Category: Education

The speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, to the NSPCC conference on 12 November 2013.

There are really – at heart – just 2 schools of politicians.

Not left and right.

But those who believe in intervention. And those who don’t.

Faced with crises and disasters abroad some of us believe that we should – whenever we can – act decisively. And the interdependence of our world only makes it more important than ever that we seek to promote human flourishing everywhere we can.

Others prefer not to act.

Some – usually on the left – say we have no right to intervene when other nations and other polities organise their affairs differently. It is cultural arrogance.

Others – usually on the right – say intervention is bound to be costly and rarely if ever effective. We should mind our own business.

I disagree with both.

Just as I disagree with the non-interventionists in education policy.

Faced with the extent of inequality in our society, the denial of potential, the myth that we are a meritocracy then I believe we need to intervene – energetically, vigorously, determinedly – to improve our school system. We need to remove those teachers who are underperforming and pay good teachers more, change the leadership where schools are failing and allow good school leaders more freedom to expand, stop making excuses for our failure to keep pace with other nations and start setting higher expectations.

Others disagree.

There are some – usually on the left – who argue that inequality is a stubborn socio-economic fact, a consequence of capitalism, and schools cannot make much difference so education reform is a dead end.

There are others – usually on the right – who argue that schools can do little more than sift out the stars and let them shine while preparing the rest to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. Reform to make comprehensive schooling successful and opportunity more equal is an exercise in futility.

I disagree – profoundly – with both those views.

Which is why we have acted to make the dream of great comprehensive education a reality.

We have driven change to get more great teachers – and we have the best generation of teachers ever now in our schools. With more top graduates going into the most challenging schools.

We have accelerated reform to liberate schools from suffocating bureaucracy – and now there are more academies and free schools than ever before – outperforming those schools still in bureaucratic hands – and giving poorer children a better chance in life. And we have ensured that all schools are held to account more rigorously than ever before for the difference they make to the lives of the poorest.

The legislative – and administrative – changes we have made in education reform are significant. And it is now my department’s responsibility to make sure that we drive change on the ground more rapidly and more rigorously.

But there is one other area which is my responsibility in government where we have not yet intervened vigorously enough.

The protection of our most vulnerable children.

We have not intervened to rescue those children who have been suffering the most in our society.

My time in politics so far has been punctuated by moments when all of us have been left speechless – because a child’s cries were never heard.

Peter Connelly

Khyra Ishaq

Hamzah Khan

Keanu Williams

Daniel Pelka

All children who cried out in pain – and we never listened. And never acted.

After each of these children’s deaths there have been – I am sure, sincere – protestations that lessons must be learned, that those in power must act and that such tragedies must never happen again.

But have lessons been learned? Have those of us in power acted in the right way?

I don’t think we have – yet.

I believe that we have not been either systematic, radical or determined enough in our efforts to reform the system of children’s social care in this country.

But that is changing.

And it is my aim to ensure that change is equal to the challenge we all face.

As someone who started their life in care, whose life was transformed because of the skill of social workers and the love of parents who were not my biological mother and father but who are – in every sense – my real mum and dad, this is personal. A child’s opportunity to flourish should not be a matter of chance – it should be the mission which guides all our actions.

And we can make a difference. Just as we are doing with our school reforms.

And just like our school reforms there are three critical areas where we need to change.

We need to improve the professionalism of those who work with children.

We need to break out of bureaucratic ways of working to generate the sort of innovation which delivers dramatically better results.

And we need to be clearer about accountability – what we expect, and who from – so that the most vulnerable get the protection they deserve.

We will ensure that the resources are there to support the most vulnerable children.

Through the pupil premium plus we have increased school funding for children in the care system – from April looked-after children will attract £1,900, more than double the current amount. And we have expanded the numbers of children entitled to the additional funding – no longer must they be in care for 6 months before attracting it; now they will get it from day one. For the first time, schools will be given the premium for adopted children and those who leave care under a special guardianship order or residence order.

Edward Timpson, the Minister for Children and Families, worked extremely hard to get this all agreed and I congratulate him for it. It’s an achievement which underlines this government’s absolute commitment to improving the life chances of vulnerable children; and to closing the attainment gap between poorer children and the rest.

But just as our investment in schools generally can only generate the right results with reform, so our additional investment in the most vulnerable children will only secure the improvement we need if we get the three pillars of reform right.

More great social work

Let me turn to the most important of those first – the people who work with children in need.

When the Prime Minister took time – and pains – to praise social workers in his speech to the Conservative Party conference he did something both critically important – and brave.

But – and I hope he will forgive me – I don’t think he went far enough.

I think it’s hard to explain just how difficult – how challenging – how important and how inspiring – the role of social workers is.

Social workers spend their time with the children and families in our society who face the gravest difficulties – those who may have been bruised and battered by events and circumstances and yet are in many cases deeply resistant to accepting the help they need.

Social workers have to develop relationships with adults, win their trust and understand their problems, while at the same time thinking hard – and first – about the needs of the children in these homes.

Social workers have to weigh very delicate technical, psychological, social and moral questions in their minds as they work with these families.

Are the problems these families face – the mental health issues, the substance abuse, the domestic violence, the emotional ties between different partners, the alienation from the workplace, the lack of parenting capacity – resolvable? And over what time frame?

And as we work to resolve these problems, are we leaving the children in these homes at risk? Are they at direct risk of abuse from violent adults? Or at risk of sustained neglect which will blight the rest of their lives?

Social workers have to try to use their skills – and training – to get those families’ lives back on track. And that will often mean challenging habits of behaviour in adults which they are reluctant to abandon. It will mean emphasising the importance of delayed gratification, self-discipline, consideration for others and pride in achievement. That is not easy.

Neither is it easy to see through the sometimes manipulative – and sometimes evasive, dishonest or disingenuous – behaviour of some adults as they lie about their drinking, their drug use, their efforts to find work or – most critically – which men have access to their house – and their children.

Social workers have to invest significant time and care in trying to change these difficult lives while also having to battle optimism bias – the trait in human nature to which we are all prone – which leads us to want to believe people when they say they will follow our advice. And which leads us to want to believe that existing relationships can be made to work, if we give them time.

Because succumbing to that optimism bias can mean that the children – who are always our first concern – can be left at risk and in danger when we need to intervene to rescue them from an abusive environment just as determinedly as we would seek to rescue them from the scene of any natural disaster.

Behind that little phrase – the rule of optimism – lie untold hours of suffering: Daniel Pelka on his dirty mattress in his dark, locked room, hungry and alone; the 4-year-old Hamzah Khan shrinking from maternal neglect to the size of a 12-month-old baby, in a house unfit for habitation, his corpse mummifying in his mother’s alcoholic swamp of a bedroom.

Children scrabbling for scraps of food, not turning up at school, or turning up bewildered and bruised, too afraid to speak out, if anybody bothers to speak to them at all. That is what the ‘rule of optimism’ means – closing our eyes to all this. And as long as we continue to close our eyes and look away, collectively, we in government and the public too, then we too fail to stand behind that child.

But the people who do stand by these children – and save them – are social workers.

That is why it is both such a noble – and demanding – vocation.

It requires a level of professionalism every bit as great as that of doctors or barristers, teachers or lecturers.

Which is why we need to ensure that the people we attract to social work are as talented as possible – and why we need to ensure the training we give them is as professional as possible.

That is why I asked Sir Martin Narey – the former chief executive of Barnardo’s – to undertake a thorough review of social work training.

We know there are many, many superb social workers in the field at the moment. I’ve been fortunate enough to see some of them at work. I’ve discussed how we should approach some of the most complex family problems with some exceptionally gifted new entrants to the profession working in Hackney. I’ve benefited from the wisdom of current and former directors of children’s services such as Alan Wood, Anne-Marie Carrie and Andrew Christie. And I am particularly indebted to our first Chief Social Worker Isabelle Trowler – whose intelligence, honesty and passion make her a superb leader of the profession. Her appointment follows through on one of the key recommendations from Eileen Munro, whose review of child protection has launched us on this path of reform.

