Cat and Mouse

Renowned for being utterly stubborn when I believe in something, it is time to play the next round of the Cat and Mouse game with Mr Gove. Let's see how long the game continues...

Dear Mr Boodoo,

Many thanks for your response to my recent letter to the Secretary of State. I very much appreciate you taking the time to reply to my many thoughts, and welcome you outlining what the Government have been, and will be, doing to address several of the issues about which I raised concerns.

It is interesting to read of the Government’s proposals to once again revise the foundations of the National Curriculum and, although I appreciate the sentiment expressed about the need to give “much more autonomy over how it is taught back to the teachers”, this does ironically strike me as what was happening in our education system before the National Curriculum was originally established. Trust was very much grounded with the teachers across our nation’s schools pre-1988, and a national standardisation process was not deemed necessary; a system that ironically (it now appears) allowed schools “much more freedom to design their wider curricula to meet the needs of their pupils”.

In your letter, you also outlined several new and developing initiatives that the Government are working on to promote value to vocational education; amongst them the Technical Level Qualifications, the Technical Baccalaureate Measure and the increased engagement between schools and businesses. You also mentioned the £20 million investment being made available to new Traineeship programmes, to support young people into Apprenticeships and other jobs. All of these are indeed positive steps, but once again strike me as a step back to what fundamentally existed in our education system before the National Curriculum was introduced: businesses offering children apprenticeships, whilst skilled craftsmen trained up the nation's youth in order to educate their skills first hand within the world of vocational business.

Forgive me if my surmising of your letter is somewhat simplistic, but it does strike me that, fundamentally, the Government and the Department for Education are working to deal with the symptoms of a nation's ailing educational problems, rather than addressing the cause. The initiatives you outlined, although positive in many respects, are to all intents and purposes mere plasters being applied to gaping wounds in our nation's educational body. I appreciate that often it is not deemed a successful term in office if a Government is to “halt progress” and turn back the clock to reassess former models of education; yet I wonder sometimes whether wisdom lies more in lessons established in the past , rather than progressive reactions to what has come before.

Although I greatly appreciate you taking the time to reply to my original letter, I do still have many comments, concerns, ideas and initiatives that I would like to be able to discuss in more depth. I wonder whether the Department offer any forums for collaboration between ministers and educators, and whether there would be an opportunity for me to meet with yourself or your colleagues to talk further about developing a positive future for the children of this nation within our education system.

I very much look forward to hearing from you and thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Yours sincerely,

Rachel Musson