Guess who's back…

Guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back.

Now this looks like a job for me 

So everybody, just follow me 

Cause we need a little, controversy 

Cause it feels so empty, without me 

I said this looks like a job for me 

So everybody, just follow me 

Cause we need a little, controversy 

Cause it feels so empty, without me

Well, it's me. Not Slim Shady at all, though I like to think I possess the same street smarts as Mr. Mathers. Though I may be wrong.

I'm back for a massive load of marking and preparation for a huge amount of new teaching, which is going to be a real struggle this time. Oh for a job with sensible workloads, timetables and managers. Maybe in the next life.

Anyway, I thought you might like to see my Christmas present from Neal, who's a very creative man. He's got it into his head that Michael Gove (the education minister who thinks he's intelligent) looks like a fish, so he produced a bottle of artisan Govefish Oil. I literally laughed until all my stomach muscles hurt.

Rear view of the pourer

The other side of the pourer

Govefish sauce

Made in the Faeroes, Bottled in Stoke

Meet the producer

More doom and gloom

Morning all. What a horrible few days: Ireland's gone bankrupt - and the banks are getting away scot-free (minimum wage to be cut but corporation tax staying at 12%: I genuinely think this is just cause for violent protest), and the Tories are up to more awful tricks. For a government which claims 'we're all in this together', most of the cutbacks seem to be hitting the poor and the young.

Today's attack is one that's close to my heart - school sport, because I've been volunteering at grassroots and élite youth sport for several years now, as a coach, referee and child protection officer. That's a weird feeling: I spent my schooldays trying to avoid sport in any shape or form, eventually compromising by becoming a cricket scorer: trips away, shiny coloured pencils, free scrumptious teas and no physical activity whatsoever.

However, Michael Gove has decided to abolish the School Sports Partnerships, run by the Youth Sport Trust. They organise sports participation and competitions, set up sport classes in schools which lack qualified PE teachers and run major competitions. It's one of the great things Labour did: before they took power, 25% of children received the legal minimum 2 hours per week of sport. By 2010 it was 95% - a stunning achievement. Now it's being abolished, solely to save £162m: a bargain compared with the costs to the NHS of a generation of kids getting fat and wheezy.

Fencing is one of the key sports in the SSPs, which deliberately widened the activities available to attract kids who weren't into netball or football. It's been great for the sport too: from an exclusive bunch of toffs who weren't ever going to do well globally, British fencing has acquired a flood of motivated, fit kids of the kind who'd never get anywhere near a piste under the old system (i.e. often black, working-class, state-educated). The results are starting to show: the teens in the system now are terrifyingly good and will definitely be winning Olympic medals before long.

It's an especially bad idea because the Olympics are coming to London in less than a year. So the world's sporting heroes, sports fans and media are going to descend on the global sporting showcase while Gove deliberately makes sure that there won't be any effective legacy at all: merely another generation of fat couch potatoes.

Gove's sop is £10m for a 'Schools Olympics'.

My Cabinet colleague Jeremy Hunt has got a marvellous proposal for a school Olympics.”

That's a bit weird: there already is one. It's called the UK School Games. It's been running for 5 years and it recreates the Olympic experience - team village, top quality venues, medals, Olympians wandering round talking to competitors, drug tests, the lot. It makes me wonder if Gove actually doesn't care what's going on - he just wants to abolish anything his predecessors did.

David James, the former England goalkeeper, has an excellent piece on this reactionary cut - read it here.

Charity starts at home

Michael Gove's big plan for schools is to take them away from elected authorities so they can be run at a profit by management companies, letting them filter out unwanted students, while teachers, teaching assistants and cleaning staff etc. have their salaries cut. Oh, and the schools are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and parents won't have any oversight rights.

Obviously, this hasn't gone down very well amongst parents, teachers, cleaners, local authorities etc. So he needs some help to make it look like a good idea.

Who has he asked to help out? Well, he's given the £500,000 contract to the New Schools Network. Without, rather naughtily, advertising the job to anyone or putting it out to tender. Who are they, you might ask?

Oddly enough, it's run by Rachel Wolf. Eh? Who? Conveniently, this 25-year old (wow, she must be highly experienced) is… Michael Gove's 'special adviser', i.e. convivial party hack (and mummy's been given a little job too). She also worked for Boris Johnson, attended private school, and went to Cambridge. She's got a BA (Hons) in Natural Sciences, before you ask. Educational qualifications? No. Postgraduate expertise? 'Fraid not. Pedagogical theory? Second-hand, at best.

So obviously she's got the perfect background to understand the needs and challenges of state schools. She won't be edging them all towards privatisation at all. Perish the thought.

A 'classic swing voter', apparently. 

Nobody knows where the rest of her 'independent organisation's' money comes from because she's keeping it secret. What's the betting it's from Tory donors and private education firms?

she abandoned thoughts of postgraduate study and went back-packing with friends to Mexico. While there, she received a job alert from the university careers service for a research post with Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, wrote the required two essays – one on higher education, one on the Taj Mahal – danced all night in a Cancun club, caught an overnight flight home, was interviewed two hours after she landed and got the job. "From then on, I got sucked in," she says.

That job led to working on Johnson's mayoral campaign, and to helping Michael Gove shape the Tories' education policy. However, she insists she is not at all political, and would never take money from any political party for her New Schools Network."I am your classic centrist swing voter," she says. "Although the Tory Party is now something I could support – not surprising, really, since I wrote lots of the policies."

How very convincing. So she's had a year abroad and then 'advised' a couple of Tories about a school system she's never experienced. As for being a swing voter: she may have been 18 and eligible to vote by May 2005, so at most she's voted in 2 General Elections, so it seems unlikely that she's swung very hard or far. What an intellectual she is…