What these great practitioners know – and what I have discovered – is that despite the success of Step Up to Social Work in bringing more able graduates into children’s social work, we are still not recruiting enough great people into social work and we are not training existing social workers well enough.

That is why the launch of the new Frontline programme by the Teach First alumnus Josh MacAlister is so important.

Teach First helped transform perceptions of teaching.

Its recruitment process was explicitly elitist. Only top graduates from the best universities need apply.

And just being clever wasn’t enough. You would be screened to see if you had leadership ability and only if you had the character, as well as the smarts, would you be selected.

The reason for such elitism?

Because teaching is important – and difficult work. It’s not easy holding the attention of 30 hormonal teenagers for an hour while you take them through differential calculus.

We need very impressive people to do that work. And those of us who are parents want to know that our children are being taught by the best possible candidates.

Because Teach First made it clear that only the best could cut it as one of their teachers, they attracted a huge number of applicants. To make it on the course was a special badge of excellence. A signal of prestige.

And soon the halo which Teach First generated over its recruits spread across the teaching profession. Education was where top people were going. So more top people – whether through Teach First or by other means – went into education.

Which is why we now have more people with firsts or upper seconds entering teaching than ever before – and why Ofsted have recorded an increase in the number of good and outstanding lessons in our classrooms under this government.

What Teach First has done for teachers over the last 10 years, Frontline now aims to do for social work.

It’s an extremely demanding and competitive course – with a highly selective application process – because as I’ve underlined today, it’s a uniquely demanding job being a social worker.

It requires both intellectual abilities, and a level of emotional intelligence, or common sense, which are out of the ordinary.

I’m delighted that because Frontline has set such a high bar, it has reinforced the prestige which should attach to social work – and since its launch just 6 weeks ago over 4,000 people have started the application process.

Those who win a place will benefit enormously from the experience of the superb social workers in whose teams they will be placed.

But as well as recruiting the best people, we also need to ensure social work training is as rigorous as any profession’s.

Despite the existence of some very impressive courses, that isn’t the case at the moment.

The intellectual demands are not always as high as they should be.

Theories of society predominate over an effective understanding of child development, the cognitive damage that accrues through neglect and appropriate thresholds for taking children into care.

And there isn’t enough stress on high-quality practice.

Barristers need to show not just a knowledge of law but advocacy skills, surgeons not just an understanding of anatomy but technical mastery. Children’s social workers often join the profession having assembled a portfolio of work which does not include the practical experience or knowledge necessary to help families and protect children.

Sir Martin Narey’s report will confirm that we already produce some fine social workers. But it will say more about the need for improvement, about varying educational standards at universities, and a failure to be clear about what our social workers need to know and understand when they emerge into this most challenging of careers.

I expect – as ever – that in the reporting the criticism will attract more attention than the praise.

I hope what I have said today will help set things in context – by helping to explain just what a demanding job social work is and just how impressive the profession’s leaders are.

But it is the mark of a mature profession that instead of rejecting criticism, it embraces challenge. The medical profession has retained public respect and prestige because it has recognised the need to improve its practice at critical moments – embracing a more rigorous approach to evidence through the widespread adoption of randomised control trials and taking a firm line with those who do not adhere to the highest professional standards.

I am sure that if – as I hope and expect – social workers recognise the rigour and helpfulness of Sir Martin’s work the profession will only grow in public respect. A defensive or dismissive reaction will only, I fear, make it more difficult for all of us to achieve the change we need in child protection.

There is another area in which social work training deserves to be challenged.

In too many cases, social work training involves idealistic students being told that the individuals with whom they will work have been disempowered by society. They will be encouraged to see these individuals as victims of social injustice whose fate is overwhelmingly decreed by the economic forces and inherent inequalities which scar our society.

This analysis is, sadly, as widespread as it is pernicious. It robs individuals of the power of agency and breaks the link between an individual’s actions and the consequences. It risks explaining away substance abuse, domestic violence and personal irresponsibility, rather than doing away with them.

Social workers overly influenced by this analysis not only rob families of a proper sense of responsibility, they also abdicate their own. They see their job as securing the family’s access to services provided by others, rather than helping them to change their own approach to life. Instead of working with individuals to get them to recognise harmful patterns of behaviour, and improve their own lives, some social workers acquiesce in or make excuses for these wrong choices.

But the best social workers in England today don’t just reject this approach instinctively – they have taken it apart intellectually.

The London Borough of Hackney – although a proud part of our capital city – has every social – and economic – problem you could think of in modern Britain concentrated in its few square miles.

It also has some of the best – and most innovative social workers.

And they have developed an approach towards their practice which explicitly rejects the idea of their families as passive and powerless victims of circumstance or social workers as dispensers of other agencies’ services.

Their approach – Reclaiming Social Work – insists on the social worker co-operating closely with families in need, providing both the challenge and the support required to change behaviour. Social workers are trained in the use of the therapies proven to improve behaviour. Families are set expectations of improved behaviour. And social workers are trained in the analysis of risk so they know when children need enhanced protection, or removal from danger.

Reclaiming Social Work involves much more as well. It replaces the existing model of one social worker to each family with a team approach. Counter-intuitively, that actually creates greater continuity – because it means no child’s safety is dependent on just 1 person. Clear lines of case responsibility are, of course, vital; but the team approach encourages professionals to work closely together, within a culture of high regard and aspiration for children.

It also involves holding social workers to the highest professional standards with close and rigorous management. It’s why, in Hackney, up to a third of those who were in place when the current DCS introduced Reclaiming Social Work have had to move on.

A formal evaluation of Reclaiming Social Work has just reported. It found better management, greater consistency, and more emotional and administrative support for social workers who were enabled to spend more time with families. Children were seeing 2 to 3 times more of their social worker than in comparable social work units operating under the traditional, linear model. Families themselves reported much higher satisfaction with their social workers.

I am determined to spread this rigour throughout the children’s social care profession.

Hackney’s success in pioneering a whole new – and highly successful – model of social work brings me to the second critical change we need to make. Just as school reform required not just more great teachers but more space for innovation so improving child protection will require not just better trained social workers but also more freedom for social workers – and their managers – to innovate.

Reforming structures for higher standards

To talk of innovation in children’s social care might seem odd. Surely the qualities we associate with innovation – risk-taking, new thinking, diversity of provision – work against what our instinctive attitude towards child protection would be – playing safe, ticking the boxes, insisting on compliance with the rules.

But ticking the boxes hasn’t kept our children as safe as they should be. Our child protection system has its strengths, but the tragic cases I cited earlier are powerful reminders of a terrible truth – our child protection system is still failing too many children.

Ofsted inspections confirm that we are not providing the quality of child protection we need to.

In its last inspection framework, a third of those LAs inspected were found inadequate for their child protection services; not a single council was outstanding.

The reasons why are – in a complex and sensitive area – inevitably complex and sensitive.

I accept that decisions made by politicians – of all parties – have contributed to our problems.

The way politicians in the past have reacted to failures within the system has encouraged a defensive approach based on compliance with the minimum demands of bureaucracy, rather than a pursuit of excellence.

There is a temptation to see adequacy as enough – and the impression that creates of social work is unattractive to the idealists we need in the profession.

That needs to change.

We have to ensure social work follows where teaching has led – by providing room for people to innovate, improve, influence others to change and spur emulation.

The greater freedoms enjoyed by teachers in academies and free schools have generated new curricula, new approaches to classroom management and new pedagogies. These have improved results for children in academies and free schools, which are doing better than other schools. But far from losing out through innovation, and competition, the rest of the education sector has been spurred to improve and catch up. And we now have not just a greater emphasis than ever before on the question of how we raise education standards, we also have a debate about education increasingly owned and driven by teachers.

