But there are other factors – number of choices allowed, number of pupils wanting school places and number of easily-accessible schools available – which affect the number of times a school could be mentioned in parents’ preferences.

Parents in parts of London can name up to six schools. In other parts of the country parents are only allowed to name three. So schools in the capital have double the chance of being named as schools elsewhere.

Similarly, there may be thousands of parents after places in London schools most of which could be accessed by public transport. This means that London schools can trawl from a wide, densely-populated area. Again, this makes it more likely that London schools will attract more mentions than those in  sparsely-populated rural areas where only a couple of hundred parents a year are looking for places.

Consider this hypothetical situation:

Much-hyped inner-London academy (MHILA) has100 places. Parents are allowed to name six schools in order of preference. MHILA attracts 1,000 mentions. But only 200 are first choice and some of these are from parents more than10 miles away. The remaining mentions could be anywhere from 2nd to 6th choice.

Rural secondary school (RSS) also has 100 places. There are only 200 pupils requiring places locally – parents are allowed to place three schools in order of preference. RSS receives 150 mentions. 120 of these mentions are first choice.  Most are from parents less than 10 miles away from the school.

So, which of these schools is the most “oversubscribed” based on parental preferences? Is it MHILA with its 1,000 mentions? And RSS didn’t get as many first choice mentions – 120 against MHILA’s 200. But the number of parents making a choice in the rural area is so much smaller than in London.

It can be seen, then, that oversubscription figures can be misleading. So, would it be an accurate use of the figures if MHILA trumpeted in the national press that it was one of the most oversubscribed in England and this was a sign of its popularity?

Perhaps it’s time for schools to stop boasting about “oversubscription” – it’s misleading and sounds too much like bragging. And the Department for Education should stop using “oversubscription” to generate spin about the alleged popularity of its pet schools.

Isn’t it obvious that children with Special Needs are best catered for in Special Schools, and mainstream children benefit from not having their time wasted by the extra attention needed by their less fortunate peers? And it goes without saying that children that are insufficiently able to get an A*-C grade in academic subjects like history, French, English literature and pure sciences are much better off, and will cause less trouble, doing easy vocational alternatives.

If school pupils are so badly behaved that they disrupt lessons and ignore their teachers then it is also obvious that more rigid discipline is needed with zero-tolerance punishments for the miscreants and more rewards for the compliant.

According to Michael Gove’s Free School model, all that is needed to improve schools is to take power from professionals and give it to parents demanding ‘common sense’ school policies.

This further strengthens the market-based approach and extends it to how subjects should be taught as well as to how pupils should be dressed, grouped and managed. By such means ‘common sense’ should reign supreme and standards will rise as a result of the universal power of market forces.

The 1977 Nobel laureate economist James Meade who died in 1995 wanted the following epitaph inscribed on his tombstone: “He tried to understand economics all his life but common sense kept getting in the way”. As for economics, so for education, and no more so than in England in the Michael Gove era.

There is no educational issue where this is truer than that of mixed ability teaching, which has been extensively researched over the last 40 years. There is no consensus on the effects of mixed ability grouping on the attainment of the most able, but there is conclusive evidence that all pupils benefit when taught alongside more able peers.

The Cognitive Acceleration approaches of Shayer and Adey and others stress the importance of the social context of learning, and especially peer-peer interactions. This does not rule out setting by ability but CA and other developmental approaches do not involve pupils sitting in silence, in isolated rows, absorbing information.

The English education system has for some time been in the grip of fear of indiscipline in schools, for which common sense dictates ever more severe punishments and authoritarian control. Early on in my headship school, when we abandoned a rigid disciplinary regime based on punishment and rewards, replacing it with a programme of planned teaching of the skills of inter-personal relationships, on the Bloom affective taxonomy model, behaviour improved and both fixed term and permanent exclusions dropped to zero. This was sustained over many years.

T H Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog, that great Victorian defender and advocate of Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, believed that science was ‘merely the application of Common Sense’. No scientists believe this today. I like to think that Huxley was just confusing ‘common sense’ with logic. We now know that science teaches us that the truth is frequently profoundly counter-intuitive.

Lewis Wolpert’s excellent 1992 book ‘The Unnatural Nature of Science’, contains many examples of the ‘common sense’ fallacy, some of which feature in the following list.

If a piece of string was to be tightly fitted around the 25,000 mile circumference of a smooth globe the size of the earth and then lengthened by a yard, how far from the surface of the globe would the string then stand out? (Answer: about 6 inches).

What happens to the pressure in a balloon as you inflate it? (Answer: it gets less).

