Choosing A secondary school: Some Advice, Some Condemnation.

In my June 2014 blog, “I am all for extremism in schools,” I called for an end to all faith schools. I claimed they were by nature divisive and encouraged social segregation.  A catholic school headteacher called me “destructive.”  and  that he was taking his balls home. I thought I had been quite reasonable in condemning the holy Irish priests and nuns who had dumped 796 children’s bodies in a Tuam cesspit after they had died in church run children’s homes. I hadn’t even mentioned the thousands of children forcibly removed from Ireland’s “fallen women” and exported to America. And as for the sainted Pope John 23^rd’s previously secret 1962 advice to bishops as to how to cover up for paedophile priests – not a word did I say.

In 1978 a group of Christians were offended by an article I had written and held a meeting where they decided not to pray for me. Fine thing, religion.

I had a look at the offended headteacher’s catholic school Ofsted Report and found that his school had fewer than average children entitled to free school and fewer than average children with special needs.

My niece went to a Hertfordshire catholic secondary. In the days when Ofsted judged “inclusivity” they wrote that her school had very few kids on free school meals, very few with special needs and no English as a Second language learners. They could have added that middle class, white catholics pre dominated. Ofsted said that the school was, “outstandingly inclusive.”

I wandered around Ofsted reports on catholic secondaries in these semi rural parts and amazingly the same picture emerged – it seems that, here at least, catholic secondary schools receive relatively few successful applications from the neediest families. When I wrote to all secondary heads in Hertfordshire and asked them to state at Open Evenings, “We welcome children of all abilities, including those with special educational needs,” I received one severe written complaint from an “outstanding” catholic school. Perhaps, we catholics, for you can never leave, are a wee bit defensive.

However, if there’s any doubt on what religious schools should be doing, take a look at Matthew 18:1-6 “ But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 19:14 “let the little children come to me.”

I think that meant all the children, not just the brightest.

This isn’t a blog about catholic schools. Many of our “outstanding” schools have the highest pupil scores on admission. One comprehensive, near me, cannot be judged on “closing the gap” criteria because the slightly weaker, needier students don’t go there. No gap to close. A trawl through five Hertfordshire “outstanding” secondaries will show that, coincidentally I’m sure, their Year 7 children come to them with high SATs results.

The brightest children at age 11 join outstanding schools who are judged that on the basis of levels of progress. Children with mild learning difficulties do not make the same rate of progress as other children. A Level 5 at age 11 has to get a “B” grade at 16 for 3 levels of progress. This is quite easy for a level 5 kid to achieve.

A Level 3 child, one who has achieved the standard of a good 7 year old by age 11, is expected, by Ofsted, to progress to a grade “D” by age 16. This is quite hard for a Level 3 kid to achieve. Such a student does not look good on school results tables.

Ofsted fails schools if most children are not making three levels of progress. Therefore the school needs fewer slowly progressing students to survive and prosper in league tables and with Ofsted. Fair enough, keep those kids out and you are on the way to an “outstanding” grade.

Don’t believe me? As I will show in October’s blog it is considerably easier to get a fat man through the eye of a needle than to be judged outstanding in a school with low entry grades.

To ignore league tables  a headteacher and their governors, would need to be on a mission or have some sort of vocation, and commitment to all students achieving their potential - precisely what we say at open evenings.

I wonder if the point of secondary admissions is to stop the children most in need of a good education actually getting in to the best schools. And, inviting approbation and condemnation from my colleagues, some headteachers seem actively engaged in turning away  children who need and deserve good schools.

When I called the first post war London Co-op’s milkmen’s strike broken bottles were regularly under my car wheels. I best be gentle with the headteachers.

During the next four  weeks thousands of families will be trying to choose the best secondary school for their children. In Hertfordshire this may involve choosing from a group of good schools but for some the choice is still daunting.

Here’s the choosing a secondary school game with Open Evening Bingo in italics:

For some parents the uniform rules can be a tremendous signal of a school’s worth: if it is unfashionable and expensive and can only be bought in one shop there’s your good school. I was speaking with a parent whose son’s blazer cost £130, and very pretty it was too. They may be acting illegally but who’s going to tell? I bet his blazer has never been a goalpost.

Some schools expect an annual “voluntary contribution” from parents – a useful message for families struggling to survive on low incomes at a time when wages have fallen behind prices. I know of a school where the USA football trip – already out of many budgets – demanded that each player’s family bought a £500 Quiz Night table. Another school required every student to buy their own i-pad. Helps keep out the riff raff.

If the school has an admissions test – usually looking for musical or linguistic ability surely that’s your good school.

If the school, “tries hard with kids with special needs but is not very good at it,” that’s surely a sign of excellence, because Ofsted certainly don’t care. We are jolly good with children whose special need is that they are exceptionally bright and you will find their names on our Oxbridge Honours Board.

Why should  schools admit kids who need a little extra help, children who would surely flourish in an outstanding school and soar to mighty heights of academia if there is a risk that Ofsted will criticise, league tables condemn and parents choose elsewhere?

We can’t be having schools which admit children of all abilities, children who may need stretching or supporting, boys and girls who live side by side in the same streets but are selected out of the “good” schools by the schools themselves. Hide the SENCO is a popular Open Evening game amongst some of the “best” schools who find educating children who need a bit of help to catch up the equivalent of climbing mountains in ankle length skirts.

As I approach a 15th Open Evening as headteacher I am aware that these events are proof that every science lesson contains explosions or volcanic actions and that PE teachers wear suits. One must never consider how many children, on how many occasions, contributed to the building of a wonderful kit car.

Once upon a time we all took on specialisms in return for government money. The funding is long gone, the specialism no longer favourably funded and the curriculum demolished and rebuilt on other grounds. Heaven help the school who took PE as a specialism 15 years ago.