That is what I want to see in social work. Room for the profession to innovate, try new ways of working, think afresh about practice and what constitutes success. I want to see existing social workers holding their peers to account, questioning the validity of what is currently considered adequate practice.

That should involve social workers asking some tough questions of the profession.

Do we intervene early enough and focus our attention on the right families?

Is the model of a single social worker owning a case increasingly inadequate when multidisciplinary teams have been shown to achieve so much?

Do we have enough people in place ready to foster, adopt and provide permanency for children in care? If not, why not?

Are our decisions informed by rigorous assessment of the evidence? Are the assessment tools we use constantly being reviewed to see how we can make them better? Is our practice capable of being evaluated so poor ways of working can be discarded and innovation can spread?

Do social workers in the field contribute to building a more rigorous base of evidence for academics to draw on? Can we construct career paths for excellent social workers which allow them to stay in the field, and lead by example, rather than having to go into management?

For these questions to be asked – and acted on – we need to rethink how we organise children’s social services.

Why must all child protection services be delivered in-house?

Why aren’t there more independent social work practices which local authorities can draw on as they need?

Should social workers automatically be managed and led by other social workers? Especially when some of the most visionary leaders in social work and child protection – such as Sir Martin Narey and Peter Wanless – come from a range of backgrounds?

It is difficult for a social worker to get promoted unless it is into an office-based management position – something which the Hackney model so intelligently changed. But this design means we have a tier of managers in social services who are not trained in commissioning and strategic management skills. Yet we expect them to run these extremely complex organisations; while allowing their expertise on the front line to go to waste.

No wonder sometimes social workers get it wrong – barely out of training, barely supported, and left holding the cases of the most vulnerable families in the country, under a management system which isn’t strong or stable enough. This is wrong, and it isn’t a question of cuts or increased referrals and the myriad other reasons we hear – it’s a question of management and structures.

For innovation to take place, the current monolithic model of providing child protection has to change.

That is why I welcome the innovative approach to child protection taken by the NSPCC, which draws on best, evidence-based practice from around the world to introduce – and closely evaluate – services such as Baby Steps, Caring Dads and ‘assessing the risk, protecting the child’. It is refreshing to see a charity invest so heavily in programmes which can make a real difference on the frontline in tackling abuse and neglect.

The same belief in innovation underpins our approach to the most underperforming local authorities – such as Doncaster – where we are doing what we did to the lowest-performing schools in the academy programme – providing the best leadership and new ways of working through a new trust. I confidently expect that the improvements we will see in Doncaster means this model will grow.

I also want to see more of the best in the profession – such as those who run the social work practice in Staffordshire – given more freedom to expand and spread good practice.

And, of course, I want to see a bigger role for the best people in the voluntary sector – like voluntary adoption agencies – who can complement the good work already done by the best local authorities while improving provision in our poorest areas. And we are legislating – through the Children and Families Bill going through the Lords – to facilitate this.

Also, from today, all local authorities have the freedom to delegate their functions for children in care and care leavers to third parties – a first step towards freeing up innovative and ambitious local authorities to deliver greater diversity and excellence of provision.

Over the coming months, we will examine the case for extending these freedoms to more areas of children’s social care services. Already innovative local authorities – such as Staffordshire and Richmond and Kingston upon Thames – are developing plans to reshape their children’s services in this way, to bring a fresh impetus to reform in a sector which has, for too long, been closed to voluntary sector and other providers.

And, in order to ensure that innovation is focused on improving provision for children in need – not just above every other consideration, but as our only consideration – Edward Timpson and I have asked a visionary social entrepreneur and progressive thinker to help lead our new innovation programme, which we announced just a couple of weeks ago.

Clive Cowdery, a great innovator, successful entrepreneur, the founder of the Resolution Foundation and one of the most passionate advocates of improving outcomes for children in care in Britain today, will work with the Department for Education over the next 18 months to ensure we get the very best out of the profession.

Clive is working with us because we both know we need change and improvement and we both believe that can only come from those dedicated professionally to helping children. This is not an area where we need commercial imperatives and ethics, we need public service imperatives and ethics – but we need to ensure we improve what we are doing, radically and urgently.

Where should the buck stop?

And that brings me to the third pillar of reform – accountability.

We will only know if we are doing the right thing if we have hard, rigorous, evidence that outcomes are improving for children.

Are the interventions we use working?

Are families ending substance abuse, re-engaging with work, improving their parenting, ending domestic violence?

Are child protection case conferences run in a timely and efficient fashion with every participant present, prepared and involved?

Are children taken into care spending less time waiting to be adopted? Are we recruiting more adoptive parents? Are more children being adopted more quickly with every month that passes?

And – critically – are fewer children living in squalor, facing neglect, enduring abuse and dying at the hands of adults?

We can never promise that these evils will end. Man’s fallen nature makes that impossible. But we can expect that over time – even as we face setbacks and reversals, tragedies and malice – we can make more children safe.

In meeting these ambitions – in holding the system of child protection to account – it is critically important that we avoid the easy and counter-productive temptation to load more and more responsibility on to the shoulders of social workers and social workers alone.

That means not just sharper, but more intelligent accountability.

We have worked hard to make the way in which we hold schools to account fairer and more intelligent. Our new approach to accountability for secondary schools will reward schools that value and encourage every child, particularly the lowest achievers and the most vulnerable.

And we are working to make the system of accountability in child protection fairer – and more intelligent.

That is why, for example, I have insisted on the publication – in full – of serious case reviews.

Under the last government, too few SCRs were published in full; too many were left unreadable by excessive redactions.

This was as shortsighted and counterproductive as keeping secret the contents of an aircraft’s black box after an aviation disaster.

It is only if we can all see – and study – what went wrong that we can begin to put things right.

We have assembled a panel to review SCRs and advise on initiation and publication – a panel composed of a top family law barrister, a writer with a lifelong interest in children’s welfare, a respected figure from the voluntary sector working in child protection and an expert in aviation safety – to ensure that we get the maximum level of transparency and the greatest level of learning from serious case reviews.

Reading serious case reviews is a depressing task. The same evils visited on very similar children, the same mistakes made by professionals under similar pressures. But as we now enter a period of greater transparency there is now a chance for us all to learn from the accounts now being published of the mistakes made in the past.

There are a multitude of lessons to be drawn – from the importance of proper record-keeping at case conferences, to the problems generated by large individual caseloads and high social worker turnover.

But one of the most important lessons I have drawn is that the focus which sometimes gets directed on the role – and decisions – of social workers leads us away from the critical role – and often the terrible failures – of other professionals.

Whether it’s the police, or doctors, or local government lawyers, or the impact of poor judicial decision making, it is important that we hold other professionals, and other institutions to account for child protection just as much as we do social workers.

Critically, in local government, we need to ask tougher questions of council chief executives and political leaders rather than zeroing in on just social work practitioners and directors of children’s services. Social workers do not operate in a vacuum. Ultimate responsibility for child protection should rest with the chief executives on six-figure salaries, and their political leaders, who may not concentrate on vital questions of child protection because these issues do not influence their job prospects or move votes.

We have changed the rules so that chief executives now appoint the chairs of the local safeguarding childrens’ boards, and through the new Ofsted inspections they will be held to account for the people they appoint. This is a vital role, which I expect LA chief executives to take seriously and to fund properly.

I have been criticised for setting standards and timetables for local councils for adoption. But I have had to because the leadership was not there at the local level. And there is still an insufficient sense of urgency among too many local government leaders.

I am delighted that we are now seeing a record number of children being adopted; in the latest figures, a 15% increase on the year before. But there is more – much more – to do.

As there is in helping improve conditions for children in residential care.

