People who know me from Twitter (@legalaware) will appreciate that I consider my finest achievement to be 5 years recovery from severe alcoholism. I am very proud of this fact, in that if I carried on drinking, I would be dead. I am able to be a law student on the Legal Practice Course, but I have been open about this illness of mine which haunts me until I die.
However, I believe passionately that Gove is incorrect. I think it’s highly suspect that he has point-blank refused to acknowledge the academic viewpoints of senior professors in education concerning a recent report, if that particular report is correct.
Of course, you cannot believe everything you read in the papers. It could be true that what is reported here is not entirely accurate: “The move was signalled in an internal education department document leaked to the Daily Mail. The document says: “The Department for Education expects that existing GCSEs will disappear … Those starting GCSEs in 2013 are the last pupils who will have to do them.”
Rather, on a much happier note, I like and respect Liz Truss, even though she is a Tory! You can follow Liz here on Twitter. The Guardian later writes, “Gove’s move comes as influential Tory MP Elizabeth Truss calls for the teaching of maths at core, preparatory or higher level to be compulsory until the age of 18 by 2015. in a report to be published on Thursday tomorrow. Truss said: “The government needs to take urgent action to address the lack of mathematics attainment in schools. Current failings are hampering social mobility and the UK’s long term competitiveness. Let’s make this year – when we celebrate Turing’s centenary – that we start to climb back to the top of the maths table.”
(*) The reason I like Mathematics is that it potentially teaches you to think logically. ‘In the old days’, we used to have open-ended 30 mark questions as one-liners, for example on the radius of curvature, where you did not have your hand-held at every stage. This is the same reason I enjoyed my own finals at Cambridge in neuroscience, where it was essential to evidence your argument with published academic papers, provide a balanced argument, and, most essentially have a logical introduction, middle and conclusion; we had to answer each paper with three essays, of one hour each. This is what Michael Gove I suppose might call ‘intellectual rigour’, and it is an excellent argument; however, I completely reject it on purely nostalgic grounds. However, the counterargument to this, for me, is that too much emphasis on logic and reasoning might mean that you ignore (to their detriment) skills which might be described as involving ‘emotional intelligence’, considered to be vital for leadership (see Dan Goleman’s work). I should like to elaborate on this theme on a further post on a comparison between the old O levels and GCSE, and a consideration of the proposed English Baccalaureat.
I have only ever caught sight of Michael Gove once, and that was at Portcullis House at the launch of GEER, which was later to become Labour Left, at the kind invitation of Dr Eoin Clarke. Actually, my first impression of Michael Gove was that this is a very elegant man who is probably very much nicer than he is presented by the media in the adversarial knockabout system of Parliament.
I know a thing about education. I was awarded a Queen’s Scholarship to Westminster School, where that other guru of ‘social mobility’ went, Nick Clegg. I was awarded a Foundation Scholarship by my College at Cambridge for achieving the second highest mark in the University in the Natural Sciences Tripos for any biological subject in finals, before I did my Ph.D. there too. I also obtained 13 As at GCSEs, 4 As at A level and 2 1s at S level. As it happens, I think that Carl Lygo, the overall head of BPP which includes one of the top law schools in the country, is a wonderful champion of social mobility, and this is particularly crucial for the legal profession, for example. I hope that Liz would be proud of me, in that I achieved a A in Mathematics and A in Further Mathematics, and above 90% in my Special paper all at GCE Advanced Level from the (old) Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board. Somewhat conversely, out of all the possible ‘outcomes’ in education, primarily, I believe that the best thing that all students can derive from education in confidence in learning how to learn for the rest of their life.
Sadly though, I also believe passionately that England has a complete mess of an educational system. I was awarded a Queen’s Scholarship on merit at 13, and worked very hard for my GCSEs. However, there are people who are simply written off by the age of 16. I also believe that the University class system is nonsense; at Cambridge, in some subjects, the top 80% now receive a I or II.1, but you will be able to get hold of the most up-to-date statistics from the University Offices at Peas Hill. This has a knock-on effect for people unable to pursue certain professional careers, such as architecture, law, medicine or engineering, unless they have become a high-flier at an early age. This is simply wrong, but I hope sincerely Michael Gove, a man whom I could potentially like, will have a long hard think about it. I have every faith in him actually. A return to O levels I feel would be mindless if it were done for purely nostalgic grounds, and the emphasis was on rote-learning rather than learning-to-learn and learning-by-making-mistakes (which are vital for innovation).
