Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[Section_31]

compromise over child poverty has now been reached within the coalition. The income measure will be retained, but others will be added to create a more “nuanced” picture of child poverty in Britain

 

I'm genuinely lost for words.

[dickie mint]

That Gove is a shithouse.

[JER]

[YOUTUBE]HAqyf7a4xFM[/YOUTUBE]

 

Karma is a bitch

[dickie mint]

[YOUTUBE]HAqyf7a4xFM[/YOUTUBE]

 

Karma is a bitch

 

 

Brilliant.

[JER]

The schools crusade that links Michael Gove to Rupert Murdoch

The education secretary has close ties to Rupert Murdoch and would be a key figure if he attempts to move into the UK schools market

 

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David Leigh

The Guardian, Monday 27 February 2012

Article history

 

Michael Gove meets Rupert Murdoch frequently and is an enthusiastic backer of the ideas put forward by the head of his education division. Photograph: David Jones/PA

On a freezing November day in 2010, the education secretary, Michael Gove, turned out in east London to inspect a desolate stretch of dockside ground near City airport, where Rupert Murdoch had offered to build an academy school.

 

The cabinet minister was accompanied by Rebekah Brooks, then News International chief executive, and an entourage of other top Murdoch staff, including James Harding and Will Lewis.

 

Despite the unprepossessing venue there was no mistaking the company's enthusiasm for the project. Murdoch described himself in a speech as the saviour of British education, thanks to his company's "adoption of new academies here in London".

 

It was a high-water mark of the love-in between Gove, Murdoch and the Conservative government. Gove, a former Times journalist, had previously gone out of his way to flatter his own proprietor, writing that Murdoch "encourages … free-thinking".

 

Shortly after the Docklands visit, the phone-hacking scandal disrupted these close relations. News International's proposed academy was quietly abandoned. Newham council says nothing was subsequently done to fulfil Murdoch's promises.

 

But Gove returned to his pro-Murdoch theme last week, publicly attacking the Leveson inquiry, set up in the wake of News International's misdeeds, as a threat to press freedom. "Whenever anyone sets up a new newspaper – as Rupert Murdoch has with the Sun on Sunday – they should be applauded and not criticised," he said.

 

It was a reminder of the extraordinarily close links that still exist between publishing tycoon and Tory politician. One of Murdoch's long-term projects is what he calls a "revolutionary and profitable" move by his media companies into online education. Gove would be a key figure in any attempt to penetrate the British schools market.

 

The education secretary meets Murdoch frequently and is an enthusiastic backer of the ideas of Joel Klein, the head of Murdoch's new education division. Within a week of his promotion in 2010, the minister was at dinner with Murdoch, according to officially released details of meetings.

 

The atmosphere could only have been warm. Gove once sang Murdoch's praises in a 1999 Times column as "the greatest godfather of mischief in print" who possesses "18th-century pamphleteering vigour". He wrote that Murdoch "encourages … free thinking. His newspapers … are driven by public demand and the creativity of chaotic, cock-snooking, individuals."

 

Murdoch in turn was kind to his former employee. When Gove first arrived at Westminster in 2005 as a backbench MP, the Times topped up his salary with a £60,000-a-year column. His wife still works for the paper.

 

Murdoch's publishing arm, HarperCollins, also gave Gove a book advance in 2004, when he was first selected for the safe Conservative seat of Surrey Heath. It was for a history of an obscure 18th-century politician, Viscount Bolingbroke.

 

Puzzlingly, the book was never delivered. HarperCollins refuses to disclose the size of the advance and its size is not specified in Gove's register of financial interests. Asked if his advance should be returned eight years later, HarperCollins says Gove "is still committed to writing a book on Bolingbroke but obviously his ministerial duties come first for now". Gove will not comment.

 

At the Gove dinner on 19 May 2010, Murdoch was accompanied by his then right-hand aide in Britain, Rebekah Brooks. Brooks was also with the education secretary at a second dinner three weeks later, on 10 June, for what his department terms "general discussion".

 

In a subsequent speech to the National College for School Leadership, Gove singled Joel Klein out for praise. Klein was a US lawyer then running the New York school system. But Klein was also Murdoch's own favourite US educator. His clashes with the teachers' unions and his enthusiasm for academy-style "charter schools" had caught the tycoon's interest. Murdoch planned to hire Klein himself.

 

Gove told his British audience on 16 June that US reformers such as Klein were insisting on "more great charter schools … free from government bureaucracy" because they were "amazing engines of social mobility".

 

Within 24 hours of that speech, the minister was once more at the lunch table with Murdoch himself, again with Brooks in attendance and, according to the department, other "News International executives and senior editors", for "general discussion".

