A PERSONAL TRIBUTE TO SIR JOHN ROWLING

On Friday 17th January Sir John passed away after a short illness.

If you read my blogs you know I have never written this about anyone: Sir John was a great man. 

This is a personal tribute so much of what I write is about how he inspired me to work for the important things in school. He also easily persuaded me to do research, presentations and articles. I would walk away from his gentle requests determined to do my best, only once refusing his offer of an opportunity to write a song and perform it to 2000 teachers. Sir John had looked up my name and found an American folk singer. 

I very nearly said yes.

I am not a biographer but his career included around 20 years as head of a school that sounds like a Northumberland version of Chauncy. He was awarded a knighthood for services to education and was a massive part of London Challenge. He worked with dozens of schools helping them improve London children’s achievements and opportunities to such an extent that London boroughs went from the bottom of national tables to the top. Of course, he was not alone – this was a highly effective group of realistic, experienced, non-political school leaders – but he was himself working with 55 schools in 2008.

Sir John unashamedly focussed on ordinary kids doing well in our schools and he walked away from a government which perhaps differed from the focus of London Challenge. He set up PiXL (Partners in Excellence) with the 55 schools mentioned above. He has left an incredibly influential organisation with around 3,000 schools attending cram-packed, inexpensive, inspirational, practical conferences and on-line curriculum resources of stunning quality and relevance.

It was easy to like, admire and respect Sir John. I was also fortunate to watch Sir John rally and brief the PiXL leaders before the start of a national conference and there was no doubt what he wanted, what the expectations were of the day and of every presenter and organiser. He would then address conference explaining our mission and his views on how we could all make schools a better place for children and staff.

He worried the Department for Education when PiXL helped us all be more effective in targeting support for children taking public exams, giving ordinary children in ordinary schools the access to well directed support without the need for families to employ private tutors. 

The work we all did for and with Sir John probably helped 50 Chauncy students pass their GCSEs. PiXL have around 1500 secondary schools. Those thousands of students every year for a decade went to college and university and got better jobs. The work we all did under his leadership changed lives. 

That’s some legacy.

The TES interviewed him asking, “Is this the most influential man in UK schools?”

Sir John was a charming man and patient. He gently rejected my calls for mass demonstrations in Westminster. Mind you, he was outraged by a senior government education minister, still in post, who explained to Sir John that all schools needed to improve children’s literacy is to have all children read the works of Jane Austin, repeatedly.

In recent years Sir John moved PiXL towards wider issues in education. Most recently he has talked passionately about “Character” and the missing third – the 35% of students who fail in our schools. He leaves us the task of providing genuine equality of opportunity for all our students.

Sir John read my blogs and even though he may have disagreed with my approach he was always the very first to write to me. His last response on 12th December included his last instruction to me: “…people like you will press on!”

I bet he wrote to everyone. He always remembered our names and greeted us as friends.

His Christmas message to PiXL members hoped for 2020 to be a time of,

“Hope for a sensible approach to the improving of education for all our students? Hope that we might escape the over-emphasis on measures and judgement and move into a new world of inspiration, creativity, excitement and deep and wide learning about subjects and personal development and character.” 

I think Sir John may have believed in heaven. God would be well advised to prepare for improvements in that area, maybe ensuring more of us pass the entrance test.

Dennis O'Sullivan

What Will We Teach Our Children?

What Will We Teach Our Children?

John Harmon entered, brylcreamed hair, shoes shined army standard, the Senior Service cigarette stubbed out. A small man, the birthmark that covered one cheek throbbed and we feared. Harmon’s frequently foul mood was clear and the first to fall was Mulkearns who put up his hand in the timid manner of the hungry Oliver Twist to stutter that he felt sick. Harmon gave him the waste paper bin, waited a few moments and asked him to spell circumlocution. It's an easy word but Mickey messed it up. Harmon summoned him to the front and belted his backside with the whack - a bone shaped piece of leather. The alphabet took over. Oakley was beaten next; O’Gorman got the same, followed by O'Neill and now the room was spinning. I doubt I could have spelled my own name as I became the 5th 12 year old in a row to get whacked in front of the class. I was never aware of how many followed me that day but I do know that I have never used the word circumlocution in any other context than this.

John Harmon was a bad man. 

Three years later he gave us a poem to read - and my life changed forever. Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” gave me my first insight into the beauty of words, although those words describe the horror of soldiers in a gas attack in World War One:

“Dim through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” 

An education leader who has given hope to hundreds of schools hounded by the current government, and probably the next one too, Sir John Rowling, asked me to write, “Something, anything you like using poetry.” Hours later the world was thrown into turmoil around intolerance, fanaticism and freedom of speech. I came into education in 1978 to empower children through literacy and the “Je suis Charlie” response to the slaughter of journalists endorses the vitality of language. This blog is an expanded version of the article published in PiXLis ((January 21st 2015) as “The Beauty of the Word.”

This time I get to use some rude words.

In search of the beauty of words, targeted at those obscuring faith with murder, perhaps for discussion in a multi-cultural classroom if one is allowed to discuss Jihadi John:

“You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children
You must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a God.”

Leonard Cohen “Story of Isaac”

Harmon called me “Thick Irish” around the time I discovered Yeats questioning in “An Irish airman Foresees his Death” why his friend’s son fought for the British. 

“I balanced all brought all to mind
The years to come seemed waste of breath
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.”

I was beginning to learn a bit about other people from poetry. Much later I found Yeats’ love poem, “Aedh Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven” on a scrap of paper. Sadly, the lady was quoting it to the next in line. I hope he was impressed.

“I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

One day in 1991 I was transfixed by WB’s brother, Jack Yeats’ painting, “Men of Destiny” in the National Gallery in Dublin. I was forced to travel with a previously unfelt hunger to Sligo to look for more of his work. With a curriculum obsessing on correctness, chronology, rote learning and interminable practice for timed tests of memory, poetry, music and art have little place in meddling politicians’ ideology of education. But the beauty of words will stun, challenge and change the way children learn and understand the world. With 80 days of dull electioneering ahead, and at least one world leader afraid to debate his policies:

“I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you.”

Bob Dylan, “Positively 4th Street”

I giggled when Polonious was stabbed in “the arras” and I came across “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours” in “Hamlet” and then advice on decision making in “Macbeth,” “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.” I have taught Shakespeare to thousands of children – sex, drugs, murder, revenge, greed all done better than Eastenders. What’s not to like?
I hope you all have at least one song that stops you functioning for a few moments. Mick Jagger wrote, “Wild Horses” to stop Marianne Faithful leaving him. I still can’t listen to “Leaving Nancy” by Eric Bogle nearly three decades after my mother died. Many will know him for, “The Green Fields of France,” so dreadfully mauled for Remembrance Day, alongside that bloody Sainsbury’s football nonsense. “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” on the terrible Galipoli battle tells of the ship carrying the wounded home:

“I looked at the place where my legs used to be
And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me
To grieve, to mourn, and to pity.”

