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.