Labour has shown, through blocking an Eton-sponsored sixth form in the North-East, and its vindictive VAT levy on independent schools, that it continues to put ideology before progress.
Children starting school have new demands placed on them both socially and in terms of learning. Reading requires them to focus closely on small details, and also to move their eyes.
People are being broken, and the authorities, including some school leaders, are doing nothing about it.
We have reason to be grateful to them, and for this detailed first-hand account of how it was achieved.
Cummings and Gove have the satisfaction of knowing that Labour has accepted their main policy objective – academy trusts; is not ditching phonics; and seems unlikely to bring back the AS examination.
As with literacy, the result of progressive approaches to maths has been failure and misery.
I usually ask children, in a jokey way, if they behave perfectly all of the time, and explain that languages, like children, behave most of the time – but not always.
It is easy to see officials laughing up their sleeves while dumping every pupil with extreme behaviour in the same place.
English was flooded with French for 300 years. So we can’t always rely on the letters to tell us all we need to know.
I may have been too quick to think that Labour was about to repeat its mistakes.
We should give children the whole truth, and teach them to think for themselves.
We need to tell the truth even when it hurts, and Conservatives made serious mistakes in education too.
The key issue is whether she will allow the most successful state school in history to be thrown to the wolves.
Successful learning depends on matching teaching to children’s learning needs. This can’t happen if the range of needs in a class is too wide for a teacher to reach.
Cummings, intelligent but impulsive, attracted Conservative politicians through his ability to demolish the box as well as think outside it, but he lacked any clear view of the consequences of his ideas.