The Long March of Chairman Gove

Like Chairman Mao, we’ve embarked on a Long March to reform our education system

Michael Gove 

According to the Telegraph, 'Michael Gove’s great project is transforming education'. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of specialist academy schools, independent of local authority control, many part-funded by commercial or personal sponsors with their own idiosyncratic educational agendas. There will be 800 academies at the start of the new school term, with a further 800 schools busy applying to become academies. There will be 24 "Free Schools" opening this term (although a few of this tiny cohort aren't actually schools set up by parents, but former minor independent schools which have decided that it would be easier to get their funding from the same pot as other taxpayer-funded schools, rather than getting parents to stump up several grand a term to buy their kids a sense of innate superiority and a spiffy blazer).

How does the Gove model compare with what's widely acknowledged to be one of the world's most successful educational systems? LynNell Hancock at Smithsonian.com thinks that the rest of the world has a lot to learn from Finland:

The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good...”

... Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union.

Impressive. So how did the Finns get there? Parent Power? Breaking the power of teachers' unions and the educational establishment? Setting up specialist academies in place of all-round local schools? Ditching bog-standard comprehensives? Getting thrusting business executives in to shake up all those woolly-headed educationalists who don't live in the "real world"? School league tables? Competition? A thriving independent school sector for those with the money to have their children educated in a prole-free environment? Not being afraid of a bit of elitism? Telling parents that it was no problem if their local school was hopeless, because they could always just spend 80 hours a week setting up a new Free School from scratch?

Strangely enough, an education system that's the envy of the world looks absolutely nothing like that:

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

Gove's Long March isn't exactly transforming education. He's certainly accelerating the pace of the Academy programme started under New Labour, but the direction of travel is precisely the same. The same tired old orthodoxy that entrepreneurs and parents must know more about delivering education than teaching professionals. The same visceral loathing of the same quality of education for all (shorthand insult "bog-standard comprehensives"). The same compulsion to shake things up with some ill-thought-out initiative (in this case Free Schools) that grabs headlines but does nothing to improve education for the overwhelming majority of pupils.

Far from transforming education Gove seems intent on entrenching an educational orthodoxy that's been warmly embraced by the British political establishment for at least a generation. An orthodoxy that is almost the precise opposite of what has been proved to work.

Via