Monday of this week was apparently “Blue Monday”, the point in the year when we are supposedly at our lowest ebb. Whilst the evidence supporting this concept is pretty weak, anyone who did wake up feeling a little fragile can’t have been helped by the photo of Donald Trump and Michael Gove that had gone viral by breakfast time. Like many, I often have a pretty strong adverse reaction to photos of the president-elect (I’m still trying to ignore the reality of Friday’s inauguration).

However, on this occasion it was the sight of the former education secretary smiling back from across the Atlantic that I, and I’m sure many others, found most galling. While Mr Gove is busy polishing his journalistic credentials, teachers and school leaders up and down the country are still trying their best to get to grips with the significant fallout created by his badly designed and disastrously implemented reforms.

It is one of the most frustrating features of politics that ministers rarely stick around long enough to see the true ramifications of their policies. Secretaries of state for education can effectively wreak havoc on the profession safe in the knowledge that it is highly unlikely they will ever be fully held to account for the decisions they make. Mr Gove recently said that it was “too early to say if everything I did as education secretary was right”.

Judging by the reaction to this statement on social media, it would appear that most teachers feel they are ready to make that judgement call. I would argue that some of the biggest problems currently facing the profession and education more generally are the direct result of policies launched in the Gove era.

Cleaning up Gove’s mess

The current mess that is the primary assessment system has its roots in the period when Gove was in office. While I have a great deal of sympathy with the argument that national curriculum levels needed to go, to scrap them without a long-term better alternative in place was inexcusable. It has led to the situation where we have teachers working with an “interim framework” which is simply not fit for purpose and needs significant overhaul.

In the secondary sector, a recent poll has shown that more than two-thirds of students and parents do not understand the new grading system that he introduced for GCSEs. This is somewhat ironic when you consider one of his main justifications for reforming assessment in the primary phase was that the old system was confusing and unhelpful for parents.

Another of Gove’s major legacies is the still relatively new national curriculum. At the time, many teachers (aka “enemies of promise”) pointed out that parts of the curriculum were simply inappropriate for primary-aged children. The content of the grammar curriculum is a particularly pertinent example. Last summer one of the leading architects of the curriculum, Tim Oates, suggested that there might be a “genuine problem about undue complexity in demand” when it came to the grammar content. We are now in a situation where no one has the appetite for a further overhaul of the curriculum, yet we know that there are significant parts which should never have made it through the first draft.

When it comes to school structures, Mr Gove’s obsession with the free school project has led to a situation where new schools are being built where they are not necessarily needed whilst other parts of the country face a major crisis in terms of school places. His decision to put rocket boosters under the academies policy before appropriate governance structures and financial accountability mechanisms were put in place has also led to a series of embarrassing stories for his successors.

It wasn’t as if these consequences were not predicted. There were countless professionals at the time who foresaw exactly what would happen, but those who showed such dissent were dismissed as being part of the “blob”. Perhaps the problem is that many of those who expressed concern were experts in the field of education, and we all know what Mr Gove thinks of those.

When looking at the now infamous photo, I couldn’t help but wonder whether during their time together, Mr Trump took the opportunity to ask Mr Gove for his advice on how best to design and implement education policy. I do hope not - it strikes me that, after the inauguation, America will have enough problems.

James Bowen is director of middle leaders’ union NAHT Edge. He tweets at @JamesJkbowen 

For more columns by James, visit his back catalogue

(Picture credit: Times Syndication)

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