Thirteen years ago, the future direction of English Education was changed by the appointment of Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education. With the simple click of a question to an AI bot, I can publish the following ‘lowlights’ of his tenure to 2014, in terms of those as they affected the classroom:

1. Gove’s introduction of the new National Curriculum was met with criticism for its rushed implementation and lack of consultation with educators.
2. Lack of consultation: Gove was criticized for his top-down approach and limited consultation with educators, parents, and other stakeholders in the education sector.
3. Decline in creative subjects: The narrowing of the curriculum and emphasis on core academic subjects resulted in a reduced focus on arts, music, and other creative subjects.
4. Increased emphasis on exams: Gove’s focus on exam results and league tables created a high-pressure environment for both students and teachers, resulting in teaching to the test.
5. Widening attainment gap: Despite the government’s intention to reduce the attainment gap, under Gove’s tenure, there were concerns about a widening gap between disadvantaged students and their peers.
6. Removal of mandatory sex education: Gove’s decision to remove the requirement for mandatory sex education in schools was criticized for neglecting the importance of comprehensive sexual education.

In addition, the wider environment of education was seriously damaged as well

1. Strained teacher relations: His confrontational style and criticism of teachers led to strained relationships with the teaching profession, leading to low morale and strikes.
2. Funding cuts: Budget reductions in education during Gove’s tenure led to a strain on resources and impacted the quality of education in some schools.
3. Increased academization: Gove’s promotion of academies and free schools led to concerns about accountability, lack of local authority control, and potential inequality in education provision.
4. Scrapping of Building Schools for the Future: Gove’s decision to cancel the Building Schools for the Future program resulted in the cancellation of numerous school building projects and left some schools in need of repair and expansion.

The ‘bot’ also summarises 10 possible highlights, and I’ll refer to those later, but ‘mid-flow’ so to speak, there’s nothing to admire about Gove’s bravery in risk taking and radical reform agenda.

The source material for ChatGTP predates the last 2 years, but I can certainly confirm that the arc of 24 months since continues to be very unkind to Mr Gove and the choices he made for our children’s future. Our current Chief Inspector of schools, Amanda Spielman, addressed the House of Lords Education committee yesterday and ‘blamed’ specialisation available at 14 for GCSE, and that we had not yet learned how to make ‘harder subjects’ attractive to girls at 16+ – Spielman, 62, told the committee: “I think some of the people who’ve looked very hard at things like girls’ take-up of subjects like physics have recognised that there is a strand that’s down to individual choice and how you make it attractive to girls to opt for triple science rather than double science. It is a real conundrum without taking away that permissiveness that is a very deeply ingrained property of our system.”

Ms Spielman compounds the felonies from where Mr Gove left off. What the Gove reforms have done is to cause school curricular development to come to a juddering halt. By driving through content reform coupled with the regression to examination is to at a stroke limit the ability of researchers to check whether the reforms have worked for about a decade – back in May 2017, Lord Baker (formerly Secretary of State for Education under Margaret Thatcher) launched an alternative set of proposals in the light of the available evidence then of the ever-onward march of technology and the need for skills development to match. Do please bear in mind that Baker’s reforms in the 1980s supported the development of the GCSEs we now enjoy, uniting a school population that had been previously divided by the 25% who followed O levels and the majority left behind taking either Certificate of Second Education (CSE) or other lower level vocational courses. You can read Lord Baker’s reform agenda here, which makes some very telling points, but in no way is deliverable without establishing an agreement that there is a core methodology that teachers, instructors, educators and parents need to adopt.

Throughout the development of humanity, we have required multiple pathways for the successful development of children’s knowledge, skills and understanding. Genuinely successful schools throughout the world know this, and so apply the clear principles of providing Alternative Instruction within and around the curriculum. The essence of the excellent Early Years Foundation covers 7 stages, and they do really cover the piece, and demand of course that EYFS leaders keep separate the various areas, because they need to be delivered in a rainbow spectrum of ways :
Communication and language development. …
Physical development. …
Personal, social, and emotional development. …
Literacy development. …
Mathematics. …
Understanding the world. …
Expressive arts and design.

The trouble is of course, is the Gove/Spielman approach is to ‘inspect’ the success of settings (nurseries/schools) covering this stage (and all the others of primary, secondary and sixth form) via measurable outcomes. No credence at all is given to the successful elements of the programme that are simply unmeasurable. Even worse, you see that inspecting agencies and commercial providers reduce the elements of their approach by combining sections (even if they are uncomfortable cohabitees) thus changing the priorities of the teachers accordingly – here’s one commercial product providers derivative =Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and Design.

Correctly spotted dear reader, the setting has been let off having to worry about some of the ABSOLUTE fundamentals that drive successful child development, such as speaking, listening, sharing, collaborating, engaging physically, failing, falling and resilience building. A very good friend and highly respected researcher in her own rights, Professor Pat Preedy has railed against the DfE’s failure to include physical movement and assessments of same in the foundation stage, and even produced for schools a free-to-use resource programme, Movement for Learning, for schools to adopt if they lack the confidence of their own knowledge in this area. Sadly the programme was disrupted by C19 epidemic, DfE lost interest it seems and with so much changeover at the top of Secretaries of State, it’s unclear how this can be reprioritized for the nation.