If you fire a bullet from a gun horizontally across a flat field and simultaneously drop an identical bullet from the same height, which will hit the ground first? (Answer: they will both hit the ground at the same time).

If you empty a glass of water into the sea and allow it to mix with all the oceans in the world then after this mixing has taken place, dip it in again to refill it what are the chances of retrieving some of your original molecules? (Answer: very high).

When you burn a piece of magnesium ribbon ending up with a pile of white ash how does the weight of the ash compare with the weight of the original piece of magnesium? (Answer: it is heavier).

If you toss a coin five times and it falls on heads each time what is the chance that it will fall on tails on the next toss? (Answer: 50:50)

If you add some ice cubes to a tumbler of water what happens to the water level in the tumbler as the ice melts? (Answer: it stays the same)

Adey and Dillon’s ‘Bad Education’ (2012) contains many more examples on this theme. I fear that misplaced ‘common sense’ populism is threatening to do great damage to the English education system.

But the by-line said it was written by Education Secretary, Michael Gove.

He began by showing his football-supporting credentials:

“I’m used to disappointing Saturday afternoons. A season ticket at Loftus Road is rarely a passport to paradise.”

But last Saturday afternoon had been a bitter disappointment, he wrote. He’d gone to speak at the National Association of Head Teachers expecting to hear discussions about “the best in contemporary teaching”, Shakespeare, Eliot (T S not George). But instead of hearing heads talk about what is actually the bread-and-butter of primary teaching, “Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog” or Macavity the Mystery Cat, he was heckled.

The heads were defeatist, he said, they subjected his approach to “apparent criticism”. Wonderful understatement considering they were jeering him.

But he was unrepentant – other countries were reforming their systems, he claimed. Yes, they are, but in the other direction: graduation at 18 and less emphasis on facts.

Gove tried to grab the high moral ground, “I want our young people to be able to succeed”. So does every teacher, but this isn’t enough for Gove. He continues:

“…we’ve accelerated the pace of reform…setting higher standards in maths and English in our new national curriculum”

I love the inclusive “we”. Of course, academies don’t have to follow “our new national curriculum”. Neither do they have to employ trained teachers.

In a typical piece of Gove distortion, he described criticisms as “a direct attack on the principle of setting higher expectations.” It’s “defeatism” to talk of the pressures facing teachers. They should be more like the “genuinely world-beating heads” who embrace his reforms. But he’s worried that the achievements of these plucky few may be “overshadowed by the media amplification of those voices unhappy with higher expectations.”

There followed a list of some familiar names who do Gove’s work “in defiance of the pessimists and fatalists.”

But the only thing that separates these heads from thousands of other successful heads is that they open free schools or run academy chains.

One name constantly praised is Patricia Sowter CBE.. In 2011, Gove wrote this in the Evening Standard:

“Patricia Sowter took over her first school, Cuckoo Hall [in 2002], when it was in special measures and risked closure because it was so bad…”

But here’s the rub: it wasn’t true. Cuckoo Hall was not in special measures (see thread here) and neither was it underperforming. Results in the 2002 Sats were above the local authority and national average.

So why did Mr Gove say something that was demonstrably untrue? This propaganda is more serious than the now infamous “survey after survey”. It’s more serious than taking small sections from exam questions or lesson plans out of context and lambasting them. It isn’t true. It’s fiction.

Which raises the question, how much of what Michael Gove says is equally fictional?

I thought the Times article was a parody – but it leaves an unpleasant taste.

The two boroughs with the highest spend-per-pupil in the country were two years ago revealed to be Hackney and Tower Hamlets. These are two boroughs with some of the highest levels of deprivation in the country, but which achieve above average results.

Indeed it is arguable that these two boroughs, in terms of value-added, have some of the best results in the country. Last year the DfE published borough-by-borough data on what proportion of children who are “low-achieving” at age 11 (below level 4 on average in the Year 6 SATs) go on to achieve 5 GCSEs including English and Maths.

Nationally the figure was 7% of those low-achievers achieved the GCSE benchmark. The two boroughs with the highest  figures were, you guessed it, in Hackney (22%) and Tower Hamlets (23%). Each achieved more than three times the national average for these previously low-achieving children. Is it coincidence that the two boroughs who do best at this key measure are the two best-funded ones?

Indeed the example of London schools as a whole give a similar message. Chris Cook at the Financial Times has demonstrated how London schools are clearly ahead of the rest of the country in terms of value-added. And London schools are also generally the best funded per pupil. That funding is not the sole cause of London success but it may be that it would not have been possible without it.