Earlier in the autumn we published a comprehensive set of data on the children’s homes market: where these homes are, who owns them, which local authorities have sold them all off and now find themselves sending vulnerable teenagers hundreds of miles from home to unsafe areas.

Again, some in local government, and elsewhere, objected to this tougher accountability system – but the terrible stories of vulnerable children in residential care not being adequately protected from exploitation – like Rochdale and Oxford – meant we needed to change.

Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the number of voluntary and private organisations providing children’s homes across England. In 2000, 61% of residential places were provided by local authorities – by 2006, that had shrunk to just 35%.

Today, 78% of children’s homes are run by the private or voluntary sectors. But while there are outstanding examples of high-quality services in residential care, it is a sector characterised too often by low-qualified staff, a lack of innovation and poor outcomes for children.

So we are shining a new light on the market and changing rules to toughen up standards in the sector. We are working with competition experts and economic regulators, as well as private and local authority providers, to improve the commissioning system in this market.

This is an area ripe for innovation – for both commissioners and providers to aim higher, to emulate the very best of national and international practice and reshape residential care in this country to put the safety and care of children above all other considerations.

I have also been criticised for my impatience with the judicial system – and my frustration at the way the courts have made it more difficult than it needs to be for social workers to ensure children are taken into care.

I am delighted that latest figures show average case duration down from 55 to 41 weeks in 2 years, with the numbers being delivered within our target of 26 weeks up from 12% to nearly 30%. It’s a tough target but it can be delivered.

Judges need to be held to account for inefficiencies and errors just as much as any other public servant. I am glad that there are welcome signs that the judiciary are working in new ways, and I applaud the leadership Sir James Munby has shown in this area. A wig and gown should be signs that you serve the public, not a way of shielding yourself from accountability.

So, improving social work practice; encouraging innovation; and sharper and more structured accountability.

Those are the 3 principles that are guiding our reforms – reforms that will ultimately create a brighter future for those who need government most – our most vulnerable.

And for those of us privileged to be able to serve in government, making sure the system changes so the most vulnerable are better protected is what our time in office is for.

The statement made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 1 November 2013.

I announced in February my intention to reform GCSEs to ensure they are rigorous and robust and give students access to high quality qualifications which match expectations in the highest performing jurisdictions.

Today I am publishing the outcome of a consultation on subject content for new GCSEs in English literature, English language and mathematics, which will be taught in schools from September 2015. I have prioritised English and mathematics because they are both fundamental to facilitating learning in other subjects, and yet PISA evidence demonstrates that 15-year-olds in 9 other countries are, on average, at least half a year ahead of students in England in both reading and mathematics. Reform of these key subjects is, therefore, a matter of pressing urgency.

The new mathematics GCSE will demand deeper and broader mathematical understanding. It will provide all students with greater coverage of key areas such as ratio, proportion and rates of change and require them to apply their knowledge and reasoning to provide clear mathematical arguments. It will focus on ensuring that every student masters the fundamental mathematics that is required for further education and future careers. It will provide greater challenge for the most able students by thoroughly testing their understanding of the mathematical knowledge needed for higher level study and careers in mathematics, the sciences and computing.

The new mathematics GCSE will be more demanding and we anticipate that schools will want to increase the time spent teaching mathematics. On average secondary schools in England spend only 116 hours per year teaching mathematics, which international studies show is far less time than that spent on this vital subject by our competitors. Just one extra lesson each week would put England closer to countries like Australia or Singapore who teach 143 and 138 hours a year of mathematics respectively. We announced on 14 October that mathematics, alongside English, will be double weighted in secondary school performance measures from 2016. This will also provide a strong incentive for schools to ensure that they are strengthening their mathematics provision.

My ambition is that the great majority of students should continue to study mathematics, post-16, by 2020. All students without a grade C or above will continue to study mathematics post-16. New high-quality ‘core maths’ qualifications will be introduced from 2015 for students who have passed GCSE, and want to continue to improve the mathematics skills they need for further education and work, but don’t wish to take a full AS or A level. The new GCSEs will provide a firm foundation for this further study.

The English language GCSE will provide all students with a robust foundation of reading and good written English, and with the language and literary skills which are required for further study and work. It will ensure that students can read fluently and write effectively, and will have 20% of the marks awarded for accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar. It will also encourage the study of literature for those who do not take the English literature GCSE, with students reading high-quality texts across a range of genres and periods.

The new English literature GCSE will build on this foundation, and encourage students to read, write and think critically. It will involve students studying a range of intellectually challenging and substantial whole texts in detail including Shakespeare, 19th-century novels, Romantic poetry and other high-quality fiction and drama. The new GCSE will also ensure that all students are examined on some ‘unseen’ texts, encouraging students to read widely and rewarding those that can demonstrate the breadth of their understanding.

In September of this year Ofqual and I confirmed that, for the remaining subjects consulted on, new GCSEs will be ready for teaching from 2016. The content for those subjects will be published in spring 2014.

The new GCSEs in English and mathematics set higher expectations; they demand more from all students and provide further challenge for those aiming to achieve top grades. Alongside the GCSE content we are publishing today, Ofqual is announcing its decisions on the key characteristics of reformed GCSEs, including new arrangements for grading and assessment.

The government’s response to its consultation and the new subject content for GCSEs in English literature, English language and mathematics have been published on its website and I will place copies of these documents in the House libraries.

The statement made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 8 October 2013.

I am proposing an amendment to the Children and Families Bill that will make significant changes to the legislation regarding young carers. This is in line with the commitment made at Commons Report by my colleague the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children and Families (Mr Edward Timpson) to look at how the legislation for young carers could be improved. This amendment will be considered during the House of Lords Committee stage of the Children and Families Bill.

Improving outcomes for carers is a priority for this government as we said in 2010 when we published ‘Recognised, valued and supported: next steps for the carers strategy’. We are clear that effective whole family approaches to assessment are essential to improving support for adults and young carers alike. My department has been working with voluntary sector partners for several years to encourage local services to adopt ‘whole family’ approaches to supporting young carers and their families. In that time we have funded and shared some excellent good practice examples and delivered numerous workshops and seminars. While we have seen plenty of appetite for working in this way and some changes to the way local services are designed and delivered, change has been slow. Meanwhile, data from the National Census shows us that the number of young carers is rising.

Recent evidence from the Children’s Society’s ‘Hidden from view’ report indicates that young carers are no more likely to be in contact with support agencies than their peers. Carers Trust found that the majority of those that are identified as young carers still don’t get an assessment of their needs or access to the support they and their families need. The consequences can be serious and long lasting. ‘Hidden from view’ also found that young carers achieve on average 9 grades lower than their peers at GCSE which can have consequences for their long term economic prospects and life choices.

It is clear therefore that we need to do more to support young carers. With the Care Bill also under consideration by Parliament, this is an ideal opportunity to ensure that young carers get equal consideration and protection. That is not to say that they should be treated the same as adult carers. We are committed to ensuring that young people are protected from excessive or inappropriate caring responsibilities. The best way to achieve that is to ensure that the person being cared for, whether that is an adult or a child, is assessed and has all their eligible needs met first. To do this effectively requires local services working together across the statutory and voluntary sectors to consider the whole family’s needs. Edward Timpson has worked and will continue to work closely with Norman Lamb, Minister for Care and Support at the Department of Health, to ensure that that our respective pieces of legislation and associated guidance work together to deliver support to the whole family.

Both departments have worked closely with interested parties over the summer, including the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, the Association of Directors of Adult Services, the National Young Carers Coalition, the Local Government Association, practitioners and young carers themselves. Our proposals reflect these discussions. We have also identified key principles to consider in the drafting of regulations and statutory guidance about a whole family approach to assessment of adults under the Care Bill. Draft regulations and guidance will be published for consultation in the spring.