I see our work as teachers as a snub to the ideology of working class failure lazily embraced by seemingly all our political parties. Labi Siffre was happy that his “Something Inside So Strong” was used as a rebel yell beyond its original South African context. So simply,

“The higher you build your barrier
The taller I become.”

With Mr Cameron declaring major reform of education within 50 days of a new conservative government there must be teachers everywhere wanting to adapt Dylan’s,

“Stand upside down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I’ve had enough, what else can you show me?”

(It’s all right Ma I’m only Bleeding)
Taylor Dupree’ s "Who Do You Think You Are?" adds over-confident bite as we tackle the next mess of promised educational reform:

"You do not scare me, mistake me not for weak
You can dig a hole for me, but that doesn't mean I'll sink."

But with young teachers leaving teaching because of the tedious insanity of exam factory life there will need to be, in the words of Father Ted’s placard of protest:

“An end to this sort of thing.”

I'm not sure that the teaching profession, and particularly its headteachers, is up for any sort of fight.

Who would teach English today? I watch young, talented idealists building careers on the conversion of D1 grades into C passports, needing to build upon accurate use of highlighter pens rather than a deeper understanding of words, thoughts, feelings and ideas. If they don’t, of course, the headteacher that I am will move them from teaching these students. Careers now built on sand.

All alert assembly-givers see that glazed look on the silent faces of compliant, disinterested students when we rise to tell them how we won the war, the runs we used to score and other dynamic autobiographical wonders. I read Mo Foster’s poem “Boggerel” to Year 11s one sleepy afternoon:

“I wonder why men piss on the floor?
Is it down to aggravation?
Neglect or lack of concentration
Are they lost in such abstractions
That they lack mundane reactions?
Is it simply they don’t see
In which direction that they pee?
Do they do it to annoy?
Do they practise when a boy?”

There is more, of a feminist slant, to the poem if you wish to look it up.

Free speech, the right to offend and the use of succinct language to express oneself – the poet’s license – and you can do this in a lesson. In “This Be The Verse” the childless Philip Larkin spat :

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”

I suspect Seamus Heaney may have been merely full of fine nationalist rhetoric, but when the BBC announced in 1982 that a British poet had won the Nobel Prize for poetry my heart sang as he replied:

“Be advised my passport’s green
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast the Queen.”

One does not need many words to provoke thought; here's a few found on a pedestal by Shelley amongst ruins and decay:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

A lesson for history: all become dust, even the grandest, the mightiest and the most powerful and not necessarily in strict chronological order.

Ted Hughes’s “Hawk Roosting” isscarey, but I loved watching realisation spread across a classroom possibly discovering a dictator’s love song to himself?

“There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.”

Auden’s “I have no gun but I Can Spit” could be a clarion call for free speech, perhaps in opposition to Al Capone’s,” You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” I am worried, now, that the government say that radicals should not be left with children, unsupervised. Bloody hell, do I count?

Should those of us disgraced by politicians in education, rage with Dylan Thomas against inevitable defeat, although he was literally bemoaning blindness:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

How about teaching the wonderful, “Warning” by Jenny Joseph?

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

Or if one fears age and death as Dennis Potter’s “Singing Detective” one can cry along to the Charles Aznavour Song, “Yesterday when I was Young” with the searing,

“I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out
I never stopped to think what life was all about,
And every conversation I can now recall
Concerned itself with me, me, and nothing else at all.”

I can sit for minutes beside Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken:”

”Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Was Stevie Smith lamenting or declaring:

“I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.”

Decades ago, I taught alongside some awful English teachers who wouldn’t recognise a semi colon or an extended metaphor no matter what shade of highlighter was used. Teachers are better by far today but increasingly denied a part in a wonderful, joyful journey of discovery and enlightenment, of provoking children to look at their world through others’ eyes whilst discovering the beauty of words, of pictures and of music.

None of this seems to be in any part of our new curriculum for a tedious age of insular nationalism and British values.

Blog 30, 55,000 words in, a very different piece of work. But don’t blame me, if Sir John can help “failing schools” succeed with young people whose dignity and ambition are then kindled I can at least try to show that there is a little more to school, English and learning than the times tables school of education.

But, Dylan again:

“Ain't no point in talking to me
It's just like talking to you.”

Dennis O'Sullivan
Sunday 8th February 2015

Politicians Want Teachers To Take An Oath. Well, You Asked For It.

With the approach of the General Election we can look forward to the Sunday morning policy announcements from all the political parties. From now until May we will have knee jerk reactions to the latest opinion polls and focus group discussions. Already ASBOs will be replaced by Crimbos, new dangerous dog laws will be enacted and penalties for cyberbullying quadrupled. Look out for new policies on cat grooming in public places, suggested bans on French cheese, bicycle lanes encircling the M25 and a new train link to your constituency.

Given 4 years of mayhem poured upon our education system the Labour Party are out for reform and votes. Tristram Hunt – the privately educated pretty boy shadow secretary of state for education went on a mission to Singapore to find what works best. He came back from his expenses paid, no doubt first class travels, with the answer: Get teachers to swear an oath.

It seems there were no T shirts available.

This will be an education-light blog because the chance to mock the politician is enticing. Oaths are pledges and promises but they can also be insults and curses. I think I will look to the latter.

Hunt did suggest the oath be similar to the renowned Hippocratic Oath no longer compulsory for doctors. Maybe he meant The oath of the hypocrite, seemingly taken by many politicians around election time.

I’ve been swearing about politicians venting their ignorance upon our schoolchildren for some time, so I think I will continue. I have researched oaths in the interests of fulfilling Tristram’s desires and I will endeavor to run the full gamut of oath opportunities.

There’s biblical backup to using oaths. According to Luke (13:6-9) Jesus cursed a fig tree which did not produce the fruit he desired to sate his hunger. The tree died. There are many interpretations of this parable, one is “be careful what you wish or pray for because it may happen.”

More recently:

When I was a member of The Mischief Makers in 1961 I swore a powerful oath of lifelong loyalty, possibly on a vatfull of bat entrails, on punishment of Chinese burns. I think this is what Tristram wants so perhaps I should bow and pledge allegiance to his highness and his cronies, invoking divine witness and promising self- flagellation for any failure I commit in their eyes.

