6 years ago.

This bureaucracy meant that schools built under the programme cost three times more than similar private sector buildings and twice what it costs to build a school in Ireland. Only 96 brand new schools out of a total of 3,500 secondary schools have been built in the 7 years since the last Government launched the scheme – and the bill has rocketed by at least £10 billion.

The whole way in which we build schools needs to change to ensure that more money is not wasted on pointless bureaucracy, to ensure that buildings are built on budget and on time, and to ensure that a higher proportion of capital investment gets rapidly to the schools that need it most. That is what I have asked my review team to do.

And at the same time, I want to invest more money in great teaching. While we have the best generation of teachers that we’ve ever had, we need to do more to make opportunity more equal. It is a sad reflection on our education system that, in the most recent year for which we have data, just 45 of the 80,000 young people from the poorest families made it to Oxford or Cambridge.

We are determined to ensure that every child has access to excellent teaching, especially the poorest. And that is why we will now double the number of highly accomplished graduates teaching in our schools, recruit hundreds more graduate teachers into areas of poverty where they can help raise attainment in the most challenging schools and also fund the expansion of graduate teachers into primary schools for the first time.

The article written by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, in the News of the World on 11 July 2010.

I was the first person in my family to go to university and Oxford changed my life. The opportunities it gave me were limitless. And now I’m determined to give many more children from poorer backgrounds the chance to go to our best universities.

Because the sad truth is that, despite lots of spending, we still have one of the most unequal school systems in the developed world. In the last year for which we’ve got the figures just 45 children from the poorest homes got to Oxbridge. That’s 45 out of the 80,000 children on free school meals in a year group. More students got to Oxbridge from the private schools that politicians like Harriet Harman went to than from poorer homes. That terrible inequality of opportunity is why the ‘News of the World’ campaign is so important.

And that’s why this government will spend more on the education of the poorest children through our pupil premium – a top-up fund to help the poorest pupils in every school. We will also spend more to get the best graduates to teach and inspire children in the most deprived schools. We’ll let all children sit the rigorous exams that used to be restricted to private schools and we’ll give every teacher new powers on discipline so every school can have good behaviour and every child can learn.

As a nation we are still wasting talent on a scandalous scale, and we have to put that right.

The speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, in the House of Commons on 21 June 2010.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for this opportunity to update the House on our progress on reducing bureaucracy in the schools system, giving more power to front-line professionals and accelerating the academies programme, which was begun with such distinction under Lord Adonis and Tony Blair.

During the Queen’s Speech debate, I outlined in detail our plans to extend academy freedoms. I mentioned then that we had more than 1,000 expressions of interests from existing schools. I can now update the House by confirming that more than 1,700 schools have expressed an interest in acquiring academy freedoms, with more than 70% of outstanding secondary schools contacting my Department-a remarkable and heartening display of enthusiasm by front-line professionals for our plans. As I have explained before, every new school acquiring academy freedoms will be expected to support at least one faltering or coasting school to improve. We are liberating the strong to help the weak-a key principle behind the coalition Government.

As well as showing enthusiasm for greater academy freedoms in existing schools, teachers are enthusiastic about the opportunities, outlined in our coalition agreement, to create more great new schools in areas of disadvantage. More than 700 expressions of interest in opening new free schools have been received by the charitable group the New Schools Network, and the majority of them have come from serving teachers in the state school system who want greater freedom to help the poorest children do better.

That action is all the more vital, because we inherit from the previous Government a schools system that was as segregated and as stratified as any in the developed world. In the most recent year for which we have figures, out of a school cohort of 600,000, 80,000 children were in homes entirely reliant on benefits, and of those 80,000 children only 45 made it to Oxbridge-less than 0.1% and, tellingly, fewer than those who made it from the school attended by the Leader of the Opposition.

Given that scale of underachievement, it is no surprise that so many idealistic teachers want to start new schools, such as those American charter schools backed by President Obama, which have closed the achievement gap between black and white children. In order to help teachers do here what has been achieved in America, we announced last week that we would recreate the standards and diversity fund for schools, started by Tony Blair and abandoned under his successor. We are devoting to that fund £50 million saved from low-priority IT spending-less than 1% of all capital spending allocated for this year-and we are sweeping away the bureaucracy that stands in the way of new school creation, with the reform of planning laws and building regulations.

Five years ago, the then Prime Minister said outside this House:

“What we must see now is a system of independent state schools, underpinned by fair admissions and fair funding, where teachers are equipped and enabled to drive improvement, driven by the aspirations of parents.

We have pushed higher standards from the centre: for those standards to be maintained and built upon, they must now become self-sustaining to provide irreversible change for the better.”

That is the challenge that Mr Blair laid down, and this coalition Government intend to meet it.

Ed Balls: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for coming to the House, because his free school policy raises important issues of funding, fairness and standards-and it should not have been smuggled out in a Friday morning press statement. I should also say that Lord Hill has written to my colleagues in the other place confirming that the Academies Bill will, in fact, be enabling legislation for free schools. The Secretary of State should have the courtesy to inform this House, and those on the Opposition Front Bench, of his plans in that regard.