High levels of funding do not guarantee high standards. There may be boroughs and schools who do not use their money effectively. But when high levels of funding is combined with an effective local authority and high-performing schools, as in much of London, the results speak of themselves.

The Reform proposal, effectively to cut school spending by 18%, is an extremely dangerous one. Now is the time to question whether austerity is needed at all, not to turn in desperation to school expenditure and endanger the future of our children.

The DfE quietly set up last month what could be seen as a “middle tier” of officials and consultants, who are now monitoring the performance of both academies and non-academy maintained schools in nine regions across England.

This seems most odd in the context of the new framework for the inspection of Local Authorities designed to hold them to account for their performance in school improvement matters. Perhaps if they are to be held to account it should be made quite clear precisely what it is they are accountable for in the era of Academies.

The whole area of school improvement has now reached an almost farcical level of incoherence.

The Mr Man exercise is cherry picked as Janet Downs observes, and is only one of a large number of exercises on the Active History web site. It may be appropriate, or it may be a bad piece of work. We don’t have to defend every piece of work on every web site. However what Gove does is to take a piece of evidence out of context to make his general case. This is invalid deduction. There are bad doctors. There are certainly bad hospitals. I live in Stafford, and the local hospital is a national scandal. But we do not condemn the NHS because of poor standards in particular areas. We try to improve the service – which is what the people of Stafford are seeking with their hospital.

In theory, Gove is doing the same for education. But what he does not practice is select a bad example and then say everything is awful. In this case, he is arguing “proper history of being crushed under the weight of play based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture….At GCSE level this infantilisation continues. One set of history teaching resources….” and off he goes. The full speech – May 9th at Brighton college is full of similar examples of making a general statement from isolated cases. It is intellectually invalid. His method always involves special pleading and the whole speech provides evidence of this polemical approach.

In this particularly rich case of how a career politician operates, Gove is also playing to the old Black Paper approach, used in the 1970s to great effect and never known to fail since, of saying everything is wrong so politicians must intervene. However in the Mr Man Example he plays to the old view that GCSE is rubbish – so teachers should adopt the IGCSE, or international GCSE, that state education is rubbish so schools should be modeled on independents, the root of the academy movement, and that They Do Things Better Abroad and we must catch up with the International Competition.

Except that the Active History site is run from an independent school, is an IGCSE site, and is located abroad – the International School for Toulouse. So it has ticked all the boxes and fails to match up to the Gove agenda. We may also note this is a teacher run resource, which is what Gove advocated in his April 25th speech.

There is no pleasing Mr Gove.

And indeed there is not. He is on a mission, and evidence is what fits his preordained case. In this context, critics are to be ignored and the evidence cherry picked to suit. This is not objective and balanced judgement, but a politically driven agenda which selects what is said to give the desired impression. On school History the objective assessment, supported by OFSTED reports – at least in the era before Michael Wilshaw took over – was that history is well taught, and universities regularly praise History, which is a Facilitating Subject. It is therefore profoundly disturbing that Michael Gove argues in this manner, and essential that we keep pointing to his partisan and illogical approach.

Trevor Fisher
Editor, Education Politics.

Second, what happens in classrooms is critical for learning, so support teachers, time for lesson preparation and continuous professional development are vital.

Third, formative assessment rather than SATS and GCSEs: if possible, abolish arbitrary external assessment and support effective school-based assessment.

Fourth, cooperative citizenship schools could become the foundations for a democratic learning society in which all our children can flourish. Get rid of standardised external inspection, but develop critical friends to interrogate school self-inspection.

Not much of a story: I went to a Steiner school, studied maths and history of ideas, refused to take exams at university on principle and worked in adult/community education for many years, was a local authority adviser/inspector, Ofsted accredited and wrote or edited a few books on education. Mainly taught adults and youth, but had a weekly Y4 class doing ‘philosophy with children’ and circle time for a year (with a teacher present).

Gove proposes a ten level grading system using numbers, with the present A* and A grades covered by the top four of the new grades to enable better discrimination between the brightest students applying for places in our top universities.

In this LSN post I demonstrated the fact of grade inflation.

In this post I drew attention to the irrational implications of loading so many league table and school quality functions onto the single high stakes C grade GCSE indicator.

In my New Statesman article I argue for an eight level grading system with multiple ‘threshold’ progression levels.

The following is from this New Statesman article. The degree of convergence of my scheme with Gove’s is scary. In my scheme the top grades would be high numbers as in National Curriculum Levels, not low numbers as in the former CSE.

