Bumpy ride ahead for Gove

Education minister Michael Gove today announced a radical overhaul of the school system in England and Wales.
In a move designed to move teaching and learning back towards the basic principles upheld in the past, he has proposed the abolition of all current baseline testing for 5 and 11 year olds and the replacement of such tests with results based on phrenology.
The move, says Gove, has a firm basis in scientific research. “It will give a clear indication at an early age of what kinds of things learners in schools are likely to achieve. Naturally, we will be on the look out for students with eyes set too closely together or pronounced supraorbital ridges.”
Pupils whose skulls do indeed reveal criminal tendencies will go to ‘special’ schools. These schools will be compulsory and residential. ‘Inmates’ will not be expected to achieve gainful employment upon release at 18, but will be conditioned to feel gratification when helping others, thus helping the unemployed to form a willing cohort of the Big Society, rather than staying at home all day smoking skunk, watching Jeremy Kyle and overusing the word ‘isit’.
Mr Gove, when confronted by an angry parent who accused him of making an uninformed, swingeing decision on the basis of a discredited pseudoscience, was heard by onlookers to reply that it still had the word ‘science’ in the name and was therefore at least worth a go.
Teaching unions have opposed the move. The NASUWT issued a statement stating that teachers would not be willing to sign up to a system based on “reading the bumps on a child’s head”, although they conceded that it might make as much sense as policies such as the Free Schools programme or the currently incessant pressure designed to drive schools towards becoming academies.

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