I have an oath for politicians to start my thinking: something about answering the questions asked, being truthful, honest and principled, acting and voting according to conscience, manifesto and constituents ’wishes. And taking care when submitting their boyfriend’s rent allowance, their duck’s housing needs or their husband’s adult viewing costs.

Oaths can be foul words. We now have Reception Class children being tested so that they can be given a baseline score against which school improvement can be assessed in a league table.. Whilst schools furtively seek out the hardest possible tests for the five year olds, I have some swearing to do about this.

Perhaps we have misjudged Tristram. Maybe he has been listening to the views of teachers and he sympathises. Perhaps his oath is the kind of words we use when exasperated, bullied and condemned.

5 year olds must now study fractions and decimals in order to keep up with Finnish children who don’t even start school until they are 7 years old. I swear that’s nonsense worthy of a Tristram oath.

Levels to show progress through the curriculum have been abolished and will be replaced by whatever system an individual school deems fit. Allegedly parents had difficulty understanding the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,7 & 8 nor could they work out how a level 6 might show progress from a 5. So now we have no universal information until the end of year 6 when children will be given a mark around 100. I promise (oaths again you see) that I have been reliably informed that it looks like 106.1 will be an average score at age 11. Oh, goodness.

Quelling more offensive, gutturals about the present government’s assessment nonsense I have to mention GCSEs. In future GCSE grades will be allocated according to “comparable years data.“ Find a year when 11 year olds achieved the same SATs results as this year’s 16 year olds did 5 years ago. The GCSE results achieved by the former group will be replicated by the latter group. So this ensures results can never improve nor deteriorate.

However, for various reasons everyone accepts, there are no reliable comparable scores.

Well, bother and blast. I am informed, and I asked for this on oath, that there is no writer, commentator, academic, educationalist or human being connected to assessment who believes that we now will have a joined up system of assessing our children. Which oath would you suggest?

This evening, we are told that there has been a 46% rise in student appeals against exam grades mismarking. The regulatory body, OFQUAL, said this was bound to happen with new exams; there has been“volatility.” Not their fault.

Students, no doubt, mildly curse the lost opportunities of badly marked exams, whilst Education Minister, Nick Gibb says “45,000 papers having their grades upgraded is unacceptable.” Not his fault.He is“very unhappy, ” and, “we are monitoring what the exam boards are doing.” Not resigning, then?

Mr Gibb might more sensibly have claimed the Mafia oath of “Omerta” where a member of the organization keeps silent. Mind you, this often involves the silent person “taking the fall,” for the offence.

When one goes to court one may swear an oath to promise to tell the truth. We call upon God to witness that this time, and perhaps only this time, we will tell the truth. Quakers refute the oath as they believe it is an excuse for dishonesty. Di, insists I include her joke about quakers liking oaths when they are pronounced with an Irish accent.

I believe the scouts have now dropped God from their oath but they still swear to “help other people” and in America to, “to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight,” which sounds great advice for all of us.

Well, that’s the scouts and they have a three fingered salute to go with it. According to David Icke, who you may remember as the TV football pundit who shell-suited declared himself the son of God, the freemasons have more suspect oaths and salutes.

Allegedly, freemasons vow to help their fellow masons,” to fly to their relief,” and if they don’t they will pay the penalty,“having my body severed in two, my bowels taken from thence and burned to ashes,” which are then scattered so that no memory remains of such a “vile and wicked wretch as I would be. “ No wonder they give each other jobs. At the elevated, very rarely reached 33rd level of freemasonry, according to ex mason, the reborn Jim Shaw,” May the wine I now drink become a deadly poison to me,” if he breaks the oath of secrecy, and, of course, it is only a man that can become a freemason – ironically dressing up in aprons.

You may have noticed a veering away from education in this blog. Given the open goal of conservative education mess – free schools with no kids and unaccountable academy chains fiddling expenses for example, Labour has the opportunity to wreak havoc at election time by appealing, in common sense terms, to the millions of frustrated and confused parents whose children are on a treadmill of league table obsessed, Ofsted fearing tests.

And they suggest an oath.

Apparently legendary bluesman Robert Johnson gave his soul to the devil, aged 27 and the musicians curse was born. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse are the best known of the dead at 27 musicians’ list.

Everyday in America, millions of children swear an oath to a piece of cloth. In our schools we have a new found instruction to promote British values. My relatives in Ireland used to speak of British values but I think the ones we are meant to promote are not Oliver Cromwell’s but ones of decency, integrity, honesty, fair play and equality of opportunity. Let’s all swear a great big oath to those values and punish those in authority who cheat on them. May your innards become your outers and your children cross the road when they see you.

Also in America is the curse of their presidents. From 1840 until Ronald Reagan used his western actor skills not to die from a bullet, every president elected in a year ending in 0 dies in office Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt and Kennedy all met the criteria. I think the next one will be the president after Hilary Clinton.

Tristram Hunt is perhaps an occultist and is egging us on to make effigies of the enemies of promise and the spoilers of education. I wish the present government thinking, or that of the Labour opposition, was to support the arts in school rather than relegate them to some sort of home play time activity. Effigies can be made of wood (Technology lessons please) clay (Ceramics) or stuffed puppets (Textiles is long gone in most schools). You paint the effigy (Art GCSE for all) then you stab it or burn it (in a poor Food Tech lesson?). The better the artwork the more likely the “pure sympathetic magic” will work. Now, children, of whom shall we make effigies in our Gifted& Talented Art workshop?

I am off on a ramble now so cut to the final few lines for some closure, if you wish

To those politicians who play with our children’s learning, opportunities and futures, may these fine Irish curses apply:

           May the snails devour your corpse

           May the devil take you by the heels and shake you

           May you be afflicted with the itch and have no nails to scratch with.

Time now, for the Bob Dylan reference. Listen to “My Back Pages” for a plea:

           “I wish that for just one time

           You could stand inside my shoes

           You’d know what a drag it is

           To see you.”

This may be borrowed from the Irish, “May she still be alive till everyone’s sick of the sight of her.”

Marriage vows have changed so much you can swear an oath to do just about anything. No longer is obedience essential from a wife. However, another Irish curse, “May you get the runs on your wedding night.” Or how about “May you marry a wench that blows wind like a stone from a sling.”

Addressing my union’s excellent patient leadership who keep telling us that the political parties are listening to your arguments and vision. Get some promises, pledges and real words signed in their blood as an authentic oath.

Moving to a close with some Shakespeare, (All’s Well That Ends Well 1V, ii)

Mr Hunt

              “ ‘Tis not the many oaths that make the truth

                But the plain single vow that is vowed true.”

