Anyone Can Do It

Not content with telling pupils that their exam results are worthless, the Ministry of Gove has decided to devalue teaching qualifications as well. This will bring academies in line with the sort of establishments that produced the likes of Daveybloke and his double-dip Chancellor, which will obviously be all to the good. A spokesbeing proclaimed that allowing children to be taught by unqualified teachers was a "minor change", and that the Ministry, in the wisdom of its Goveness, expected that qualified teachers would continue to have some sort of place in Britain's schools. Unfortunately, there have been previous instances of flexibilitisation which turned out less flexible than anticipated; notably the tuition fees fiasco, when ministers did not anticipate that raising the maximum to £9000, while cutting everything else, would result in all the universities increasing their fees to £9000.

It's unlikely that anyone would have been surprised, let alone shocked - this is, after all, the government that took its advice on health reform from junk food merchants - but, in a rare fit of tact, the Ministry of Gove chose the day of the Olympic opening ceremony to make its announcement. This vintage bit of New Labour media management was the only aspect of the policy to be roundly criticised by Labour's education spokesbeing, Stephen Twigg, whose own idea of a teaching qualification is a uniform, some shouting and a willingness to kill people for money. The Ministry of Gove responded that it was absurd to suggest that announcements were made "at the convenience of the global news agenda", which is, of course, the diametric opposite of what Twigg actually suggested, namely that the global news agenda had been used as a convenient source of static in which to dump announcements having to do with Michael Gove.