{"id":7661,"date":"2020-03-07T09:25:19","date_gmt":"2020-03-07T09:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7661"},"modified":"2020-03-07T10:23:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-07T10:23:35","slug":"my-meeting-with-the-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2020\/03\/07\/my-meeting-with-the-minister\/","title":{"rendered":"My meeting with the minister"},"content":{"rendered":"

I met a DfE minister last week to talk about Teach the Future and it\u2019s 6 asks. I said the government should take these admirable young people, their justifiable concerns, and their measured proposals seriously.\u00a0 <\/span>The minister said that the DfE was listening to what they were saying.\u00a0 <\/span>I said they wanted more than that. <\/span><\/p>\n

We talked about the standard DfE arguments that the national curriculum does cover climate, ecology, etc. \u00a0I said that this wasn\u2019t the case when it comes to thinking about what might happen in the future and what the UK would be doing. This is a key student point and they are right to make it.<\/span><\/p>\n

We talked about Teach the Future\u2019s call for an inquiry.\u00a0 <\/span>I said that the PR costs to DfE of not having one would exceed any financial costs of doing so.\u00a0 <\/span>The minister wondered whether having an inquiry on this would mean that they\u2019d find it hard to resist other demands. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that\u2019s a real concern for DfE as they must have six such requests a day, for example on dog training, road safety, financial literacy, mental health, resilience, etc.\u00a0 <\/span>Batting these away with smooth words must form 90% of someone\u2019s job description.\u00a0 <\/span>But what we are talking about is not about such everyday matters. It\u2019s about something much more existential and it\u2019s coming from young people themselves. <\/span><\/p>\n

There is a deep-seated, firmly embedded reluctance amongst senior DfE civil servants to changing the curriculum. It\u2019s in the Department\u2019s DNA and you can understand why as you cannot just keep doing it because, for one thing, schools need clarity.\u00a0<\/span>So it\u2019s going to be fascinating to see how DfE manages all this when more smooth words will just not do.<\/span><\/p>\n

The realist in me thinks that they\u2019ll want to continue to say no. \u00a0But the tired cynical part of me wonders if they might agree to set something limited up (maybe an internal review) and seek to control\u00a0both\u00a0<\/span>process and outcomes.\u00a0 <\/span>This has the key merit of both doing, and not doing, something. \u00a0 It also procrastinates which is a key civil service skill. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Doing this would put Teach the Future in a bit of a bind as it\u2019s not everything they want, but it is something.<\/span><\/p>\n

We shall see!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I met a DfE minister last week to talk about Teach the Future and it\u2019s 6 asks. I said the government should take these admirable young people, their justifiable concerns, and their measured proposals seriously.\u00a0 The minister said that the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}