 

At the end of summer 2010, Murdoch formally hired Klein for $2m (£1.3m) a year, plus a $1m signing bonus, to launch what he called a "revolutionary, and profitable, education division". Murdoch bought Wireless Generation, a US educational technology firm, for $360m, and gave it to Klein to run. Murdoch's vision was that he would digitise the world's so far unexploited classrooms. He told investors: "We see a $500bn sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs." He envisaged some of News Corporation's large library of media content being beamed to pupils' terminals.

 

Gove seemed to be an enthusiast. He met Klein on 30 September 2010, before the announcement of his link-up with Murdoch. The Department for Education does not explain the circumstances, other than saying "more than 10 others" were present for a "general discussion".

 

The following month, Murdoch flew to London again, to deliver the Margaret Thatcher lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies. He called for a revolutionised education system in the UK "that really teaches … In the last decades, I'm afraid, most of the English-speaking world has spent more and more on education with worse and worse results".

 

He boasted: "That is why so many of my company's donations are devoted to the cause of education – including the adoption of new academies here in London. There is no excuse for the way British children are being failed" .

 

Gove was with Murdoch for the celebratory dinner afterwards, along with Murdoch's son James and all his editors. And in the new year, Klein flew to England along with Murdoch himself for three days spent at Gove's department. He was "visiting UK as guest of DfE to explain and discuss US education policy and success", say officials. Gove was photographed visiting the King Solomon academy with Klein, who addressed a free schools conference. Gove dined with Murdoch, and with Brooks yet again, at a dinner hosted by businessman Charles Dunstone, an academy sponsor.

 

On 19 May, Gove breakfasted with Murdoch in London. The tycoon flew on from that meeting to address a Paris conference of internet entrepreneurs. This time, he went into some detail about News Corp's plans for educational technology. He and Klein had been touring educational projects around the world, in South Korea, Sweden and California. Schools were the "last holdout from the digital revolution" he said. "Today's classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age …The key is the software."

 

"I'd expect in the next [few] months we'd be making some acquisitions," Klein told the Financial Times. "There's the willingness to put in significant capital."

 

He cited the Khan Academy, a not-for-profit producer of educational videos through YouTube, as an example of how technology could add value.

 

On 16 June, Gove addressed the teachers' college in Birmingham on strikingly similar lines, calling for "technical innovation" in the classroom. He cited the "amazing revolution" of iTunes U in publishing lessons online. The same night, he dined with Rupert Murdoch yet again.

 

Four days later, Gove returned to the theme in another speech, praising News Corp's new hiring, Joel Klein, and urging his audience to read an "excellent article" Klein had written promoting charter schools.

 

Murdoch himself, returning to London, spoke at a conference of chief executives. The Times recorded: "Mr Murdoch detailed a vision whereby almost all children would be provided with technology such as specially designed tablet computers. He said that through such advances, 'You can get the very, very finest teachers in every course, in every subject, at every grade, and make them available to every child in the school – or if necessary, in some cases – in the world.'

 

"Mr Murdoch said that News Corporation, parent company of the Times, would help to spearhead this change by growing its business in providing educational material. He said he would be "thrilled" if 10% of News Corporation's business was made up of its education revenues in the next five years."

 

On 26 June, Gove was at yet another dinner with Murdoch. He followed it up with the most explicit endorsement to date of News Corp's education project in an address to the Royal Society entitled Technology in the Classroom. He even held up for praise Klein's favourite model, the Khan Academy, which was "putting high-quality lessons on the web".

 

He said: "We need to change curricula, tests and teaching to keep up with technology … Whitehall must enable these innovations but not seek to micromanage them. The new environment of teaching schools will be a fertile ecosystem for experimenting and spreading successful ideas rapidly through the system."

 

Murdoch's education project now began to falter, however, because of the looming British phone-hacking scandal. In the US, voices began to question the links between Klein and contracts awarded by the New York education department to Wireless Generation, the technology firm acquired by Murdoch. Klein and Murdoch's education division lost a hoped-for new $27m contract with the New York authorities.

 

Klein himself was catapulted into a central role in the company's attempts to firefight the scandal. He flew over to London to the parliamentary committee hearings in July. While all eyes were on Wendi Deng as she landed a punch on the foam-pie thrower who attacked her 80-year-old husband during the televised session, few noticed the dry legal figure sitting just behind her.

 

He now plays a key role in controlling the controversial management and standards committee (MSC) that is house-cleaning at News International by handing over journalists' incriminating emails to the police.

