Category: Speeches

The speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, at Cambridge University on 24 November 2011.

In 1879 William Gladstone gave one of his more memorable speeches. In the course of his oration he invoked Pericles, Virgil and Dryden, he poured scorn on Disraeli’s doctrine of Imperium et Libertas, he discussed the merits of the Andrassy Note and the Treaty of San Stefano and he outlined six principles of Liberal foreign policy – specifically a limit on legislation and public expenditure at home to conserve the nation’s strength, the preservation of peace, the maintenance of a balance of power in Europe, the avoidance of needless entanglements, the acknowledgement of the equal rights of all nations and a positive bias in favour of those people fighting for freedom.

In the same address, Gladstone also compared the arguments for Protection and Free Trade, enumerating the advantages of Free Trade, he discussed the folly of land reform and the break up of great estates as a remedy for agricultural distress and he went onto argue that wealth creators should be free from every unjust and unnecessary legislative restraint.

Impressive you might say. Some admirable sentiments you might be inclined to agree. With which all of us who might aspire to be Mr Gladstone’s heirs in the Commons would do well to acquaint ourselves.

Invited to reflect on other contrasts between then and now you might consider how far standards of oratory had fallen. You wouldn’t get a speech like that in Parliament today.

But Gladstone wasn’t speaking in Parliament. He was addressing a crowd of landless agricultural workers and coal miners in Scotland’s central belt.

Gladstone’s Third Midlothian Address is remembered today, insofar as it is remembered today, as the culminating moment in his back-to-the-people, grass-roots, comeback kid campaign for the premiership.

It deserves to be remembered as an important moment in the Manichean struggle between the crusader Gladstone and his cynical adversary Disraeli, between the Liberal Party in its High Victorian heyday as a guardian of limited Government and a Tory Party of a proudly imperial kind that we no longer know.

But the reason I recall that speech now, is because the most striking thing about the Midlothian campaign is not how different today’s Liberals and Tories are from those of one hundred and thirty years ago.

I think the most striking thing is how different the public of 130 years ago were.

Or more specifically, how different were the expectations that the political class had of that public.

It was assumed that an audience of agricultural labourers and mineworkers would either be familiar with or, at the very least be curious about, Pericles and Dryden, the intricacies of the Andrassy Note and the deficiencies of the San Stefano Treaty, the merits of Protection and the arguments from first principles for Free Trade.

The public were paid the compliment of assuming they were intellectually curious. They weren’t patronised by being treated as rude mechanicals.

It would have been unthinkable for Gladstone to have used the House of Commons to answer a question on the fate of a character in a soap opera, as Tony Blair did when he expressed his support for the innocence of Deirdre Rachid.

It would have been inconceivable for any member of his Cabinet to have sought public approbation by letting the world know they had the critical tastes of a teenager, as Gordon Brown once did, when he confessed his fondness for the Arctic Monkeys.

It would have been impossible to credit if any leading politician of their age had been asked, as Nick Clegg was, how many lovers they had taken before marriage, or as David Cameron was, whether or not he had harboured lurid sexual fantasies about a previous party leader.

I draw these comparisons not because I am such a narrow nostalgist that I wish to live in a pristine past purged of modern popular culture.

I draw them because I look back with admiration at the great Victorian statesman, their intellectual and cultural self-confidence, and in particular the great ambitions they harboured for the British people.

It was an automatic assumption of my predecessors in Cabinet office that the education they had enjoyed, the culture they had benefitted from, the literature they had read, the history they had grown up learning, were all worth knowing. They thought that the case was almost so self-evident it scarcely needed to be made. To know who Pericles was, why he was important, why acquaintance with his actions, thoughts and words mattered, didn’t need to be explained or justified. It was the mark of an educated person. And to aspire to be educated, and be thought of as educated, was the noblest of ambitions.

The Eminent Victorian, and muscular liberal, Matthew Arnold encapsulated what liberal learning should be. He wanted to introduce young minds to the best that had been thought and written. His was a cause which was subsequently embraced by leaders of Victorian opinion as a civilizing mission which it was their moral duty to discharge.

In an age before structuralism, relativism and post-modernism it seemed a natural and uncomplicated thing, the mark of civilization, to want to spread knowledge, especially the knowledge of great human achievement, to every open mind.

But, over time, that natural and uncomplicated belief has been undermined, over-complicated and all too often twisted out of shape.

Well today I want to reclaim it. I want to proclaim the importance of education as a good in itself. I want to argue that introducing the young minds of the future to the great minds of the past is our duty. I want to argue that we should be more demanding of our education system, demanding of academics, headteachers, professionals in school and students of all ages. We should recover something of that Victorian earnestness which believed that an audience would be gripped more profoundly by a passionate hour long lecture from a gifted thinker which ranged over poetry and politics than by cheap sensation and easy pleasures.

Intellectual exercise, like physical exertion, or so I’m told, becomes easier the harder you work. A consistent investment of intellectual effort brings the satisfaction of seeing problems dissolve before your analytical gaze.

I think any society is a better society for taking intellectual effort more seriously, for rewarding intellectual ambition, for indulging curiosity, for supporting scholarship, for feting those who teach and celebrating those who learn.

I believe that because I believe we have all been endowed, either by a generous creator or by those selfish genes, with the capacity to share in greatness.

We may not all be able to inherit good looks or great houses, but all of us are heir to the amazing intellectual achievements of our ancestors. We can all marvel at the genius of Pythagoras, or Wagner, share in the brilliance of Shakespeare or Newton, delve deeper into the mysteries of human nature through Balzac or Pinker, by taking the trouble to be educated.

I believe that denying any child access to that amazing legacy, that treasure-house of wonder, delight, stimulation and enchantment by failing to educate them to the utmost of their abilities is as great a crime as raiding their parents bank accounts – you are stealing from their rightful inheritance, condemning them to a future poorer than they deserve.

And I am unapologetic in arguing that all children have a right to the best. And there is such as thing as the best. Richard Wagner is an artist of sublime genius and his work is incomparably more rewarding – intellectually, sensually and emotionally – than, say, the Arctic Monkeys. Yet it takes effort to prise open the door to his world. That effort is rewarded a thousandfold. The unfulfilled yearning of the Tristan chord, the battle between power and love in the Ring, the sublimity of sacrifice in Parsifal, all these creations of one mind can, today, move and affect the minds of millions with a profundity almost no other work of man can achieve.

But for any of us to properly appreciate and enjoy Wagner takes time. And work. The oft-quoted jibe that Wagner has some great moments but some terrible quarters of an hour underlines how inaccessible he can be, at first.

But one of the first lessons we learn on the road to maturity is that the greatest pleasures are those which need to be worked at. Instant gratification palls. Investing care and attention, and deferring gratification, brings understanding, appreciation and real enjoyment. Whether its friendship or cooking, listening to Richard Wagner or appreciating a work by Nicolas Poussin, the more time and care that is invested the richer and deeper the rewards.

Which is why I am worried that far too often we do not expect, let alone, demand the level of effort, application and ambition of which students are capable. We do not seek to stretch them, and reward them, as Gladstone stretched and rewarded his audience of labourers one hundred and thirty years ago.

I accept that some may think my position is romantic – hopelessly so. How can I talk of Pericles and Wagner when the young people I dream of engaging with Greek heroes and German operas were on our streets this summer rioting and are on our conscience this winter as the number of young unemployed appears to rise remorselessly?

