British Conservative Party politician Michael Gove served as Secretary of State for Education from 2010 to 2014.
Gove was appointed as Education Secretary with the formation of the Cameron-Clegg coalition, having previously been the shadow secretary of state for children, schools and families. His earliest moves included reorganising his department, announcing plans to allow schools rated as Outstanding by Ofsted to become academies, and cutting the previous government's school-building programme.
He opened the National Pupil Database and introduced the phonics check, a reading test for year 1 pupils. The later parts of his tenure were dominated by the Trojan Horse scandal. During his Education Secretaryship, Gove was criticised by teachers unions and academic associations for his attempts to overhaul British education. He left the role when he was moved by Prime Minister David Cameron to the office of chief whip in the 2014 cabinet reshuffle.
Appointment and early actions
Gove became Secretary of State for Education with the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government following the hung parliament after the 2010 general election. He ascended to the role after serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families in the Shadow Cabinet of David Cameron from 2007 to 2010. An early action was changing the name of the department from the Department for Children, Schools and Families to its previous name, the Department for Education. He announced plans for schools rated as Outstanding by Ofsted to be allowed to become academies.
Comments on social class and school achievement
In July 2010, he said that the Labour Party had failed in their attempt to break the link between social class and school achievement despite spending billions of pounds: quoting research, he indicated that by the age of six years, children of low ability from affluent homes were still out-performing brighter children from poorer backgrounds. At a House of Commons Education Select Committee he said that this separation of achievement grew larger throughout pupils' school careers, stating: "In effect, rich thick kids do better than poor clever children when they arrive at school [and] the situation as they go through gets worse".
Exam and curriculum reforms
Gove's views on exam systems became clear in December 2014 after the release of archive papers from 1986. GCSEs were the brainchild of Sir Keith Joseph. Margaret Thatcher, believing they lacked rigour, fiercely opposed them. However, opposition to the new exams from the teaching unions persuaded her to introduce them immediately, purely so as not to appear weak. Although Gove had sought but failed to replace them, his special advisor, Dominic Cummings, described the 1986 decision as catastrophic, leading to a collapse in the integrity of the exam system.
During the 2010 Conservative Party Conference, Gove announced that the primary and secondary-school national curricula for England would be restructured, and that study of authors such as Lord Byron, John Keats, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy would be reinstated in English lessons as part of a plan to improve children's grasp of English literature and language. Academies are not required to follow the national curriculum, and so would not be affected by the reforms. Children who failed to write coherently and grammatically, or who were weak in spelling, would be penalised in the new examinations. Historian Simon Schama would give advice to Government to ensure that pupils learnt Britain's "island story". Standards in mathematics and science would also be strengthened. He said that this was needed because left-wing ideologies had undermined education. Theirs was the view, he thought, that schools "shouldn't be doing anything so old-fashioned as passing on knowledge, requiring children to work hard, or immersing them in anything like dates in history or times tables in mathematics. These ideologues may have been inspired by generous ideals but the result of their approach has been countless children condemned to a prison house of ignorance".