 

Until Murdoch's UK operation has been fully cleansed of its hacking toxicity, the way will not be open for Klein to resume his education projects, and his formerly close political links with Gove. But the end of the process of "draining the swamp", as one MSC source put it, may now be in sight.

 

Invited to respond to these issues, a Gove spokesman declined to comment.

 

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[dennis tooth]

Academy schools attain fewer good GCSEs, study shows | Education | The Observer

 

 

Gove’s stealthy school reforms could become as toxic as the NHS bill

 

Mehdi Hasan

 

Published 16 February 2012

 

 

The Education Secretary's free-market reforms to our school system are a political time bomb waiting to explode.

 

Another week, another attack on the government's health "reforms" - and on the hapless Andrew Lansley. One of Lansley's Tory cabinet colleagues told the ConservativeHome website that he should be fired from his post; the Lib Dem deputy leader, Simon Hughes, took to the airwaves to agree. The brazen attempt by Lansley to open up our health service to "any willing provider" - and, by extension, to EU competition law - has galvanised opposition to what Kingsley Manning, head of health at the outsourcing firm Tribal, once gleefully described as the coalition's "denationalisation" of the NHS.

 

All eyes have been on the health service but what about the denationalisation of the education system? Michael Gove is quietly presiding over the biggest shake-up of England's schools since the Second World War - there are now 1,529 academy schools, outside local government control, compared to 200 when the coalition came to power. They've been joined by 24 so-called free schools, set up by parents, charities and other unelected groups. Competition, choice and autonomy are the watchwords of the Gove education agenda.

 

Meanwhile, calls to give the private sector a bigger role in running such schools abound - and not just from Tory backbenchers or right-wing think tanks. David Bell, who was permanent secretary at the Department for Education until the end of 2011, said this month that he, like the Education Secretary, saw "no principled objection" to profit-making companies taking over state schools and predicted that they would "probably" do so eventually.

No rebellion

 

In fact, they already are. Last month, the for-profit Swedish company IES UK was awarded a £21m, ten-year contract by Gove to manage a free school in Suffolk - to be known as IES Breckland. Yet, according to a recent YouGov poll, fewer than one in four voters think free schools will improve education standards and less than a third of voters are in favour of allowing private companies to manage such schools.

 

Determined to roll back the frontiers of the state and to dismantle the central-government-funded, local-authority-maintained system, Gove and his boss, David Cameron, aren't listening. There is no "pause" planned on education reform; there is no Lib Dem rebellion brewing in the Lords. Unopposed, Gove continues to churn out measures that will accelerate the de facto privatisation by stealth of England's state education sector.

 

“There is an analogy here with the NHS reforms," Rebecca Allen of the University of London's Institute of Education tells me. For-profit companies aren't - yet - allowed to build or own state schools but, she says, "effectively, under the government's reforms, for-profit companies will soon be running many of our schools".

 

Allen's colleague at the IoE Stephen Ball sees Gove's reforms "as a softening-up of the system for further privatisations". He cites the scrapping of the General Teaching Council, the Training and Development Agency for Schools and the Support Staff Negotiating Body as evidence that England's school workforce is being made "more manageable and cheaper. Salary costs are the major issue for for-profit providers."

 

This isn't about freedom for local communities; it's about freedom for big corporations. The education services sector in the UK is worth close to £2bn - a figure that will soar once the coalition's changes to school structures have kicked in fully.

 

And don't believe the fraudulent rhetoric about "choice": the only person with any freedom of choice is Gove. Take Downhills Primary School in Tottenham, north London, which the Department for Education is forcing to become an academy despite vociferous and public protests by hundreds of local parents and teachers. The response from the Education Secretary? He dismissed his opponents in north London as "Trots" and claimed that they were "happy with failure".

 

Like Lansley, Gove is content either to ignore or deride grass-roots opposition to his ideological, small-state, outsourcing agenda. But Gove, unlike Lansley, is one of the original Cameroons, a founding member of the Prime Minister's Notting Hill set. His seat at the cabinet table is much safer than the Health Secretary's. The former Times columnist is also ferociously intelligent and, unlike Lansley, a master communicator: charming, eloquent, media-savvy. "Michael, in fact, sees himself as a future prime minister," a long-standing friend of the Education Secretary tells me.

Mind the language

 

Nonetheless, Gove's brilliance can be exaggerated and the potential for a public backlash on school reform underappreciated. Already, in less than two years as Education Secretary, he has had to execute humiliating U-turns on the funding of school sport and free books; apologise repeatedly in the Commons after giving MPs incorrect information about which school-rebuilding projects were to be axed; and been accused of an "abuse of power" by a high court judge over his decision to scrap those projects without proper consultation.