Well, yes, I am romantic in one sense I suppose. Promethean even. I believe man is born with a thirst for free inquiry and is nearly everywhere held back by chains of low expectation. I am convinced there is an unsatisfied hunger for seriousness and an unfulfilled yearning for the demanding among our citizens.

In Willy Russell’s drama Educating Rita, his heroine, played by Julie Walters in the film version, is portrayed at one point in a cosy Merseyside pub with her friends and family as they, increasingly merrily, belt out the familiar numbers they’ve sung along with all their lives.

As a picture of traditional working class solidarity, it’s moving – in current circumstances it’s even elegiac. But, as Russell knows, it’s also constricting. Rita, growing frustrated with the limited horizons of her close-knit community, insists “there must be better songs to sing” and seeks them in education.

Her subsequent, earnest and driven, pursuit of knowledge helps rescue her tutor, Frank, from his jaded and complacent approach to learning as he recovers, through her, his original enthusiasm for literature.

Educating Rita is fiction of course, but it resonates because there are so many of our fellow citizens who know there are better songs to sing than those they hear around them every day.

The appetite among parents from poorer homes for strenuous educational excellence – for stretch and challenge – is constantly under-estimated.

Let me illustrate my point with one anecdote. And then some data. The anecdote first.

Jade Goody may be an unfamiliar name to many of you. But she is the epitome of a celebrity famous for being famous. A contestant on the crudely exploitative TV game show Big Brother she was singled out for notoriety because she appeared so tragically poorly educated. She didn’t know where or what East ‘Angular’ was, she seemed at sea with any literary, historical, cultural or political reference – and therefore she became a poster girl for general ignorance and terminal educational failure.

To her enormous credit, she turned this notoriety into celebrity, turned scorn into sympathy and transformed a fleeting appearance in a game show into the launchpad for a hugely successful modern media career.

Her life was cut tragically short, however, by cancer. But before she died she worked harder than ever to set up a trust fund for her sons. With the explicit aim of enrolling them in one of Essex’s most traditional prep schools and then ensuring they could go onto public school.

Scorned as she may have been, almost by the whole nation, for her lack of education, Jade knew its worth. If she merely wanted her children to be rich she need simply have left them her wealth. But she wanted more – she wanted them to be educated, to have their minds enriched.

And lest you think Jade is an exotic exception, a bird of bright plumage atypical of her environment, consider the facts on the ground now in our capital.

For generations the working class communities of South London have been tragically ill-served by council-run schools which consistently failed to secure a decent clutch of GCSEs or their equivalent for the overwhelming majority of their pupils. It was assumed that the children could scarcely be expected to do better, given their backgrounds. And parents were denied any meaningful information about how their children’s schools performed relative to others so they had no real idea how badly they were being betrayed by those who took their votes, council rents and rates for granted.

But recently those families have been given an alternative. Through a combination of league tables, schools free of council control, and headteachers free to hire who they want and pay them what they want.

As a result of these changes we can see that for example the peer Lord Harris of Peckham now runs a dozen comprehensives which were once local authority controlled schools. They draw pupils from the same communities that they always have, and they enjoy the same level of funding as all their neighbours. But their results are incomparably better. Ten times as many students get five good GCSE passes as a few years ago. The rate of performance improvement is far faster than that of any neighbouring school. And schools which once struggled to fill their classrooms are now hugely over-subscribed.

And that’s because so many parents, and its often parents who themselves were denied a great education themselves, yearn to see their own children properly educated. And they know what that entails almost instinctively.

They know that mathematics, English, the sciences, foreign languages, history and geography are rigorous intellectual disciplines tested over time and want those subjects prominent in the curriculum. They know that ordered classrooms with strict discipline are a precondition for effective teaching and a sanctuary from the dangers of the street. They know that respect for teachers as guardians of knowledge and figures of authority is the beginning of wisdom. And as a result we now have a situation where parents don’t just flock to these schools, they actively petition local authorities to allow Lord Harris to take over their schools.

The Harris academies, like those of ARK, E-ACT, ULT and others are providing children with the opportunity to transcend the circumstances of their birth, just as the grammar schools of the past gave an, admittedly smaller, proportion of their predecessors similar opportunities.

And to visit these schools is to be reminded, at every turn, of what a love of learning looks like.

In Burlington Danes, an Academy run by the charity ARK in White City, academic excellence is recognised with a rank order system for every pupil in every year, allocating a place to every child in every term based on their performance subject by subject. So at half term the children are examined, given their scores from 1 to 120. That’s kept private. Then they have the opportunity in the remaining half term to improve their scores and at the end of it every student in every year is ranked, in every subject and for effort, and also artistic and sporting achievement. When I encountered this the first time I thought – that’s a bit hard core, must be unpopular with some of the parents and some of the students. But actually I was told that this had been the single most popular change that had been initiated. The children were now so anxious to do well in this competitive process, which rewards the acquisition of knowledge, that they petition the head to have them transferred out of classes where teachers are weak into those where teaching is strong. They know when they are being fed material which is thin gruel intellectually and they demand better. They ask for more homework and additional reading. They thirst to know.

In another Academy school that I visited just last week, Denbigh High, the students, overwhelming Asian, second and third generation immigrant families, competed to tell me why they preferred Shakespeare to Dickens and they showed me how alliteration, personification and first person narration helped hook readers into the openings of particular novels.

When students from the communities that these schools serve display such passion for learning they only underline how poorly we serve so many of their contemporaries.

Because while schools such as these may ensure that three quarters of their students get five good GCSEs, the whole country only succeeds in getting half of young people to that level.

And what’s worse is that just around 16 per cent manage to succeed in getting to secure a C pass or better at GCSE in English, Maths, the sciences, a language and history or geography.

And lest you think that a C pass in these subjects is an impossibly high hurdle for many young people consider this.

It is possible to secure a C pass in mathematics GCSE with less than 35% of the questions right.

Until this Government came to power there was no formal recognition of grammar punctuation or spelling in the mark schemes for GCSE.

Conventional grammar – as we understand it here and as Simon Heffer lays it out masterfully in his wonderful book Strictly English – doesn’t feature in the English curriculum.

But the English Language GCSE can include listening to tape recordings of Eddie Izzard and the Hairy Bikers.

In English Literature, many students will only have read one novel for their exam – and the overwhelming number – more than ninety per cent – will have studied only either Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies or To Kill a Mockingbird. Out of more than 300,000 students who took one exam body’s English Literature GCSE last year, just 1,700 – fewer than 1% will have studied a novel from before 1900 for the exam.

In science GCSE students are asked which is healthier – a grilled fish or battered sausages?

In History GCSE, only a tiny proportion of students who get the chance to choose the papers study for those which deal with our own past in any depth – the overwhelming majority focus on the American West 1840 to 1895 or the Nazis.

I could go on.

I could explain that it’s possible to secure a good pass at A level in a modern language without having studied any work of foreign literature.

I could relay the sentiments expressed to me by members of the Royal Society last week who found current science A levels inadequate preparation for university study.