Through this amendment to the Children and Families Bill we believe we have arrived at a solution that will deliver 4 things: it will consolidate and simplify the legislation relating to young carers’ assessments, making rights and duties clearer to both young people and practitioners; the right to an assessment of needs for support will be extended to all young carers under the age of 18 regardless of who they care for, what type of care they provide or how often they provide it; make it clear to local authorities that they must carry out an assessment of a young carer’s needs for support on request or on the appearance of need, and provide the appropriate links between children’s and adults’ legislation to enable local authorities to align the assessment of a young carer with an assessment of an adult they care for.

This amendment will work with provisions in the Care Bill that also support the combining of assessments, and the forthcoming regulations on a whole family approach to assessing and supporting adults. Together they will provide a clear legislative framework that will support local authorities to consider the needs of the whole family, deliver coordinated packages of support and protect children and young people from excessive or inappropriate caring roles.

The speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 5 September 2013.

Above my desk at home there’s a simple slogan – ‘If you can read this, thank a teacher’.

And I do. Every day. I give thanks for the wonderful opportunities I’ve been given by a succession of great teachers – from Mr Gillanders to Mike Duncan, Mrs Christie to Cath Richmond.

Every day I also give thanks for the amazing work being done by the teachers who are starting the new school year this week.

I am fortunate as Education Secretary because we have the best generation of teachers ever in our classrooms – including the very best generation ever of young teachers – those who have entered our classrooms over the last few years.

Whenever I can, I give thanks for their work – not just privately, but on any public platform I’m given. Including this one.

This government is determined to do all it can to support the teaching profession.

Because there can never have been a more important time to be a teacher.

Teachers hold in their hands the success of our country and the wellbeing of its citizens; they are the key to helping every child in this country to realise their full potential.

Teachers are the most important fighters in the battle to make opportunity more equal.

Teachers are the critical guardians of the intellectual life of the nation.

Teachers give children the tools by which they can become authors of their own life story and builders of a better world.

It is teachers, not poets, who are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.

And it is because the teaching profession is so crucial that our programme of education reform has been designed to empower teachers; to give them more freedom, more power and more prestige.

I know that – sometimes – the speed with which I want to improve our schools, and – occasionally – the style with which I have made my case, have led some to argue that I am – implicitly or explicitly – seeking to criticise teachers.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

I want to defend teachers – and teaching – from the critics and cynics.

Because there are attacks directed at teaching – and I want to fight them.

In too many ways and by too many people – the importance of teaching is being denied.

There are 4 principal attacks on the work teachers do, which I want to anatomise today:

The first attack holds that teaching is a depressing and demotivating activity – and that the profession is suffering reputational decline.

The second attack is a denial that teaching can make any real difference.

The third attack is the sidelining of the teacher from the activity of learning.

And the fourth attack comes from those who believe teachers can’t be trusted – that they need outsiders at every turn to monitor, police and approve their activities.

I want to deal with each of those attacks in turn.

The first attack on teaching comes – perhaps surprisingly, perhaps unsurprisingly – from the leadership of the 2 biggest classroom unions.

Chris Keates, the General Secretary of the NASUWT, has described teaching as a profession ‘in crisis’ – in which morale is at ‘rock bottom’, or ‘an all-time low’.

She claims that teachers are ‘angry, frustrated and demoralised’; that three-quarters of teachers feel professionally disempowered, that recruitment into initial teacher training is plummeting, and she has cited what she has claimed is research showing that over half of respondents have considered leaving the teaching profession.

Why is morale so low? Well, according to Chris Keates’s closest colleague, it’s because this government’s education reforms are a breach of international humanitarian law.

According to Dr Patrick Roach, the Deputy General Secretary of the NASUWT, this government’s Education Act was ‘a crime against humanity.’

It was ‘a smash and grab raid that will tear apart our schools and our communities’.

Dr Roach is not, however, alone in suggesting that government reforms constitute cruel and unusual punishments inflicted on suffering innocents.

Martin Powell-Davies of the National Union of Teachers National Executive has claimed that our education reform plans will make teaching ‘a totally unbearable profession’.

It has come to something when the General-Secretary of the NUT ranks almost as a voice of moderation. But even though Christine Blower doesn’t indulge in the hyperbole of others she still presents teaching as a profession in the grip of some terrible malaise.

She has argued that ‘it is hardly surprising that some teachers are voting with their feet and leaving the profession. A combination of pension cuts, pay freezes, an ever-increasing workload and continual inspection and criticism from government at every turn will make retention of teachers increasingly difficult’. And she has argued that ‘those who remain’ face ‘plummeting morale’.

The picture these union leaders paint is of a profession which no one rational would wish to join – a profession which is unattractive, unrewarding and unfulfilling.

The truth, however, is very different.

Teaching – as a profession – has never been more attractive, more popular or more rewarding.

Take the figures cited by the NASUWT about teacher opinion – they come from a self-selecting sample of their members, unrepresentative of the profession as a whole.

And despite their survey’s annual claims, it’s clearly not the case that more than half of NASUWT’s members are actually leaving the profession every year – in fact, year after year, more people in England join the teaching profession than leave it.

Indeed, teaching has a far better retention rate than many other careers for highly-qualified people. Overall, teachers are only half as likely to leave their chosen profession as graduates in popular non-teaching roles (44% of graduates in non-teaching roles switched career within their first 3.5 years, compared to just 21% of teachers).

The numbers who would recommend the profession are up.

Ninety-eight per cent of school leaders surveyed by the National College for Teaching and Leadership this year say that overall ‘it’s a great job’; and 91% say they would ‘recommend their job to other staff’.

The numbers who think that the profession is rewarding are up.

The Teaching Agency’s annual survey of final year undergraduates at leading universities found that 86% thought that teaching is a rewarding career; 66% think teaching involves ‘demanding work that has real status and kudos’; 61% think teaching is a ‘great career option for the long term’. When asked to choose an adjective that best described a teaching career, the largest number of respondents said ‘rewarding’.

Last year’s survey found that 71% of undergraduates thought the image of teaching was improving, while 72% thought their friends and family would react positively to them becoming a teacher – up 6% since 2010.

The numbers of highly-qualified people entering teaching are up.

More than 7 out of 10 new teachers now have a first or upper-second class degree, the highest proportion ever recorded and an increase of 9 percentage points since 2010 to 2011. Teach First has moved up to third place in the rankings of the Times ‘Top 100 Employers 2013’, its highest ever position; first place in High Fliers research of 100 major graduate recruiters.

According to the OECD, teachers in England are comparatively well-paid – with annual salaries in England higher than the OECD average, and higher than those in progressive Scandinavian nations such as Finland, Norway or Sweden.

Teachers in England already progress up the pay scales twice as quickly as the OECD average, and our reforms to pay progression will mean that, from this year, the best teachers will have the opportunity to access greater rewards even earlier in their careers.

And school leaders are now free to reward their best teachers more than ever before – with more autonomy to attract, retain and reward those teachers who have the greatest impact on their pupils’ performance.

And research from March this year found that 69% of career changers thought that teaching was a career for them to consider, a rise of 5% in just 4 months; 71% of students felt that teaching was a career for them to consider, a rise of 10% in just 4 months.

I think that growing enthusiasm for teaching reflects the fact that opportunities for teachers are now greater than ever.

As national, local, and specialist leaders of education, leaders of academy chains and teaching schools …

There are opportunities to change lives as subject leaders, like Simon Mazumder at Altrincham Girls Grammar – Head of Maths, a specialist leader of education, who is currently doing brilliant work on primary maths in collaboration with Manchester University.

And there are opportunities to become educational pioneers by opening free schools, which can reshape how we teach and how students learn.

Educational innovation has a new generation of heroes and heroines in Peter Hyman and Oli de Botton at School 21, in the team behind the Greenwich Free School, or in the inspirational classroom practitioner Mark Lehain who has opened an academically ambitious new school in one of the most disadvantaged parts of Bedford.