 

Inside the Department for Education, civil servants "are nervous about the prospects for judicial review", says a well-informed source. "They are also nervous about his language. He's not just calling teachers or trade unionists 'Trots' - he's calling ordinary parents 'Trots', too."

 

Such belligerence by Gove could backfire on him in the long run. Confidential documents on the coalition's outsourcing reforms, drawn up by senior civil servants and released under a Freedom of Information request last July, reveal how private providers of public services such as education "will compete on price but quality may suffer" and notes how greater choice and competition require "provider exit as well as entry . . . but exit of providers (eg, school closure) may be controversial and unpopular".

 

The Education Secretary can't say he wasn't warned. And those Conservative cabinet ministers who, in private, have voiced their object*ions to Lansley's NHS reforms should perhaps now keep a close eye on Gove. Education could become as toxic for the Tories as health.

 

Reckless, dogmatic and without the backing of any discernible electoral mandate, Gove's free-market reforms to our school system are a political time bomb waiting to explode.

 

Rafael Behr is away

[lifetime fan]

I'm genuinely lost for words.

 

Cunts, that is the word you are looking for mate.

[Section_31]

Armed resistance could soon be called for.

[dennis tooth]

Warning: changes will 'happen under the radar'

4

 

2 February 2012

 

By David Matthews

 

Reports that the government is to shelve its higher education bill raise the prospect of the coalition sneaking controversial changes through not only by ministerial directives that avoid parliamentary scrutiny, but also in other unrelated bills, an academic has claimed.

 

It was reported last week that the higher education bill that was due out this spring had been delayed "indefinitely", although the government insists that no decision has yet been made.

 

According to Gillian Evans, emeritus professor of medieval theology and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge, this raises a number of new possibilities.

 

If the government had truly turned against the reforms, she said, it "would have been trying to make political capital out of it", as it did when it announced a "pause" to the proposed reorganisation of the NHS in order to "listen" to concerns.

 

The fact that it had not done so suggested that its intention was to press ahead, but to make changes by other means, she argued.

 

Professor Evans pointed to last year's Education Act, the vast majority of which deals with schools, but which contains a clause allowing the government to raise interest rates on student loans in line with those that are "commercially available".

 

"That's university stuff - what's it doing in a bill about schools?" she asked.

 

She added that the 2003 higher education White Paper had contained proposals about creating "stronger links with business and economy".

 

These aims were not included in legislation passed the following year, but instead the government channelled money into Higher Education Innovation Funding, which supports knowledge exchange, something that did not require legislation.

 

Liam Burns, president of the National Union of Students, has also argued that the "most damaging" of the government's proposals will be able to "happen under the radar, without scrutiny from either the House of Commons or the House of Lords" if the higher education bill is shelved.

 

david.matthews@tsleducation.com.

 

New Statesman - Academies: five things they don't tell you

[Section_31]

My mate is a teacher. He said they've recently toughened up Ofsted inspections and said the new IT syllabus is laughable and includes having to teach programming languages to kids in Toxteth who can't sit still for two minutes, when - as his mate told him who runs a software company - 'why would I hire a Liverpool schoolkid to programme anything when I can send all the work to India and they'll work through the night for nothing?"

 

He's of the opinion that the Tories will try and show schools to be failing so they can bring the private sector in to 'save' them.

 

I think we're witnessing first hand the triumph of the corporation over the human being. And the only way the Tories can think of to make us more competitive, is to 'out slave' the slave labour in the east.

 

These really are terrifying times.

[JER]

My mate is a teacher. He said they've recently toughened up Ofsted inspections and said the new IT syllabus is laughable and includes having to teach programming languages to kids in Toxteth who can't sit still for two minutes, when - as his mate told him who runs a software company - 'why would I hire a Liverpool schoolkid to programme anything when I can send all the work to India and they'll work through the night for nothing?"

 

He's of the opinion that the Tories will try and show schools to be failing so they can bring the private sector in to 'save' them.

 

I think we're witnessing first hand the triumph of the corporation over the human being. And the only way the Tories can think of to make us more competitive, is to 'out slave' the slave labour in the east.

 

These really are terrifying times.

 

My son has autism - which McSchool will want to take him on I wonder?

[lifetime fan]

My son has autism - which McSchool will want to take him on I wonder?

 

None.

 

Which is why the NAS are opening a new 11-16 school in Bristol this summer.

[Section_31]

The Tories are just abhorrent scum. Labour are a disgrace for letting it happen too. Fucking cowards everywhere.

[lifetime fan]

The Tories are just abhorrent scum. Labour are a disgrace for letting it happen too. Fucking cowards everywhere.

 

That is more depressing than anything.

