7/20/2014

Nicky Morgan sets out to build bridges with teachers


The new education secretary, Nicky Morgan, moved with extraordinary speed last week to build bridges with teachers. Just hours after Michael Gove was sacked, she rewrote a final ministerial statement from her predecessor to include a promise to listen to their views on schools reform.


Her intervention was welcomed by the teaching unions, who said it signalled "a wholly different tone" after more than four years during which Gove angered many in the profession by largely ignoring their views, and dismissing the wider education establishment as "the blob".


When Gove was removed from his job in David Cameron's wide-ranging reshuffle, a written ministerial statement to parliament about consultations on the next steps of his curriculum reform, drawn up in his name, was circulating in Whitehall and among interested parties. But as soon as news broke that he had been ousted from the Department for Education to become chief whip, the statement was promptly put on hold and not formally released.


The next day, however, an amended version was tabled in parliament, this time under Morgan's name and including a completely new, teacher-friendly paragraph. It read: "The consultation is an opportunity for teachers, further and higher education employers and all those with an interest in these important subjects to provide their views. We intend to listen to those views in shaping our final proposals."


Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said she was taken aback by the willingness to engage. "It is just so refreshing to see that this consultation will be opened to teachers, and to hear that ministers now want a dialogue. Hopefully these are not just warm words and we will be able to actually work together. But it has to be welcomed, because Gove never wanted to listen to what anyone else thought, as he knew he was always right."


Morgan, who had been a minister for only nine months when promoted, is this weekend still reading herself into the new post. While government insiders say she will not back away from Gove's main reforms, she has been charged with trying to improve rock-bottom relations with teachers.


Some in the Tory party believe she could review the policy of allowingunqualified teachers to teach in academies and free schools, which some Conservative MPs say leaves them unnecessarily vulnerable to Labour criticisms over standards.


Gove's dismissal by Cameron was the biggest shock of last week's reshuffle. While it pleased teachers, it angered many on the right of the Tory party, who saw him as the government's most impressive and driven reformer, who could boast real achievement in expanding the number of academies, establishing free schools, and reforming the curriculum. Downing Street made it clear, however, that Gove was pushed aside because the party's campaign director, Lynton Crosby, believed he had become "toxic" with the teaching profession and the electorate in general.


Cameron was also worried that Gove's presence at the DfE was destabilising the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition. Nick Clegg told friends last week that he had decided not to deal directly with Gove any more after a series of arguments over policy, and insults directed against him by Dominic Cummings, a former Gove special adviser.


"I decided not to have anything more to do with him and to do it all through David [Laws, the Lib Dem schools minister]. I have got broad shoulders but I just thought life's too short," the deputy prime minister said. Clegg told LBC radio: "Many … felt quite offended by the way in which Michael Gove and his team appeared to brand all teachers as a 'blob', [to say that] all teachers somehow weren't doing a proper job.


"I thought that was a divide-and-rule approach to teaching, which doesn't get the best out of teachers … That's why I would like to think that with a change of personnel we can now turn the page and, instead of denigrating teachers, we can celebrate what many, many teachers across the country do."


An Opinium/Observer poll finds that 26% of voters believe Gove did a good job as education secretary, while 39% say he did a bad job. .

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