News
Michael Gove and professional associations
Posted by: Rosemary, 01 February 2012
Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, has told the Education Select Committee that teachers will benefit from aligning themselves with professional associations: ‘They produce material on the curriculum and professional development, they have educational journals…they [all phases of educators] should be part of one fused profession’.
In advance of the session the Committee asked the public to suggest questions via twitter. More than 5000 tweets were received. All the questions were reviewed and a selection used to prepare for the session and decide the topics to be raised.
A video of the full Committee proceedings can be seen on this link. Responses to the Twitter questions being at 2.23mins. The question about professional associations begins at 2.o6 mins.
An online transcript of the Committee meeting can be found here.
Interesting quotations fromthe transcript include:
‘On the EBacc“ think the English Baccalaureate is a very very useful measure, it exposes a variety of things that have gone wrong in our education system but schools that feel it is not necessarily right for them; their ethos or their pupils, should feel strong enough to say, “We are taking a different approach”. They will have to justify, quite rightly that decision to parents, but there is no penalty from the government in saying that you have got a zero percentage score in the EBacc if you are doing well in other measures.’
On attainment
‘Central to your question is an unexamined hypothesis that I would contest, which is that there are children who cannot get five A to Cs including English and maths. Show me those children. There are schools that are capable of getting nearly every child to that level.’ [Q11]
