A Michael Gove speech about education reform brings to mind the description in AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner of the moment when the excitable Tigger comes to visit Winnie-the-Pooh for the first time and catches sight of a tablecloth. The relevant passage goes as follows: “‘Excuse me a moment, but there’s something climbing up your table,’ and with one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the tablecloth, pulled it to the ground, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle, got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully, ‘Have I won?’”
Mr Gove’s speech on schools on Monday had plenty of Tiggerish content. The ambition that it should be hard to tell the difference between a state and a fee-paying school was one of the most striking. It would be wonderful if it could be true, but in the Britain of 2014 such a thing is simply a fantasy. To pretend otherwise glosses over much that is fundamentally unequal in the school system. The claim illustrated Monday’s warning to Mr Gove from his former permanent secretary Sir David Bell not to believe his own hype about the education establishment “Blob” with which, like Tigger and the tablecloth, Mr Gove is engaged in a noisy struggle.
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