There are also new opportunities to shape the whole educational debate.

In the past, the education debate has been dominated by education academics – which is why so much of the research and evidence on how children actually learn has been so poor.

Now, thankfully, teachers are taking control of their profession’s intellectual life, taking the lead in pioneering educational research and creating a living evidence base.

Later this week the brilliant Tom Bennett – teacher, blogger, behaviour guru and free thinker – is bringing together other teachers at the ResearchED 2013 conference to debate how to use the most rigorous evidence to improve teaching itself. Some of the most impressive names in the profession – such as Tom Sherrington, Joe Kirby and Daisy Christodoulou will be speaking.

Their initiative follows on from the groundbreaking work we commissioned from Dr Ben Goldacre – the author of ‘Bad Science’ – to help us understand how better use of evidence could improve teaching practice. His paper on ‘Building Evidence Into Education’ generated a vast amount of enthusiastic debate and discussion among teachers when it was published in March this year, both on and offline.

And his paper sits alongside fascinating research carried out by teaching schools, exciting schemes like the National College for Teaching and Leadership’s Test and Learn programme, and the projects run by the Education Endowment Foundation, a new charity working to ensure that children from all backgrounds can make the most of their talents.

I am particularly encouraged by the work being done by teachers to shape new curricula, using the freedoms enjoyed by academies. Caroline Nash, the inspirational sponsor of Pimlico Academy, has set up a wonderful new organisation – the Curriculum Centre – to help teachers develop challenging and aspirational knowledge-rich programmes of study. In Ark’s academies new and more ambitious maths curricula have been developed by brilliant young teachers. And David Benson, the newly-appointed principal designate of the Kensington Aldridge Academy, is also developing aspirational new approaches to the curriculum for students from disadvantaged communities.

As well as leading the education debate, teachers are also our most valued public service workers. More and more teachers are being publicly recognised by this government for their inspirational leadership.

More classroom teachers than ever before are being honoured for their work – in the 2013 honours alone, Ann Hambly of Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, Ashbourne; Paul Hughes of Queensbury Upper School, Bedfordshire; Peter Latham, a former PE teacher from Otley, West Yorkshire; Maggie Morgan from St Paul’s Nursery and Primary School, Brighton and Hove; Linda Wainwright from Slade Green Infants School.

In fact, around 10% of all 2013 honours were awarded to people from the world of education.

So – far from the picture drawn in such unremittingly bleak colours by the teaching unions, the reality of teaching in England today is that there’s never been a better time to be a teacher.

In fact, I could not put it any better than Gerard Kelly, the outgoing editor of the bible of teaching, the Times Educational Supplement – who wrote in his valedictory editorial that:

Contrary to most reports, teaching in Britain has never been in better health…The quality of recruits is phenomenally high, the pay isn’t bad, the profession’s status is rising, schools have never been better equipped and teachers’ pensions remain generous compared with most. Students have never been more motivated and parents rarely so supportive. Most encouraging of all are the widespread acceptance that a ‘satisfactory’ education isn’t really good enough and the determination of schools and teachers to take ownership of their profession, sharing ideas and best practice in ways unknown only a few years ago…

The fact is that teaching, for all its bureaucratic indignities, petty frustrations and ceaseless initiatives, is a more respected profession and a more attractive graduate destination than it has been for many years. The stresses are endlessly cited, less so the equally stratospheric satisfaction levels. It really is the ‘noblest of professions’.

The second attack on teaching has also – perhaps surprisingly, perhaps unsurprisingly – come from within the teaching unions. But it’s very far from restricted to them.

The essence of this attack is a belief that teaching cannot actually make that much of a difference to the life chances of children.

The people who make this argument exist on both Left and Right.

From the Left – and from the perspective of a teaching union general secretary – Dr Mary Bousted makes the argument more eloquently than anyone. I say this in a spirit of genuinely respectful disagreement because I believe Dr Bousted is one of the most impressive people in the education debate.

Mary has argued that the socio-economic circumstances of children determine their fate far more than the level of academic expectations at school or the quality of teaching.

She maintains that the most important factor in educational success abroad is not great teaching, high expectations of students or the valuing of knowledge but ‘less wealth inequality’ and ‘far more balanced school intakes’.

In essence – for Mary – it is overwhelmingly the case that deprivation is destiny.

From the Right – and from the perspective of a distinguished academic – a parallel case is made by Professor Charles Murray. Again, I have enormous respect for Charles Murray and his work – but on this occasion, I disagree with him.

He and others like him have argued that, because children inherit different cognitive abilities, the quality of teaching cannot significantly alter that and therefore large numbers of children are not equipped to succeed academically.

In essence – for Charles – it is overwhelmingly the case that genetics are destiny.

But if a child’s background and genetic makeup were all that mattered, then we would expect the same sorts of pupils in the same sorts of schools to get the same sorts of results. Whereas even the most cursory glance at schools in England and America reveals huge variations in performance, even in those schools with the most similar pupil populations.

There are schools with relatively gifted – or wealthy – intakes which perform poorly, coasting along without generating real progress.

And there are – thankfully – many state schools where children from poor backgrounds, who may have been dismissed as unacademic, perform brilliantly.

Indeed there are some schools where the children – irrespective of background – all perform well.

Schools like the Ark academies in England – like ULT’s Paddington Academy and Thomas Jones Primary in West London.

In all of these schools children from the poorest, most deprived backgrounds achieve just the same (impressively high) marks as their richer, luckier peers.

And in other schools children who have been labelled as likely to perform at below the average academic level defy that categorisation.

In schools like Cuckoo Hall Primary or Durand Academy far more children than the national average are registered as having special educational needs. But the vast majority of children – regardless of the challenges they face – achieved at or above the expected level in numeracy and literacy.

Why do these schools succeed, transforming poor children’s lives and life chances, for good? Why do their children manage to achieve far over the odds, giving the lie to those pessimists and fatalists from Left and Right and defeating both the poverty of their backgrounds and their so-called innate ‘genetic limitations’?

Because they share a single common denominator – a single-minded focus on teaching. On recruiting the best candidates, giving them the best training and development; maximising the time children spend being instructed by passionate experts in the disciplines of rigorous thought.

An overwhelming body of academic literature shows that teacher quality and pupil performance are inextricably linked.

McKinsey’s report, ‘How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top’, showed that quality of teaching is the most important driver of quality in any education system – more important than any other factor.

Studies in Tennessee have shown that an individual pupil taught for 3 consecutive years can make as much as 2 years more progress when taught by a top-performing teacher than by a poorly-performing teacher – teachers working in the same building, teaching pupils in the same grade, from the same backgrounds. Analysis in England has identified a quantifiable, measurable improvement in pupils’ exam grades when taught by a high-quality teacher.

Other studies have shown that the benefits of high-quality teaching last a lifetime – with pupils taught by top-performing teachers ‘more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighbourhoods, and save more for retirement’.

All over the world, in individual schools and wide-ranging academic literature, the evidence is crystal clear.

Great teaching can and does make a huge difference to children’s performance.

Great teaching involves empathy and energy, authority and resilience; detailed planning; constant self-improvement. A great teacher has the ability to ‘read’ a classroom and understand its dynamics, instantly; shows inspirational leadership, exciting and motivating pupils to help them achieve their full potential.

But common to all the great teachers I know is a love of children and a love of knowledge.

And that shouldn’t be surprising – because the very best academic research also proves the vital importance of an education which is knowledge rich.

This concept is, however, undermined by the third attack on teaching, an old one – as old as Rousseau, in fact. It’s the belief that education should not be an activity in which the teacher imparts knowledge to the child but a pursuit – by the child – of what it finds interesting.

In Émile, Rousseau wrote: ‘Let [a child] know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason, he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts’.

Various so-called progressive thinkers subsequently took up the same position.