The imaginary, “How to be a Headteacher” course tutors us in how to describe our schools. On Open Evenings we are all unique, have a special ethos where moral values are important and teaching and learning are at the heart of what we do.(I love that bit) Miss out the “we teach a traditional academic curriculum and have the highest standards” or,” “We have many gifted and talented students,” and a headteacher may be condemned.

Why do I tell you, “We have the highest standards of behaviour,” and “We aim to help all students fulfil their potential?”

Can you imagine a headteacher suggesting, “Our standards are pretty naff and expectations are low; we tolerate ill-discipline, encourage bullying and kids are scruffy on purpose; our curriculum is unbalanced and, we don’t care if students do well?” Quite obviously, the opposite of what we say at these events is unimaginable – “the Law of the Ridiculous Reverse” ( Simon Hoggart quoted in an excellent “Choosing a secondary school” article in The Guardian 23^rd September 2014)

Emphasise Latin if you’ve got it.

The money a school has in its accounts was allocated to schools to educate children. However, thousands of pounds are spent on glossy brochures, designer websites and superfluous adverts. Schools pose the children carefully by the nice tree; blonde girls with ponytails most prominently.

School facilities may well be very good but say, “state of the art,” “the envy of others” or even “the finest in the country,” and pray that no-one asks for the evidence. A few touch screen computers in a library can be state of the art to some of us older people.

Look forward to Open Evening Bingo.  I will be using all the phrases I condemn –did you think I was daft?  You will be looking for gravitas and perhaps accepting that you will be bored listening to my speech. My London accent is a bit common, innit? But at least I don’t drive a powder blue Fiat 500.

If you are choosing a new school for your children, please understand that the vast majority of our schools are better than when you went to school yourself. Teachers are better teachers and lessons are fuller and carefully planned. I think we have a right to good local schools and I am pleased that both my daughters were able to study locally in non selective comprehensives.

Talk to your neighbour’s children about their school, have a look through the literature on the school’s website, ask about extra curricular activities and try to see exam results in relation to your own child’s abilities. Younger students tend not to hate everything so ask the 12 year olds if they enjoy school.

Talk to the students if you can, although I must ask you not to hang around the school gates approaching random kids. One headteacher recently said “It’s important that every child is known,” to which one ex-student muttered, “You never once spoke to me in 5 years.”

Do look at Ofsted Parentview comments. Select “All” for a 3 year total.  Notice, if you do compare, that the majority of parents seem quite happy with their own child’s school.

Read the Ofsted Report, although the prose can be painfully inadequate. Take care. Birmingham’s Park View Academy received the highest Grade 1  accolade and the fine words, “All schools should be like this,” (Ofsted 2012) and  then became the so-called Trojan horse hotbed of Muslim takeover and indoctrination a little over 12 months later. It then received the lowest Ofsted Grade 4.

Ask to visit the school on a normal school day. If we will not let you visit then we may be embarrassed, very, very busy people, aloof or unwelcoming. I am touring with 15 sets of parents next week as I am entirely proud of what we do and the young people who study here.

I didn’t start out to give advice but if you are choosing a school, good luck.

Google an excellent 2008 article by Francis Gilbert, “How to Choose a Secondary School” for some common sense advice or, if in doubt, tell schools your Level 6, gifted daughter plays violin for England and watch them fall over themselves to form a disorderly queue for her admission.


Dennis O'Sullivan
Sunday 28th September 2014

GCSE Results Day: Now teachers lose their jobs

GCSE Results Day: Now teachers lose their jobs

Pretty girls leaping. It’s GCSE results day. With Performance Related Pay ordinary teachers of bright kids will fare better than those who brilliantly teach those children who don’t make 3 or 4 levels of progress. With the threat of Ofsted for the lower attaining schools results day defines their futures. The incentive to do all one can for the students means sometimes teachers have overstepped the mark. And talking of marks: over-extended exam boards’ standards are deteriorating and few teachers, parents or students trust them. The independent regulator, Ofqual has politicised itself in its toadying and the political parties just need a soundbite. Today, careers are savaged, destroyed by a single statistic and good people are distraught.

That’s everyone covered except to say it sometimes seems that young people are mere statistics.

The dominant phrase “5+ A*-C grades including English and Maths” diminishes education, whilst making schooling at age 15 a bore beyond reasonable tolerance. For schools the phrase spells Ofsted inspection on the “computer says no” model we have come to detest. Fall below the ‘Basement’ figure and your school may be sent into an academy chain. My friend, Fiona, has put much of her life into successfully dragging her school away from the basement in a secondary modern school next door to a grammar school where the most able have been creamed off. Her teachers struggle in the 30% - 40% range with kids who have been told they are failures at age 11. Parents flock to her school and I have seen amazing things done there, for the partially sighted for example. Ofsted will destroy their efforts and abuse their achievements.

Another headteacher friend was so drunk on the joy of this year’s results she was unable to talk to me.

Compare unfavourably in raw data and teachers may spend demoralised months responding to frequent frenzied senior management edicts, policies and strategies as school leaders try to avoid condemnation and dismissal.

At Chauncy in 2012 we had 26 C grade students awarded a D grade in English. The Head of English was summoned and she and I faced resignation.  How could we have cocked up so badly? We had failed the kids. Some of them wouldn’t be getting into 6^th Form or college. At least one of us cried that night.

A picture emerged on the internet. Exam boundaries had been changed after the students had completed the course and taken the exams. Gove had said there would be no increase in pass rates and “independently” Ofqual told the exam boards to reduce 10,000 C grades in English to a D grade. Excel – one of the boards were told that if they didn’t reduce the grades Ofqual would. I can’t remember the number of foul words I used to describe this betrayal of students and teachers but I did join in a lawsuit against Gove and his regulator. How could students trust us or the system when they had been cheated? They made fools of us, legally but unfairly.

We do not need the GCSE measure at 16. The damning obsession means even less now that young people must stay in education or training until aged 18. I should have more faith but what’s the point of vocational courses for 14-18 year olds if you exclude them as a measure.

