Science fiction: Sir Chris Woodhead warned Gove to beware the Blob

This June, David Aaronovitch interviewed Michael Gove at the Wellington College Festival of Education. To begin the interview, Aaronovitch asked Gove why he was encountering so much opposition from within the profession. In education, Gove replied, there are progressive viewpoints and there are traditionalist viewpoints. The education establishment clings to the former, and he wants to move schools towards the latter. 

It was heartening to hear such clarity in his response. However, one may well question how much power the Secretary of State has to change what teachers teach, and how they teach it. Gove is hoping to achieve nothing short of a culture change across 24,000 schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland — something that is very difficult to legislate from Westminster. 

He has entered a battlefield strewn with the debris of previous campaigns. Throughout the 1990s, Sir Chris Woodhead fought for higher academic standards in state education, first as Chief Executive of the National Curriculum Council and then as Chief Inspector of Schools. The experience left him war weary, and in 2000 he resigned as Chief Inspector. On the eve of the 2010 election, a sceptical Woodhead engaged in a dialogue with the then Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove in Standpoint. He asked, "Will, though, the Conservative government take on the educational establishment and win? At the very least, the jury is still out on that question. I'm not sure that Michael or anyone else understands just how difficult ‘the Blob' is to fight."

Woodhead's term "the Blob" is taken from a 1958 science-fiction film about a giant amoeba-like alien that terrorises a small American town. The Blob seeps into every corner of the community, and subsumes any attempt to destroy it, becoming more powerful with every attack. It is a convenient metaphor for what Gove calls the education establishment. Teaching unions, local education authorities, teacher training providers, and education quangos are the core components of the Blob-a bloated morass of vested interests. 

The Blob's monopoly on the supply of schooling has been damaging enough, but far more damaging has been its intellectual monopoly. As the guardian of a particular thought-world, any deviation from the approved progressive orthodoxy is suppressed. In their dialogue, Woodhead advised Gove that, to rescue schools from the Blob, he would need "to abolish the National Curriculum, to abolish Ofsted and to abolish the teacher training system". Even for Gove, such actions would have been too radical. However, three years into his tenure at the Department for Education, the Blob is showing significant signs of weakness.

I became a teacher in 2011, and in my first two years the insensible operation of the Blob's progressive orthodoxy was profound. At the university education department where I studied for my PGCE teaching qualification, the tenets of child-centred teaching were promoted not as one method among many but as the definition of "good practice". In an essay I criticised the ideas of one of progressive education's prophets, Lev Vygotsky — a Soviet psychologist who died in 1934. I was given a grade on the pass/fail borderline and told that I might have to resubmit the essay. My traineeship was punctuated by training sessions, all reinforcing the diktats and jargon of progressive education: active learning, relevant (i.e. dumbed-down) curricula, skills over knowledge, leniency in discipline and limited teacher-talk. As a trainee teacher, I was reliably marked down in lesson observations for my unwillingness to embrace this approach.