TORY education secretary Michael Gove suffered a humiliating defeat on Thursday when he was forced to drop his flagship proposal to replace GCSEs with the EBC exam, calling it a ‘bridge too far’.
Gove announced the English Baccalaureate Certificate last September to a fanfare of approval from his Tory colleagues for his determination to return to ‘traditional fact-based learning’ and dispense with the GCSE exams.
Gone would be the decades of struggle by teachers and educationalists to try and actually educate children, especially those from working class backgrounds, and reward their educational achievements through awarding them GCSE grades.
Instead, Gove was intent on a return to the single exam at the end of a two-year EBC course, a return to the old pass or fail system where pupils are trained to pass exams instead of gaining knowledge.
The EBC system reeked of the old grammar school/public school ethos so beloved by the Tories for its almost total exclusion of working class children.
The EBC was restricted to a limited number of subjects – English, maths, science, history, geography and languages.
To achieve the EBC certificate pupils would have to pass the entire series of subjects; failure in one of them would result in them not getting a qualification but a ‘statement of achievement’ – or as teachers correctly termed it a ‘statement of failure’.
Gove’s ridiculous claims that he wants to extend this public school system to the entire education system is just total nonsense. At a time when schools funding is being slashed to the bone, when schools are being ‘failed’ and threatened with closure on a daily basis, the upheavals of introducing EBC would have collapsed the entire educational system and created a veritable storm of anger amongst parents – a storm that threatened to engulf the coalition government and plunge it even further into a terminal crisis.
Gove has been touted amongst the Tory Party as the man to take over from the embattled Cameron and has positioned himself as the hard man of the right, willing to take on the teachers and their unions and drive through the privatisation of schools and the introduction of performance-related pay.
He has made a career out of vilifying teachers and dismissing the educational achievements of children and young people by his constant bleating about devalued GCSE qualifications.
Now Gove has been forced into a humiliating U-turn as his plans have been recognised by everyone from the examination watchdog, Ofqual, to the Select Committee on Education as unworkable and of a type which will push the system over the abyss.
He also faced the threat of legal action from the examination companies who feared a loss of revenue.
Responding to Gove, the Labour shadow education minister, Stephen Twigg, refused to call for his resignation and made it clear that the Labour leadership are quite prepared to work with Gove and the government to achieve a ‘consensus’ on changes to the education system.
At a time when the coalition is at its weakest, when it is split and divided, falling apart at the seams , the Labour leadership steps forward to offer it a lifeline in the form of working together with a hard-line opponent of workers’ rights to reach consensus on how best to smash up the public education system.
The Labourite class traitors are in fact collaborating with the coalition’s attacks on education, the NHS and the entire Welfare State.
Along with the leaders of the trade unions they are doing absolutely nothing to defend schools or hospitals from closure, they will not even call for the discredited Gove to go, let alone fight to bring down this government.
The issue couldn’t be clearer – Gove must be forced out and along with him the entire government, to be replaced not with the treacherous Labour Party but with a workers’ government that will abolish private education and guarantee the finest education for every child.
