Yesterday brought us the eye-rubbing remarks to the Sunday Times (£) by Ofsted’s departing chairman, Zenna Atkins: ‘It’s about learning how to identify good role models. One really good thing about primary school is that every kid learns how to deal with a really s*** teacher. In the private sector, as a rule, you need to performance manage 10% of people out of the business. But I don’t think that should be the case in teaching Evidence abounds, however, that some officials at the Education Department, motivated both by ideology and by a bureaucratic desire for control, played a crucial role in sabotaging the government’s education reforms. ‘I have never known any other civil servants quite like these in the Education Department with such a view that theyMonday, 12th July 2010
Sweeping up for the enemy
11:19am
One of the many flawed assumptions beneath the managerialist approach to government – aka Titanic, rearrangement of deckchairs on -- is that standards in public services can be effectively policed by regulators. Hence the creation of quangos such as the Office for Standards in Education or the Inspectorate of Probation. But what happens when these regulators themselves become part of the problem?
...Gove on the rack -- but who put him there?
11:28pm
Reading today’s Sunday Telegraph claim that the new Education Secretary Michael Gove was to blame for the débâcle over the misleading details of the cuts in the school rebuilding programme put me in mind of comments I recorded in my 1996 book about education, All Must Have Prizes.Ruminating upon the never-ending war of ideological attrition being waged by the education establishment upon the very concept of a liberal education -- and consequently upon the life chances of countless thousands of British schoolchildren – I wrote:
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Tuesday, 13 July 2010
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