‘Studio schools’ look to be another add-on to the chaotic array of schools Mimsy already presides over. Lost in the mire of his ideology he seems happy to stumble into anything that looks ‘exciting’. For us impotent observers bemused by his antics, however, it would be rather more exciting if he were to offer some thoughtful view of where his rag-tag school empire is heading – more strategy, less of coups de foudre.

To judge by his remarks of the moment, his studios seem designed for the gammas – to make up for our national deficit of plumbers perhaps. His lofty academic principles don’t seem to allow him so far to untangle the differences, or connections, between academic education, vocational education and vocational training. Maybe he should use some vacation time to read up on processes of learning, in all its width and depth. If he can’t find time to get as far back as Aristotle, or even to bone up on Tomlinson, he could do worse than start by casting an eye on Richard Pring’s recent Oxford-Nuffield review of ‘Education and Training for the 14 to 19s’. It has obviously escaped his attention till now.

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In this tour de force of  excoriation of snake oil merchants he highlights a learning assistance programme called ‘Brain Gym’. An import from the wackier reaches of California, it was allowed to appear on the website for the Young Gifted and Talented Programme supported by the old DSCF.

‘Brain gymnastics’ purport to improve blood supply to the frontal lobes of the brain by a number of improbable contortions of hands and neck. This process, it alleges through a fog of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, stimulates the brain’s seat of rational thinking.  Mr Balls in his day accepted to the Commons Science & Technology Committee that ‘Brain Gym’ had “little merit”. Nevertheless, ‘Brain Gym’ was taken up apparently by many hundreds of schools, and reference to it is still to be seen on Ed’s former department’s website, as though permanently endorsed by government.

The fact that it is there demonstrates how, so casually, a thoughtless bureaucracy can impinge on the minds of earnest and credulous people – in this case teachers, all too scientifically illiterate – looking for a quick fix to a believed problem.

The ‘Brain Gym’ example is hard to beat as a study in how easy it is for central bureaucracy to fail to control itself or be controlled against making mischief in promulgating ideas.

Ideas in the hands of bureaucrats who don’t know what they are doing have the potential to be dangerous – as ‘Brain Gym’ could be if it weren’t so daft as (as thankfully a number of sceptics’ contributions to the website attest).

The new mastermind for schools, Mimsy Gove, claims he wants to see an end to his department’s fiddling with the school curriculum and its delivery. Behind his pretensions to localism, however, his essential centralism leaves him firmly in the rank of usual government suspects. We shall see soon no doubt what he’s really made of.

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Which would you trust to run the best Department?

DIOGENES

Mr Balls’s commissioned advertisement for his dodge, however, titled ‘Bringing Learning to Life’, scores  an own goal with its ambiguity. Serves him right for adopting commercial – and ignorant – publicity whizz-kids to handle his intellectual responsibilities (if he has them). 

Meanwhile, Mr Gove welcomes the aged US comedienne, Goldie Hawn, to breathe her quasi-Buddhist view of life into another of his range of funny academies. Goodness knows how a timeworn figure from transatlantic ‘stage, screen and radio’ is to add to the quality of our public education; by importing yet another piece of the now boring celebrity craze?

Are these two, leader and would-be leader of our national culture as distilled in our schools, so shallow in philosophies or even so empty of thought that they have to descend to these vulgarities to justify their policies? You could almost bring yourself to live with state control of education, if at least it were dignified.

O tempora, O mores!

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Mr Mitchell’s question has a poignant ring, coming as it does from an area infamous for its weird tale of academy sponsoring, but it has a general application too. Congratulations Mr Mitchell! Your query  deserves to be put up in lights all over town and country. The Head Poncho’s reply? “All publicly funded schools are accountable”. Full stop. Next?

Either Mr Balls is so thoroughly embarrassed by the Sunderland situation or his étatism is so deeply ingrained that he doesn’t know how to respond to it at all. Either way, blankly he evades the point; doesn’t want to say anything so dangerous as concerns the little matter of local democracy?  Lord help us if, as rumoured, Mr B. has ambitions to be Labour’s next prime minister. Then, citizens, look forward to total enslavement under Leviathan!

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Unseemly as it may be to indulge in schadenfreude, yet perhaps a vinegary smile may be forgiven at certain extracts from the IoG’s report, as for instance: ‘Whitehall and the Treasury have few tools beyond the brute force of political edict’; ‘all the worst bits of policy making come from the centre’;  ‘conspicuous lack of a coherent strategy . . coupled with an obsessive attempt to micro-manage policy’; ‘what comes out of No 10 is lots of barmy ideas –   here is a problem, let’s have a knee-jerk reaction to it tomorrow’.  And so on. 

Don’t these comments on central government in general ring a bell with all those who have fretted for twenty years on a lower plane, the condition and development of our public education? 

How was it, one wonders, that the combined force of our superintelligent Whitehall mandarins didn’t wonder themselves where the centripetal tendencies they had colluded upon with control-greedy politicians in the last pre-millennium decades were leading them?  Did they not realise the risk of constitutional corruption that the centralising mindset, once established, would lead to?  If not so, can it be that our vaunted civil service has turned out to be after all just a covey of machine men, Soviet style apparatchiks, heedlessly ushering the country into a mire of governmental decadence that the rest of us mere citizens should be ashamed of – whenever we wake up to, and stand up to, the centralist fiasco foisted on us?

