HOW DIVERSE IS THAT?
How confusing that on one hand, education minister Michael Gove professes to value educational diversity and innovation, and on the other hand his department seems to be determined to stifle those pedagogies that best embody it. Only two years ago he was talking about 'enabling choice and diversity', with the suggestion that his free schools would be free from the constraints of the statutory national curriculum.
Speaking to the London Evening Standard about Montessori and Steiner schools in 2009, he said, 'They are educational movements that explicitly want to do things differently. They engage the passions of teachers and parents. They tend to have the results in the end, both in character and ability, that parents would want to see in their children ... If we are about enabling choice and diversity, it is only right to allow both movements to become essentially state-funded schools.'
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