John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
Michael Gove’s comments on Hilary Cremin’s Rewilding Education are the most critical I’ve ever read about a book.
Her lumping together of the enlightenment, modernism, post-modernism and capitalism in order to condemn the lot show that she has not thought seriously about any of them.
As Gove says, the book is full of “toxic nonsense…idiocies” that would get her a failing grade in a first-year essay, but that is really her point. Western education is rotten to the core, and its criteria, dating from the discoveries of the enlightenment, are the reason for it. Judge and be damned.
She is not the first to think this.
Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning drew the ire and contempt of the romantic William Blake, and the use of grading and marks was roundly condemned in the 60s in Illich’s Deschooling Society. She also has some valid points, notably that there is far too much stress in the system, and that an over-emphasis on detail can prevent us from seeing the big picture. But is this blurting outburst the thinking that the Education Faculty of a leading world university should be accepting, let alone promoting? And is it what the Cambridge Education Faculty actually does, or is Professor Cremin, like Dr Arday, “an aberration”, who expects to be believed without critical examination?
A former professor referred me to its Ofsted report of 2024 , shortly after Cremin’s promotion. It describes something different, and better. The first paragraph sums it up –
“Trainee teachers at the University of Cambridge benefit from exceptional teaching and guidance. This is underpinned by a belief in research and professional development that permeates the partnership. Trainees gain an excellent grasp of the fundamental theories, traditions and approaches that teachers must master. They embrace the notion that completing this course is the start of their journey as reflective and informed practitioners, not the end.”
The report is the work of eight inspectors, six of them HMI, a far higher inspector-student ratio than in a school. It emphasises the Faculty’s close co-operation with partner schools, a point reinforced by a former lead HMI for maths, who had worked with it as a head of department. “A genuine partnership” was his verdict, and the Faculty had recognised his own expertise by having him contribute as a lecturer.
On the other hand, when Michael Gove exposed the openly Marxist personal views and agitation of the “enemies of promise” shortly after taking office, and was hammered by 100 teacher trainers, including Cremin, I started reading their websites and found that he was telling the truth.
A group of teacher trainers in the 70s had founded an informal group aimed at “the transformation of education through teacher training,” and this attempt to indoctrinate students was the result. Every form of back-doors skulduggery was employed, not just to marginalise opponents, but to drive them out of education departments. In the case of one professor, now a Fellow of the Royal Society, the technique was to employ hostile examiners for their doctoral students. One of the newer universities forced a doctoral candidate I know to rewrite his proposal to ensure that it was based on their principle of sociological determination, and hence wrecked it.
I met it in a small way myself, when a seminar for Teach First on language teaching at Leeds Beckett University found itself scheduled against a full conference session, with the obvious intention of limiting participation.
It did not work, but the point was made, backed up by a conversation at lunch that was loud enough for me to hear. Personal antagonism, in the style of Militant, was used to force the lecturer Jeanette Williams out of the London Institute of Education for having written a book on teaching children to write. No-one, of course, is going to admit to any of this, or to the backdoor methods used to stifle dissent. One local authority inspector, for example tried to get me sacked for exposing the neglect of reading in a local university in The Times Educational Supplement, and I was fortunate in the extreme that the chief inspector at the time agreed with me, and not with them.
So where is the truth?
Clearly, the whole of the Cambridge Education Faculty, far less the whole of the teacher education sector, is not party to this scandal. Just as Michael Gove was correct to say that a career should not be destroyed by a single comment, valuable work should not be discredited by an aberration. But Gove was right about the blob in 2010, and now, reinforced by Woke and anti-white racists, it has established an even stronger grip on research, examinations and the most senior appointments.
Cambridge’s independent inquiry needs to address some difficult but important questions. Was there contact between Dr Arday and members of the university prior to his application and interview? If so, by whom, how and when, and did they invite him to apply? How was the Board of Election appointed? It was chaired by the vice-chancellor’s nominee, but what of the other members? And for other universities – Who were the examiners for Dr Arday’s PhD, who was involved in its review? Why did Liverpool John Moores University not issue a list of the errors and corrections it had identified, rather than gloss over the issue? And why did Roehampton not proceed with an investigation into a complaint about his teaching when its course leader observed it and found the complaint justified? We may never know the answers to these questions.
But until we do, they will remain open.