On the way to that awakening and revolt, for us who once served a purpose initiated by the ‘44 Education Act, with its ideals of localism and of advancement of the public good as a whole, let us weep for their casual effacement by the cult of central control – as we survey the incoherent wreckage of a non-system it will have left all of us.

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For me in my reading armchair, book in one hand and periodical in the other, the coincidence of these two sets of ideas has resonated with one large aspect of the current plight of  public education. As we well know, this has suffered for all too long, since the ill-named ‘88 Reform Act, from regimentation and control – under a centralist dogma with the self-imposed blinkers that stultify and confine intelligence in one, flat dimension. But now witness the two different public attitudes – both in their way scandalous – offered by actors in the pantomime we are obliged to call government to two recent education reports – both blockbusters in scope and importance.  In this there appears to be little doubt but that our ‘masters’ assume they occupy a separate plane of existence from common mortals. 

Consider the government’s attitude to Professor Robin Alexander of Cambridge University and Oxford’s Professor of Education, Richard Pring.  Alexander’s Primary Review – the deepest enquiry in the field since the Plowden Report of 40 years ago – was blankly dismissed as ‘old hat’, while Pring’s Nuffield-funded Review of Education & Training for the 14-19s – a review of the sector never before tackled so comprehensively – has been virtually ignored. When results of explorations in such breadth and depth over many years conducted under the aegis of two of the UK’s premier universities  (which also figure among the top five universities internationally) are treated as dross or simply overlooked, one can only assume that the state politicos who condemn them live in a sphere so set apart as to be extra-terrestrial. Where one world derives its substance and strength from discovery and evidence in the living world of educational practice, the other in its weary fairyland demonstrates its tenuous hold on reality by cleaving to misplaced myth, like what Richard Pring in his Nuffield review calls ‘performance management’.

Is there another government office in the civilised world that could persist in such a weird life of denial? So weird that the DCSF, lately deserving to be known as the Department of Callow Schemes and Fantasies, has evidently acquired a further outer space character, earning perhaps the title of DLGM, the Department of Little Green Men?

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“ . ..  The pity is that politicians, who pollsters tell us are trusted only by 13% of the population, can so easily make fools of themselves by endeavouring to close down all thinking outside their own. How much wiser to welcome new ideas and give civil society, including teachers – who are trusted by 82% of the population – the chance to debate how best to improve the education of our young learners.”

Fortunately the modern hero Alexander does not call for any old British Grenadier to come to the rescue. In standing up stoutly in public in defence of his team’s years of extensive research in great depth he has given a shining example to us all. Moreover, the strength of his Review is reinforced by its independence of government funding and so of any taint of government mindset and ideology. There is resonance here with the situation of Professor Nutt, the eminent pharmacologist, who (the Home Secretary believes) should not give vent to thoughts divergent from government ‘policy’ outside his Advisory Council in a lecture or anywhere else (perhaps even in his sleep?).

Scientists are consequently up in arms about their intellectual integrity. Other undisputed experts, like Alexander, have an equal right to be angry in parallel circumstances. I’d go further and say that the whole of the professional corps of this country had better watch out for attacks from an executive dictatorship that will insist on having its petulant way and that, as we have seen throughout the scandals of the last summer affecting the whole of the political class, is seriously out of touch with the minds and the tried experience of real people. Let that corps take warning from the battering suffered by the teaching profession in the public education service, their understanding of children’s needs subjected to the diktat of mechanically minded central government for the last twenty years – their capacity to rebel weakened by government’s grip on them as assumed servants of the state, an assumption that immediately tells that it does not begin to  understand the core values of the education it presumes to command.

So, aux armes, citoyens professionaux! And for a start let all educators rally to the barricades behind Alexander! It is more than high time to face down the die-hards and dead-heads and show them the true spirit and strength of the so long derided “education establishment”.

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Malcolm, who teaches in the local primary school, found himself one day “teaching a class of six watched over by three OFSTED inspectors who were , in turn,  watched over, by three of Her Majesty’s Inspectors.”  “You couldn’t make it up,” says Mullin.

What kind of a world is it where big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, and little fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum?

Diogenes

“What a good idea for education to be less centralised. What we really need are organisations which could advise schools on current best practice; give ongoing support and guidance to schools which they really knew well; oversee admission policies to be fair to all; and be accountable to the local community. What would be a good name for these? Local, dealing with Education, and with some Authority. Let me think  . . . ”

The famous Thatcher word above (slightly adapted), used when the lady desired to show a certain steely determination, comes home to roost on Master Balls’s patch. There could be a number of causes of his change of heart – and we could be cynical about some – but if one of them is the realisation that a clanking state bureaucracy cannot ever find the the power let alone the wit to manage ‘the life of the mind’ as exemplified among the values that should inspire public education for a population of sixty million, well – hallelujah!

On the day the Vatican claim to have found the true burial place of St Paul it may be fitting for us to celebrate another minor damascoid revelation. Just a crying pity that the powers that be took the wrong road twenty or more years ago and so missed the right vision.

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