Michael Gove, the education secretary from 2010 to 2014, set in motion many of the reforms we’ve covered over the past 10 years. How does he think it’s gone? He talks to Schools Week …
Q: Was there one policy that worked best?
A: It’s difficult to disentangle one individual policy from the suite of changes that we introduced.
Our view was that you needed to look at every element of the education system if you were to drive improvement.
At the beginning, we were clear there were two overarching things we needed to do: raise attainment overall and narrow the gap between children from poorer and wealthier backgrounds.
Q: Did you go too fast by turning on the academisation ‘rocket boosters’?
A: The Academies Act [2010] was pushed through at great speed, but we wanted to do that so in the new school year we could have a tranche of schools that had converted and could act as the exemplars.
We were right to accelerate that progress, but there was a point where we were going over the speed limit.
Some multi-academy trusts grew too fast. But it was necessary to generate momentum, to have as many schools as we were capable of acquiring academy status.
Q: Scandals included one free school founder charged with fraud. Would you do anything differently?
A: Nothing strategically. There would have been individual examples where a slightly greater degree of due diligence or wariness would have been justified at an earlier stage. But things will always go wrong in public sector reform.
The change was controversial at the time, so media focus was on the free schools that failed, or the academy chains that were faltering – and much less on the existing poor provision [in council-run schools].
There was a sense that that which was novel and contested should be looked at and held to a higher degree of scrutiny. That is an understandable political and media phenomenon, but it meant that the overall question of the need to drive improvement everywhere was sometimes occluded.
But the point that we made about academies and free schools is that, overall, there would be a self-correcting mechanism. In some respects it was welcome to have that scrutiny shone on them, because it meant that when there was failure, we would intervene more quickly.
But I don’t think that teaching or the education profession has been marked by any greater level of failure in leadership than any other realm. Probably less so because of the people who choose to come in.
I probably did do stuff that needlessly alienated people
Q: We now have more academy regulation and a better understanding of good governance. Should you have got that in place first?
A: I think that we refine as we go. The education system we inherited in 2010 had some very good features, but it also had some major flaws. In the process of reform and change, not everything will go right, but you have to look in aggregate overall at the changes that were made.
Q: Your promised autonomy. Has it turned out how you envisaged?
A: Yes, autonomy has to exist within a structure of accountability. And Michael Barber made the point that you can mandate adequacy, but you’ve got to unleash greatness.
If you want innovation and the highest performance possible, then you have to give professionals a greater degree of freedom.
But, if they fail, you have to be ready to intervene sharply and effectively. And the way in which you can assess failure is by having high standards and a rigorous set of accountability mechanisms.
Q: Are you comfortable with trust CEO pay levels?
A: Worth every penny. Dan Moynihan deserves £1,000,000 a year for what he’s done.
The chief executive of the Harris Federation is helping children from some of the poorest backgrounds in London transform their lives. That’s great in my book. If someone is paying themselves a huge amount and the results are terrible, then sooner or later they’re going to be exposed.
The proof is the transformation that they bring about. For me, the key is outputs not inputs.
That might seem blithe, but I am delighted that great heads are paid well. It’s one of the things I always argued [for]. There will be people in other parts of privatised utilities and other areas who will be earning significantly more and not deserve it. But these people are heroes and heroines and deserve every penny.
There was a point we were going over the speed limit
Q: Do you regret using the “the Blob” (officials seen as reluctant to implement government policy)?
A: The phrase became a point of vulnerability as far as our critics were concerned. I remember having a conversation afterwards with the sponsor of a multi-academy trust where I said “I think I probably made a mistake there because when you’re trying to carry the maximum number of people with you, sometimes you have to have fights on points of principle. Maybe that was a bit too pugilistic”.
And he said “no, you were absolutely right to do it because the people who are driving change on the ground need to know that the secretary of state is on their side. It’s only if the enemies of excellence are squealing that those of us on the ground who are trying to drive change know that we’ve got an ally in office’.
I probably did do stuff that at times needlessly alienated people who either could have been allies or, at the very least, would have been open-minded about what we were trying to do.
Q: Was abolishing Building Schools for the Future a mistake?
A: It was absolutely the right thing to do. However, the way in which I announced it was politically inept. It was graceless and maladroit and it lacked empathy, so it was a political failure rather than a policy failure.
Q: What do you think you got wrong in your time?
A: In my desire to focus on schools overall we de-emphasised some of the other support for children. It was right to say the focus must be on schools as academic institutions and raising attainment and narrowing the attainment gap.
But some of the other work that children’s services departments do – and that you need to put around children – we didn’t emphasise enough initially… there was too sharp a turning away from some of the things that Ed [Balls] and his team had put in the children’s plan.
Q: Should we move to an all-academy system?
A: My bias has always been in favour of encouraging as many schools as possible to become academies, and wherever possible to be part of a family of schools. In my [former] job, I was trying to encourage as many parts of England as possible to adopt a mayoral model – because I think it’s the right one.
But there will be some parts of England who will say it’s not right for us. You’ve got to respect that because if you’re a Tory, you recognise that diversity overall is generally a good thing,
Trying to impose uniformity, however good that model may be in your mind, disregards sometimes the accumulated experience of people in a particular geography or locale for whom your lovely model won’t be right – or certainly not right yet.
Q: Critics say your reforms have pushed creativity out of schools.
A: Creativity comes from mastering a discipline. Some of the current conversation about creativity being squeezed out by the curriculum and assessment, or critical thinking being squeezed out because of rote learning, is nonsense peddled by people who don’t know what’s been happening in our schools and misunderstand how the brain operates, how children learn and what real creativity is.
One of the biggest concerns for the future is that legitimate and indeed noble aims risk being used as a way of eroding the hard-won gains that curriculum and accountability changes have secured [and] to move away from rigour in the delivery of these subjects.
End of sermon.