Here’s a teacher’s vow for you, no fancy words required:

              “I will do all I can to help children learn.

Dennis O'Sullivan   Wednesday 22nd October 2014

End of Term Report: Go Now Michael Gove, Make Haste, But Quietly Please

End of Term Report: Go Now Michael Gove, Make Haste, But Quietly Please


I have been struggling with what seems to me to be a mightily appropriate metaphor but it is one so brutal it may offend; unless one sees it as a metaphor of course.

              “And I hope that you die

               And your death’ll come soon

                I will follow your casket

                In the pale afternoon

               And I’ll watch while you’re lowered

               Down to your deathbed

               And I’ll stand over your grave

             ‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead.”

I use Dylan’s angriest song, "Masters of War," to show my anger at the destruction of state education.

The news that Gove has been sacked as Education Secretary rushed joyfully around our schools. He had done his job, smashing a state education system that he despised and his fellow privately educated ministers ignored. He’s off now to be Chief Whip, flattering Cameron and telling fibs about Theresa May whose job he coveted. His wife, the barely readable Sarah Vine, hides his underwear (The Times 04-05-11) so there’s a more useful way he can while away the empty hours - searching for his knockers. He owes Murdoch money but he may join The Daily Mail, editing the newspaper that should not speak its name, cobbled for people that share his fantasies and challenged lifeform.

http://games.usvsth3m.com/slap-michael-gove/

 So end of term, how did it go Michael?

You introduced many new exams, the most dangerous at age 16 and 18 where you return us to speedwriting memory tests which will mess up children’s opportunities, and the silliest at age 5 when teachers interview tots for 30 minutes – a sort of viva, I guess. The private schools threw out your new exams and carried on with iGCSEs. Now that many of us have copied, “from the very best the independent sector has to offer,” (Gove in My Academy Spring 2014) you are finding all sorts of ways to stop us as they are not fit qualifications. Goodness knows what will happen to all those Eton boys whose qualifications are rubbished at university and job interviews when up against comprehensive graduates.

 You rewrote the History Curriculum. Your own view of history is unique, biased and unsound. We do not understand history by starting at Year zero at age 5 and progressing chronologically through Ethelreds and Caesars, great men of each century, until we reach the benign misunderstood First World War generals at age 16. To you history is unconnected great British men and there are no themes and certainly no lessons to be learned studying the development of state education.

State schools have no money because you cut us to pay for your toys. With increased costs, government capital funding diverted to your toy schools and 6th form funding slashed by at least 20% in the last 3 years you have sent us all to the brink of financial disaster. A 6th Form college has just replaced lecturers with unqualified facilitators. The Education Funding Agency has now decided that a 6th Former doing 3 A Levels is part time and therefore lower funded. Call it theft and be done.

 Teachers have been insulted and their unions ridiculed. You raised the retirement age, gave us new pay policies, pay structures, performance management and a 1% pay rise for the next 4 years, if we can meet your exam only targets.

Your childhood must have been miserable for you to believe our children should learn by rote. Drama, Art and Music are relegated to “prep.” You seek control of our schools directly from your untutored office. You have been the most interferingly unlistening, unadvised political ideologue in the history of state education. You may rewrite history, but we will remember you.

 You spent £2 million insulting teachers by prattling on about what skills the 200,000 redundant ex-military men could bring to our classrooms. You managed 42 and the DfE added injury, “Entry requirements were deliberately high to ensure top-quality recruits…(they will need) GCSEs at Grade C in English and Maths.” Nothing more?

And just this month there is the idea that retired people could fill the gaps in our staffing. Perhaps a sacked politician could teach a lesson a week of KS3 Maths. Continuity means nothing to you.

                     “You that never have done anything but build to destroy

                       You play with my world like it was your little toy”

 You sent the anti terrorist squad to investigate possible political interference by muslims in Birmingham and then your mate at Ofsted, announced no notice Ofsted inspections. First visiting, surprise, surprise a 95% African Caribbean school in North London. You’re anti European Community anti some religious groups running schools and very pro some others – Christian and Jewish religions – running theirs. You put down multi-cultural society and integrated communities and lecture us on British Values. Values like fair play, equal opportunity, honesty and integrity?

It’s only school dinners, nutrition v obesity, but you dropped school meals standards for academies in 2010, and after lunch with the Leon restaurants sent them, pals of Cameron from schooldays to investigate in 2012. Now you attack school meals standards in 2014. Opportunity knocked, Michael?

You rob our students of their earned exam success and your mate, Glenys Stacey, last seen howling at a departing, mocking audience of school leaders, “I am independent of Gove, honest; we never meet, believe me…” Michael says he doesn’t want kids studying great American literature at GCSE and it immediately disappears from the syllabus. Great independent minds thinking alike?

 Gove and Stacey reckon there’s too much preparation of students (state school only, not those doing “prep” of course) She wants teachers to tell her, anonymously when we engage in bad practice: teaching to the syllabus, counselling, coaching, study skills, mnemonics, mind maps and mock exams. Some schools warm up the kids before an exam, give them a banana and a bottle of water and then have professional invigilators in air conditioned well lit halls. Halls with clocks. For exams to be fair, “ungamed,” state school students take exams in the dark, wearing blindfolds and mittens. They should not be told what the exam is about or how long it is.

You brutally condemned people who disagree with you, “Yada, Yada!” you chanted on Question time, “bad academics” you called the professors who told you to stop meddling. And the rest of us,? Seems we are, inelegantly, “The Blob.” Your special advisers tweeted @toryeducation against all counter Gove views. You denied knowledge of them and then obeyed orders to tone them down. Oops! You refused freedom of Information requests for your files on spurious grounds and were ordered to comply. Lying, Cheating and Dissembling is not very British, Mr Gove.

 Do you remember when that Parliamentary Select Committee mocked you for saying that all schools have got to be above average. Liz Truss ordering us to do better than the Shanghai selective schools. Schools which do not admit the sizeable local servant class. Around 95% of the Chinese school system is years behind us with an early leaving age, massive truancy and illiteracy all conveniently discounted from the results published by the OECD as PISA.”

You deliberately misled about international exam tables and you were mugged in every country you visited. When they took you to their model schools you slathered and salivated and told us to better them. When you visit English schools they send the bad boys on a trip to “a long way away” (Secret Teacher, The Guardian 20-06-14) and you must think we paint walls freshly every day. A week ago, your staff wrote your congratulatory speech on a visit to my friend’s school four hours before you arrived.