When one’s career, employment, standard of living, status and prospects depend on “5+ A*-C grades including English and Maths” is it surprising that some of us give too much time and help to push borderline students over the grade boundary. Years 10 and 11 are now barren, tedious, repetitive years for students as they are drilled towards the “5+ A*-C grades including English and Maths.”  We are constantly assessing them and parents may recognise the language of  Predicted Grade, Target Grade and/or Challenge Target Grade. GCSEs are too narrow, have too much assessment and do not prepare students for further study or employment. Rote learning is not educational.

Don’t insult us by criticising “teaching to the exam.” Once the test becomes the measure it becomes useless as an educational tool. Did you expect us to lie down after 2012 and sacrifice more kids’ self-worth, just rewards and opportunities on the false altar of unreliable statistics. Exam attainment at 16 is now just a passport. No one expects a driving instructor to teach the glories of the open road prior to a test.

Did you think you could bully us into failing our students? Where was I supposed to lie down?

10% of my blog visitors are in America and this month Latvians, Poles, Ukranians and two of my sisters have been reading my blogs. I’d better explain what is making me cross (this time).

In England GCSE exams are set and marked by five exam boards (also called ‘awarding bodies’). They are supervised by the government regulator, Ofqual. The late Gove appointed Glenys Stacey as Ofqual Chief Executive from a field of one. When she asked a conference of headteachers if they believed she was independent of Gove we shook our heads in unison and she got quite animated in fruitless defence.

Gove said more kids would fail exams, Ofqual immediately did the deed. Gove doesn’t like American literature in English exams – like magic, Steinbeck and Harper Lee disappear. Gove didn’t like the A*-C grading; neither does Glenys. It’s a shame that neither have taught a single lesson in their lives, imagine that sort of empathy when working with kids.

Gove has gone, destroyed by his etonian betters and Stacey can now, settle down in regulatory mode and be a non political civil servant. She has much work to do and I hope she will do it with us.

Like many astute candidates for a job she started a Masters degree course on Educational Assessment just before interview. She has not yet graduated, but one must not condemn her failure to complete, in four years, what is usually a 2 year part time course. Many of us believe we should examine students when they are ready and if you need a little more advice from your tutor, don’t think it’s cheating.

In November 2013, Gove changed the rules, announcing major policy in “The Telegraph” rather than parliament. Two weeks before students were due to sit ‘early entry’ exams he declared  that resit results would not be allowed in  League tables.  Many schools immediately and at considerable expense withdrew early entries. Many headteachers made up excuses for the students and parents, sadly avoiding the truth.

Glenys Stacey had no experience in education but did claim at interview that being a mother was good preparation. Primary headteachers in particular find a front gate forum of parents who know how to run schools because they went to one themselves. I recently considered taking over my local petrol station on this basis.

If Ofqual has tinkered with results again this year, teachers will lose their jobs, some will be demoted and some will give up the profession they love. The feared ogre of Ofsted roars into schools on these results and the work of teachers is dominated by the havoc wreaked by the ungodly Gove-Wiltshire–Stacey trinity. With disingenuous disregard for students and teachers, Stacey has warned us to expect “greater volatility” in this year’s results. Apparently, this year’s students may be of different ability to last year’s. There are new, harder exams with less coursework and tougher boundaries. I hear that there are, indeed students, teachers and schools inexplicably in dire strairts today, yet  Stacey boasts, “We have maintained standards.” I fail to understand how English results going down and Maths going up can be the same standard. Add to this that one is meant to be able to compare a “B” grade in 2014 with a “B” grade in 2011 and that Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have their own grades and maintaining standards is a falsehood not worthy of your paygrade.

Ofqual’s  job is to make sure the system runs smoothly, overseeing the exam boards, specifications and syllabuses and ensuring the boards mark properly so that the qualifications are fairly awarded.  Good students earn their grades and should receive them.

The exam system is outdated, deteriorating and near collapse. It brutalises and demoralises good people with inadequate, inaccurate measurement of memory-test exams. Teachers will happily embrace constructive, planned and rational change designed to promote and celebrate achievement. Consider this please: our students would benefit from more assessment during their studies, and less examination at the end.

Ofqual should advise the government. Introducing new tests, exams, qualifications and curriculum for every age group from 4 to 19 at the same time is educationally unsound and daft. To create a new History curriculum you have to introduce the age 11 course to students four years after the age 7 one. This cannot be done concurrently to suit a political thirst. Think building blocks.

Don’t call us cheats. Gove gave us the inelegant term, “gaming.” Independent Stacey adopted the word and concept, asking teachers to let her know, anonymously, where their schools were “gaming” the exam system to secure higher grades. Gaming refers to practices helping kids do better than if they walked into exams unsullied by preparation and practice, wearing blindfolds and mittens. If this is the standard of your academic investigations let’s hope you can resit the Masters, after guidance, advice and a walk through the specification. I bet it’s a non exam course.

My wife has been gaming my daughter’s exams. They do it in the evenings, behind closed doors. They speak French before tests and this gives Cathy an adavantage.

Is it only half the middle class world who use private tutors: gaming, dependent on private wealth?

“Gaming” is forever with us; how innocent am I?

My school has (that means I have) increased the timetabled curriculum for English and Maths with more teachers and smaller classes. From age 11 we target the skills that will be examined  at 16; from age 14 we practice exam questions; at 15 we target likely questions. At 16 we do early entries and we double entry some students for GCSE English and the private schools’ preferred iGCSE. We do practice essays, and “walking talking mocks.” On exam day  we get the kids in early for a warm up; feeding them them toast and bacon rolls. Each student is given a bottle of water. We have a team of dedicated invigilators, an air conditioned hall and a very big clock. Students are provided with a black pen and we are nice to them. No barking attacks the students. As an exams centre we administer public examinations faultlessly according to exam board inspection.