John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
Michael Gove’s comments on Hilary Cremin’s Rewilding Education are the most critical I’ve ever read about a book.
Her lumping together of the enlightenment, modernism, post-modernism and capitalism in order to condemn the lot show that she has not thought seriously about any of them.
As Gove says, the book is full of “toxic nonsense…idiocies” that would get her a failing grade in a first-year essay, but that is really her point. Western education is rotten to the core, and its criteria, dating from the discoveries of the enlightenment, are the reason for it. Judge and be damned.
She is not the first to think this.
Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning drew the ire and contempt of the romantic William Blake, and the use of grading and marks was roundly condemned in the 60s in Illich’s Deschooling Society. She also has some valid points, notably that there is far too much stress in the system, and that an over-emphasis on detail can prevent us from seeing the big picture. But is this blurting outburst the thinking that the Education Faculty of a leading world university should be accepting, let alone promoting? And is it what the Cambridge Education Faculty actually does, or is Professor Cremin, like Dr Arday, “an aberration”, who expects to be believed without critical examination?
A former professor referred me to its Ofsted report of 2024 , shortly after Cremin’s promotion. It describes something different, and better. The first paragraph sums it up –
“Trainee teachers at the University of Cambridge benefit from exceptional teaching and guidance. This is underpinned by a belief in research and professional development that permeates the partnership. Trainees gain an excellent grasp of the fundamental theories, traditions and approaches that teachers must master. They embrace the notion that completing this course is the start of their journey as reflective and informed practitioners, not the end.”
The report is the work of eight inspectors, six of them HMI, a far higher inspector-student ratio than in a school. It emphasises the Faculty’s close co-operation with partner schools, a point reinforced by a former lead HMI for maths, who had worked with it as a head of department. “A genuine partnership” was his verdict, and the Faculty had recognised his own expertise by having him contribute as a lecturer.
On the other hand, when Michael Gove exposed the openly Marxist personal views and agitation of the “enemies of promise” shortly after taking office, and was hammered by 100 teacher trainers, including Cremin, I started reading their websites and found that he was telling the truth.
A group of teacher trainers in the 70s had founded an informal group aimed at “the transformation of education through teacher training,” and this attempt to indoctrinate students was the result. Every form of back-doors skulduggery was employed, not just to marginalise opponents, but to drive them out of education departments. In the case of one professor, now a Fellow of the Royal Society, the technique was to employ hostile examiners for their doctoral students. One of the newer universities forced a doctoral candidate I know to rewrite his proposal to ensure that it was based on their principle of sociological determination, and hence wrecked it.
I met it in a small way myself, when a seminar for Teach First on language teaching at Leeds Beckett University found itself scheduled against a full conference session, with the obvious intention of limiting participation.
It did not work, but the point was made, backed up by a conversation at lunch that was loud enough for me to hear. Personal antagonism, in the style of Militant, was used to force the lecturer Jeanette Williams out of the London Institute of Education for having written a book on teaching children to write. No-one, of course, is going to admit to any of this, or to the backdoor methods used to stifle dissent. One local authority inspector, for example tried to get me sacked for exposing the neglect of reading in a local university in The Times Educational Supplement, and I was fortunate in the extreme that the chief inspector at the time agreed with me, and not with them.
So where is the truth?
Clearly, the whole of the Cambridge Education Faculty, far less the whole of the teacher education sector, is not party to this scandal. Just as Michael Gove was correct to say that a career should not be destroyed by a single comment, valuable work should not be discredited by an aberration. But Gove was right about the blob in 2010, and now, reinforced by Woke and anti-white racists, it has established an even stronger grip on research, examinations and the most senior appointments.
Cambridge’s independent inquiry needs to address some difficult but important questions. Was there contact between Dr Arday and members of the university prior to his application and interview? If so, by whom, how and when, and did they invite him to apply? How was the Board of Election appointed? It was chaired by the vice-chancellor’s nominee, but what of the other members? And for other universities – Who were the examiners for Dr Arday’s PhD, who was involved in its review? Why did Liverpool John Moores University not issue a list of the errors and corrections it had identified, rather than gloss over the issue? And why did Roehampton not proceed with an investigation into a complaint about his teaching when its course leader observed it and found the complaint justified? We may never know the answers to these questions.
But until we do, they will remain open.