Truss has announced that child carers who want a qualification will require a GCSE grade C in English (and maths, but let's not go there). That a person has GCSE grade C in English bears absolutely no relationship to their ability to care for children and foster children's language growth. Carers could, however, usefully be taught how young children actually learn language. I'll give her a clue (since she doesn't have any) - it's not by being taught.
It seems somehow appropriate that Gove, who clearly wishes to roll the whole world back to the time when he was in his nice comfortable school where there were no discipline problems and everyone he knew studied Latin, intends to increase the rigour of maths lessons by putting more emphasis on 'imperial measures'. But even he wasn't at school when we still had an empire.
The current curriculum merely asks that pupils are familiar with the names of imperial measures and know approximate conversions into the metric system. Perfectly sensible. Even more sensible would be to follow the advice of Lord Howe, the former Tory Cabinet minister, who earlier this year called on ministers to end the 'deeply confusing shambles' of using a mixture of metric and imperial measures. He warned: 'The only solution is to complete the changeover to metric as swiftly and as cleanly as possible.'
There's a good article on Gove by Suzanne Moore in today's Guardian :
Eventually someone will have to come along and pick up the pieces.
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