World class - but who cares?

It took a lot of people a lot of work and a lot of time to create what was collectively one of the best set of resources for educators in the world. The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency's site offered a superb range of teaching and planning resources; Teachernet gave instant access to the current guidance on a wide range of government education policy; Teachers' TV was a wonderful source  of video resources covering governance, leadership, teaching and support staff.

As a headteacher I made frequent and constant use of teachernet, for example for detailed guidance on exclusion or matters of school governance. Meanwhile, my staff used QCDA resources to help their planning and delivery of many aspects of the curriculum.  As a trainer I have made regular use of the excellent video collection on TTV and frequently speak to headteachers who use them for staff development.

In a world where our political masters bang on about Britain needing to be world class these resources were just that. It is doubtful if any nation could boast such a wide range of high quality and professional resources. You would expect Michael Gove to be a proud man.  And you would be wrong.

As part of his mission to take education back to the twentieth century one of the first steps taken by the Secretary of State was to deprive schools of these wonderful resources.  It was easy to justify, of course, on the grounds of economy - these website must have cost..... hmmm, how much would it really have cost to have kept these world class resources? We are left to conjecture what might have been the real reason for Gove to remove them. Surely, surely, his refusal to acknowledge that there was anything good about New Labour's education advances would not extend here?  Perhaps his 20th century thinking excludes them?

The QCDA resources and teachernet have already been consigned to the National Archives and tomorrow is the final day for Teachers' TV. The site will then be taken down.  They may have been world class but nobody noticed. And few cared. Certainly not Michael Gove or Sarah Teather.

A storm in a chalice

This furore about the Church of England preparing to open the doors of its schools to the children of non-believers really is a media storm over nothing. Even the most casual observer of education history will appreciate that Anglican schools have always been there to serve the community in which they are located. Let's not forget that, before state provided education began in 1870 the only volume providers of schools were Anglicans' National Society and the non-conformists' British and Foreign Schools Society. The schools they built were to serve not the denomination but the nation. This was different for Jewish schools, established to support Jewish tradition and teaching among Jewish children and to help migrants to Anglicise. It was also different for the Roman Catholic schools, established from the early 20th century to uphold Catholicism among the mainly Irish migrant communities.

It has only been in relatively recent years that the Church of England has been in a position to be able to restrict admission to members of the Anglican communion, with a small percentage of open places. This is a Roman Catholic model that has always sat uneasily alongside the founding purpose of CofE schools. Several years ago the Archbishops Council resolved to create more open enrolment, taking us some way back to founding principles. The recent remarks by the Bishop of Oxford, as Chair of the CofE's Board of Education merely confirm this intention.

The move, of course, only relates to the minority of Church schools who have had the dubious luxury of being this selective. Many Aided - and all Controlled - schools simply serve their local community as the founding National Society intended.  The proposals make a lot of sense and represent what must be the future model of faith schools within a state-funded system. It really does no good for sneering popularists such as Toby Young to make capital from a return to first principles. He and the more scornful sections of the press are making much of not much.