Tough teachers, free schools and Berlin Walls

Robert Peal, 10 February 2014

Michael Gove seemed omnipresent last week, making speeches, giving interviews, riling coalition partners, and whipping the commentariat into a flurry of opinion pieces. Much of this was kicked off by his speech last Monday at the London Academy of Excellence (LAE) in East London.
The LAE has been heralded as early evidence for the success of Gove’s free schools reform. Established in 2012, it is an academically selective sixth form college in Stratford sponsored by a group of independent schools, including Eton, Highgate School and Brighton College. The LAE made a big splash in the Sunday Times last month when six of its pupils were offered places by Oxford and Cambridge, achieving more than every school in the borough Newham, where the LAE is situated, did in the previous year combined.
I attended the speech, and enjoyed seeing inside such a successful new institution—the library’s book selection certainly belied high academic aspirations. Rather predictably, the ensuing media debate bore little resemblance to the content of Gove’s actual speech…

This is a cross-post from Robert Peal’s blog, where the article first appeared. You can read it in full here.