I could even quote from Robert Tombs, a history don here in Cambridge who lamented in the London Review of Books that, “The present system – curriculum, examination methods and teaching practices combined – is ineffective in producing skills or knowledge, breadth or depth. It drills students to write formulaic essays on causation and mechanically ‘evaluate’ miscellaneous texts for ‘reliability’. And it’s boring: students and teachers are stuck in a round of tests, exercises and exams, which discourages them from venturing outside the limits of a fragmented and decontextualised curriculum. Hence a level of ignorance that still sometimes makes me gasp, and complacency about that ignorance, as if no one could possibly know anything not specifically taught.”

I could go on but I think you get the picture.

That is why the Coalition Government is reforming our national curriculum – so that every parent and every child is clear on the essential knowledge they need in the subjects that matter.

It’s also why we’re reforming our whole exam system – so our GCSEs and A-levels can stand comparison with the most rigorous exams in the highest-performing jurisdictions.

And also it’s why we’re ensuring those schools with the worst academic record are taken over by organisations with a proven track record of educational excellence.

Schools in East Manchester which have under-performed for years are now being transformed, as Academies, through the example set by the leadership of Altrincham Girls’ Grammar School.

A comprehensive in Wiltshire which had not allowed service children to fulfil their potential is now being transformed as an Academy sponsored by Wellington College.

Uppingham is supporting schools from Preston to Grimsby which desperately needed to have their ambitions raised beyond what they have ever achieved in the past. Brighton College is setting up a new academy school for the very brightest sixth-formers in one of the most deprived parts of the East End of London to give them an equal chance to compete for university places with students at fee-paying schools.

Overall there are now more than 1,400 academies and free schools in England – a 700% increase in the numbers we inherited – all of them are schools free from local authority control and focused entirely on raising standards. They have all the freedoms of independent schools over curriculum, staffing, timetabling and ethos. And I expect great things of them.

But 1,400 is not enough. And to take reform to the next stage I want to enlist more unashamedly elitist institutions in helping to entrench independence and extend excellence in our state sector. I want universities like Cambridge, and more of our great public schools, to help run state schools. They will be free of any government interference, free to hire whoever they want, pay them whatever they want, teach whatever they want, and as a result we can demand higher standards.

I want this because I believe in a truly liberal approach to education – like that outlined by John Stuart Mill – where the state provides the finance and sets high expectations but the delivery of education and the management of day-to-day learning is devolved to genuinely independent schools and chains of schools.

And I also believe we must be more radical in our reform programme because we are still not asking enough of our education system, and we are not being ambitious enough for our young people.

Now of course I acknowledge that children are working harder and as I’ve said on every platform I’ve been given, and as I’ve always said, I believe that the young teachers who are now entering the profession are better than any generation of teachers ever before.

But I don’t believe it is enough to compare ourselves with the recent past and assume that incremental progress from where we once were is enough.

That lack of ambition would have appalled our Victorian ancestors. And it’s certainly not apparent in other nations. In the last ten years we have fallen behind other countries. We have fallen from 4th in the world for the quality of our science education to16th. 7th in the world for literacy to 25th. 8th in the world for maths to 28th. In Shanghai 14 year olds are two years ahead of their English contemporaries in maths skills.

In Singapore and Hong Kong children are introduced to calculations involving fractions and the foundations of algebra long before our children.

In Poland and Hungary children are expected to be familiar with a canon of great literature more extensive and demanding than any we have ever prescribed.

Now there are very powerful economic reasons why this relative decline should worry us. Globalisation may be a moderately ugly word for what is really just the victory of liberal economics or Victorian political economy over its rivals – but its consequences of globalisation for those without qualifications are truly ugly.

The number of jobs available in this country to those with few, or no, qualifications is rapidly diminishing as lower wage costs abroad, and technological advance at home, bear down on employment opportunities.

Those countries with the best educated workforces will be the most attractive to investors, particularly if those workforces are mathematically and scientifically literate and have displayed a talent for hard work and application throughout their student days.

The more connected, and numerous, your population of well-educated citizens are, the greater the potential for intellectual collaboration and creativity, driving innovation and growth. Whether its Palo Alto or Silicon Fen, there’s a reason why we need to preserve the idea of communities of scholars which the original founders of Oxford and Cambridge established.

Countries which award soft qualifications to students, which are not comparable to those in the most rigorous jurisdictions, suffer just as surely as a country which issues money too promiscuously to pay its debts suffers. Grade inflation, like currency inflation, costs us all in the long run.

So I believe we need to do everything we can to stimulate economic growth and I have argued that the best way of doing so is for policies to drive up educational standards. There is no question but that a better educated population is our best long-term growth strategy. Investment in intellectual capital is the best way of a nation securing a proper return on its money.

But it is important that while we acknowledge the critical role that higher educational standards can play in generating wealth and spreading opportunity more evenly, it’s really important that we do not subordinate education to purely economic ends.

If we are to recapture and reclaim the importance of liberal learning we must always state that education is a good in itself.

And in our anxiety to explain, as I have to, why a focus on educational excellence makes sense economically I must make sure that I do not fall into the trap of justifying learning only in utilitarian or instrumentalist economic terms.

I acknowledge that one of the reasons why we want economic growth is so that we can ensure that the place of learning in our culture and civilization is protected, and enlarged.

I want, not for economic reasons but for the best of reasons, more of our fellow citizens to study English literature in depth. I want that because the great works of the canon contain eternal truths about human nature conveyed with a profundity and weight it’s impossible to encounter anywhere else.

Middlemarch should be part of the mental furniture of many more of our fellow citizens because its lessons about respecting the autonomy and individuality of others, its exercise of imaginative sympathy, its belief that one should not seek to make instruments of others to satisfy your own will and its author’s recognition that good is more often achieved by modest persistence than grand projects are all conveyed with such sublime and generous mastery of feeling and language that it is a delight to spend time in the presence of George Eliot’s genius.

Whether its Austen’s understanding of personal morality, Dickens’ righteous indignation, Hardy’s stern pagan virtue, all of these authors have something rich to teach us which no other experience, other than intimate connection with their novels, can possibly match.

I also want more of our fellow citizens to study mathematics and science to a higher level because there is a beauty and wonder in the physical world, a poetry and pattern in number, an awe and excitement in mapping creation which takes all our brains onto a higher plane.

Scientific reasoning, the falsifiability of assumptions, the need to measure reliably, weigh evidence rigorously, submit to the examination of peers, all of these things which science teaches us contribute to the questioning mindset our society needs if it is to avoid error, falsity, superstition and folly.

Similarly the study of history is important. Not just because it is an excitement in itself – because it brings us into direct contact with the lives of those great men and women who bent events to their will. It also teaches us how to weigh evidence, test assertions, sort good arguments from bad, plausible explanations from bogus.

I also believe in the study of a foreign language because it extends not just the reach of our empathy but it opens up new ways of reasoning and judging. It allows us to see how complex individual societies and cultures are, gives us a new way of observing the world and ourselves. It gives us a privileged vantage point accessible only after hard work, but worth it because so much is revealed.

I believe in the application to all these subjects because they cultivate the mind – and they inculcate in the citizen the virtues we once called republican.

It was a central argument of renaissance historians and political theorists that any republic or commonwealth – whether the Rome of the time before the Caesars or the Holland of the seventeenth century – needed citizens who were schooled in virtue if it was to survive and prosper.

Open, and participative political systems could not long endure if men were left simply to follow their appetites or allowed, unprotected, to fall prey to demagoguery.

