A five-minute poem attacking the education secretary, Michael Gove, has proved a runaway success on YouTube, amassing over 200,000 hits. Stories about the video have been featured by the Independent newspaper and the Huffington Post, as it has been shared and commented on across social media. Performance poet Jess Green was born in Leicester, and studied creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She has appeared at a number of venues in the north-west, including Write Out Loud Sale.

"A lot of the mainstream press make out that teachers are lazy and take long six-week holidays and are selfish, but it is not until you go into a classroom you realise how hard it is," she said. "I have been working in schools for the past three years and I come from a family of teachers and I have seen how downtrodden teachers have become. They are being asked to reach completely unrealistic targets and for pupils to make huge levels of progress, regardless of whether they have come from a privileged private school background or have just come into the country from a war zone."

In her poem Green refers to a picture of Gove, a former journalist, on the picket line in Aberdeen during a newspaper dispute. She plans to make 'Mr Gove' part of her first full-length show which she hopes to perform at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival in August.

The video is by Nathan Human.