Plan Out – Gove’s cunning plan for education laid bare
COMMENT – Do you remember how Baldrick was forever offering Blackadder his latest ‘cunning plan’? And how these plans invariably ended up being totally ludicrous, like the one in Blackadder III, in which…
Clock Wise? Calling time on Wilshaw’s pay and performance policy
COMMENT – I can’t help it. I’m fast becoming completely obsessed by the increasingly barmy, illogical and paradoxical utterances of Gove and Wilshaw or, as I’ve begun calling them, MichaelDum and MichaelDee. In…
Bacc Passage – Gove gives GCSEs an old-school seeing to
COMMENT – I’m always amused by the notion that changing the name of something will de facto cause all and sundry to believe that the thing itself is better. For example, I’ve always…
Unhelpful Labels – OECD Education Report States the Bleedin’ Obvious
COMMENT – Have you noticed how most educational research, conducted by seemingly elite bodies and organisations, has a tendency to culminate in what Basil Fawlty would have described as a ‘statement of the…
Stranger than Fiction 2 – Gove’s Epic Dickensian Nightmare on Waterloo Road
COMMENT – A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece which mentioned how badly television fiction represents schools. It was with some astonishment, therefore, that I realised this week how wrong I had…
Feeding a Line – The double-talk behind Gove’s selling of school fields
COMMENT – I thought that my last piece said all I wanted to say about the government and school sport, but I should have known better, if only because the Coalition’s ineptitude tends…
Bad Sports – The dirty tricks undermining state school sports
Weren’t the Olympics marvellous and didn’t Team GB do incredibly well? As a Sheffielder, I swelled with pride when Jess Ennis triumphed in the heptathlon and honked with pleasure at the news that…
Bum Deal – A permanent bruise on the backside of state education?
COMMENT – A while ago, whilst working in the garden, I pulled enthusiastically at a deeply rooted plant. It gave way much more quickly and easily than I had anticipated, causing me to…
Old Hat? Teaching qualifications are so yesterday.
COMMENT – It’s been a quiet couple of weeks for the education satirist. What with the Olympics and the wonderful stories emerging of chaos and calamity, I’ve felt quite bitter and resentful that…
Gravity, Not Mediocrity – The real reason kids do not always reach for the stars
COMMENT – I’ve been out of the education news loop for a while, dealing with real-life issues of my own (God bless the NHS for saving my mother’s life – a couple of years…