As David Green of Civitas has pointed out, these included influential writers like Ivan Illich, whose book ‘Deschooling Society’ (1971) complained that ‘real learning is not the result of instruction … most learning requires no teacher’; to Carl Rogers, author of ‘Freedom to Learn’ (1969), who claimed that teaching was “based upon a distrust of the student. The attitude of teachers was: ‘Don’t trust him to follow his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him what he should think; tell him what he should learn”.

These arguments have been particularly pernicious in crucial areas like the teaching of reading, for example – where research has consistently and comprehensively shown, both in this country and around the world, that systematic, phonic instruction by a teacher is the most effective and successful way of teaching children to read.

Ideologues, however, have long argued against phonics and direct instruction, claiming instead that children should be allowed to discover letters and words for themselves. This mindset – which holds that direct instruction (what you and I would call teaching) is harmful to children’s creativity and curiosity – is not new.

From the Hadow report of 1933, which stated that ‘the child should begin to learn the 3 Rs when he wants to do so’; to the Plowden report of 1967, which declared that the ‘skills of reading and writing…can best be taught when the need for them is evident to children’ and the Bullock report of 1975, stating that ‘we do not suggest that children of any age should be subjected to a rigorous and systematic training programme’…the educational establishment has conspired against teachers.

Again and again, in this country and abroad, educational thinkers who call themselves progressive, but who are anything but, have converged on the belief that the importance of teaching should be downgraded.

These theorists have consistently argued for ways of organising classrooms and classroom activity which reduce the teacher’s central role in education.

All too often, we’ve seen an over-emphasis on group work – in practice, children chatting to each other – in the belief that is a more productive way to acquire knowledge than attending to an expert.

Although, as the great Texan President Lyndon B Johnson said, ‘you aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.’

Some schools have been pressured to fit in with prevailing doctrines, even against their own instincts. Some nurseries and schools in Kent, for example, reported to us that they were told to remove tables and chairs from their classrooms; were told that they were not allowed to keep children sitting still for longer than 1 minute for every year of their lives – not even during registration, or when listening to a story; were told that children were not allowed to tidy up, or be asked to put their coats on, in case it interrupted ‘child-initiated play’.

And it’s not just group work – almost any activity which is not direct instruction has been lauded by the so-called progressives while direct instruction has been held up to criticism and ridicule.

In her fantastic book ‘Seven Myths About Education’, Daisy Christodoulou recalls her own teacher training – when she was told that she talked too much in lesson practice – and in a bizarre inversion of LBJ’s wisdom she was told that when she was talking, the pupils weren’t learning.

So what happens in classrooms when teaching is marginalised?

The teacher Matthew Hunter records on his blog a series of lessons aimed at history students between the ages of 11 to 16 that he had encountered.

They included studying the battle of Hastings by re-enacting it on a field with softballs, spending 3 lessons making castles out of cardboard boxes, making plasticine models to represent Hitler’s main aims as Fuhrer and recreating life on a slave ship by making pupils gather under their desks.

Another teacher records a lesson for A level English students in which they were asked to depict literary characters on a paper plate – drawing a face on the plate – and then asked to use stickers to define the character’s principal traits – pinning the stickers on their clothes and mingling with other students, while they introduce themselves ‘in character’.

Allied to these teaching methods which have nothing to do with passing on knowledge, there has also been an emphasis on teachers having to put their own learning aside so that work is ‘relevant’ to the students. This has resulted in the dumbing of educational material down to the level of the child – with GCSE English papers that ask students about Tinie Tempah, or Simon Cowell – rather than encouraging the child to thirst after the knowledge of the teacher.

I believe that we need to move away from these approaches to education – I would call them pedagogies but they don’t leave much place for the pedagogue – towards an education system which believes, right from the early years, in the importance of teaching.

Because schools are – above all – academic institutions. We need teachers to actively pass on knowledge, organised in academic disciplines such as physics and history – to introduce children to precisely those areas of human thought and achievement which they are most unlikely to discover or understand on their own.

Children naturally learn to talk; they do not naturally learn to read, or to play the violin, or to carry out long division.

The most impressive scientific evidence on how children learn – from experts like Paul Kirschner, Richard E Clark and John Sweller – all points towards the importance of direct instruction. Their work on ‘why minimally guided teaching techniques do not work’ is hugely powerful.

Their thinking is reinforced by contemporary advocacy from the very best teachers at the sharp end – like Daisy Christodoulou. In ‘Seven Myths about Education’, again, she points out that learning depends on teachers passing on key ‘building blocks’ of knowledge to students so that they become lodged firmly in the memory. Using an instant recall of times tables, for example, to tackle long multiplication.

Although the work may initially be hard, it brings its own special rewards. Only after building fluency in scales can musicians play a great sonata or concerto; only after learning how letters on the page correspond to sounds and words can children discover the magic and mystery of English literature.

Daniel Willingham’s research in cognitive science has provided compelling evidence that a traditional knowledge-rich curriculum is the key to educational success.

As he has written, ‘knowledge does much more than just help students hone their thinking skills: it actually makes learning easier. Knowledge is not only cumulative, it grows exponentially. Those with a rich base of factual knowledge find it easier to learn more – the rich get richer. In addition, factual knowledge enhances cognitive processes like problem solving and reasoning. The richer the knowledge base, the more smoothly and effectively these cognitive processes – the very ones that teachers target – operate. So, the more knowledge students accumulate, the smarter they become.’

Willingham’s comment that ‘the rich get richer’ is, sadly, not just a metaphor. All too often, children from more affluent backgrounds effortlessly acquire this broad knowledge base at home, equipping them with the tools needed at school and beyond; those from less privileged backgrounds miss out.

The educationalist E D Hirsch has proved this phenomenon beyond any doubt – with research demonstrating that students with a higher level of ‘background’ knowledge were able to understand and analyse complex texts much better than their peers without that knowledge, who tended to come from poorer, less privileged backgrounds. As he wrote:

African-American students at a … community college could read just as well as university…students when the topic was roommates or car traffic, but they could not read passages about Lee’s surrender to Grant [a pivotal battle in the American Civil War]. They had not been taught the various things they needed to know in order to understand ordinary texts addressed to a general audience.

This, then, is the perverse result of so-called ‘progressive’ denigration of knowledge. Gramsci put it best: ‘the most paradoxical aspect of it all is that this new type of [education] is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but crystallize them in Chinese complexity.’

In short, for too long – whether driven by a romantic, Rousseau-ian reluctance to crush a child’s delicate spirit, or a glib, Google-era insistence that knowledge is irrelevant in a world where ‘you can just look it up’ – the role of the teacher has been eroded.

Which is why it is so encouraging that a growing number of teachers – indeed the most popular teachers on the web, like Andrew Old, whose blog has received more than 600,000 hits; Tom Bennett, with almost eight and a half thousand followers on Twitter, and Joe Kirby, with almost 2,000 – are arguing for a restoration of knowledge and direct instruction; in short, standing up for the importance of teaching.

The fourth attack on teaching is one in which governments – including Conservative governments – have at times been complicit.

It’s the belief that teachers need others to validate the work they do – whether those others are university academics, or inspectors, or examiners – who have never been teachers.

Take, for example, the whole practice of teacher training.

The evidence shows the best teacher training is led by teachers; that the skills which define great teaching – managing behaviour, constructing compelling narratives, asking the right questions, setting appropriate tasks – are best learnt from great teachers; that the classroom is the best place for teachers to learn as well as to teach.

The work of Doug Lemov in the United States – teacher, founder of a charter school, author of ‘Teach Like a Champion’, which has transformed the debate around teacher training and won followers all over the world – has found support right across the American political spectrum.

In this country, schools play a central role in all of the ITT providers judged to be outstanding under Ofsted’s tough new regime.

We have already taken a number of steps to put teachers and schools in charge of recruitment and training.