If these polities were to succeed then citizens needed not just a technical education in a skill to earn their living or basic literacy and numeracy to learn the laws and pay their taxes. They needed to have learned lessons from history, studied the examples of great men from the past, developed robust reasoning skills, had a grounding in ethics, learned to appreciate the importance of art and music, architectural and natural beauty. Without that knowledge, that understanding that the survival and enhancement of a civilization and its culture mattered more than manoeuvring for personal advantage, a society it as thought would inevitably decline, dragging all its citizens with it.

And it is to you, as members of this University, that I now look for champions ready to enter the public square uphold the pursuit of knowledge as a good in itself.

And ultimately I cannot put it better than Gladstone did, in another of his great speeches, his rectorial address to the University of Glasgow.

He was concerned about the dominance in the life of the nation of a new class of speculative financiers who were united only by “the bond of gain, not the legitimate produce of toil by hand or brain.” They, in an uncanny prefiguring of what happened with derivatives, “gave their name to speculations which they neither understand nor examine” and their endorsement means they act as “decoys to allure the unwary and entrap them” into unwise investments.

The growth of these individuals who were indulging in such speculations was proof, Gladstone thought, that “we live in a time when, among the objects offered to the desire of a man, wealth and the fruits of wealth have augmented their always dangerous preponderance.”

We might well reflect on the appositeness of that warning for our own times – and in particular the importance of places of learning as bulwarks against greed and materialism.

Universities were, Gladstone argued, “places of hard labour and modest emoluments” well that much hasn’t changed…

…”but the improvement of the condition of the student flows from the improvement of the condition of his mind, from the exercise and expansion of his powers to perceive and to reflect, from the formation of habits of attention and application, from a bias given to character in favour of cultivating intelligence for its own sake, as well as for the sake of the direct advantages it brings.”

“The habits of mind formed by universities are founded in sobriety and tranquillity, they help to settle the spirit of a man firmly upon the centre of gravity; they tend to self-command, self- government and genuine self-respect.”

“All honour then to the University, because while it prepares students in the most useful manner for the practical purposes of life, it embodies a protest against the excessive dominion of worldly appetites and supplies a powerful agency to neutralizing the specific dangers of this age.”

To which I can only say, as I’m sure the audience at the Third Midlothian Address did, hear, hear….

The speech made by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, on 13 October 2011.

Thank you all for coming along this morning.

As Amanda [Spielman] and Glenys [Stacey] pointed out, the purpose of today is to open a debate, not to close it. To ask some questions, not to come to firm conclusions. But I’m very conscious that when you have a debate in education, there’s always a danger that the participants in that debate can be caricatured. On the one hand, you have those people who believe in rigour, who instantly morph into Charles Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, demanding facts alone. And on the other hand, those people who believe there’s room for free play and creativity in education are sometimes caricatured as the offspring of AS Neill, the headteacher responsible for Summerhill, the school in which it was entirely up to children how they spent their time every day. I sometimes feel some sympathy for one of the children at Summerhill, who once at the beginning of the day asked their teacher, ‘Sir, must we do as we please today?’

But in looking at that debate I think it’s also important to recognise that in Glenys and in Amanda we have two people who can help us steer it, who are superbly well-equipped. Now of course, as soon as I mention Glenys and Amanda, you’ll wonder which of the caricatured roles I’ve just described do they fit into. Are they Gradgrind’s daughters, or are they the spiritual sisters of AS Neill? Well I’d like to think of them in a wholly different light. I’d like to think of them as the Cagney and Lacey of the standards debate, two hard bitten cops who are out there to make sure that those of you who are responsible for doing wrong are put behind bars. But actually, despite the toughness that Cagney and Lacey displayed, which both Glenys and Amanda have, I actually think a better comparison would be to think of them as Kay Scarpetta and Jane Tennison. Both of them are skilled forensic investigators of crimes and believe me – and believe me, if you’re responsible for those crimes, there is no escape from these two.

But in looking at the debate about standards overall, one of the questions you might be asking is where do I stand? And it’s very, very important, when one is talking about standards, to recognise that you’re tightrope-walking over a minefield. On the one hand, if you’re the sort of Education Secretary who praises the achievements of young people, than you can be accused of being Pollyanna, saying that everything’s wonderful and there’s no need to worry. On the other hand if you raise a critical eyebrow and say that you do have some concerns, then people instantly put you into the Eeyore camp, and instantly presume that you are a relentless pessimist. So which am I? Pollyanna or Eeyore? Am I Candide for thinking that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds? Or Victor Meldrew who, when I look at Key Stage 2, GCSE or A level results, simply cry out, ‘I don’t believe it!’ Well, the truth is, I’m actually on the optimistic side of the equation – a qualified optimist, but an optimist nonetheless. I believe that our children are working harder than ever before. I believe that the trend suggests that the Flynn Effect, as it’s been called, is correct. That children are more intelligent than ever before. I certainly believe that the teachers that we have in our schools are the best generation ever. And I also believe that children and teachers are working harder than ever.

But because they’re working harder, we have to make sure that our exam system works harder as well. And we need to make sure it works harder because education overall is being put to the test as a result of global forces. One of the most profound influences on me in doing this job has been Sir Michael Barber. And Sir Michael’s work for McKinsey has reinforced in my mind what so many studies have also underlined. That the tendency, which has bedevilled English education in the standards debate, to look to the past, is not the most effective way of making sure that standards are where they should be. What we should be looking at are the rest and the best. We should be comparing ourselves with other jurisdictions. We expect that each successive generation evolves, adapts, and does better than the previous generation. That’s what being human is all about: being the best, striving for excellence. It means, in a standards context, comparing ourselves with other countries and other jurisdictions that are doing even better.

But it’s important, in asking our exam system to do more, asking our curriculum to do more, that we also recognise that exams cannot do everything. And it’s important again that I emphasise, in front of this audience and in front of every audience, that some of the most important things that happen in schools cannot be tested, examined or quantified, no matter how sophisticated the method we are that they used. How do you measure enthusiasm or love of learning? How do you quantify the sense of joy or anticipation that a pupil feels when they arrive in a classroom knowing they’re going to be entertained and inspired for an hour. How do you quantify good citizenship? How do you calibrate team spirit? It’s because there is so much that can’t be measured and quantified objectively that we’re changing the way in which schools are rated by Ofsted, so that the new Chief Inspector will have a direct brief to ensure that, alongside the data that we publish on the basis of exam performance, a more rounded judgement is made about the quality of teaching and leadership in each school, so that we balance exam performance with the performance of the school in so many other areas – such as what we might call the tacit curriculum, and what we might also call character building.

But it is the case that exams do have a critical function alongside the changes that we might make to inspection, and indeed to the national curriculum, in making sure that we continue to raise standards in all our schools for all our children. They have, as we all know, an accountability function. Exams are one of the ways in which we judge schools, one against the other. But they also have a sorting function in letting us know which candidates are doing best. And that sorting function helps us identify, during the progress of a child’s education, which pupils need more support and which need more stretch and challenge. And it also helps, at 16 or 18, in allowing that individual child to decide which institution it might be best for them to progress to, and in helping institutions decide whether or not that young person has the capacity to benefit from what they have to offer.

And of course qualifications have a preparation function. The programme of study and the syllabus that is tested in the qualification should be a body of knowledge that equips a young person to move on confidently to the next stage of their lives – whether that’s taking up an occupation, or moving on to further or higher education.