 

I've let my membership lapse and see no one appealing beyond the prefect to get me to cough up with my money again.

[sparta7]

[YOUTUBE]HAqyf7a4xFM[/YOUTUBE]

 

Karma is a bitch

 

Pity he didnt break his neck, the cunt.

[JER]

That is more depressing than anything.

 

I've let my membership lapse and see no one appealing beyond the prefect to get me to cough up with my money again.

 

I am going to stick with it for the time being - until Boris is kicked out in a few weeks time.

[Section_31]

Labour needs top-down rebranding IMO, it should be waging a media war using social media if needs be and engaging young people. Activism among the young is on the rise and Labour are nowhere to be seen, all we're stuck with his this fucking nasal moron and his fucking 'squeezed middle' shite. Absolutely useless sack of shite they are.

[piscinin]

Vote Anarchist people!

[lifetime fan]

Labour needs top-down rebranding IMO, it should be waging a media war using social media if needs be and engaging young people. Activism among the young is on the rise and Labour are nowhere to be seen, all we're stuck with his this fucking nasal moron and his fucking 'squeezed middle' shite. Absolutely useless sack of shite they are.

 

What is there?

 

Chucka Umana?

[VladimirIlyich]

Labour needs top-down rebranding IMO, it should be waging a media war using social media if needs be and engaging young people. Activism among the young is on the rise and Labour are nowhere to be seen, all we're stuck with his this fucking nasal moron and his fucking 'squeezed middle' shite. Absolutely useless sack of shite they are.

 

John Prescott is now on twitter!

[Section_31]

What is there?

 

Chucka Umana?

 

Fuck knows, but the Obama camp managed to pull it off pretty well in 08 with regards to guerilla marketing. It's the only way to get around the Telegraphs and ITNs of this world.

 

There's huge anger out there, among young people, the public sector, the poor, and it's pan European. The left leaning parties should be working together.

 

I just don't see the point in being a centre right party in a country of centre right parties.

[JER]

Think a lot of people who voted for Ed thought he would bring those kinds of ideas to the table - unfortunately his twitter adventures usually end in embarrassment.

 

Ed has been dealt a massive hand, and is just fumbling around giving interviews to the guardian. By the time he has woken up, the country will have become a third world economy with half the population on the streets. All our state school children will be taught by McDonalds, and the hospitals will charge you £500 for treating a sprained ankle. All in the name of 'free choice'

[VladimirIlyich]

Theres no doubt Miliband is a lot brighter than Cameron but with his slight speech impediment it makes people not able to take him seriously as an authority figure.

 

That might seem harsh or discriminatory even but I believe its a large part of the problem.This plus the fact that not many people could tell which leader represented which party.

[stringvest]

Think a lot of people who voted for Ed thought he would bring those kinds of ideas to the table - unfortunately his twitter adventures usually end in embarrassment.

 

Ed has been dealt a massive hand, and is just fumbling around giving interviews to the guardian. By the time he has woken up, the country will have become a third world economy with half the population on the streets. All our state school children will be taught by McDonalds, and the hospitals will charge you £500 for treating a sprained ankle. All in the name of 'free choice'

 

Yep. I have never been as angry with the Labour Party as I am now. They are letting the country down. A lack of leadership and abdication of responsibility bordering on the criminal. Don't get me wrong; the wanton destruction of the social infrastructure of this country conducted by Cameron and his acolytes and supported by the toadying, snivelling LDs at their heel IS morally criminal, but fuck me, if Labour cannot or are not willing to grasp the nettle now, then the country is already beyond redemption. I have to be optimistic that there is someone with the intellectual capacity, the drive, the marketing and oratory skills, the passion, the gravitas, and the moral and social compass to grab the party by the scruff of the neck and lead it to win the next election. It's not going to be a Milliband, that's for sure.

[VladimirIlyich]

Yep. I have never been as angry with the Labour Party as I am now. They are letting the country down. A lack of leadership and abdication of responsibility bordering on the criminal. Don't get me wrong; the wanton destruction of the social infrastructure of this country conducted by Cameron and his acolytes and supported by the toadying, snivelling LDs at their heel IS morally criminal, but fuck me, if Labour cannot or are not willing to grasp the nettle now, then the country is already beyond redemption. I have to be optimistic that there is someone with the intellectual capacity, the drive, the marketing and oratory skills, the passion, the gravitas, and the moral and social compass to grab the party by the scruff of the neck and lead it to win the next election. It's not going to be a Milliband, that's for sure.

 

As much as I didnt like him being a Blairite I honestly believe David Miliband has/had a genuine opportunity to get a Labour government elected but the party chose the wrong brother.