Tag Archives: michael gove

Arrogant email from Michael Gove adviser confirms culture of secrecy

2:39pm Wed September 21st

The Guardian today published a leaked email in which a close aide to Michael Gove fiercely rebukes attempts by a civil servant to obtain transparency from a charity paid £1,000,000 of taxpayers’ money to administrate Gove’s “new schools” programme.

News of smoke and mirrors at the Department for Education will come as no shock to loyal Scrapbook readers, however, who read the story of s ecrecy around the New Schools Network (NSN), run by yet another Gove adviser, last October.

The government refused to disclose full details of the business case submitted by NSN. Stonewalling by DfE led to an intervention by the Information Commissioner, who ordered them to reply. A heavily redacted FOI response was finally received after a 70-day delay.
The DfE have no idea who NSN’s other donors are – and crucially – whether those donors would stand to benefit financially from the introduction of free schools.
Education ministers have dodged further questions around procurement, with the department claiming “no other tenders were sought from other organisations [because] NSN has been active in this area for some time”. In this case “some time” means “since the charity was started less than a year ago”.

The arrogance with which Dominic Cummings responds to entreaties from within the department is nevertheless breathtaking:

“NSN is not giving out to you, the media or anybody else any figure on ‘expressions of interest’ for PQs, FOIs or anything else. Further, NSN has not, is not, and will never answer a single FOI request made to us concerning anything at all.”

Contrast this with the spin from Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude on ”the degree of honesty we have with the public”:

“The most startling difference between this administration and the last is the degree of honesty we have with the public … We have put government transparency at the heart of our approach … When it comes to transparency and openness, we want nothing less than radical culture change for the public sector.”

On transparency, the gulf between rhetoric and reality has become an embarrassment.

Planning minister tabled legislation to make it harder to build houses

9:36am Mon September 5th

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At loggerheads with the conservation bodies such as the National Trust, planning minister Greg Clark has said the government would not back down on controversial plans to make it easier to build houses. Doubtless Clark is hoping everyone has forgotten about his 2006 private members’ bill — which, erm, tried to make it harder to build houses.

Introducing his Ten Minute Rule Bill as an opposition backbencher, Clark told the Commons:

“In a short time, the character of some of our most prized areas is being completely destroyed, although we never would have considered that possible.”

Prominent supporters of the legislation, which sought to restrict building developments on tracts of private land, included the likes of Michael Gove. It is not without some irony, then, that Clark now finds himself defending legislation without which he claims we would:

“… continue the position we are in where we are not building enough homes for the people needing them for the first time.”

Presumably terrified of another Caroline Spelman-style forest sale meltdown, Clark has said he will hold talks with opponents of planning reform.

Perhaps they should along a copy of Clark’s “Protection of Private Gardens (Housing Development) Bill” to jog his memory.

Michael Gove’s turf war with civil service paved way for email leak

11:03am Tue August 30th

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Department for Education emails leaked in today’s Guardian reveal how key government work has been farmed out to partisan allies of Michael Gove at the controversial New Schools Network. But this isn’t the first time the secretary of state has attempted to bypass his own department’s civil servants.

Back in March, as we reported, Gove flouted the civil service recruitment ban by advertising externally for two speechwriters. Emails released in response to a freedom of information request show that the move was initially blocked by junior minister Lord Hill, but opposition was soon quashed, and Gove was able to hire Alexandra Gowlland — a former researcher for Tory minister Nick Gibb — along with Elena Narozanski, who worked as his special adviser barely a month before the positions were advertised.

In February, James Frayne — a former campaigns director for the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and another key Gove ally (he features on the acknowledgements page of Gove’s book Celsius 7/7) — was brought in as Director of Communications after the veteran Caroline Wright took voluntary redundancy. And only last week, Gabriel Milland of Policy Exchange was appointed head of news, replacing Lee Bailey, who left in May “without a new role lined up”.

Gove will be insisting that teachers are Tories next.

Murdoch wants Gove to replace half of British teachers with computers

6:04pm Wed August 3rd

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Following up on a Political Scrapbook report from July, the new issue of Private Eye features an interesting angle on Michael Gove’s relationship with high level directors in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Last year, News Corp purchased Wireless Generation, a company which makes teaching assistance software, and hired former New York schools Chancellor Joel Klein to head it up. In a June interview with the Times, Murdoch seemed almost giddy at the prospects made available by his new acquisition:

“You can get by with half as many teachers. The teachers can be a lot better and a lot better paid.” As well as cutting back on teacher numbers, there would be a big reduction in textbook budgets. Mr Murdoch joked that he hoped to put textbook publishers out of business.

As we reported in last month, Wireless Generation was awarded multi-million dollar no-bid contracts to provide these very systems to the New York school system. Interestingly, almost as soon as Gove had taken over the Department for Education, the government announced the abolition of BECTA – the quango which oversaw IT procurement in schools.

Klein, now in charge of NewsCorp’s post hacking clean up operation, has visited Gove’s department on two occasions, and describes the education secretary as a “friend”. Prior to the release of Gove’s media meeting lists, he was referred to on the DfE website simply as “former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education”, without reference to his current position at NewsCorp.