“The new exam grades will need to recognise that ability is continuously variable over a large range. The aim should be to lift this continuous distribution in its entirety, rather than engage in futile attempts to narrow it, except for specific skills essential for functioning in the modern world. The current A*-G system has eight grades so at least as many will be needed in the new system. Why not build on the work of the early National Curriculum Council and grade 16+ exams on the basis of National Curriculum Levels as originally proposed? A range of eight Levels from L3 to L10 could replace the GCSE grades G – A*. Each Level could be defined in terms of the Bloom taxonomy of cognitive challenge and be common across all subjects. This would create a rigorous, coherent equivalence in status between subjects in academic, technological and creative studies. Just such a system was devised in Leicestershire in the late 1980s as a Mode 3 (teacher designed and assessed) GCSE programme in multiple subjects that rapidly became extremely successful and popular with schools. It was killed off by the 1988 Education Reform Act.

Grade hurdles would still be needed for progression to post-16 apprenticeships, high quality vocational courses and A levels, but these could then be chosen with reference to the actual Bloom Levels required, rather than the present crude GCSE C success/failure system. For example, in the reformed system Level 7 (C) might be appropriate for entry to A level courses and university matriculation and would require the demonstration to some degree of what Piaget called formal thinking. For example, in maths this would require an ability to work with algebra; for computer studies some programming would be needed: subject specialists across the curriculum being readily able to interpret such differentiation within their own areas of expertise. Level 5 (E) might be suitable for entry onto a wide range of other career ladders while Level 3 (G) would validate knowledge at the most basic, but nevertheless worthwhile level compared to the absence of it.

The task of the education system should be to raise educational outcomes for all pupils, so producing a better educated and more intelligent population at every level.

What is wrong with having well educated plumbers, actors, motor mechanics, shop assistants, footballers, tennis players, care workers etc. as well as more broadly educated teachers, doctors, lawyers and engineers? Both requirements are achievable within a comprehensive school system provided all schools enjoy genuinely all-ability intakes of children. This is not a futuristic socialist fantasy. Something like it is in its infancy in Hackney, the first LA area where most of the secondary schools, LA comprehensives, independent academies and religious schools co-operate in a system that to a significant extent is proving successful in at least partially combating the pernicious polarising and degrading effects of school league tables.

These schools also appear to be accepting the role of the LA to administer the agreed uniform admissions process and to co-ordinate co-operation between schools in the interests of raising standards across the borough.”

I therefore believe that these proposals from Gove should be welcomed, not so much for his obsession with discriminating between the most able students (although he makes a fair point here) but because such regrading would address the fact of grade inflation and at the same time abolish the present high stakes C grade driver of league tables.

The value of the new grades would need to be protected from future grade inflation and I believe the best way of achieving this would be to link them with national percentiles of performance. This is not straightforward because it could not be done on the simple basis of percentages of entries as different subjects attract different entry ability profiles.

As set out in my article something like the Bloom taxonomy would be needed to ensure that grades across different subjects reflected equivalent levels of demand.

But has Mr Gove boobed again by attacking a history lesson plan which featured the Mr Men?

Gove faced questions yesterday by the Commons Education Select Committee about his condemnation of the resource. He told MPs he had personally done the research for his Brighton College speech after being alerted to the “Mr Men history site” by a Labour-supporting teacher described as a “very informative voice in the education debate”.

But the site is not named the “Mr Men history site”. It’s Active History, a popular site which contains hundreds of lesson plans for secondary age pupils. Teachers from all over the world subscribe so they can access them.

Mr Gove’s defence of his ridicule rested on this statement:

“The striking thing about it is that while there have been some people who’ve been offended, or who’ve disagreed with the thrust of the argument, no-one has disputed that it’s a popular resource, no-one’s disputed that it was material that was aimed at 15- to 16-year-olds, and opinion divides on whether or not it’s appropriate.”

The striking thing about Gove’s comment is that he seems to expect someone to say that this resource was unpopular. But that can’t be answered. Unless Russel Tarr, the website’s author, keeps a record of how often each resource is accessed then there’s nothing which will dispute or prove its popularity.

The second striking thing is that Mr Gove seems to expect someone to say the revision lesson wasn’t aimed at 15-16 year-olds when the rubric clearly says it was.  Perhaps Mr StruckDumb will step forward to claim that iGCSE candidates are not aged 15-16 but are really in Year 1 so any lesson plan designed for iGCSE can be used with 5 year-olds who are, of course, familiar with the Weimar Republic.

The popularity of the resource is actually irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether only a tiny number of teachers downloaded it or there were thousands. The teachers who chose to download it obviously thought it might work with their pupils. And that’s the point – they are professionals. They should be able to use their autonomy to choose activities they might find useful without the possibility of being sneered at by politicians or, worse, other professionals. Equally, they should be free to reject any plan they think is not appropriate.

