Guardian award-winning columnist, Suzanne Moore, last Wednesday contributed a bizarre, hissy-fit of an article "Michael Gove is destroying our school system" that prompted blogger Tom Bennett to respond with "The Intellectual Abyss in Education: Suzanne Moore and why everyone's an expert".
After first pointing out the essential "pot-calling-the-kettle-black" contradiction on which Suzanne Moore's article rests, "Gove, the amateur, the journalist who knows nothing about education, [is] put in his place by Moore, the amateur, the journalist, who apparently knows so much more than he", Tom Bennett has this to say:
So what about research? The rational outside observer might think that this was a safe harbour against whim and fancy. But, tragically, it isn’t. The relationship between educational research and real schools, real children, is an unhappy, fractious one.
Does research tell us how many children in mainstream schools, identified as having 'special educational needs', make such progress as a result of the teaching they receive as later no longer to be so identified?
My understanding is that DfE do not collect this information. Seems fundamental, to me. If no-one knows how many children are making progress (never mind how for the moment), then how does Suzanne Moore or anyone else know whether the mainstream education system is working or not? Or whether anyone is "destroying it"?