Getting your retaliation in first: Maybe Clegg is just scared of David Laws cos hes said to be brighter than Nick?? From the Guardian: Nick Clegg was accused of opportunism after the deputy prime minister announced his party wanted to end Michael Goves ideological experiment and require all free schools and academies to be subject to the national curriculum... The tenor of Cleggs remarks appear to clash with the enthusiastic support for unqualified teachers in free schools expressed by the Liberal Democrat schools minister David Laws last Thursday in the Commons. Laws had said unqualified teachers were doing a superb job in schools, and said the best backstop to teaching quality was not formal qualifications, but Ofsted inspections. So Clegg may have, wittingly or unwittingly, undermined his close ally David Laws. Oops. Is this a tactical move to the left by the Lib Dem leader? An attempt to try and woo back Lib Dem voters whove defected to Labour since 2010? Leading Orange Booker and the Tories favourite Lib Dem MP, Jeremy Browne, sacked by Clegg from the government in the recent reshuffle, seems to think so and isnt happy. Browne told the Guardian: I dont think we should be instinctively statist and I dont think we should be instinctively in favour of the status quo. I want us to have a restless, radical, energetic, liberal reforming instinct that is about putting more power and responsibility and opportunity in the hands of individual people. Ouch. Meanwile, Conservative education minister Elizabeth Truss has weighed in too - from the BBC: Mrs Truss said it was a shame some Lib Dems did not back free schools. She said the whole point of the schools is they have these freedoms... thats whats helping them outperform maintained schools. You shouldnt kill off the goose thats laid the golden egg, she said. And a senior government source, according to the Mail, has savaged Clegg (on behalf of Cameron?): Yesterday Mr Clegg was accused by one Government source of trying to cling on to ‘chauffeurs and people greasing up to him’ by pandering to Labour in the hope of keeping his job in a Lib-Lab coalition after 2015. In the strongest condemnation of Mr Clegg since the Coalition was formed, the source said his name had ‘become a byword for cheap sanctimony, opportunism, gimmicks and lying’. Whoa! (On a side note, its worth pointing out that free schools actually centralise, rather than decentralise, power - whether they live or die, how much money they get, their level of inspections, etc, is all in the hands of the Education Secretary in Whitehall, not in the hands of parents, teachers or local communities.)
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 07:45:47 +0000
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