 Enough of your past; here’s your legacy

Four University Technology Colleges, triple funded, have been inspected by Ofsted. One is Outstanding (well done you) two have orders to improve (that’s a 3 they got) and the 4th achieved a mighty 4 (Special Measures.) 1 out of 4 is embarrassingly awful.

 The Bedford Free School head, Mark Lehain you paraded at conference, strutted your stuff to blue rinse applause, NUT are on strike today, he gloated, so we have sent recruiting leaflets to families telling them we don’t strike. Clap, clap, clap. Ofsted came; they got a 3 and he bleated that it was too soon to be judged.

When Gove visited a UTC last week he had to talk about the failure to open the Fulham Free School. A very cross headteacher, Alun Ebenezer, felt let down. I swear he did say, “This is an outstanding school.” It hasn’t even opened.

Lord Toby Young, darling of the Free School, founder of the West London Free School cannot keep a headteacher; I guess we aren’t necessary, but three heads in two years? And when,Toby, will you need the publicly funded 2nd building?

Academy chains are so admired by Gove as they are in perfect position to introduce the Tory dream grammar schools. 14 such chains, yes 14, managing over 170 schools have been barred from taking on more schools because of concerns over, “education standards and financial mismanagement.” (Daily Telegraph 19-03-14). The 34 strong E-ACT chain has been ordered to relinquish control of 10 schools following Ofsted inspections found serious weaknesses in the quality of education. Kids being failed, Michael.

 Grace Academy, which runs three schools in the Midlands and was set up by the Tory donor Lord Edmiston, has paid more than £1m to companies owned by the governors and their families. Lots of shocking figures in this article including one family member earning, “£367,732 from Grace Academy over the last six years for consultancy work.” (The Guardian 12=01-14)

The TKAT chain boasted to the parliamentary select committee, they had dispensed with,“within weeks of conversion, 26 out of our 40 headteachers and many other senior staff.” ((BEN 29-01-14)

The Prospects Academy chain was forced to close (BBC News 20-05-14) after 2 of its 6 schools were deemed inadequate. More public money squandered on another ill-thought-out gamble with children’s education.

 Tory Party darling, Katharine Birbasingh (Gove calls her “often”) had had many jobs in her 10 year teaching career when she wowed conference with disturbingly disloyal pictures of her failed students. Lost her job for that but has been given her own free school in Wembley. Joy of joy, to see the very attractive and happy children’s faces on the school’s website. Oh dear, they have no school, no site and no students. Stop using photos of kids Burba and stick to writing your who to shag, “Singleholic” nonsense.

Finally, almost, and briefly you will appreciate, Free School funding – a.k.a. diverting money to open free schools. “Free schools budget trebled to £1.5 billion” (BBC 11-12-13).The average cost per free school is £6.6 million – twice what the DfE claims, according to the National Audit Office (NAO December 2013) The NAO says there have been problems, “financial mismanagement claims at 3 open free schools… More than a quarter of all spending on school buildings – £241 million has been on free schools in areas with no need for extra places” the NAO claims. The Public Accounts Committee claimed, “one in four desks at free schools were empty.(POA December 2013. In May 2014 Gove raided the education budget for another £400 million to shore up his free school lunacy.

But are they any good? “The percentage of free schools given Ofsted’s lowest, ‘inadequate’ rating is now nearly twice as high as the rest of the state sector.” (Observer 14-05-14) and this means that 11% of kids in frees schools are badly taught. Children are being failed.

By Tuesday of last week I had read 470 students’ reports of ambition nurtured by their teachers. I spoke with 200 parents and awarded 650 prizes on Wednesday. On Thursday I welcomed 166 nervous children for their first day at secondary school and that evening I was moved by Facebook praise, smiling children, relieved parents and our tireless, uncomplaining staff at the end of another 12 hour day. The following day we welcomed 1058 children aged 4 – 11 to our school, Beverley cooked with 245 of them in one go! Bag packing at Tescos for our Air Ambulance charity; a carwash in the rain for Peacechild International and sponsorship of many walkers to treat Children’s Cancer raised £1600.This is our community and we are proud of it. That evening we danced, sang, wigged out as 40 or so acts at our rock concert filled the halls. Our Art Exhibition wowed hundreds. This is what we do, and another 16 hour day ended as parents and staff mopped the floor.

 You can never and most certainly will never be part of this, Michael. You wont ever see it and your imagination, stuck in yourself and your dreamless machinations, will never, ever enjoy what we do.

If unbridled optimism is all we've got, if spirit is all we have to oppose the devil then I’ll settle for that.

I want to do this forever.

You can't stop me .

 Bye, Mickey.

 

Modern Education Reality: The Trouble With Fat Kids Is They Can’t Get Up Chimneys.

 My computer adopted a luddite approach to this 20th blog, eating whole sections of text in an instant and repeating single letters forever. Glancing at the screen showed what I had hoped to be literary, incisive, somewhat cross, incredulous and frustrated prose to be complete incomprehensible nonsense.

I am grateful to Mr Gove for inspiring me to write. In the four decades since I graduated with a decidedly unearned degree in politics I have rarely encountered a politician capable of spouting such garbage. I remember yawning at rabid Trotskyists declaring themselves the new leadership of a soon to be grateful working class, encountering racist nationalists who were as thick as they were wrong and the scariest of all, a group of animal rights activists who showed me a gun. As a committed anarcho- syndicalist with a penchant for individualism and a spot of libertarianism I attended an international conference of Wicked Messengers. We drank and some smoked to enhance clarity and decided Liverpool’s renegade Big Flame, would no longer be welcome in our thoughts. A little later my own group, Southampton Solidarity, stayed up all night to make sure we were able to greet the gasworkers’ change of shift to show them our support. We couldn’t find the gasworks.

 I was sort of affiliated to an even stranger international group – The Situationist International who were fantastically and artistically creative, slogan heavy and quite odd. “The Revolution in Everyday Life” by Raoul Vaneigem seemed such a brilliant anti blueprint from the barricades of Paris in 1968 alongside “The Society of the Spectacle,” decrying the template of life in a goldfish bowl watching 50 inch TVs. Unfortunately the situationists were big on expulsions and they swiftly expelled each other. In my version, Guy Debord, the other founder ended up in a supposedly drunken row with Vaneigem and they expelled each other in 1972. The SI died, except that in a typical twist one member had never been expelled because he was a long term resident in a mental hospital.