On funding, will the right hon. Gentleman confirm not only that his free school policy will establish a free market in school places, in which parents will be encouraged to set up taxpayer-funded new schools at will, but that he has secured no new money at all from the Treasury to pay for it? Will he confirm that he is using savings from cutting free school lunches for poorer children to fund his announced £50 million of start-up support, and that that is a drop in the ocean compared with the billions involved in the actual cost of his new policy?

Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm Professor David Woods’s finding that the proposal for a new parent-promoted school in Kirklees would

“have a negative impact on other schools in the area in the form of surplus places and an adverse effect on revenue and capital budgets”?

The question is whether existing schools will see their budgets cut and lose teachers to pay for the new schools, and whether the Building Schools for the Future programme is now on hold to fund his new free schools policy. On fairness, does the right hon. Gentleman agree with the Swedish Schools Minister that

“free schools are generally attended by children of better educated and wealthy families making things even more difficult for children attending ordinary schools in poor areas”?

How will he ensure that the losers from the budget cuts will not be the children of middle and lower-income families?

It is important that the right hon. Gentleman should answer this question. Has he put in place clear safeguards to stop existing private schools from simply reopening as free schools, with taxpayers taking over the payment of school fees? On standards, can he confirm that since the Swedish free schools policy was introduced, England has risen to the top of the TIMMS-Trends in Mathematics and Science Study-league table in maths and science, but Sweden has plummeted to the bottom?

Will the Secretary of State amend the Academies Bill to prevent parents from delegating the entire management of free schools to profit-making companies? Alternatively, can we look forward, as in Sweden, to the grotesque chaos of private companies scuttling around the country touting to parents, saying that they will set up a new school for them, and make a profit, at the expense of the taxpayer and other children’s education?

Michael Gove: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his questions. May I seek to put his mind at rest? He asked whether the Academies Bill created the provision for the creation of free schools. I confirm now, as I confirmed during the Queen’s Speech debate, that it absolutely does. He specifically asked about free school meals and their funding. It is interesting that he should have asked that, because when he was at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, he did not secure the funding for the extension of free school meals; in fact, figures from the Treasury confirm that that was an underfunded promise, which raised the hopes of the poor without the cash being there to sustain it. It was a cynical pre-election manoeuvre, typical of the right hon. Gentleman.

I confirm to the right hon. Gentleman that under no circumstances will I take for the free schools programme money intended to extend free school meals to poor children. That money will go towards raising attainment among the poorest children. I rejected the idea that the right hon. Gentleman has attempted to advance. As I pointed out in my statement and on Friday, the money for the programme comes from low-priority IT projects. If he had simply read the press statement, rather than relying on unsubstantiated and unsourced reports, he would know that.

If the right hon. Gentleman is concerned about saving money and making economies, may I ask him this? Two weeks ago, I wrote to him asking whether he would help us to find economies in the education budget by releasing the Handover report, which he commissioned when he was in office to try to find economies in the schools budget. If he is serious about bearing down on costs and greater efficiency, will he now confirm that he will allow us to read that secret report on saving money? His silence is eloquent in itself.

The right hon. Gentleman was kind enough to refer to the words of the Swedish Schools Minister, Mr Bertil Östberg. Let me just say that the Swedish Schools Minister- [ Interruption. ] What a tongue twister that was. As the right hon. Gentleman will know, Swedish is a language, particularly given the diminution in the number of people studying modern languages under his Government, that fewer and fewer people can translate properly. He clearly cannot, because the Swedish Schools Minister said that the article from which Labour are quoting was

“very biased. It is taken out of context…I have not warned the British Government against introducing Free Schools. I clearly said to the newspaper that the Swedish Free Schools are here to stay and that is something positive”.

All the academic evidence from Sweden shows that more free schools mean higher standards. All schools improve when the number of free schools increases. A second study found that in a given municipality, the higher the proportion of free schools, the more standards rise all round. The evidence not only from Swedish free schools but from American charter schools shows that such schools help to close the gap between the poorest and the wealthiest children. It is that innovation in the cause of social mobility that lay behind the original academies programme introduced under Tony Blair, traduced by the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), and brought back under a reforming coalition Government.

The comments made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 18 June 2010.

The most important element of a great education is the quality of teaching and free schools will enable excellent teachers to create new schools and improve standards for all children. This government believes that passionate teachers who want to make a real difference to education should have the opportunity. That’s why I am today inviting groups to complete a proposal form and enter a process to set up new free schools.

Hundreds of groups, from teachers themselves to charities such as the Sutton Trust, have expressed an interest in starting great new schools. Just like the successful charter schools in the US, supported across the political spectrum, these schools will have the freedom to innovate and respond directly to parents’ needs. The new free schools will also be incentivised to concentrate on the poorest children by the introduction of this government’s pupil premium which will see schools receiving extra funds for educating children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In this country, too often the poorest children are left with the worst education while richer families can buy their way to quality education via private schools or expensive houses. By allowing new schools we will give all children access to the kind of education only the rich can afford – small schools with small class sizes, great teaching and strong discipline.