GOVE HITS SCHOOLS, TEACHERS AND PUPILS WHERE IT HURTS !

While most of the Tory members of the Cabinet are namby-pamby wets, one stands out as a go-getting hardliner - Michael Gove.

Already facing criticism from the left wing, egalitarian liberals who infest our society, over his decision not to reappoint one Baroness Morgan as the head of 'OFSTED', he's now announced that he wants our schools to bring back 'traditional punishments' as  response to bad behaviour by their pupils. Gove sees this as meaning the return of proper detentions, lines and more community-based sanctions such as cleaning classrooms or weeding school grounds.

Baroness Morgan is a Labour life peer and a former adviser to Tony Blair; it can hardly be a surprise that a Tory-led administration would want to bring in a more like-minded head for such an important QUANGO, but that hasn't stopped Gove's deputy, the expenses fiddling Liberal David Laws, from being reported as being 'furious' with his boss over the matter. Gove simply says that he feels it is time to refresh the leadership of OFSTED; what's wrong with that ?

As for classroom discipline, it's surely about time that teachers were given the power to exert some genuine control over the louts whom they are often called upon to educate. Unsurprisingly, teachers unions, all predominantly left-wing bodies, are jumping up and down in their usual hysterical fashion but without actually saying anything very meaningful; effectively, they're just carrying out their normal activity of opposing anything which a right wing government attempt to do to improve our failed education system.

Listening to Gove on today's 'Andrew Marr show' on the BBC, he's now chucked in another little bomb, suggesting that it's high time the little darlings worked a bit harder by having longer school days. In my time at school, we worked from 9-4 with a lunch break and a short morning break; now, it seems, that the school day is more like 9-3 with frequent 'free' periods in between and, of course, an emphasis on a plethora of 'life style' subjects aimed at indoctrinating children in areas such as equality and diversity, personal relationships and so on. My own knowledge from teenagers of my acquaintance is that they do very little at school which is of any use to them and that there's very little in the way of sanctions for bad behaviour. One 'A'- level pupil, whom I know, spends no more than a handful of hours at school plus a few more at a placement; her actual effort is minimal and yet she expects to gain the equivalent of 4 'A'-levels in due course and then go on to university. When I was at school, she'd have been lucky to get on an 'A'-level course, let alone go to university.

It's well passed the time for a radical overhaul of our education system and Gove may well be the man to do it, if he's given long enough at the job. That, of course, is the issue, as always in British politics. Unless the Conservatives win the next election he'll be out of a job by May next year and that will be that.