Now some of you may be thinking, ‘Well, that’s all very well. But qualifications do you have, Secretary of State, to pronounce on this debate?’ I suspect I only really have only one qualification to enter into this debate. And that qualification is that none of the qualifications that I have come from the English schools system. I was educated in Scotland. And therefore, I don’t have a dog in the fight when it comes to deciding whether the A levels of the 1970s or the 1950s were a golden era. Because I was fortunate enough to be educated in that jurisdiction, I can look at the English exam system with – I hope – an element of detachment. And because I can look at the exam system as a citizen of the United Kingdom, but someone who was educated outside the system, I feel instinctively that we should judge that system against its international peers. And that’s why, throughout the time that I’ve been both the Shadow Education Spokesman and the Secretary of State, I’ve been so keen on those international comparisons that professor Michael Barber and others have drawn to our attention. Most of you will be wearily familiar with me pointing out the way in which we’ve slipped down the PISA league tables in the last 10 years. But let me reinforce the importance of what that means. Research published this week by the Department for Education drew to all our attention the fact that if our children performed as well children in Shanghai, then instead of 55 per cent of children getting five good GCSEs (including English and maths), it would be 77 per cent. So if you think about it: over 20% getting qualifications that they don’t currently get – over a fifth of the cohort overall. That means 100,000 more children getting the bare minimum of qualifications that most employers regard as a test of real employability. There’s 100,000 lives transformed for the better if we improve our education system. By a different measurement, it would mean that a child who currently gets 8 C grades at GCSE would – if they were as well-educated, and doing as well as pupils in Shanghai – would get 3 As and 5 Bs at GCSE. That’s a real difference. A concrete step forwards. And one that I believe that we should seek to take and aspire to reach here.

Now, specifically in asking if our examination system is helping us reach that level, one of the first questions we have to ask, and it’s a question, not a statement or a declaration, is are the examinations which we’re asking our children to sit delivering to them the level of knowledge that we have a right to expect if they are going on to compete against children from Shanghai for the jobs and the university places of the future. And into that debate there have already been some voices which have been very clear, that we are not giving children the level of knowledge that they require. I’m just going to reference some objective statements by individuals who again are the users of those from the education system generates as graduates and school leavers.

There was a recent survey from the British Chamber of Commerce and in it over half of small businesses in this country said they thought that the education system was failing to produce individuals with adequate skills needed for work. In their report they said, in general, and this is a reflection of business, not me, “younger people lack numeric skills, research skills, ability to focus and read plus written English”

David Frost, who’s the Director-General of the British Chamber of Commerce, said that a generation had been ‘failed’ by schools. “After 11 years of formal education,” he asserted, “employers say that they’re getting kids coming to them who can’t write, can’t communicate and who don’t have that work ethic.”

And it wasn’t just small businesses. A poll of some of Britain’s largest businesses found that there was widespread concern about the quality of potential recruits. Three out of four of those large businesses surveyed said that school leavers and graduates lack the basic skills needed to join the workforce. And of course, many of those business leaders have subsequently gone on the record. Sir Christopher Gent expressed his concerns, specifically about A Levels, and he argued: “grade inflation has devalued A levels and it is now an OK exam that used to be an excellent one.”

Sir Michael Rake, the Chairman of BT, said: “I personally think A Levels have been devalued.” And when he was still CEO of Tesco, Terry Leahy said: “Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us … are often left to pick up the pieces.”

I might disagree with any individual emphasis that any of those business leaders have put on their criticism of the exams system, but I can’t ignore what they say. And even if I were inclined to ignore what employers are saying, I couldn’t ignore what universities are saying as well. We know that more and more universities are considering remedial course for pupils, who when they arrive are unprepared for the rigours of further study. We know that there are many courses at elite universities, like Imperial, where a disproportionate number of places are taken up by students from outside the UK because they arrive better equipped for those courses. And indeed Sir Richard Sykes, the former Rector of Imperial College London, recently said of our GCSEs, that they produced students who were familiar only with “sound bite science” and he argued that the syllabus that prepared students for Imperial College, was based on a “dumbed down syllabus.” He believed that the examination we had was an inadequate preparation for Higher Education.

And it wasn’t just Sir Richard. The Royal Society in 2011, concluded in its study of science GCSEs that the level of mathematics that was being tested was poor. The Royal Society of Chemistry argued that there had been a catastrophic slippage in school science standards. They said that pupils would get a good GCSE pass by showing only a superficial knowledge of scientific issues. And the Institute of Physics has been critical too. They argue that Physics A Level is not preparing students for university and in particular, the Institute of Physics has lamented the fact that A Level Physics no longer requires pupils to be tested in calculus and their report has found strong criticism from universities about the mathematical knowledge of physics undergraduates. And that’s even though these students are generally amongst the most qualified and hard working of undergraduates.

So we can see there a weight of evidence, from distinguished voices, expressing specific concern about the body of knowledge with which students arrive into the workplace or at university.

Now again, I stress, it is not for me to endorse every single one of those findings or judgements. But it is for me to ask why, when there are so many voices asking critical questions, are they so concerned and what can we do to address them.

It’s also the case that the discontent that is felt amongst employers and universities, or is felt in a more widespread way across the country, relates not just to the level of knowledge but also to the grade that is conferred on students – the badge that suggests that an individual is ready to pass on to the next level. As we saw earlier in Glenys’s presentation, there’s been a significant rise in the number of students securing good passes. Part of that is undoubtedly down to better teaching, to harder working students and to an increase in achievement overall. But is all of it? It’s a question that we need to look at seriously given the scale of the growth in grades. The number of students getting five GCSEs at grade C or above has gone from 45 per cent in 1996 to over 75 per cent in 2010. Is all of that due to an improvement in teaching? Last year, there were over 370,000 A* results. There were only 114,000 comparable results in 1994.

And over the last 15 years, the proportion of pupils achieving at least one A at A level has risen by approximately 11 percentage points. In 2010, more than 34,000 candidates achieved three As at A level or equivalent, which allow them to progress to one the best universities. That’s enough to fill half the places within the Russell Group. Universities are increasingly asking: “how can they choose between so many candidates who appear to be identically qualified?” Again, some of that improvement is undoubtedly due to schools performing better. But for universities the question is, can it be entirely due to that?

As Glenys pointed out, there is research which suggests, from a number of independent academic sources, that there is evidence of grade inflation. Researchers at Durham University have been particularly good at challenging the growth in grade performance. One piece of analysis from Durham concluded that between 1996 and 2007, the average grade achieved by GCSE candidates of the same ‘general ability’ rose by almost two thirds of a grade. And the rise, they argued, is particularly striking in some subjects: in 2007, pupils received a full grade higher in maths, and almost a grade higher in history and French, than pupils of the same ability when they sat the exams in 1996. Similar trends have been found at A level. Academics at Durham found that in 2007, A level candidates received results that were over two grades higher than pupils of comparable ability in 1988. And pupils who would have received a U in Maths A-Level – that’s a fail – in 1988 received a B or C in 2007.

Now, again, I have to emphasise this for the third time, some of that improvement will be down to improvement in our education system: better funding, better teaching, harder working students, but all? We have a duty to ask those tough questions.

