Michael Gove's plans for education don't allow for a moment's pause
When I walk into his office on the seventh floor of the Department for Education, Michael Gove is sitting behind his desk with his jacket off. He is hunched over, writing a note on House of Commons letterhead. His left arm is pushed right out across the desk and the lines on his forehead are showing as he rereads what he's put down so far. Even as a civil servant and I advance towards him, Gove's concentration does not break. Eventually, the civil servant asks loudly, 'Have you met the Secretary of State before?'
At this, Gove looks up, sees the people in the room and springs out of his chair. He prides himself on his good manners, has an animated grin on his face almost instantly and launches into a set of conversational pleasantries.
We move over to a small coffee table in the corner of his large, light office with a view across the rooftops of Westminster to the Houses of Parliament. As soon as the interview starts, he moves forward to the edge of his seat. He is a bundle of energy, speaking at 150 words a minute in perfect paragraphs. He appears consumed by the 'fierce urgency of now'; an impression bolstered by the Obama 'Hope' poster hanging on the wall behind him.
Gove begins by rattling off his latest plans. This week, he will announce that 88 'bad schools' are to be taken over and placed under new management. This is the largest number of failing schools ever turned into academies in a single year.
What Gove is doing is not new. He has just taken the Blair education agenda and placed rocket boosters under it.
During Blair's whole time in No. 10 only 83 schools were turned into academies.
If Andrew Lansley had followed the same approach - simply picking up the last PM but one's NHS agenda and running with it - he would have saved himself a lot of trouble.
Gove is also planning to announce that, from now on , any schoo l where ha l f the pupils are not getting five GCSEs graded A to C, including English and Maths, is failing and will be earmarked for takeover; the line has previously been at 35 per cent. 'You've got to lift the bar, you've got to raise it up, ' he says, with such force that he almost tips off his chair, 'because otherwise - if we continue to make excuses for under-performance - we will find that all the children whom it's my job to secure a better future for are falling further and further behind.'
One would have thought that this would be enough to be getting on with, but there's more. Gove tells me that 'the 200 weakest primaries' will be placed under new management by the beginning of the next school year because 'there is only so much that you can do between 11 and 16'.
Gove's decision to sprint out of the blocks means that he has clipped a fair few hurdles along the way. He has had decisions overturned by judges and been repeatedly summoned to the House of Commons to explain himself by the Speaker. But he is unapologetic: 'Anyone who is in any way admirable has made mistakes and has learned from them.'
'The important thing to do, ' he argues, 'is to strike a balance between maintaining the momentum required to go forward but also acknowledging that when you do embrace reforms, no one is going to get everything right at the beginning.'
Warming to his theme, he launches into a defence of one of the Cameron government's favourite devices, the U-turn. 'As you implement things, do you need to change and improve the model as it applies on the ground? Absolutely. Anyone who is developing a sophisticated product would do so.
There are planes flying now which are manifestly airworthy but that doesn't mean that you can't learn from advances in aerodynamics and in fuel efficiency to reform them and that a line down which you went in the past can't be improved.'
When Gove started the job, he took every setback to heart. But now he is more phlegmatic, remarking that 'it is not given to any of us to avoid making mistakes, they occur'. He has also grown a thicker skin. When I ask him if he worries about criticism less now than when he first took office, he answers 'yes' without missing a beat. What is driving him on is a fervent belief that things in education don't have to be the way they are. To his mind, 'The biggest single problem in state education in England is that we are not ambitious enough.' Gove believes that 'five GCSEs, including English and Maths, should be seen as a baseline that we can get practically every child to, and there are schools that do it'.
His aim now is simple: to get good schools to take over the bad ones. He hopes that we will have 'schools in particular areas saying please give us under-performing primaries, please give us the secondary down the road which isn't doing so well and we will improve it'. Reform should not be driven from the centre but the periphery. He wants to do himself out of a job.
The Education Secretary claims that the best head-teachers now are 'thinking like social entrepreneurs who are looking for another opportunity in which their idealism can be given free rein'. One wonders, though, whether the idealism of teachers is enough to deliver the great change that is needed.
Gove is unwilling to use the word profit. He admits that 'it is possible' that there would be more new free schools opening if the people setting them up were allowed to make a profit. But, rather comically for such a committed Eurosceptic, he hides behind the fact that European Union procurement rules mean that there are complications to letting state-funded schools make money. Intriguingly, though, he stresses that as a 'Blairite pragamtist' he believes that 'what's right is what works'.
In other words, he has no principled objections to people making money out of running state-funded schools.
One of the many obstacles to allowing schools to make a profit is the presence in government of the Liberal Democrats. But Gove has nothing but nice things to say about them.
When I ask him whether he would campaign against his Lib Dem deputy, Sarah Teather, at the next election, he is - for once - lost for words. After a moment's pause, he settles on the line: 'Would the House of Commons be better after the election of Sarah Teather to it? Of course it would, no question.' He then adds the name of a few of other Lib Dems who he would like to still see in the Commons after the next election - David Laws, Nick Clegg and Jeremy Browne. But then, perhaps noticing the intense stare he is being given by one of his special advisers, he remarks, 'I suppose I'd better not answer the rest of that question.'
On the walls of Gove's office is a map of Scotland, a reminder of his roots and of devolution - the Education Secretary's writ doesn't run north of the border, but however much of an optimist he is, he can't summon much hope of a Conservative revival in Scotland. 'It's not heartening at the moment because one of the striking things - and I suppose this is a measure of it - even though the erosion in the Conservative vote this time round was less than the erosion of the Liberal Democrat vote or the Labour vote, it was still eroding. More than that, we did particularly badly where there was a straightforward Labour/Conservative battle.' Asked what might revive the Scottish Tories, he answers, with a rare note of melancholy in his voice: 'I don't think there is any single thing that can be done.'
As a civil servant frantically tries to wind the interview up, I ask Gove what grade he would give himself. He ducks the question by saying that he'll have to be 'externally assessed'. This he will be, by millions of parents. If - and only if - they stop feeling that it is a battle to get their child into a good school, we will know that Gove has succeeded.
Author: FORSYTH, JAMES