Rupert Murdoch’s hacking fixer is friends with “hero” Michael Gove

3:08pm Mon July 18th

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As the News International contagion spreads, Michael Gove has been conspicuously silent about his links to the Murdoch empire, including a £60,000+ annual contract and his close relationship with the man now charged with mopping up the scandal.

A journalist by trade, Gove held a highly lucrative weekly columnist for The Times until 11 January 2010. Stangely, however, the contract with News International, which effectively doubled his standard MP pay packet, remained on the books for at least nine months and into Gove’s tenure as a cabinet minister before it was finally removed from the register of members’ interests on 28 March 2011.

Gove is contracted with Murdoch owned Harper Collins to write a biography of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and his wife remains Beauty Editor of The Times.

Interest is also growing into his relationship with the man heading up News Corporation’s new standards committee, Joel Klein.

Many of Gove’s ideas for his free schools pet project have been borrowed from Klein, a former chancellor of the New York City school system. He came to the UK in January at Gove’s invitation to speak at the government’s Free Schools Conference, and to visit the King Solomon academy, run by a potential free schools operator.

At the conference, Klein gushed about his pal:

“This country is so lucky to have a man with Michael’s vision and commitment … In my world that makes you a hero, my friend.”

Klein stepped down from his position as schools Chancellor last year, walking straight into a $2m a year job as CEO of News Corporation’s education division. Last month, News Corp were awarded a $27m bid-free contract by the state of New York to develop software to track student test scores.

Klein has, in recent days been brought into Rupert Murdoch’s inner circle, to offer guidance on the phone hacking scandal. Murdoch has formed a “management and standards committee” to fight the crisis, which will report directly to Klein.

A figurehead of the free schools movement, Klein used his time at New York city hall to end teacher tenure and close more than 100 public schools. He and Mayor Michael Bloomberg replaced them with a free market system of charter schools, outside of public control and with selective admissions processes.

Sound familiar?

Michael Gove’s own council opposes parents breaking strike action

3:17pm Wed June 29th

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Council bosses in Michael Gove’s own constituency have placed themselves at odds with the education secretary over suggestions that parents should help to break tomorrow’s pension strike by teaching unions, Scrapbook can reveal. Surrey County Council, in which lies Mr Gove’s constituency of Surrey Heath, have warned headteachers not to allow parents or other volunteers to prevent school closures:

“The use of volunteers (such as governors or parents, brought in specifically to help maintain staffing levels in the school) is best avoided.”

In guidance issued by senior officials, heads and school governors are advised to balance their duty to provide education with the need to “engender goodwill amongst remaining staff, particularly bearing in mind that they may be supportive of the industrial action even if they are not a direct party to it.”

And Surrey is not alone. Local authorities up and down the country have told this blog that they will not be encouraging the practice. Sheffield City Council claimed they could see “major problems” with the idea, not least of which were concerns over the safety of children under the care of untrained staff without CRB checks.

Of the councils contacted, none were aware of any schools open to parental scabbing. Even Kent County Council, where local MP Tracy Crouch proudly announced she would abandon her responsibilities in the Commons to score points against teachers, couldn’t name a single school where she’d be welcome.

It appears that Gove is handling this crisis with the same ineptitude as the rest of his portfolio.

Pictured: Hypocrite Michael Gove on a trade union picket line

1:22pm Mon June 27th

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As union-bashing Michael Gove accused teachers of taking “militant” strike action over pension cuts, Scrapbook thought it apposite to revist the photo above of a certain bespectacled trainee journalist.

The image depicts the education secretary alongside union colleagues from Aberdeen’s Press and Journal, distributed across the northern counties of Scotland. Liberal Conspiracy reports that he went on a strike for as long as four months after his employers de-recognised the National Union of Journalists.

Indeed, Gove was described by his former shop steward as quite the firebrand:

“He was an active striker, willingly taking his turn on picket duty and going on a small delegation to Strasbourg to press the union’s case”

Current plans to make teachers pay more, work longer and get less in retirement threaten to choke off graduate recruitment, prompt thousands of older, experienced teachers to retire while making it even more difficult to recruit headteachers. The move sees the more cautious ATL union striking for the first time in 127 years.

Perhaps Gove should sit down with his former comrades instead of slinging mud.

Gove uses incorrect physics reference while calling for harder exams

1:24pm Wed June 22nd

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Perhaps Michael Gove deserves a spell with the dunce’s cap after an ill-advised scientific reference. Calling for more rigour in GCSE and A-level exams, the education secretary held forth on the science curriculum in a recent interview with The Times:

“What [students] need is a rooting in the basic scientific principles, Newton’s laws of thermodynamics and Boyle’s law.”

As students of physics will tell you, however, Isaac Newton’s laws relate to motion and gravity. The laws of thermodynamics, relating to the transfer of heat, were initially developed by Lord Kelvin more than 100 years after Newton had snuffed it.

Complaining that history is not taught in chronological order, Gove goes on to use the example of his daughter:

“My daughter does toys through the ages, then she does the Vikings, then the Greeks; and she gets confused.”

Perhaps that after-school tuition from her father could account for the confusion.

Hat-tip: Daan Kang

Tag Archives: michael gove

“You can get by with half as many teachers. The teachers can be a lot better and a lot better paid.” As well as cutting back on teacher numbers, there would be a big reduction in textbook budgets. Mr Murdoch joked that he hoped to put textbook publishers out of business.

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