Gamers such as Lewis Hamilton? He has a team of dozens, millions spent designing better car stuff, nutritionists and fitness trainers, coaches using every device to analyse his racing style, He has on board computers and pit stops where he doesn’t even put the petrol in himself . He practices in the car and in simulators, on the track he will race. My goodness, they virtually drive the race for him.

I’ve heard of candidates trying to spot interview questions, newsreaders using notes and prompters, firefighters simulating fire rescues, actors learning lines and fuel tanker drivers being shown exactly how to transfer toms of fuel. Gamers all.

There has been cheating. Extra help or time in SATs, model answers where kids change a few words, constant correction of coursework, inflated marks in oral exams and too much help in practical exams. Yes, it has always been done and it is wrong. To prevent such malpractice we need effective monitoring exam boards, to  visit schools during controlled assignments, talk with students, film oral exams, read coursework submissions and use computer plagiarism checkers. Warn, penalise and publicly ban centres found cheating. Headteachers will quickly impose internal checking to save their school’s reputation. Put this alongside an ethos of trusting schools and abolishing league tables and we stand a chance of integrity returning. Simply using a mountain of terminal exams which exam boards fail to mark properly is not the answer. Do away with resits, Modular exams, early entries and access to iGCSEs and you will remove a burden on markers. But with the 16 million papers (Guardian Jan 2012) all now to be sat in June the exam boards stand no better chance.

There are too many exams and too many end of course exams. Properly moderated school assessments in most subjects would be a more efficient and accurate way of assessing student achievement. The only way forward is for the assessment system to be built on trusting teachers and reported student achievement broadened. Have fewer formal assessments, with a new role for in-school trained, responsible assessors. Schools are really very, very good at knowing their students and assessing each one’s ability in each aspect of each course. Ofqual must look to use this knowledge rather than rely on statistical models of assessment. A lack of trust explains the removal of Practical assessments from the new Science A levels.

And. Please can we make the tasks assessed a bit more exciting, stimulating, challenging and rewarding. Problem solving maths is on the ball here.

A student’s grade should not be based on the choice of board . I am in favour of one board, one syllabus. However, the AQA Drama results were so crazily wrong in 2011 many schools switched other boards, saving thousands of students from irrational failure. This is by no means a unique example. Government and Ofqual seem to agree that speaking and listening should not be examined in English, so many switched to iGCSE. I want one resourced good board funded by the massive fees we already pay them and regulated by an Ofqual free of political catchphrases and interference. Any money received by an exam board employee for writing exam textbooks should go to reduce the cost of exams.

We should abolish league tables as unfit for purpose.  We now have the Govian exclusion of resit grades, many vocational subjects, “discounted” subjects which, for example, counts one of Art and Textiles as meaningful. The official, published result will be the first exam sat, so if Art was sat on Monday 10^th June and textiles on Tuesday 11^th June Art counts in league tables and Textiles is rubbished. Well, it isn’t as if any one designs, makes, sells or even wears clothes is it?

NAHT, ASCL and PiXL have combined to support schools with “end of Year 11” statistics including early entries, unintentionally wrecking league tables in the process. How then will Raiseonline enable Ofsted to condemn on figures alone? And by the way, what’s wrong with a Leaving Certificate/Graduation standard that records all student achievement as a passport to job interviews and further study? And goodness, how will we cope if more young people achieve this standard?

If the league tables are there to entice or deter parents on such simplistic measures do we really think families are that naive? I know dozens of people who love our school despite the drawback of a blogging headteacher..

Exam boards make many, many mistakes. Schools paid exam boards £328 million in 2013 (Channel 4, 15-08-14). Every year incompetent marking leads to incorrect grades given to candidates and attempts to get injustice corrected are met with bureaucratic, defensive obstruction from exam boards. We have seen our ICT coursework, marked by the same teacher for 12 years, reduced by 3 grades per A level student. Our English language coursework, marked by the same teacher for five years, has been marked down an entire A Level grade. There are countless examples of this across schools When a candidate gets a remark the remarker receives the original script with the first marker’s marks. This is bound to influence the second marker and is a highly dubious practice in academic matters. Appeals cost schools £5.5 million in 2013 (Channel 4, 15-08-14).

The arts suffer more than most from interpretive moderation. Just two recent cases in my experience:The Drama A level moderator told the head , that’s me, that she was happy with our marking. All kids were then downgraded. Our appeals were dismissed without explanation An experienced Music A level teacher resubmitted the exact same lower sixth work a year later.  All grades went up.

Exam marking is outrageously hit and miss with the misses failing good students. Marking is neither accurate nor fair (HMC Report 2012) “12,250 grades changed at A level and 26,270 grades changed at GCSE” after schools appealed (Ofqual Statistical Bulletin March 2012). Real people, real mistakes that could cost teachers and students their careers.

Schools pay dearly to appeal badly marked exams and Ofqual’s response was to add this to the gaming accusations. Stop appealing results, you said, because the examiners doing the remark were often tempted to give a higher mark on appeal.

Parents, teachers and students do not have confidence in the exam boards. Ofqual’s own polls showed that, “89% of headteachers had ‘considerable’ concerns about GCSEs, citing worries about incorrect marking of papers, grade boundary issues, incorrect grading and lack of information and knowledge about standards.”  (Ofqual, May 2013)

When Ofqual polled 4,696 people they found that “one in five of all teachers (20%) believe that around a quarter of GCSE students get the wrong grade.” Alarmingly, Ofqual declared this “a broadly positive statistic.” (Ofqual 2012) My Masters course emphasised research methods and use of statistics

In the same survey Ofqual reported 41% of parents ‘not confident’ students got the correct GCSE grade, 33% likewise concerned about inaccurate A Level grades. Goodness, Glenys, how high do these figures need to be before you demand higher exam board standards?