Why did I associate with such people? Debord made a lengthy film of nothing much: blank screens, incoherent dialogue and occasional static ending in 30 minutes of silence. He wanted to “problematize reception.” Intellectuals watched the film at the trendy ICA cinema in London, possibly in 1968. As the first audience left they passed the queue for the second sitting and not one mentioned the nothingness. This brings me back to British politics and education in 2014 – I have to keep blathering on about the nothingness, the lack of coherent thought and the obscene and real indifference to children’s education.

 By the way, I would like to thank the 11 readers from Ukraine diverted into my prose. I have to warn that I have recorded over 100 visits from Russia, meaning they outnumber you by about 10 to 1. Just like their army, I fear.

 Gove drops subjects he thinks are useless. Media Studies is rubbished and only partly because The Family Gove were and will be paid well by the corrupting Murdoch empire. As Churchill might have said, never has so much been paid to so few for so little. Politics is out so that students can't contextualise his preening selfish pursuit of unwarranted glorification. RE doesn't count either as the pope never beatified the man who sees himself as more saviour than saint following a visionary chat with Satan. PE has to go to ‘prep’ as the chances of anyone considering the younger Gove to be an athlete is probably limited. You know how cruel people can be to new recruits. In Laurie Lee’s “Cider With Rosie a child spent a considerable time on his first schoolday following the instruction, "Wait there for the present." Go get a rubber hammer, striped paint or dooberry firkins are anecdotedly frequent instructions to apprentices.

Can you believe Gove’s cruel peers had him sign up to the inter house gurning competition telling him he was a natural. Those privately educated wags foresaw his future as an amateurishly created plasticine recreation of alien life form using selfies to frighten miscreant babies.

 A shock announcement from @toryeducation where Gove’s “Special Advisors” (Henry de Zoete and Dominic Cummings) are definitely not the authors: Gove to be New England football manager. A gurning Michael swooned, “I have nothing but admiration for the young fellows who daily kick a ball around a field of grass mowed so brilliantly by fabulous groundsmen, of whom I am forever in awe. I must apologise again to Mr Smithies my old PE teacher for I fear I was a total washout on the footie field. running around and that sort of thing. But of course I can manage the England team. I am humbled to be in the same changing rooms as the chaps whose names I will soon commit to memory. I believe in the 2 3 5 system that worked for a month in 1966 when Britannia ruled the goals and a brave Britisher, Pickles the dog, saved the world cup. I will answer my country's call and issue instructions on how to header the ball, how to get mud off one’s shorts and where to buy dubbin for cleaning boots. Always cross with the laces pointing inwards, don’t you know.

In his powder blue polyester tracksuit Gove expanded his sporting nouse, “Low expectations have been the cause of society's ills. Autistic kids just need a firm push from better teachers, better doctors cure cancer and everyone can be an opera singer. Insults from recently exposed members of The Blob (anyone anti Gove’s way of thinking) that our boys may be affected by Amazonian heat is another attack by the enemies of promise.” Mickey, as he likes to be known now he’s earned a reputation for taking it, has hastily summarised his team tactics for victory in Brazil in a " Everything I know about footie" short tome likely to emulate his blank paged “Everything I know about Education,” number 9 in the 2013 Amazon chart. It was the Amazon chart which got Michael energised....Amazon, Brazil, footie; had god summoned after a game of word association?

2nd minister for approbation, Elizabeth Truss, has been to China and learned how to be good. Use chopsticks, that's what they do in top of PISA League Shanghai. (Children will struggle to learn to use chopsticks, will get thinner and be able to clean our chimneys. QED.) Despite the fact that the Shanghai education experts cannot account for 200,000 of their child population in their school results, we have got to, got to be like them. Embrace the rule that migrant workers in Shanghai are not allowed to have their kids educated in the area. Fancy a spot of apartheid anyone?

Minister Truss’s policy seems to be that school age kids should stay in school during daylight hours and only go home to sleep. Despite opposition from The National Day Nurseries Association and the Pre School Learning Alliance, sort of experts I guess, Truss says we can raise the contact ratio from 1 adult for every 8 four year olds to 1 to 30 because that sort of work, well, how hard can it be? It doesn’t need teachers either – just “sufficient numbers of staff.” None of it is skilled. None of it matters, Let’s cheapen it. The reason for childcare and early years teaching? We need mums at work, in flexible part time jobs. Mums must go to work but must be at home to welcome the kids at the end of the day; it’s bad parenting if not. Schools must open 8-6 and in the holidays with no mention of quality provision, control or inspection; schools are buildings of containment. We need to give employers greater flexibility in managing the female dominated, part time, zero hours, minimum wage, labour force and schools should play their part in keeping the kids off the street while mum’s at work. At the same time ministers are sympathetic to term-time holidays, it’s not like the kids will miss anything important. I needed four professional qualifications to do what I do; Truss just needed a desire to succeed Gove.

One of the big anti-immigration arguments is that we should force British workers to do unskilled manual jobs when the schools have trained them as demoralized, uneducated, drearily dull, ambitionless, unskilled workers, used to spending longer days in schools, where Gove’s desired pedagogy relies on a daily grind of six one hour lectures and recitation of facts. As economies move from the Industrial Age to the hyper connected digital age with 3 billion people connected via the net, we want to graduate automotons. On such a cruel sea do we float, where our masters are stuck in a golden age of worker servitude.

 The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reports that the UK “has a higher proportion of low-skilled jobs than any country in the OECD, except Spain….30% of workers were overqualified for their jobs, and there were far fewer graduate jobs than graduates…..22% of UK jobs required no more than a primary education compared with less than 5% in Germany and Sweden.” It is hard to blame our schools for this lack of economic progress. The briefly insulting then ingratiatingly creepy Vince Cable says teachers know nothing about the world of work. Minister No 3 should get out of the way. Think on this, Mr Cable: We have increased the supply of skills now we need to improve demand for those skills by increasing the number of higher skilled roles available. Supporting Gove’s stated aim to have more students failing more exams is not enough.

 We are deskilling our workforce and again this is shown in our free schools and UTCs where unqualified people are put in charge of children’s futures. I watched on TV a British employer whose factory make models of fighter planes from the time when we won the war all on our own. Chinese labour costs have gone up, British labour costs have plummeted. There were a group of very young white men walking around a big table, picking up tiny model bits, one by one as they walked round and round and round, filling the bags to be put in a box in a way that we now do more cheaply than chinese workers. A fifth of UK jobs need only primary school education? In the words of Luka Bloom, “Take me now God that I’m almost ready..”

 The government’s own Social Mobility Commission has found that “private school alumni were 7% more likely to gain an elite job in the media or law than those with the same degree who went to state schools.” Just who are the enemies of promise here?

