Michael Gove is hailed as a rising star. He does not deserve it
In a government of disasters, unfulfilled promises and U-turns, one minister continues unflustered, unturned and largely uncriticised. While NHS reforms have stuttered – and their architect, Andrew Lansley, has been jettisoned from the health department – and doubts grow about the practicality, equity and affordability of Iain Duncan Smith's universal credit, Michael Gove's plans for education steam majestically ahead. The Daily Mail has hailed the education secretary as "the cabinet's greatest success story". In his autumn statement, the chancellor, as well as giving the go-ahead for the abolition of teachers' national pay scales, praised Gove for cutting 1,000 jobs at the Department for Education – a quarter of its workforce – and handed him an extra £1bn, mainly to fund new academies and free schools, the standard-bearers of his policies. Downing Street briefings are clear: Gove is top of the class. When Tory MPs discuss future leaders, he is mentioned as often as Boris Johnson.
Gove's policies for schools are almost as far-reaching as Lansley's for health, amounting to a Whitehall takeover of a service that, for well over a century, has been run by local authorities. Private providers, accountable through contracts with Gove and his successors, will play a central role. The curriculum and examinations will be transformed, restoring the traditional academic diet that characterised the 1950s grammar schools. Such grand schemes are necessary, Gove argues, because English schools are failing and must be released from falling standards, obstructive unions, "trendy" teachers and the "dead hand" of local authorit. Yet there is scant evidence that English schools face any kind of crisis or that Gove's policies will deliver improvements. stellar rating rests on little more than a journalist's talent for telling a good story (he was a news editor and columnist for the Times) and some distinctly dodgy statistics.
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