Chauncy has scored 24% on EBacc measures, 62% on First Entry only measures, 72% on the results achieved by the end of Year 11 and 73% if we include vocational courses in full. I reckon appeals may bring us to 74%.

Someone protect me from this nonsense.

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.

 

I Am All For Extremism In Schools

Posted Wednesday 10th June 2014



I am all for extremism in schools

I am an extremist, I have extreme views on the education of our children and I impose my extreme beliefs on 1025 children I have systematically removed staff who do not share my extreme practices and I have insisted that all governors, recruited over the last 15 years , embrace fanaticism.

I have tried everything I currently know to extend my agenda into other schools and I am a member of organisations committed to the same revolutionary vision.

I'm looking for a whole herd of Trojan horses, skilled letter writers, spoof columnists and revolutionary cadres to spread the takeover.

Or as Bobby Dylan said, "I'm liberal but to a degree, I want everyone to be free."

The context for my confessions is the “Trojan Horse” scandal to hit 21 Birmingham schools. In March, an anonymous letter was made public which claimed to be a template illustrating how state schools could be taken over and pushed into adopting a more Islamic culture. The unsigned letter could be a provocative hoax - refers to "Operation Trojan Horse" as the name of the alleged conspiracy.

At a time of anti-foreigner sentiment spreading throughout our political parties this was a heaven-sent opportunity to scare us all about muslims. Into Birmingham went four investigation teams, including experts on terrorism, for God’s sake!

Schools that were judged good or outstanding by recent Ofsted inspectors are now labeled by Ofsted as inadequate. I’m not sure I can see much evidence, that’s evidence, of extremism but I do know that the judgments on the mainly muslim state schools have been made on criteria my colleagues and I, in mainly white state schools, have never heard of. And I have endured 7 such inspections.

The Birmingham schools reject the findings as “scaremongering and an unfair misrepresentation,” calling the whole investigation "a vicious and co-ordinated smear campaign.” Much has been made of a muslim woman’s failure to shake hands with an Ofsted Inspector. This was interpreted as a cultural thing rather than most teachers’ sensible approach to Ofsted.

However, with an education system unmonitored and split asunder to satisfy an ideological obsession there are bound to be opportunities for all kinds of nutters and if you let all kinds of people run their own schools you will get extremism, almost by definition.

Many people of all ethnicities are united by their opposition to homosexuality. Our great British values were upheld in law between 1987 and 2003 with the infamous Section 28 banning teachers from suggesting, “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”

I find it hard to embrace the Old Testament punishment for adultery

“If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbour, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”(Leviticus 20:10)

And I am very pleased that Mosaic Law was replaced when Jesus came along to preach love and forgiveness rather than stoning. John 8:7 recounts a woman accused of adultery being brought before Christ, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

Adulterous wives have been roundly condemned. Among the often severe Aztecs they were sometimes impaled. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks favoured amputation of the nose whilst the legal code of Mesopotamia , around 4000 years ago, provided drowning as a punishment. This was as much to do with husbands’ rights of ownership as sin, of course, and the Mormon religion encouraged men to be polygamous, though not women. For failing to worship her husband in the Manu tradition of Ancient India “the king shall cause her to be devoured by dogs in a place frequented by many.”

I think what I am trying to show is that societies can have some laws and punishments we now consider abhorrent, but they can and will change in a liberal society. They remain abhorrent. There are no static context free British values and I understand that values evolve with the maturity of a society. There is no place for Sharia Law in Britain but we need to respect British muslims into society, not ostracise, isolate, label and condemn them.

 In 2011, about one third of the 20,000 state funded schools in England were faith schools, approximately 7,000 in total, of which 68% were Church of England schools and 30% were Roman Catholic. There were 42 Jewish, 12 Muslim, 3 Sikh and 1 Hindu faith schools.

Are we really surprised that Muslims do some Islam related teaching, that their ethos may be a bit different to the going-to-mass-in-school-time Catholic faith schools? Do boys in Jewish faith schools wear the kippah, Sikhs turbans and Muslim girls the niqab? Surely the refusal to insist on secular state schools means we tolerate faith schools praising and proclaiming their own religion just a bit. Do we doubt that the Methodists, Greek Orthodox and United Reformed Church who all have state funding for their schools, sometimes go on a bit about what they consider the best bits of their faiths? Allow and encourage faith schools and we must accept that elements of separatism will pervade. The Quaker school might mention pacifism when talking of war, much to the distaste of those who glorify British wars. And as for the new Hindu Free school with a ban on sausages…

 If we segregate children by religion are we surprised they become segregated socially? Our school cook, Tina, said it better than me: “If you want a multicultural society our kids have got to grow up together.”
Why would an inclusive society want to separate our children from each other on religious grounds. There’s a nice little model of how this could work in Northern Ireland.

 98% of our state funded faith schools may refer to those tablets God gave to Moses. The 10 Commandments insist: Keep the sabbath holy, Do not covet thy neighbour’s wife, oxen or his other property. And I was brought up not to question the Holy Trinity the Virgin Birth the Ascension of Mary into heaven, The Resurrection, transubstantiation, Heaven and Hell, mortal sin and the infallibility of the Pope. Well…

Long ago
I was a 9 year old debutant altar server at Our Lady’s House in Willesden and at something near to 5.00 a.m the fallen women were already at work. I remember them as worn, timid and withdrawn young women very drably dressed scrubbing the floor. Many of you will be familiar with the recent films and fuss about the dire and inhumane treatment of women in the Magdalen’s Laundries throughout Ireland. Approximately 10,000 women are known to have entered a Magdalen Laundry from 1922 until the closure of the last laundry in 1996.

The homes cared for unwed mothers and other young women considered to be wayward. They endured a daily regimen that included long periods of prayer and enforced silence. Women were imprisoned in these institutions and kept from the embarrassed holy eyes of a catholic nation.

The vengeful Catholic Church would take their children from them.