The requirements for the Alternative Instruction model in schools is so obvious, and we have always needed those AIs to keep up with other developments in society, be they academic, social, technological or even collaborative against individual. How does the latest incarnation of AI fit within my model and what recommendations do I make for schools seeking to adapt?

The most important skills children need to acquire in schools is ‘good oracy’, which is all about speaking and listening out loud together. If children can listen to others, speak about and share their ideas then we have the elements of a successful workplace too. We’ve been running Merlyn Mind, an AI classroom tool in our primary or secondary classrooms for almost 2 years now, and as we merge our junior school classes onto one site in September, we will have Merlyn in every classroom from Year 3 to Year 6. The AI engine (built from the IBM Watson project) only focusses on the data set the teachers wish the children to use, and as a consequence is both safe and enables some genuine child autonomy to their learning. If childrens’ junior education is supported by ubiquitous keyboard & screen, then IT ceases to be a subject that children can fail and becomes yet another tool in their ‘pencil case’.

When 17 Ukrainian children joined our school last May, they had none or very little English, and family backgrounds either completely absent (the children were unaccompanied) or with just a mother, herself with no english either. Educationally, pretty well every one was slipped into the correct year for their age, all were provided with a chromebook, and most had a mobile phone as well. And guess what – almost all the children quickly and successfully embedded into their peer group. Google Translate did most of the heavy lifting, fine tuning from an amazing EAL teacher we have on the staff hlped ,assively of course, who also helped some of the mothers with their baby steps into our language too. The oldest students switched in to those subjects at Sixth Form which were visual or suitably creative to meed those skills, or into content familiar areas such as Business Studies for which the separation by language was perhaps less obviously because of the world-wide harmonisation of trade, marketing and commerce. All 17 are now consummate users of technology, and are capable of asking and answering complex questions in both languages.

Technological change will continue to be with us, as long as humanity is there to push the boundaries. Some technologies are eternal, the wheel for example, others such as the fountain pen one now to be found as an affectation if still in use, yet others typewriters a footnote in history. Of course society needs to worry about cheating, after all even prime ministers can be found out for breaking the rules, so teachers must not set homeworks for children to complete which just require a cut/paste/ask Siri approach. Teaching techniques can be changed (flipping the learning) so that the students are asked to carry out activities at home which are information gathering and skills rehearsal, so that lesson time is used to demonstrate those skills and synthesise some new questions for the next steps along the way. Flipping doesn’t suit many situations and can be ‘gamed’, so having a diversity of approaches in the style bank ensures learning stays active, real and dynamic. Perhaps my biggest caution is to avoid the top&tail approach, where students of design and technology are marked for their design ideas but never make anything, as often can be the case in Food & Nutrition, where their ability to read a product label in a supermarket is valued more than their understanding and physical ability to prepare edible and tasty food safely. I’ve given some obvious examples, but it’s just as likely that children will learn and follow revision guides in English Literature as opposed to reading the book and making their own views clear.

Having lived through Cold War, I am very aware of how dangerous a weaponised world is, though given we survived that with only a few casualties, war used to be a whole lot more dangerous of course. As the use of Artificial Intelligence moves through the gears, from physical holes in physical tokens (paper ticker-tape) to digital ‘tokens’ enabling data to be searched, captured, reshaped and formed into a response in different outputs – the latter very much in its infancy. What we do know is that for IA to work, the algorithm must be able to take risks; as a consequence it frequently writes factually incorrect material, often with the ‘sources’ completely made up, even ignoring the instructions you give it! As a consequence, and in whatever domain decision makers, quality assurers and integrity checkers work, they’ll need to have the educational background and experience in the specific industry concerned. That’s why it is so dangerous for successful business leaders to jump channels, even more dangerous when they leave the sector and enter for example into surgery or social work with no practical experience.

Every adult decision maker has a view about education, as in whatever way they have been a child, they have learned ‘stuff’, and most of that happened in schools! Unfortunately, any individual’s memories of what worked for them are in no way scientifically endorsed, and certainly cannot be extrapolated out into successful approach for the wider society at large. What the chief inspector of schools should be saying is that ‘no matter what subject a child chooses to pursue when educational choices are available, those channels have to include lots of different skills, technologies and approaches. Focussing specifically on my school, every artist will use hands, crayon, brush, camera, screen and develop both analogue and digital skills. Sporting activities will include physical athleticism, and include mathematical reasoning, data handling and instructional coaching techniques. Actors and musicians will perform, learn, practice, record, digitise, blend their (and others) work, in-front and back-stage. My research groups of 14/15 year olds in Higher Project Qualification have used Artificial Intelligence and Alternative Instructional approaches, gathered insights into ethics and journalism, learned more about the ‘real world’ because of their research than they would have done if they had set out to study the ‘real world’.

So to conclude, all children and adults must be able to follow the same broad spectrum approach through their chosen years of education. Current education leaders call this levelling-up, but all too often they design an next stage model that embraces levelling down. DfE and Oftsed’s activities almost always do both, because they proscribe too much, fund it too little, and blame those who are are successful across the age range as taking unfair advantage in some way or other. The easy A2I (aid to information) for my recommendation is to pursue the healthiest approach you can find, which will include lots of variety and yet seek to be well-balanced.

Appendix – Gove’s 10 Good things from ChatGPT and my commentary to the right.

10 possibly Good Things