We also have a duty to ask tough questions about the types of reforms or change that we might make. Glenys has pointed out that the process, when it comes to awarding grades we have at the moment, is of course a subtle one and it depends on individuals in this room, whose level of statistical knowledge and sophistication in manipulating numbers far outranks my own. But I just want to ask a couple of questions. And one them relates to, and what you might regard an arid debate, between criterion and norm referencing.

Like Glenys, I believe that you can’t go back to a situation where exams all were graded on the basis of norm referencing. I do ask one question for debate, and I don’t mind if, at the end of it, people shoot me down. But I think it’s important to open the debate. Should it be the case that while we award As, Bs and Cs, entirely on the basis of the criteria which people reach, is there a case for exploring whether or not an A* should be allocated to only a fixed percentage of candidates. I’d like to see that debate explored and engaged with.

There’s another question as well. Should we publish more data about how all candidates perform? So yes, of course you know that their work is capable of securing an A or an A*. But you also know how they’re ranked, depending on the subject. I know that there are some exam boards that are debating the advisability of this but one anecdote weighs very heavily with me. Now I know – and I suspect that others of you may point this out later – that data is not the plural of anecdote but I was struck when I visited Burlington Danes Academy that the headteacher there, Sally Coates, had a rank order system she devised. Every half term, students sit examinations in every subject. They’re ranked, and performance is shared between the student, their family and the teacher. So every student knows whether they’re first or 120th in English, mathematics, and history – and also for sporting achievement, cultural achievement and effort overall. At the end of each term, the performance is then published. So students have an opportunity to improve their performance between half term, when it’s private, and the end of term when it’s public. When I asked the headteacher, Sally Coates, if this wasn’t a bit – please excuse my phrase – ‘hardcore’, and had it resulted in a revolt amongst students and parents, she looked at me and said, ‘actually, it’s the single most popular thing that I’ve done.’ Parents love it, because they’re given information that they’d previously been denied.

In the past, parents asked, ‘How has my son done?’ and they would receive the reply, ‘He’s a lovely boy.’ Now they accurately knew where he stood. But secondly, it was also the case that individual students could then compare their performance and their contemporaries’ performance in subjects. And students were now ranking teachers, on the basis of those who added value and demanding that certain teachers who were not getting them up the rankings be moved on, and that they be transferred into the classes of those teachers who were getting pupils up the rankings. So if ranking can achieve that in one school in White City, if additional data and transparency can generate those beneficial results, is there a case for exam boards publishing more data about the performance of students, rather than less. It could be a completely wrongheaded idea. But I put it out there explicitly for debate.

Technology

I also think, that as well as considering norm referencing and ranking, and the two of course are connected, we do of course need to look at other changes which are occurring elsewhere which will have a bearing on how achievement is assessed in the future. Technology is critical. As Jerry Jarvis pointed out, the examination system industry in this country has moved from being ‘a cottage industry to mass manufacturing.’ As it has done so, there is an inevitable move towards the greater deployment of technology in assessment. But the rate of technological change in education I think is rapidly going to accelerate in the next few years. We’ve already seen iTunesU and the Khan Academy have transformed the delivery of content. We already know that there are more and more sophisticated ways of using technology for formative assessment. So we have to ask ourselves ‘how will technology change the way in which assessment should be delivered and grades should be awarded?’ I think that looking at the capacity that technology has to transform the accuracy and the authority of assessment, it also gives us the potential to generate yet more data, in order to know how our schools, how our teachers and how our whole system is performing.

Resitting

In talking about teachers, I also want to ensure that our exam and our assessment system is fair to them. I recognise that the structure of accountability that we’ve set up and in particular the way that’s gone hand in hand with certain examination changes has put additional pressures on them. As Glenys pointed out, there are different views about the effect of modularisation. I’m very clearly of the view that modularisation has led to people absorbing knowledge and then forgetting it, rather that taking the whole body of knowledge necessary for a course together, and using it to best effect synoptically at the end of an examination course. I also think in sheer practical terms that modularisation and the culture or re-sitting has meant that more time is spent on external assessment and less time is spent on teaching and learning

Early entry

I also think there is a case at looking at the culture of early entry. It is the case that there are many students of comparable ability who if entered early for exams do less well and that the culture of early entry is being driven by the way in which accountability is worked in this country. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with truly outstanding students getting particular qualification out of the way, as it were, so they can then progress. But we do need to look at the way in which the nature of accountability and the way in which our exams are offered have meant that the natural progression through the curriculum has become distorted.

I also think that as well as looking at technology, early entry and the culture of re-sitting, we also need to ask ourselves, overall, if we are, in the questions that we ask, and in the design of those questions, encouraging the sorts of thinking skills and creativity that are so important.

As we saw earlier, and as Glenys pointed out, the structure of some questions in modern exams sometimes leads the student by the hand through the process of acquiring marks. Curiously, I believe that many of those who are most anxious to reinsert creativity and original thinking, and a display of knowledge in the round, would actually find the question from an era that they would have derided as the time of rote learning, may in many respects be questions better designed to elicit that degree of creativity that some of the contemporary questions that our exams ask now.

So some questions, which I’d like you to engage with. And in leading that debate, I’m confident that in the team we have at Ofqual, we have the right people and the right institution with the right remit to make a difference.

The role of Ofqual

One of the things I’m specifically keen to do is to emphasise that, with the leadership that Ofqual has, there is a new requirement for Ofqual to do more. I believe that Ofqual shouldn’t simply be monitoring achievement over time. Ofqual specifically, and this is the injunction we place on it in our Education Bill, should be asking itself the question: ‘how do we do and how do our exams do, compared to the best in the world?’

That necessarily means that Ofqual moves from being an organisation that perhaps in the past provided reassurance, to one that consistently provides challenge to politicians, to our education system overall and to exam boards and awarding bodies. That is why I think it is so important that Ofqual, like all regulators, if it is to be an effective watchdog.…sharper teeth. It is why I believe that Ofqual should the ability to fine if necessary. We do have to ask ourselves questions about this summer’s examinations. Why were there so many mistakes? Why did we leave students to have unnecessary heartache at a time of stress and tension? It’s not enough to be complacent and say that these things happen. We’re dealing with some of the most important moment in some people’s lives and therefore it is critically necessary for a regulator like Ofqual to have the powers required, to ensure that the many gifted people that work in our exam boards and awarding bodies, make sure that every year they do their best for students who are doing their best.

In stressing the role that Ofqual plays, it’s important to recognise that no matter how gifted, effective or assertive that particular body is, the responsibility for maintaining standards, and indeed the responsibility for raising standards, rests on all of us. It’s important that collectively we recognise that exam boards and awarding bodies, in the natural and healthy desire to be the best as an exam board, don’t succumb to the commercial temptation to elbow others out of the way, by saying to schools and to others “we provide an easier route to more passes than others.” I’m sure that would be a temptation that would never be felt in any breast in this room, but it’s important that that temptation, whilst it exists, is resisted. If it isn’t, then action might need to be taken.

It’s also important that we recognise that there is a direct responsibility on government. I talked about accountability earlier and the way in which it can skew performance. One of the things that I’ve been accused of recently is that by introducing a new accountability measure, the English Baccalaureate, I’ve skewed performance. Well actually, the importance of the English Baccalaureate cannot be overstated. It is one accountability measure amongst many. The reason that it has had the resonance that is has, is because it is popular and it reflects the truth. A good performance or strong performance in these academic subjects: English, mathematics, the three sciences, modern languages and a humanity, like history or geography, confers on students the chance to progress, whether on to a great job, or a high performing university. Nudging students towards these subjects and asking schools which don’t have pupils performing well in these subjects why not, is a way of generating greater social mobility and higher achievement overall.