On Wednesday 5th of June 2014 news broke of the discovery of the bodies of 796 children from one of these schools for the children of fallen women in Tuam, County Galway, my own mother’s homeland.

The children in these schools/homes were 5 times more likely to die as other children, undernourished and cruelly abused and neglected as the sins of the mothers were visited on innocent children. 796 very small skeletons of children who died in the home were found in a septic tank The Catholic Church buried these children by throwing them into a cesspit. I wonder if they recited Luke 18:16 “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God, “as they disposed of their bodies like worthless garbage.

The Bishop of Tuam says you can't impose the morality of 2014 Britain on 20th century Ireland. You can't judge people for previous behaviours. I guess the 1960s were a different time and we should let Jimmy Saville and the other paedophiles rest in peace. And let’s not go using our 21st century ideals to go on about the Holocaust.

My family were catholic. It was their job and their church’s job to teach me about being catholic. Parents have a right in the European Convention of Human Rights to bring up their children in the religion of their choice. However, they do not have a right to state funding for religious schools. I have nothing against what I know of the Hindu religion, and Muslims, Sikhs, the numerous Christian varieties, Jews and Anabaptists should all be free to worship as their religion and secular law dictate. But I am against all faith schools.

Let all schools educate about the similarities between religions, the fact that there are different views of religion. A little thought to town planning, to mixed housing provision to help create communities of people of all colours, who consider themselves British and who can celebrate their faith, or none, in a fair society based on good old British values: equality of opportunity, meritocracy, fair play and doing the right thing.

However, I don’t want to come across too democratic or liberal. Neither I nor my daughter, Scarlett, slept peacefully on hearing the Mass Grave in Galway story, sadness and anger ruining the night.

I hear that a priest wants to pray over the septic tank.

For whom shall we pray, who to bless and who to condemn? Upon whom should we wish eternal hellfire, to rot in hell - the nuns and priests, bishops and popes or the children they termed bastards?



Dennis O'Sullivan

The Eyes Have It

Wednesday 21st May 2014

Have you ever noticed that characters in novels look deeply into other’s eyes? I don’t know how often you make direct eye contact with people – personally it seems a bit seedy to me - but apparently there’s a lot to see there, and hard boiled detectives see more than most. In Dennis Lehane’s latest, quite good ”Live by Night” a character attacks some men because, “ they’d come upon him with a threat in their eyes so clear wasn’t no point in waiting for it to leave their mouths.” I think that’s brilliant.

At another point the hero is robbing some gangsters of and comes across a waitress,“ Her eyes left the pistol and rose up his forearm in such a way he could feel the hairs parting. She sculled across the centre of his chest and then up his throat and over his chin. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things.” Heck!

Later, before the sex started, “She stared at him the way she had in the payroll office, like she could see the intestines curled inside him, the pink of his lungs, the thoughts that journeyed among the folds of his brain.”

So, can you spot a liar, a fraud, a charlatan? Can you see the blankness of the apathetic, the indifferent or the bored? Le’ts check the eyes of Mickey Gove, the DfE tweeters, our national press, the BBC and politicians of all hues. Their eyes were ablaze and their scorn plentiful when dubious analysis from the OECD gave birth to the headlines that we were “plummeting down “ international education tables. (December 2013)

On the 8th May news was released that contrary to this we are apparently 6th in the world and 2nd in Europe.Time for righteous praise from our leaders or even ruefully, apologetically smiling eyes?

These rankings are based upon an amalgamation of international tests and education data - including the OECD's Pisa tests, and two major US-based studies, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls).

Triangulated no less.

Well, well, well.

I waited, for the deafening applause, the beaming smiles, from a corrected media; front pages splashed with congratulatory messages to teachers, the call for a national day of joyful celebration bannered across news bulletins, tears of relief and possibly a letter from the grateful Queen of All England to be read out in classrooms. I waited.

I turned on the BBC News. Halal meat is prepared in halal style; Scunthorpe United finish 2nd in Division 3 and Mavis the cat has been found in a shed in Wycombe. The new education tables, the results, the international comparisons, came and went quicker than a passing glint in a regretful eye.

So, the news should have proclaimed: “Gove jumped on dodgy data to wreck our schools.“ Perhaps admitting to using incomplete, corrupt and incorrect information: Gove Is Well Sorry.”(The Sun)

So, surely, the next headline, after the glassy-eyed apology,

                                                          “Gove Resigns In Shame”

Well what would you expect from an honourable man, from a scholar of heroic deeds, a man with a fearsome supply of urgency pills who compares himself to brave “Horatio at the gate?” Of course he will resign.

Opus Dei style self flagellation and heavy grade barbed wire underpants for Mickey for the rest of this parliament, and Shakespearian banishment beyond. Of course, he will do the honourable thing because now he can see that our education system needs nurturing and developing, not wrecking.

He misled everyone. He proved incapable of rationale thought and balance supported by expert advice, instead, sweeping away the foundations of a world class education system for his own jaundiced, ideology, sacrificing millions of kids to perpetual practice for SATs, GCSEs and other dull repetitive tests.

Of course he will resign. For Govey is an honourable man who read about the age of chivalry and falling on one’s sword.

No doubt he will be round my house, in sackcloth to do my garden as penance for his anti-childhood sins. Sadly, for a man so immense in his own refection Gove now becomes the forgotten man, a bit like the once admired Gary Glitter - confined to the hidden pages of popular culture, an example of mistakes to be punished. An insecure man with so much to be insecure about, and no, I don’t want to be in your gang either.

Having worked in three schools in the last 35 years I can shamelessly, categorically state that we are doing so much better now. But we are being driven backwards by Gove’s stuff. Back to the 80s

…when many kids were failing, their schools couldn’t recruit decent qualified teachers. Mining, car plant, shipyard and docks jobs disappeared and it was students’ fault. The lack of ambition was endorsed by the state. Unemployed people were counted on disability lists to be statistically hidden. My first act as a Head of Year in 1983 was to bury a 14 year old gas sniffer called Mickey. There were riots of the disaffected, by the disillusioned in the cities.

