The Education Secretary Lucy Powell is back from holiday and has given her first interview to the BBC’s Matt Chorley. A disaster…
Here are the lines:
- Powell is anti-exams: “And it’s a lot, isn’t it? It’s a lot of pressure. Is it too many? Well, we’ve just had, the government’s just had this sort of curriculum assessment review, which is kind of sitting on my desk at the moment, looking at some of these issues. You know, we’re going to look at that and take forward some changes to the curriculum and assessment system, so that it is fit for that world of work. And there are some things I think we can look at within that, and I want to take the time to look at that in terms of the current GCSEs but particularly again what we’re talking about today are the complementary qualifications that might be suitable for more students to take that give you the skills that the future economy needs and these will be high quality by the way technical and vocational qualifications…”
- She implies she wants to abolish Ofsted: “It’s a whole breadth of things that we need to change. How schools are measured, how they’re accountable, so that they’re incentivised to take on some of these qualifications. We’re gonna look at the qualifications themselves to make sure that they are the right kind of qualifications, improve them, reform them. We’re going to give new powers to mayors to both convene employers, but also work with schools and colleges in their areas to really ramp up this issue of work placements and experiences of work, which is such a missing factor.”
- She says spelling tests are too obscure: “I think, look, spelling is obviously important, you know, good grammar, I’m sure you want to talk to me about that as well, and spelling. I think what I’ve talked about in the past are some aspects, some particular aspects of the SATs, which you might remember your daughter doing, and the spelling and grammar testing in that which is It’s particularly obscure in parts, isn’t it? So look, we have had this curriculum.”
- Oxford was too academic: “I just didn’t get on at Oxford. I mean it was academically very, very hard as well to be honest with you. Not that I wasn’t able to do that, but it was, it was quite, it was, those, those eras I think it’s got a bit better since then in that era. Academically it was a quite sink or swim. There was a lot of self-teaching, self-learning which I wasn’t really used to. And I, I found myself just in a, in an environment I wasn’t really… used to.”
- She would prefer working at Topshop to being a teacher: “I might have been a teacher, maybe myself, but I did always, I did love working at Topshop, you know, and sort of having the keys on my, you know on my lanyard and being able to go around sort of serving customers and stuff, so who knows.”
Kids – strap in…