I believe the way in which parents now ask schools whether or not students are being offered these subjects reflects the fact that the common sense of the majority of parents, and the shrewd judgment of university admissions tutors, and the hard won experience of employers, all coincide in saying that these are the qualification that they prize. Not the only qualifications that they prize and schools shouldn’t be allowed to say that pursuing these qualifications squeezes out creativity. It is perfectly possible to combine these subjects with creative subjects with cultural reach, and with sporting achievements, and with everything that gives a rounded education. These are the subjects which are a passport to further progression and it’s important that schools recognise that that is the demand of parents, higher education institutions and employers.

As well as having this accountability measure, we will be publishing more and more data. It will possible in the future for newspapers, for trade unions, for anyone to construct the data that we publish to create their own baccalaureate, or their own basket of measures by which schools can be judged. And if for any reason that the English Baccalaureate is superseded by another measure developed by another institution or media organisation, which has greater currency….great. My aim is to ensure that the data is there for meaningful, nuanced and rounded comparisons to be made and for us all to push things in the right direction.

One of the reasons why I’m anxious that we should have that accuracy in the data is because I was moved so profoundly by Alison Wolf’s report on vocational education and the way in which she laid bare the fact that there are so many students that had pursued qualifications, which were nominally the equivalent of three or four GCSEs, but in the world of work weren’t seen as even amounting to a single GCSE. That is why we’re engaged in the process of ensuring that there is genuine equivalence and genuine parity between those vocational subjects that are every bit as testing as GCSEs and rigorous GCSES. We’ll be saying more in due course on how we’ll be taking forward Alison’s work.

So some questions, some assertions and I hope a clear direction of travel.

Finally, a warning: if the changes that I make – or that I want to make – win some favour with the audience in this room, and we’re able to move together collectively, one thing may happen in English education. Something unprecedented. Potentially, some might say, revolutionary. We might have a year – even a year while I’m still in office – where GCSE and A level results dip. Where fewer students get A stars, fewer students get As. When that happens, there will be an inevitable pointing of fingers – mostly, in my direction. ‘You’re presiding over a decline, you’re presiding over failure.’ Well, I won’t believe that’s true for a moment. I believe that our children and our teachers will be doing better than ever. But I think that if our exam system is accurate, precise, demanding and world-class, there will be years where performance will dip, as well as rise. And it’s far, far, far better if we’re honest with our children, honest with ourselves as a nation, and have an exam system that is world beating and respected everywhere. Because what we want an exam system to do, in the word of my old Scots mother, is ‘tell the truth, and shame the devil.’

Thank you.

The speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 23 November 2011.

Thank you for coming to Ealing and to this great comprehensive. Twyford is a superb state school which draws children from every social background and gives them all a rigorous academic education. Its performance in every area – from modern languages to music – is outstanding. This school, under its inspirational head, Alice Hudson, is a great place of learning, a powerful engine of social mobility and a joy to visit. Which is why I hope there’ll be time for everyone who wants to, to talk to Alice, see more of her school and see what great state education can achieve.

We’re fortunate that there are so many great headteachers in our schools. In the last few months I’ve had the privilege of talking to many of them. Heroes like Jim McAteer of Hartismere School in Suffolk, Mike Griffiths of Northampton School for Boys, Barry Day of the Greenwood Academy in Nottingham, Mike Spinks of Urmston Grammar in Greater Manchester, Mike Crawshaw of Debenham High and Greg Martin of Durand in Lambeth. And heroines like Sally Coates at Burlington Danes in Hammersmith, Lubna Khan down the road at Berrymede here in Ealing, Sue John at Lampton in Hounslow, Joan McVittie at Woodside High in Tottenham and Kathy August at Manchester Academy.

After nine months in this job there’s no doubt in my mind that we have a wonderfully talented cohort of new teachers and a superb generation of school leaders. But despite the dedication of those professionals, and the hard work of our children, the sad fact is that when it comes to objective measures of our children’s academic performance, we’re falling behind other nations.

Just before Christmas the most comprehensive survey of global educational achievement ever conducted showed just how daunting the challenge is. The OECD published its PISA league tables – they record progress in student achievement. But we haven’t been progressing relative to our competitors; we’ve been retreating. In the last ten years we have plummeted in the rankings: from 4th to 16th for science, 7th to 25th for literacy and 8th to 28th for maths. In those tests of mathematics, Chinese 15-year-olds are now more than two years ahead of 15-year-olds in this country. And in maths, the OECD found that just 1.8 per cent of 15-year-olds in this country ‘can generalise and creatively use information based on their own investigations and modelling of complex problem situations’. In Shanghai it’s 25 per cent.

And it’s not just the case that we’re falling behind, it’s also the case that the gap between the opportunities open to wealthier students and poorer students has grown wider over the last ten years. Opportunity has become less equal. Children in wealthier areas are twice as likely to get three As at A level as children in poorer areas. And the number of our very poorest children – those eligible for free school meals – who made it to Oxbridge actually fell in recent years. In the penultimate year for which we have figures it was 45. And in the last year, 40 out of 80,000.

These figures tell a terrible story of horizons narrowed, opportunity restricted, lives blighted. It’s not just offensive to any notion of social justice that so many should lose out in this way. It’s also a threat to our economic recovery. And a step backwards – to a past when we rationed access to knowledge and assumed there had to be a limit on how much poorer children could achieve. There is a real danger that if we don’t change we will remain stuck in that unhappy past.

First, we have to improve the quality of entrants into teaching by recruiting more talented people into the classroom. The best-performing nations – like Finland, South Korea and Singapore – all recruit their teachers from the top pool of graduates. Which is why we are reforming teacher training, devoting resources to getting top graduates in maths and science into the classroom and expanding programmes such as Teach First, Teaching Leaders and Future Leaders, which attract the best and the brightest into teaching. We also need to reform the rules on behaviour and discipline. The biggest barrier to talented people coming into or staying in teaching is poor behaviour by pupils – which is why we will strengthen teachers’ powers to maintain order in our new Education Bill.

Second, we have to increase the level of operational autonomy in our schools – over issues like pay, staffing, timetabling and spending – matching what’s happening in the best education systems across the world. Again I’m delighted that well over 400 good and outstanding schools have applied to take up our offer of academy status. And that over 200 parent, teacher and charity groups have applied to set up Free Schools. We’re also working with many local authorities around the country to ensure that dozens of the poorer performing schools in their areas are taken over by proven independent sponsors. In eight months we’ve more than doubled the number of academies.

And third, you need mechanisms that send a relentless signal that you believe in holding everyone to higher and higher standards. That’s why we introduced our English Baccalaureate in last week’s league tables to encourage more children – especially from poorer backgrounds – to take the types of qualifications that open doors to the best universities and the most exciting careers.

Yes, this pace of change is radical – but it needs to be. Those who want to keep the current system unreformed can only justify it by deluding themselves and others about the world around us. Millions of Asian students graduating from schools which outpace our own joining the international trade system? Ignore it. Moore’s Law in computer science, genetics, biological engineering and robotics transforming industry after industry before our eyes? Ignore it. Other nations ruthlessly plundering best practice from the highest-performing jurisdictions to get better and better? Ignore it and say since there are more As now at A Level than 25 years ago, everything is fine.