With Gove’s nonsense, unopposed by all political parties, “more students will fail more exam,s” and this will show the students, struggling to pass demanding exams now, that there is no point. He’s also talking about quotas for each grade, so no matter how hard students work with their teachers there will be no criteria for success. As much as we improve our teaching normal distribution curves will screw the students and the schools.

Primary schools have year 5 children doing SATs practice papers a whole 12 months before their tests from fear of public comparison tables. Secondary school English and Maths teachers and headteachers are leaving the profession, driven out by the unrelenting attack on state education: the weekly backdated changes to assessment, the drive for pass marks rather than standards, the wholesale dumping of the curriculum for 4-18 year olds and this centralised, dogmatised, unscientific and frankly incorrect interference reflecting almost complete ignorance of the great things students and their teachers have been doing. Together we have been raising standards and achievement, encouraging hope and ambition, creativity and responsibility, communication and fair play and even suggesting that hard work will be rewarded – you know, all the things employers say they want.

So, back to the eyes. Somewhere in Chelsea, where the mickey-taker conducts his morning ritual, “Mirror mirror on the wall…” and the usual sneering snigger now unmasks a salivating pestilence as he celebrates his victory over a three quarters way decent education system. His hands rubbing together so rapid in their glee that the skin flakes in clouds of foulness, and as he searches his own eyes skin peels away from rotted eyelids, gore drips from the scales beneath,
and he stares, between the tiny slits of membrane at his own reflected eyes, grunting, “Education education education, I’ll show them bloody education!” as the reptilian metamorphosis completes.

Gove casts a damp deformed shadow obscuring the progress we have seen in the last three decades. Our system needed tidying and developing, not unseeing vandalism, and we should be encouraging the best teachers I have ever known.

The voice on “Alice’s Restaurant” resonates, the original 1967 version now. Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody, complains joshingly that the audience don’t sing along loudly enough. He says, “I’ve been singing this song for 25 minutes now, I can sing for another 25. I’m not proud, or tired.” Well, I’ve written nearly 40,000 words in the last 22 blogs and by tomorrow morning I will have been metaphorically hit 15,000 times.77 USA people reading, “How to choose a secondary school this month” makes me wonder if I’m on Michael’s reading list over there at Concordia College.

Feel invited to post a comment, maybe a suggested future topic. Or if you are my local MP and you don’t like my politics or you are the Hertford Headteacher who told my friend, “Dennis is mad,” there’s an all encompassing invite to post a few words.

And next time you see Gove on TV look into his eyes, look deep into his eyes.

Dennis O'Sullivan

To parliamentarians on the occasion of Shakespeare’s 450th Birthday: A Pox on Both your houses.

April 26th 2014

I have to give you bad news today and it is an unsweetened pill.  You will know that Mr Gove (an early blog appearance as usual)is very, very opposed to students taking their exam qualifications before the age of 16. He is likewise against what he calls “gaming” when schools enter children more than once for an exam or resit to get a better mark. Ofqual admit to “several thousand” mark changes on appeal but we are to be stopped appealing.  So he has announced that schools will be barred and penalized for such wrongdoings. Bravo, Brave Gove, to stand up and tell off the private schools, who have been gaming forever, with such unequivocal bluntness is worthy of admiration, adulation and a new job. Or can it be that these new rules are going to apply only to the public sector, can it? That would be obscenely beneath the “all in it together” mantra our prime Minister declares. When aliens took the life form of Michael Gove, the 21^st century bogeyman getting away scott free with destroying our schools they avoided both glamour and shame.
The identikit Tory-Labour parties have ignored the electorate, effectively promoting the nauseating, dangerously divisive UKIP offering answers to voters real concerns – wrong answers, ill thought out and contradictory answers but nonetheless populist nasty stuff which appeals to people losing hope as their standards of living continue to decline.

I was recently asked to write something for a magazine and they are publishing the blog-type ranting leaving me to find an alternative to the quiet piece which ended quite hopefully:

“..the terrible beauty of learning, the textures and belief in teaching, the joy and delight in achievement… transcending baffled incredulity and wounded self-belief. Lotta continua, Mickey, that struggle continues.”

I explained last month how Gove became Mickey and I also mentioned Ukrainian blog readers. Well, Mickey hasn’t bothered replying but 30 Ukranians read my stuff one day last week. Worryingly for Farage they mainly hit upon “How to choose a secondary school,” so maybe they have plans to visit. If I really want to wind up the bucolic UKIP –there’s been 83 blogs read in Poland, 219 in Germany and, please explode Nigel, 139 in France. What if all these literate discerning adults descended on us with their fancy skills and bilingualism?

Our symbol of democracy, The House of Commons united in eloquent opposition to the abuse of one of its members. Apparently, Christian Torres (Chelsea South) had not claimed expenses for the bus ride to his constituency party's fete. The ever so thorough MPs’ committee for looking into MPs’ expenses regretted that his claim was two years out of date. “It was an innocent mistake,” he chimed, “and now I am being victimised. That I overlooked the rules should not penalise me… I forgot to claim the £2.20… I was only on the dammed bus as part of a publicity stunt… and even though my mum paid the fare I want the money… and I don't get paid enough…. and bigger boys made me do it, one of whom may have been my partner but I was afraid to mention that, so I want to claim his fare too. Anyway, when did we start having to submit genuine, timely expenses claims?”

Fancifully creative writing, of course.That didn’t really happen; the next lot did.

Culture Secretary, Maria Miller with a trifling expenses difficulty, was ordered to repay £45,000 by the Commons Watchdog. The MPs own committee reduced her repayment to £5,800. Having obstructed the investigation she was ordered to apologise and did so with a teenage petulant 32 seconds of the tiniest, most begrudging,“ I’ve been told to apologise.” Her fellow MPs hurried to her side whilst she spoke. Yes, they said, “Were certainly in this together!”

