Government control of schools not the best way forward

MICHAEL Gove’s ambition is to persuade or force all schools in England to become academies (Yorkshire Post, June 28). An academy is a government school. It is created under a funding contract with the Secretary of State. Under that contract, he funds each academy annually at any level he chooses. He can give seven years’ notice of terminating his contract with the governors and has no need to consult anyone else before doing that. Why is Mr Gove so keen on making all schools directly dependent on funding from him in this way?

One compelling reason, beneath the largely unsubstantiated claim that academies always do better than the schools they replace, is that he wants to be able to control, to the nearest pound, what each school in England has to spend each year. Why does he want to do that? Well, the present incumbent may not last much longer, so who better qualified to be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer than the man who establishes absolute personal control of expenditure on English schools?

There are a whole range of sensible ways of improving primary schools, in Leeds or elsewhere in Yorkshire, that need help to improve. Making them into government schools, which neither the parents nor the local authority can do anything to influence, is not one of them.

From: David McKenna, Hall Gardens, Rawcliffe, Goole.

THE brief mention of Ofsted (Yorkshire Post, June 27) reminded me of what I discovered as a headteacher many moons ago. Having been informed that we were to be “Ofsteded”, my governors thought it a good idea if I were to undergo the training so that we, as staff, knew what we were up against.

The main thing that interested me was the people on the training course. I met several headteachers and some local authority advisers who believed that they would be financially better off doing Ofsted work; school governors who had sundry axes to grind and people from “the office” who wanted to “sort out” members of the teaching profession. Along with these, there were several who wanted out of the classroom (presumably because they couldn’t hack it!) Coming way down the list was a minority who just wanted the best for children in schools.

I had been on many courses run by HMI and had always found them to be excellent with the emphasis always on where it belonged. Where it belonged was contained in my final, self-inflicted mauling from the lead Ofsted chap. I said that, throughout the whole week, there had been no mention of children.

Exit, stage left!

From: JW Slack, Swinston Hill Road, Dinnington, Sheffield.

TOM Richmond is absolutely right in criticising our “flawed structure of education” (Yorkshire Post, June 26). He obviously experienced the regular alterations to examinations as a pupil and this is always ongoing. At a time of national upheaval it is surely vital that the schools should be able to offer havens of stability and consistency as a framework for young people to mature into responsible adults with a sense of purpose in future employment.

Unfortunately, too many children lack order and stability in their own private lives which is the cause of many problems and Tom is right to point to primary education as being in more need of support.

The majority of primary school children are performing well but there is a significant minority underperforming due to various social/family problems and insecurity which makes them unready for school. The problems begin at birth and need identifying and addressing immediately with both parents.

From: David T Craggs, Tunstall, East Yorkshire.

SO, our primary school children are going to have to learn poems off by heart, are they? I hope Michael Gove, our Education Secretary, is going to explain to teachers, parents and indeed the children themselves why he thinks it is a good idea. To date, I have not read or heard of the reasons behind his thinking.

But more to the point, assuming that it all goes ahead, who will choose the poems to be learned and what will the poems be? There’s bound to be a “recommended” list... there always is.

Poems that rhyme are no longer in fashion, the nation’s poetry “trendies” having decided this. Such poems would therefore not be on the list, even though the poems we older people love and learned off by heart at school and written by the likes of Masefield, Lear, Betjeman and Wordsworth, to name but four, were in the rhyming style.

Out of sheer curiosity I looked at the poems written by the four prize winners and the nine commended in this year’s Larkin and East Riding Poetry Prize judged by Penelope Shuttle. I was disappointed to find that only one of the 13 poems chosen actually rhymed. It was as if the judge had screened out all but one of the rhyming poems entered as being “unfashionable”. And judging from the work of our present Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, she shares this view.