I want to speak with optimism of teachers’ love of our subjects and missionary zeal for learning, sometimes dormant, afraid to speak their names in a cynical materialistic daytime TV world. Our job is to summon the howls of anguish and to take that torment into the educational transformation of the lives of young people and their communities. It really is better than just waiting around to die.
Dennis O'Sullivan

Rote Learning Frees the Mind and Humankind , allegedly

Rote Learning Frees the Mind and Humankind , allegedly

There is no limit on the domineering Gove's pretentions towards supremacy yet it is sometimes hard to credit his frequent bleatings. In a speech, “In Praise of Tests” he declared rote learning to be responsible for the advancement of Jewish people in America.

The opportunist Gove is The Great Liberator. He will create a society where young people are judged by their ability to remember things he thinks important, rather than think for themselves or be judged by the content of their character. Learn poetry by rote, he says, and you understand how to be a poet. Copy great artists and be a great artist – pass the tracing paper someone. How hard can it be?

The advancement of Jewish people, and all ethnic minorities I guess, goes like this. Learn old poems by rote, learn the 12 times tables and recite a list of British monarchs and you will be good at exams. Exams are culture neutral (really?) are a pure test of intelligence (gulp) and examiners are free from the bias shown by teachers who mark coursework. Obviously, Mr Teacher inadvertently discriminates against Saul Ezra when this student writes history coursework on the Rise and Rise of the British Empire. He terms this, “The soft bigotry of low expectations.” However, they can’t show this prejudice when marking the same student’s exam script. Not like the exam marker can read the names of examinees? Exams will set you free, Monday is Tuesday, Peace is War, Freedom is Slavery and other stuff like that, apparently. This week in the UK parliament Gove wanted to bomb a tyrant in Syria. Colleagues who disagreed with him were, “a disgrace” and according to Mrs Gove, “cowards.” Best not to argue with soft bigotry, especially when there’s two of them.

Only the very safe are certain of right and wrong, who’s to blame and who to bomb.

 I write endlessly about the decimation of education that Gove is driving. This summer some of our schools show record exam results; results we developed by simply not lying down in front of Gove's runaway dogma. When he said that, "more children will fail exams,” he failed to realise the consequences. He just thought kids would fail, know they deserved to fail and submissively take their place on zero hours contracts, aware that education and opportunity is for their betters. He had a dream all right, but how patronizing to equate his class driven nightmare with the US Civil Rights movement. All the “driven” references allow me to repeat that the myopic Gove failed his driving test on six occasions, spurring no doubt his opposition to exam resits.

Gove didn’t allow for the tenacity of teachers. We plotted and planned in cadres of like-minded counter-reactionaries, many connected to the twilight force that is PiXL We entered kids up to three times for Maths exams. Yes we changed some of their courses from modular (which he hates) to linear (which favours the seat-of-the-pants students) Yes we took up the private schools’ IGCSEs, and yes we entered some kids a year earlier. The students came in for extra evenings and holidays and we practised and practised.  Our school sued the government and signed up for the Us and Them oppositional pugnacity. We gave them chocolate and the kids done great.

At the same time (see previous blog: “This is not education this is potty training...”) education is in free-fall.  Practise for tests and learn by rote, whilst stamping on creativity like some state-centred tyranny. Nationally results went down again this year, driven down by the regulator, Ofqual whose job it is to see that each year’s results can be compared and valued against each other. What, even when you artificially alter pass rates?

Now to the subject of this blog: Furry Animals of the Less Than Super Variety.

I am certain that some of you can recall the childlike self-satisfied grin of the inoffensive, anonymous, but sort of cuddly Stephen Twigg when he beat the widely tipped future Tory leader, Michael Portillo in the election of 1997. Did anyone think this seemingly nice man would be an effective opposition leader on education? Would he be the man to refute tenaciously, reject and condemn the attacks on education we now face? There are two possible reasons why he couldn’t fulfil the role. Either the Labour Party has no interest in protecting and nurturing our children and teachers or Stephen Twigg is a squirrel.

While the vandal Gove rampages there is a Labour Opposition in parliament presented with fantastic opportunities to stand up for children, families and education. So when Gove promotes Free Schools with enormous unnecessary indecent waste, Stephen Twigg will not allow any new Free Schools. Instead Labour will encourage parents to open their own schools.

When Gove meandered into the quagmire of fast tracking army disciplinarians into our schools, Twigg will open military-style schools. When Gove endlessly drools, rigour, rigour, rigour…. like some self-flagellating metronome,  Twigg mumbles, rigour is good and we will be rigorous, perhaps mistaking it with the rigor mortis of his thinking. Labour gave up the debate on education because their sole concern, therefore an obsession, is the pursuit of power. They forget that Tony Blair was elected on a mission called, “Education, Education, Education.” He was savvy enough to know that it does win votes, but only if you have a clue what you believe in. Twigg will be sacked soon and we will get policies from Labour next year because there’s an election in 2015. But do they know anything about education, or care?

A clever little employment scheme is afoot in  the UK, called Zero Hours, and it has mainly young people sitting at home waiting to be called into work by their employers. They are employed, without contracts, without hours and therefore they may get some work and pay or they may not – sort of depends if your face fits I suppose. When my neighbour recalled the London dockers lining up to be selected to work, or not, I remembered the lines of Irishmen waiting outside The Crown in Cricklewood in the hope of a day’s work. Who would have thought we would put the Shadow Education Minister on Zero Hours? Or is he squirrelled away in some year round hibernation.

As a Londoner  I used to take my daughter to Valentines Park where we would feed grey squirrels. They seemed inoffensive, guileless and harmless and they didn’t seem too demanding. That image of Twigg at his election victory returns, as a squirrel given nuts by kind, unthinking London voters. The original Labour Party embraced socialism and were called “reds” by more conservative critic. The lefties have been driven out to be replaced by a bunch of grey men in suits. Just like the red squirrels in England were eradicated by the grey squirrels I used to feed.

I feed them no more. When the squirrels squatted in my loft, making a mess and scratching hideously a nightly pandemonium, I poisoned them.

We feed birds here in the countryside but the squirrels are too lazy to find their own food and steal from the little green and yellow things. So I have a gun now.

I am not advocating assassination of Labour Party politicians but unless they get off their backsides and start protecting working families, they will remain fecklessly in opposition.

 Dennis O'Sullivan

The New National Curriculum Will Only Damage The Youngest Children.