Brand new teaching schools have become centres of excellence in training and development – and we will be expanding the number of teaching school alliances beyond the planned 500. The first group of teaching schools have now been operating for 3 years and I can now confirm that their funding will continue beyond the planned 4 years into a fifth year.

While our new teacher training scheme, School Direct, gives aspiring teachers the opportunity to work in a great school from day one, just like student medics in hospitals – learning from more experienced colleagues and immediately putting their new skills into practice.

We’ve also done a lot to deal with the systematic shortages of specialist maths and physics teachers that we inherited. We’ve collaborated with the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Mathematics to introduce prestigious new scholarships worth £20,000 and brought in new training bursaries of up to £20,000 to attract the brightest graduates into these core subjects, more if trainees go to schools with a high proportion of pupils on FSM.

But we’ve got to go even further. So we will soon be announcing even greater incentives in shortage subjects, where recruitment has historically been most difficult, and we will do even more to encourage would-be teachers to study maths and physics at A level and beyond. And we’ve ensured that – at least in maths and physics – there will no longer be any cap on the number of teachers recruited each year, no published target for ITT places; on the contrary, we want to recruit as many new teachers in these subjects as we can.

Schools can now also use their new powers to attract and reward great teachers in specialist subjects, in particular – giving them the power to pay great physics and maths teachers more, right from day one.

As schools take more control over training the next generation of teachers, many of the best academy chains and teaching school alliances are now playing an even greater role in training the next generation of teachers as accredited SCITTs, school-centred initial teacher training providers.

We want to see their numbers increase, enabling more aspiring teachers than ever before to benefit from the expertise and experience of some of the best in the business – so we will be bringing forward proposals to support this later in the year.

The best higher education institutions welcome our changes because they know that discriminating schools will increasingly choose partners in HE who deliver the best quality training and development.

Many have in fact been working hand in glove with schools for many years, and School Direct is just an extension of what they already do. Oxford University, for example, has collaborated with local secondary schools on an internship programme called Oxford City Learning for many years now, and School Direct places have simply been incorporated within that successful scheme.

But sadly, there are some vested interests within some universities that oppose the shift towards school-centred teacher training by SCITTs or through School Direct; those, perhaps, which have long relied on an effective monopoly of teacher training to sustain their finances.

So it’s vital for the future of the profession that we defend teachers from self-interested attacks – and stand up for the principle of teachers teaching teachers.

We also need to defend teaching from the wrong sort of inspection.

I am a passionate believer in the power of good inspection to improve education.

And to those who question whether schools need to be inspected by any outside body at all – suggesting, perhaps, that schools should be the only state-funded institutions not accountable to any form of external authority – I merely point out that without Ofsted, exam results would be the only arbiter of a school’s performance – making a system more pressurised, more crude and more ‘high stakes’ than the one we have now.

Inspection can be a catalyst for rapid and effective school improvement.

We know that schools judged inadequate by Ofsted have generally made more rapid and sustained improvement than those marked ‘satisfactory’, the next rung up – which have tended to coast along at the same level.

This, incidentally, is part of the reason why Sir Michael Wilshaw has, quite rightly, changed the old grade of ‘satisfactory’ into ‘requires improvement’ – sending the message that every school should, at least, reach ‘good’, and should be aiming even higher.

Ofsted also provides an essential service in highlighting brilliant practice, the schools which make a difference and the teachers we should celebrate.

And it has now changed the way it reports its findings so that every inspection report for an outstanding school clearly states on the very first page why that school is outstanding – making it much easier to understand why the best schools are doing so well.

But there have been occasions – in the past – when inspection has not achieved what it should.

Too few inspectors had recent – or current – experience of teaching.

The framework, prior to 2010, required schools to be judged against more than 27 different criteria – putting ‘quality of teaching’ on a par with ‘whether pupils adopted healthy lifestyles’ and ‘the extent to which pupils contribute to the school and wider community’.

And Ofsted’s guidance provided too little clarity about what constituted good teaching; or allowed inspectors’ personal prejudices and preferences to be interpreted as ‘the Ofsted way’.

As a result, and as teacher bloggers like Andrew Old have chronicled, time and again too much emphasis was given to particular practices like group work and discovery learning; while Ofsted inspectors marked teachers down for such heinous crimes as ‘talking too much’, ‘telling pupils things’ or ‘dominating the discussion’.

The good news is that Ofsted – under its inspirational new leadership – is moving to address all these weaknesses and give us a system of inspection of which we can be proud.

The numbers of inspectors with the right experience and credentials is rising. In 2010 to 2011, just 15% of inspections included a serving headteacher or senior leader – today, it’s 52% – and 88 national leaders of education have already trained as inspectors, with 45 more training this term and applications already oversubscribed for the next round.

Outdated, misleading guidance has been replaced with a clear directive to reward great teaching – whether it matches the inspector’s personal preferences or not.

And the Ofsted framework has been transformed so that, rather than peripherals, teaching now matters above all – in particular, the sort of teaching which generates excellence. That means less focus on processes, pedagogies, lesson plans and structures, and more focus on how well pupils learn. And a school cannot now be awarded an overall ‘outstanding’ grade unless its teaching is judged to be ‘outstanding’.

It is thanks to Sir Michael Wilshaw – himself a great teacher – that these changes have been made – and they all point in one direction – the affirmation of the importance of teaching.

That phrase – the ‘Importance of teaching’ – was the title of this government’s first and only education white paper; our most important priority then, and our most important priority now.

It is the silver thread running through every single one of our policies, every part of our reform agenda.

It’s because we know teaching can make such a difference that we have instituted policies that help teachers make that difference.

Clearing away the distractions and slashing the unnecessary bureaucracy and central prescription which sapped so much of teachers’ time and energy; in numbers alone, we’ve removed or simplified over 50 unnecessary duties and regulations; and cut the volume of guidance issued to schools by 75%, over 21,000 pages.

And giving teachers as much freedom, autonomy and independence as possible, to get on with they do best – teach.

Every teacher in the classroom knows – as Gerard Kelly so rightly said – that teaching is the noblest of professions.

Which is why everything the Department for Education does, has done and will do is designed to reinforce the importance of teaching.

The statement made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 12 September 2013.

On 8 July 2013, I launched a statutory one-month consultation seeking representations on the draft legislative order – the Education (National Curriculum) (Attainment Targets and Programmes of Study) (England) Order 2013 – required to bring the new national curriculum into effect from September 2014.

The consultation was accompanied by the publication of final proposals for the new national curriculum for all subjects and key stages (except for key stage 4 English, mathematics and science). A further consultation on the programmes of study for key stage 4 English, mathematics and science will follow, in line with the timetable for the reform of GCSE qualifications.

Officials in the Department for Education have received 750 responses to the consultation which have been carefully analysed. Yesterday, we published a summary of the responses received.

The new national curriculum that we published yesterday has been developed with due regard to the views of subject experts and teachers and to the findings of international best practice comparisons. In response to representations made during the recent consultation period, changes have been made to improve clarity, precision and consistency of the content.

The new national curriculum will provide a rigorous basis for teaching, a benchmark for all schools to improve their performance, and will give children and parents a better guarantee that every student will acquire the knowledge and skills to succeed in the modern world. It has been significantly slimmed down and will free up teachers to use their professional judgement to design curricula that meet the needs of their pupils.

This new national curriculum represents a clear step forward for schools, ensuring that all children have the opportunity to acquire a core of essential knowledge in key subjects. It embodies rigour, high standards and will create coherence in what is taught in schools. It sets out expectations for children that match the curricula used in the world’s most successful school systems.

The majority of the new national curriculum will come into force from September 2014, so schools will now have a year to prepare to teach it. From September 2015, the new national curriculum for English, mathematics and science will come into force for years 2 and 6; English, mathematics and science for key stage 4 will be phased in from September 2015.

Copies of the new national curriculum have been placed in the library of the House.