What is also striking is that Mr Gove picked on one resource among thousands on a well-used and much-praised website to “prove” that the teaching of history had been infantilised.

But Russel Tarr quotes Einsten:

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Explaining something simply is not infantilising. And if explaining something simply means recruiting the Mr Men then so be it.

Orwell used animals to explain how revolutions can turn sour and how dictatorships manipulate and control. That wasn’t infantilising either.

It was a good-natured affair and quite hard to see much difference between the two men, and the “One Nation” concept as articulated by them did seem to be a very “blokish” affair with lots of references to male politicians and political theorists.

Mr Gove kindly name-checked the Local Schools Network from the platform. I think this was really a sideswipe at the unions. He was claiming that debate about the future of education policy was not taking place in the professional organisations but amongst the grass roots and in the blogosphere.

So on one side there were bloggers like Andrew Old and someone called Tom Bennett, who Mr Gove said made the case for his reforms better than he (Gove) could. On the other side, he named the Head Teachers Roundtable and the Local Schools Network, responsible for incisive and well-argued opposition.

When it came to schools and “One Nation” the discussion seemed to boil down to governance. Mr Gove, unsurprisingly, focused on his free schools policy as an example of how teachers were now empowered to set up institutions serving their local communities in the same way that many other professionals had been free to do for years.

I was given the chance to ask a question at the end so I asked Mr Gove how he could reconcile his rhetoric of community, and local empowerment, with the fact that the last 25 years have seen a massive power grab by central governments of both colours away from local communities.

Before the 1988 Education Act the Secretary of State had three powers of direction over schools, after the 1988 Act he was given 250 powers and he now has over 2000. Several thousand academy schools are now directly contracted to the DFE.

The Secretary of State’s argument (a bit weak I thought) was not to deny my central point but to ask whether heads and schools would feel they were more or less interfered with than in the past. I suspect that if the audience has been made up of heads and teachers, there would have been an immediate, not altogether positive, response to that point.

But Lord Glasman’s answer was interesting and similar to a comment he had made in his opening remarks. I can’t provide a direct quote as the transcript isn’t available yet and I was too busy listening to take detailed notes.

But in essence he said that “we” which I took to mean Labour (or maybe he meant Blue Labour) believed in  “ a third, a third, a third” – the three way split of ownership/governance of public institutions and in schools this would mean parents, teachers and “the funders” which in the case of the free schools is of course the government.

I was surprised for two reasons. Firstly, even as a committed activist with a fairly well known interest in schools policy, I wasn’t aware that Labour had a policy on this, or was even thinking along these lines, which may say something about how policy is being developed and the extent to which members are involved.

But more importantly the sort of model he described is in fact the same as the long established “stakeholder” model of governance, in which elected parents and teachers are represented on a governing body alongside community (or foundation in the case of Trust, VA and faith schools) and the local authority, which is the funder in the maintained system.

This system is still used in maintained schools, which in spite of the DFE spin make up the vast majority of schools in this country, and is quite at odds with the academy/free school model in which the Secretary of State has a commercial contract with the sponsor who then appoints all the governors.

I for one would be very glad if Labour is planning to reinvent a modernized version of the stakeholder model of governance. Maybe a co-operative or community trust school could be the default structure for new schools in the future?

It is just not true to suggest, as the government frequently does, that only the academy model of governance can succeed. There are thousands of examples of very successful schools with this sort of “stakeholder” representative governance arrangement and also examples of academies that are failing. In either case there is provision for the removal of a failing governing body.

But the “stakeholder” model  is a real example of community activity, democracy and localism in practice. In my area, the London Borough of Camden, where no school has yet converted to academy status, we have a mix of stakeholder governing bodies, as there are a lot of faith schools and two non-denominational VA secondary schools.

Nearly every school ( and 100% of the secondary schools) is good or outstanding in Ofsted terms. The governors association, of which I am vice chair, is active and works with the LA. The Camden Partnership for Excellence also includes representatives from parent groups, the LA, governors and the wider community.

There are many examples of this type of devolved power and collaborative work emerging across the country as schools recognise that in fact they want to be part of a community, rather than a free floating institution in an atomised market driven system. Michael Gove did cite this fact as evidence of how his academies policy was creating new types of One Nation structures.

A return to stakeholder governance raises much bigger questions about what happens to schools with the existing academy governance model and I hope the Labour Party will invite those of us outside the blokes’ inner circle to discuss these wider questions before too long.

But in the meantime I feel cautiously encouraged that something along these lines might be possible.