We cannot afford to remain stuck with a school system that isn’t adapting when the pace of change in business is accelerating. The movie of the moment – the Social Network – tells the story of a company, Facebook, which almost no-one had heard of a few years ago and which is now worth billions. The jobs of the future will be found in industries none of us can envisage now. But the biography of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerburg powerfully underlines the lesson that a rigorous academic education is the best preparation for the future. When Zuckerburg applied to college he was asked what languages he could speak and write. As well as English he listed French, Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek. He also studied maths and science at school. He would have done very well in our English Baccalaureate. And the breakthroughs his rigorously academic education helped create are now providing new opportunities for billions. Which is why we need schools that equip students with the intellectual capital to make the most of these opportunities. Critically that means giving every child a profound level of mathematical and scientific knowledge, as well as deep immersion in the reasoning skills generated by subjects such as history and modern foreign languages.

We must change fast and we will change or we are going to be culturally and materially impoverished. Across the globe, the future lies in elevating our sights, raising aspiration, daring to imagine the new heights our children might scale. Which is why we need to step up the pace of reform, not slow down. And, critically, why we should set the benchmark for our children higher still.

That’s why today I’m launching a new review of the entire National Curriculum. It’s badly in need of reform. It’s too long: in total, the full document approaches nearly 500 pages. It’s patronising towards teachers and stifles innovation by being far too prescriptive about how to teach. Teachers are instructed on how to use specific techniques in RE and commanded to use certain types of source material in history. Its pages are littered with irrelevant material – mainly high-sounding aims such as the requirement to ‘challenge injustice’ which are wonderful in politicians’ speeches – but contribute nothing to helping students deepen their stock of knowledge.

And at the same time as having become so bloated with prescriptive detail about how to teach and empty rhetoric about what teaching should achieve, the curriculum is decidedly thin on actual knowledge. So we have a compulsory history curriculum in secondary schools that doesn’t mention any historical figures – except William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano, the great abolitionists (and then only in the explanatory notes). We have a compulsory geography curriculum in secondary schools that mentions no countries apart from the UK, no continents, no rivers, no oceans, no mountains and no cities, although it does mention the European Union. And we have a compulsory music curriculum at Key Stage 3 in secondary school which doesn’t mention a single composer, musician, conductor or piece of music.

The curriculum that was prepared for our primary schools by the last Government was similarly denuded of content. The English curriculum didn’t mention a single writer, novel, poem or play. The arts and music curriculum didn’t mention any artists or musicians, or indeed any composers or pieces of music. And the programme for historical, geographical and social understanding didn’t mention a single historical figure or specify a single historical period that had to be studied. The primary curriculum doesn’t require children to learn about adding or subtracting fractions – but does require that five-year-olds create and perform dances from a variety of cultures. The curriculum doesn’t include anything in science on the water cycle but does, helpfully, inform swimming teachers that pupils should be taught to ‘move in water’.

The absence of such rigour leaves our children falling further and further behind. In all those countries that perform best in international comparison studies like PISA, the curriculum contains more core knowledge and less extraneous material. As Tim Oates says:

In all high-performing systems, the fundamentals of subjects are strongly emphasised, have substantial time allocation, and are the focus of considerable attention in learning programmes.

Comparing Hong Kong and England alone, examples of topics explicitly covered in Hong Kong at primary school but not in England include:

calculations with fractions
the solution of equations
the properties of cones, pyramids and spheres
the number of days in each month and the number of days in a year
area and perimeter is limited to rectilinear shapes, and volume.
Examples of science topics explicitly covered in the Singapore primary curriculum but not the England one are:

understanding of cells as the basic unit of life; how cells divide to facilitate growth; identification of different parts of plant and animal cells
understanding the importance of the water cycle
understanding of the link between the Earth’s position relative to the Sun as a contributing factor to Earth’s ability to support life.
The TIMMS survey of maths and science teaching in education systems around the world compares those topics taught to children in different countries. It reveals some big gaps in the English curriculum. The following common topics aren’t in the English primary curriculum:

adding and subtracting simple fractions
comparing and matching different representations of the same data
finding a rule for a relationship given some pairs of numbers.
And these common topics aren’t in the primary curriculum for science:

plant and animal reproduction
energy requirements of plants and animals
ways that common communicable diseases are transmitted
properties and uses of metals
common energy sources and their practical uses
common features of Earth’s landscape
weather conditions from day to day or over the seasons
fossils of animals and plants.
A poor curriculum doesn’t just cause problems in the classroom, it also makes it much harder to set high-quality, rigorous exams. As Tim Oates said last year:

If the curriculum specifications contain irrelevant content, there will be erosion of face validity of assessments and qualifications, leading to a loss of confidence in national assessment and public qualifications. Developing fair and accurate assessment relies on clarity in the statement of that which is to be assessed – this was not provided by the highly generic statement of the revised secondary curriculum.

This is one reason why Key Stage 2 tests have become devalued in recent years. It has also led to problems with those GCSEs – English, maths and science – that have to fulfill curriculum requirements.

The relationship between curriculum and assessment can also lead to false reassurance for parents. For example, the secondary English curriculum lists a huge range of writers from Bunyan and Chaucer, to Larkin and Amis, yet there is very little requirement to study writers from any period or genre. This means that exam boards tend to focus on the same texts year after year. An unpublished departmental survey suggests that over 90 per cent of schools teach Of Mice and Men to their GCSE students. And as many students only read one novel for GCSE, the curriculum’s impression of wide-ranging study is misleading.

So the need for a complete overhaul of the curriculum is very clear – we have taken a serious wrong turn and we need to be brought back to the road travelled by the most successful education systems around the world. As we explained in the White Paper, the remit is clear:

The National Curriculum will act as a new benchmark for all schools. It will be slim, clear and authoritative enough for all parents to see what their child might be expected to know at every stage in their school career. They will be able to use it to hold all schools to account for how effectively their child has grasped the essentials of, for example, English language and literature, core mathematical processes and science.

Our timetable will allow this new curriculum in English, science and maths to be introduced in 2013. All these subjects – alongside PE – will remain compulsory at all key stages. Our aim is to introduce programmes of study in other subjects in 2014. And this timetable will allow for extensive consultation amongst interested parties. Of course I have views – some of them well-known – on the value and importance of different subjects and topics, but it is crucial that everyone have their voice heard in what is an extremely important national debate.

We are lucky to have as guides an advisory panel containing many of best current and former headteachers, including Sir Michael Wilshaw from Mossborne, John Macintosh, formerly of The Oratory, and Bernice McCabe from North London Collegiate. And an expert panel to collate evidence on the best international examples led by Tim Oates, Director of Research at Cambridge Assessment, with the support of some of the most innovative and inspiring education academies currently working in this country – such as Professor Dylan William.

These great men and women have a tough job to do. We live in a rapidly changing world and we need a truly modern curriculum that provides schools and teachers with a baseline, a benchmark that will be meaningful to parents and the wider public but that does not fetter the ability of heads and teachers to innovate and adapt. As is true of all of our reforms we don’t have time to wait – we must push ahead now on all fronts. We’ve already fallen too far behind – in this area as in so many others – made the wrong choices. I look forward to all of your support and help as we take this next step on the path to a better education for all our children.