Prime Minister Cameron has gone all religious (vote for him wont you) and declared us a Christian country as he spouted beliefs and values based on god stuff, admitting he is a somewhat occasional Christian. Every man needs a creed at election time.

There’s something fishy going on in Birmingham. It may be a big fat hoax of a letter left lying around in an editor’s intray or a real attempt by some Muslims to take over the management, curriculum and pastoral care in some schools.

There are at least three enquiries being done in Birmingham today and Gove (really having a laugh) has set his own underway, naturally led by a supremely unqualified guy, Peter Clarke, fresh from running the counter terrorism unit at Scotland Yard. Google the investigation and The Telegraph have it under “terrorism.” May I offer a “for God’s sake!” here as Gove equates Muslims with terrorism.

I was a victim in  catholic schools where we went to benediction  and mass in  school time; we mimed hymns in assembly, were taught that we would go to hell if we attended another faith’s ceremonies, whilst priests and nuns beat us with equanimity. It’s dead easy to be a Catholic school headteacher as the talent pool is restricted to those who can produce a priest’s certificate of attendance. Herabouts you also have to take pledges like “veritas” and “caring for all children” with a pinch of salt.

 Sikhs, Jews and Hindus have their own schools proposing their own way out of reality and Church of England schools contain more kids than churchgoers. Isn’t it all right for religious groupings to run their own schools, with divisive admissions policies, prayers and interesting curriculum bias financed by the state? If Muslims are doing so is it really any of Gove’s business?

Gove recently allocated funds for five free schools, obviously free from terrorist associations. They are Jewish free schools: Etz Chaim (Mill Hill) Eden (Muswell Hill) Rimon (Golders Green) South London Jewish(Wimbledon) and Alma (Finchley)all recently generously state-funded.

“Faith schools make a fantastic contribution to our education system and none more so than Jewish faith school,” Education secretary Michael Gove said in December 2010.

I’m going to believe in pixies and leprechauns, rainbows and pots of gold supplied by Mr Gove to those he chooses.

 I am so liberal that I have nothing religious against Jewish schools and accept that there is probably a Jewish flavour to the ethos, where Jewish governors are possibly a majority and they espouse a Jewish way of life. Nothing against Jewish schools at all. I’m just against all religion inspired schools and in favour of a “we’re all in it together” secular education system.

So Muslims up to no good in schools? Must be a terrorist issue or is it just a good old fashioned anti-foreigner alternative to UKIP in next month’s election?
To sink so low name-checking Christianity. Can we have blokes on horses crusading in the name of St George. George by the way, ironically, never set foot in England, good Turkish lad that he was.

When the deputy speaker gets cleared of serious sexual charges politicians united to bleat about "high profile people” being protected from such prosecutions, giving anonymity in trials to "people like him." All 3 parties moved to bully the CPS, protecting each other from the deserving consequences of their own venal stupidity, dishonesty and complicity. Deputy Speaker Nigel Evans’ confessed drunken bloke’s groping behaviour is apparently common in the House.

40% of House of Commons employees claim they have been sexually harassed at work. Imagine the fuss if it was a teacher drunkenly groping the people around them at work?

 UKIP leader Nigel Farage proclaims his politics as a break from the corruption of British politics. But here’s an oddity. Mr Farage is incessantly against foreign workers coming to the UK to take jobs that can be done by britishers. He employs a German as his secretary, OK, he says, because she’s his wife and just one of the “26 million European workers” coming to Britain in UKIP publicity.
Farage is against the EU parliament wasting money on expenses. The £60,000 he can't account for was not expenses it was an allowance and how dare we ask how he spent it. That’s almost like the rabidly anti EU and virtually everything else, Dail Mail editor Paul Dacre taking EU grants of 300,408 euros for his Scottish estate.

You may think that I am creating a stereotype, partying in urban myths. Stereotypes are sometimes thick ugly plaster over a framework of truth and our leaders really are a dodgy bunch of opportunists.

This week David Laws announced that its time to stop changing everything in education, lets settle down. If you vote us back in we will stop meddling. Could Lib Dem Laws be trusted, after all he is in the government, he is working with Gove in the DfE. Listen Honest David, I'm not the only one who's been taking notes: remember you got kicked out for a £50,000 illegal expenses claim.

Let’s trust our betters and breed a generation of the silently insulted. There is some perverted poetry that it is Mrs Fox who is leading Gove’s unrelenting hunting down of accessible qualifications. so that most students fail. And when our kids realise that the point is to stifle their ambition and aspirations I am sure they will sit quietly in rows. The rule changes on vocational courses are backdated to affect kids who started the courses 9 months ago, cos really, who cares? Not the disgracefully clueless silent Labour Party that’s for sure.

Just now I read that Gove has cancelled his speech at a headteachers’ union’s conference. He’s too busy. My own union leader asks me to believe that the government is listening. I admire your perseverance, Brian, but  you’re wrong.

Gove, Laws, Truss, Hunt and all you parliamentary abusers you don't know what you're doing. The exam-practising stress on our kids is growing – 9 two hour science exams in 2016 will be more than for a final university degree.  And just how much bloody Maths do you want them to do? What’s wrong with childhood and childish things, of a bit of creativity?  Don’t they have the right to be a 16 year old average ability kid working hard, doing well and getting recognition for that?

And the adults in education, if they’re  Maths or English teachers or headteachers in non selective schools will pack it in or get shafted. Gove has declared a 9 point scale for his new tougher GCSEs;. Well, Mickey, my anger at your machinations goes up to 11.

So my homework is for schools, its teachers, parents and leaders who know our students and families and understand our own communities to set the education agenda. 1.3 million school employees plus just under 10 million parents should swing any election, so

Seize the time.

Shout at politicians.

Shout loudly.

Dennis O'Sullivan