YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Gove

lines on the record
65
first
2025-11-03
most recent
2025-11-03
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1
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podcast

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  1. “It's just the case whoever is the minister of the Secretary of State in any given department will be groups known as the community, the sector, the stakeholders who will be the obvious sections of society with whom you deal, as you say, teachers, farmers, environmental NGOs, prison officers, house builders, housing associations. But I think it is critical to think what is the overall aim that you're seeking to achieve in this particular context and rather than thinking that the relationship with those bodies or groups is the main thing and keeping them happy is the main thing, what you should be thinking of is what is the national interest here? You know, that sounds rather pompous, but what is it that you're trying to do? If you can make these people your allies, if they can approve of what you're doing, that is fantastic. But if you sometimes have to...”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The other thing is that we have a group of major companies, the volume house builders, who control a huge amount of the housing market, the private sector housing market, and they deliberately dribble out the number of new homes that are built in order to keep prices high and profits high on their part. The other factor is that you have something which is called nimbyism. I think that's rather unfair, but we all know the phenomenon. People in niser parts of the country where others want to live resist new development because when that new development occurs, they think A, this development is ugly, but B, more importantly, there's pressure on the schools, the GP surgeries and the roads in my attractive area.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Complex and such an important question. There is a phenomenon apparently across what you might call the Anglosphere English-speaking countries, a crisis of housing affordability in America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and particularly in the UK. And people are asking questions about the extent to which this is due to, in part our financial system and the financialization of housing as an asset. In the UK, there are certainly some things that are identifiable. So the first thing is a planning system that is needlessly complex. The second thing is a body of environmental regulation.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “No. So the first thing is that we outperformed every other country or jurisdiction within the United Kingdom. We have the best readers in the Western world. We've got the best math scores in the Western world. So after a period when it's really difficult and when you would expect educational attainment to be hit across the Western world, we proved more resilient and our children are performing significantly better. That was the test we set ourselves and the gap at every level between rich and poor was narrowing until COVID.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The reason why the raw figures didn't change that much is partly because of COVID. So everyone was hit by COVID, but we were more resilient and we were essentially, we were doing more, you know, include football terms. If Arsenal or Burnley... The goal difference may not be that great at the end of the season, but if they're top of the league, if they've scored more points, they're the best team there is. And England, this is galling for me, obviously, as someone who was born and brought up outside it outperforms Scotland and Wales. So kids in Scotland aren't thicker. Kids in Wales are no more stupid. Scotland is very similar overall to England in socioeconomic terms. But England did much better. And also in the TIMS assessment in mathematics and science, we did better. No, and the gap between rich and poor.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So you mentioned PZON. For people who are listening, that's the Progress in Student Assessment or Achievement measures that the OECD, the Paris-based think tank use to compare different countries in their performance over time educationally.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Or to read Shakespeare, or to learn French and German to a high level, not just so that they can say hello to a tourist at McDonald's, but so that they can read Flaubert or they're familiar with Goethe Schiller, Wagner, and all the rest of it. That was very strongly my view. And I think the evidence shows that actually if you look at the sorts of schools that we celebrated and whose success became widespread during the time that we were in power, working class children or children from disadvantaged backgrounds did benefit from a more academic approach.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Making sure that there was a greater level of ambition and rigor, a requirement to know a wider range of facts and to be able to demonstrate facility with them in a more accomplished way. So requiring in the study of mathematics and understanding of times tables at primary and an understanding of trigonometry, calculus and algebra to a high level secondary school and so on. Now, lots of people think, oh, well, that sounds like a grammar school education. He wants to take us back. He's really only interested in his fellow young SWOTs. My argument, and not just mine, it was the argument of as it happens, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, is this is the sort of education that belongs to every child. Why should you say that just because children come from a working class background, that they shouldn't have the opportunity to do algebra?”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think, firstly, the performance of local authorities as managers of groups of schools was not what it should be, and there needed to be a greater degree of innovation and room for head teachers to exercise professional leadership. The other thing is, and I think this goes to the heart of it, lots of people would argue that the curriculum changes that I led argued for and implemented were designed for a minority. And this is where my views...”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And those children have been long neglected. Comprehensive education is a way of ensuring that children from different social backgrounds mix, but more than that, it's a way of making sure that the school thinks about the education of every child. Now, a lot of that I agree with.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Difficult to describe someone else's position when they've been a critic and to be entirely fair. But I think that Funner's view would be the comprehensive system of state education, particularly And that in particular England, more than Scotland and Wales, has suffered in the past from a form of elitism, a desire to separate children into sheep and goats, to say that a smaller group less than a majority of children are gifted and deserve to have an academic education and go on to enjoy all the fruits of life. The majority of children are neglected. They're considered to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Giving off their best, and yet at the end of it, even though you've got that intervention, rich kids enjoy greater opportunities within the state system.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “No, I very strongly believe it's about opportunity for every child. So the gap between children from wealthier and poorer backgrounds was narrowing before the pandemic. And I think you're absolutely right to choose that as the metric against which my policies should be judged because I said it would be. I said that what we need to do is to raise the bar and close the gap. That's just political jargon or a soundbite. What we really meant was we need to raise the level of performance in all schools, but in particular deal with a problem of inequality. Because when I came to office, and this is not a criticism of labor, it's just a fact. When I came to office, the gap between Rich and Poor grew during the time that they were at school. So in other words, the state is spending money, teachers are”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And you're not really moving the dolt tremendously. Say foreign secretary. But if you are in charge of a domestic ministry with responsibility for education, health, justice, or whatever it might be, then it is your job to identify where the system is not working, who is losing out, and change it by analyzing the reasons why that's come about. And you can't simply rage at the system in the abstract. You've got to analyze what the incentives are within the system that lead otherwise good people not to do a good job.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “That's incredibly kind, Rory, and you're being modest yourself. You were a very successful minister. And the period that you had of ministerial office was inevitably shorter because of the vicissitudes of politics. But you and it's there in your book. It's one of the reasons it's been a bestseller. paint a picture of the potential for good that ministers can bring about, but also the frustrations of ministerial life. I think the key thing is you've got to recognize that there is only a limited amount of time that you have. It is always later than you think. The only certainty about ministerial life is that it will end probably at a moment that you do not choose. Therefore, you have got to get on with it. You have got to show agency. And the critical thing also is, as a minister, you are there to correct things. Now, there are some roles in ministerial life where you are keeping things ticking over or you're managing relationships.”

    2025-11-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 160. Michael Gove: Education, Brexit, and Trump (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source