We cannot contain our joy that the Institute for Learning/Leaving (IfL) set up in 2002 to ‘professionalise’ the UK’s Further Education and Skills Sector teacher pool but widely credited with alienating already disillusioned teachers and causing much confusion and unnecessary anxiety along the way has been given its own pink slip and told to clear [...]
Michael Gove, UK Ed Sec, spoke at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) conference on the the 24 March 2012 so we thought we’d run through the justifications he could come up with for alienating both teachers and headteachers with his needless reforms. There was a defence of free schools and academies. There [...]
A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. Below, and just in case any UK public sector worker needed further motivation to take strike action tomorrow (November 30th 2011), a ‘striking’ Michael Gove. A case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’?
When you consider how desperate times apparently are in the UK, it would help that those with a democratic mandate were talking to each other. Last week, Ian Duncan Smith urged the recruitment of British workers, a few weeks before that Michael “The Governor” Gove decided to relax the rules regulating the employment of overseas-trained [...]
We have already written at some length about the new philanthropic organisations that appear to be doing the UK Tories’ dirty work and also the rather creative interpretation of UK charity commission guidelines that permit organisations like Teach First to operate as charities. CfBT Education Trust is another on-message charity. They claim to “provide education [...]
The word on the grapevine and now at least one UK daily is that McKinsey’s Mr. Targets himself, Sir Michael Barber, was all set to return as chief of the Department for Education. We’re not the only ones dismayed by this news as so were senior civil servants apparently. While other notables such as Chris [...]
Yet more creative reading of official statistics by a UK government minister. More than 79,000 children missed out on a place at their first-choice secondary school for this September, apparently. However, Nick Gibb Minister for Schools seems to think that this means, ” there simply aren’t enough good schools.” No it doesn’t, Nick. The figures [...]
The news that three senior McKinsey & Co consultants are in the dock for the US’s most serious insider trading scandal in generations makes us wonder if this consultancy firm is really the right one to lead UK education policy. Prosecutors allege that a billionaire hedge fund founder, Raj Rajaratnam, was given tips about McKinsey [...]
For all those celebrating the news of Toby Young’s ‘free’ school funding green light, recent events in one Los Angeles’s charter school group should perhaps make us more than a little concerned about the future integrity of opt-out schools. The LA Times report that “The Los Angeles Board of Education voted Tuesday to begin the [...]
Private Eye report that Sally Morgan, new Ofsted honcho, and adviser to school privatisation champions, ARK, will work only 2 days but be paid £45K pa. Aside from the fact that no-one is worth that much for a couple of days work, it also means that the head of the schools inspection body gets to [...]
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