Posted Thursday 18th July 2013

In my imagination, a frightfully jolly meeting took place last weekend. The setting was possibly the country retreat of Douglas Hogg MP, the ex-cabinet minister who claimed parliamentary expenses of "about £2,000" for cleaning his moat. A select group of the 20 millionaires on the government front bench turned up. Labor’s Shaun Woodward, the country’s richest MP, may have popped in with his butler in tow. Shaun has 7 properties valued at close to £20 million but still manages to claim a second home allowance. In 5 years he claimed £98,079.63 in mortgage relief on his £1.35 million Thames-side flat. His parliamentary expenses also showed regular purchases of family circle biscuits at £7.18 a tin and Tetley’s tea bags at £3.85 a bag.

This is not about class envy or knocking the rich. Just wait and see how generous these public service people are when they see child poverty and food banks in England- or am I deluding myself?

It’s a big estate so some of the practising barristers, alongside some of the directorship holders and paid speech makers, turned up at Hogg’s for tea. Sipping  no doubt demurely were  Tory barrister Stephen Phillips (£740,000 income for 1700 hours legal work) MP Geoffrey Cox, an extra £417,000 on top of his MP’s pay.  Soames earned an extra £305,000,  Riffkind £276,000, Redwood £238,000,  Labour’s Alastair Darling £263,000 and Jack Straw £183,000 because being an MP is a part time job.

They may have been talking about the imposition of an11% pay rise on MPs (elected public servants) at a time when all public servants - teachers, nurses, council employees, police, have been granted a 1% rise. Our Teaching Assistants have had a pay freeze for 3 years. MPs will be forced to accept the 11%. The vote-for-me, populist Gove says they should, “stick it!” which is quite crude and a bit rich coming from yet another millionaire. He claims for a second home, neither one being in his constituency, and the cost of his child’s cot against his MP’s expenses.

Splitting into groups based on which public school they attended, and a smaller group for the oicks, they decided on a radical plan for children's nutrition. Cameron's Eton and Bullingdon Club mates, owners of the Leon restaurant chain were appointed by Gove during an expensive posh nosh to look into the take up of school lunches. They decided parents are evil and lead chaotic lives. Packed lunches are not about expensive school dinners they are about bad parenting. Schools ought to search children's lunch boxes for crisps and anything that might feature on a desert menu. I think we are then meant to incinerate the bad foods. Mind you, I have been in school canteens where the incinerated food was the tastiest offering.

The MPs could hit upon a radical, vote catching policy. If kids are not eating school dinners, make them entirely free for everyone. The cost of administering the existing free schools meals kids, plus the cost of managing payments for the others would be eradicated and the cost of the cooked food could be partially offset against one of the rich men’s parliamentary perks. They might decide to forego their £4,000 a year receiptless dining allowance to make school dinners free for all kids. Gove drooled at the possibility of free compulsory scotch broth, only slightly misreading Dickens.

Chancellor Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor in Tipperary and Balleymon in Waterford, doggedly aristocratic in his view on this nation’s economy repeated,   "I have never studied economics." Fair play, he threw in another class eroder with let's give every child a free school uniform too. He had heard of the schools selecting their kids by insisting on £50 kilts or £80 pound blazers although that's been illegal for some years.

And then the flying pigs flew by. The rivers froze over, blood oozed from the earth and dinosaurs walked again. None of the above happened.

But this is a blog about the new national curriculum!

I'm not a fan of Simon Schama although I liked his History of Britain trilogy. Strangely, I find him too controversial and as a populist historian the man was a natural to be asked to advise King Gove on his new history curriculum. He was peeved that his advice was ignored.  Schama said the final draft was, "insulting and offensive.... pedantic and utopian" He said the new curriculum is, "essentially memories of A Levels circa 1965, embalmed in aspic and sprinkled with tokenism." And made up, “by someone who has never stood in front of a class of 12 year olds.”  I guess that means he didn't like it.

Rebecca Sullivan Chief Exec of the 6,000 strong Historical Association added," It's a shame that Gove chose not to listen to the top historians invited to contribute, or the evidence that the Historical Association provided."

The design technology curriculum was designed without consultation. “There was no advisory group and it clearly takes us back to the 1950s by introducing sock darning and flower arranging at the expense of 21st century skills.” (According to the Design and Technology Association on April 13)

The design technology curriculum was then changed to include 3d printers which none of us can afford. Someone had heard an echo of a Radio 4 article about these things.

Earlier in 2013, 100 leading professors and education experts warned that forcing children to learn "endless lists" of facts and rules "will severely damage education standards." Gove says these were bad professors.

Gove was asked why he insists children learn the 12 x tables rather than to 10. He answered that there are a myriad of other computations children need to memorise.

I reckon he believes computations around the number 10 to be European and therefore anti-British. But Michael, it seems it’s not the European community you want us to leave but the basis of arithmetic.

Let us return to the memorable computations of pounds, shillings and pence as follows:

There were 4 farthings in one penny (shortened to 1d) also two halfpennies. There were 4 pennies in a groat (later this became worth 8d and then 12d), 3d was a threepenny bit for which my sister Cathy was hospitalized after she swallowed one. We had tanners (6d) shillings (12d) florins (2 shillings) half crowns and crowns (the latter sometimes known as a dollar) ten bob notes, pounds, fivers, and the gentleman’s guineas.

The sooner we get away from the over simplified decimal system used throughout the world, the better.

Our children need more complex measuring systems to be able to compete internationally. Let’s give them sums involving inches (12 of them in a foot) and yards (3 feet), 22 of which made a chain, whilst 10 chains were a furlong and 8 furlongs made a mile (1760 yards, of course.) 3 miles made a league and this was used in some poems our children should be able to recite. Gove knows we ruled the world when we knew these things therefore it’s time to learn them by rote, just like he did.

A hide was a taxable unit of land according to the Domesday Book from nearly 1,000 British years ago. A plough is the length a horse could plough in a day assuming it had had its oats and a penny had the buying power of 4 blackjacks in 1960.

Returning to the new national curriculum. It does not apply to private schools; it does not apply to academies, or free schools. University Technology Colleges will not follow it, nor will studio schools. In fact about 80 per cent of 11-16 year olds will be in educational institutions which do not need to follow the new national curriculum. So Gove spends time and money on a curriculum he calls national and destroys the national system of education so we don't have to teach it.

Most primary schools will have to teach the new curriculum to 5 year olds so that we compete with the often compared Finland and Singapore. Children there not only don't learn the tables, phonics and science Gove is insisting on, they don't even attend school at that age.

And the answer to, “What the hell are you talking about now?” is that we have to be better than the countries with which he unfavourably compares us. We have to be better than them at everything because British is best, like Bovril.

 Memorable computations: 7 out of 10 MPs think they are worthy of an 11% pay rise.

 Dennis O'Sullivan (Headteacher)