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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.

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

The whole virtue of the ‘School food plan’ is that it’s there to help – it emphasises the vital importance of making sure food is high quality and tasty and creating a culture in your school where everyone appreciates the importance of food.

What I’d like to see is more children eating school lunches and fewer having packed lunches, and more children feeling healthier and more energetic throughout the day.

I would like to thank John and Henry for the hard work that went into this this plan and believe we now have a set of actions that can make a real difference in schools right across the country.

The comments made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 10 July 2013.

The teaching schools initiative plays a key role in the government’s plans for a school-led system, with schools freed from the constraints of central government direction, and teachers and schools placed firmly at the heart of school improvement.

I am committed to supporting this country’s education system to become an autonomous one, where the best schools lead the way in teaching teachers and where schools work together in partnership – supporting one another to provide an outstanding education for all.

That is precisely why I am eager for independent schools to become leaders of teaching schools.

I believe strongly that every child should have an education of the highest quality and I urge all independent schools to get involved, to apply for teaching school designation, and to become key players in leading this country’s school system now and in the future.

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

On 7 February this year, I made a statement outlining the next stage in our programme of raising standards in schools. I outlined draft programmes of study for a revised national curriculum, a new approach to qualifications for secondary school students and also a new and fairer way of holding schools to account for the quality of their teaching.

No national curriculum can be modernised without paying close attention to what’s been happening in education internationally.

Officials in the Department for Education have spent years examining and analysing the curricula used in the world’s most successful school systems such as Hong Kong, Massachusetts, Singapore and Finland.

Informed by that work and in consultation with subject experts and teachers, the department produced a draft revised national curriculum, which we put out for public consultation 5 months ago.

We have given all the submissions we received during the consultation period close and careful consideration and today we are publishing a summary of the comments received and the government’s response.

We are also publishing a revised national curriculum framework for all subjects except key stage 4 English, mathematics and science.

Copies of each of these documents have been placed in the library of the house. A consultation on key stage 4 English, mathematics and science will follow in the autumn, once decisions on GCSE content for those subjects have been taken.

The publication of our proposals provoked a vigorous and valuable national debate on what is, and what should be, taught in our schools. We have welcomed this debate.

It is right that every member of society should care about the content of the national curriculum, not only because it helps to define the ambitions that we set for our young people, but because of what it says about the knowledge that we, as a society, think it is essential that we should pass down from one generation to the next.

The updated national curriculum framework that we are publishing today features a number of revisions to the draft made on the basis of evidence and arguments presented to us during the consultation period. In particular we have revised the draft programmes of study for design and technology to ensure that they sufficiently reflect our aspirations that it should be a rigorous and forward-looking subject that will set children on a path to be the next generation of designers and engineers.

We have also revised the programmes of study for history. We have given teachers a greater level of flexibility over how to structure lessons and we have increased the coverage of world history, while also requiring all children to be taught the essential narrative of this country’s past.

Other significant changes include the inclusion of a stronger emphasis on vocabulary development in the programmes of study for English and greater flexibility in the choice of foreign languages which primary schools will now be required to teach. And perhaps the most significant change of all is the replacement of ICT with computing. Instead of just learning to use programmes created by others, it is vital that children learn to create their own programmes.

These changes will reinforce our drive to raise standards in our schools.

They will ensure that the new national curriculum provides a rigorous basis for teaching, provides a benchmark for all schools to improve their performance, and gives children and parents a better guarantee that every student will acquire the knowledge to succeed in the modern world.

Having confirmed our intentions for the new national curriculum we are, in accordance with the legislation that underpins it, commencing a one month consultation on the legislative order which will give it statutory effect. Subject to the outcome of that consultation, we intend to finalise the new national curriculum this autumn so that schools have a year to prepare to teach it from September 2014.

The statement made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State of Education, on 11 June 2013.

Mr Speaker.

With your permission I should like to make a statement on the future of examinations.

There is now a widespread consensus – underpinned by today’s persuasive report from the Education Select Committee – that we need to reform our examination system to restore public confidence.

That is why today we are publishing draft details of new GCSE content in core academic subjects.

And the independent regulator Ofqual is publishing its own consultation on the regulation of reformed GCSEs.

We are publishing the draft content in English, maths, science, history, geography and modern and ancient languages alongside this statement.

We will consult on that content over the next 10 weeks.

We expect these subjects (with the exception of languages) to be ready for first teaching in September 2015, with the first exams being taken in summer 2017.

Languages and other subjects will follow soon after, with first teaching from September 2016 and first exams being taken from summer 2018.

The new subject content published today has been drawn up in collaboration with distinguished subject experts – whom I would like to thank.

In line with our changes to the national curriculum, the new specifications are more challenging, more ambitious and more rigorous.

That means more extended writing in subjects like English and history; more testing of advanced problem-solving skills in mathematics and science; more testing of mathematics in science GCSEs, to improve progression to A Levels; more challenging mechanics problems in physics; a stronger focus on evolution and genetics in biology; and a greater focus on foreign language composition, so that pupils require deeper language skills.

This higher level of demand will equip our children to go onto higher education or a good apprenticeship – and we can raise the bar knowing that we have the best generation of teachers ever in our schools to help students achieve more than ever before.

Our education reforms – the growth in the number of academies and free schools, the improvements in teacher recruitment and training and sharper accountability from improved league tables and a strengthened Ofsted – are raising standards in schools. That means new GCSEs will remain universal qualifications – accessible, with good teaching, to the same proportion of pupils as now.

The specifications we are publishing today also give awarding organisations a clearer indication of our expectations in each subject.

Under the previous system, specifications were too vague. This caused suspicion and speculation that some exam boards were ‘harder’ than others, undermining the credibility of the exam system as a whole.

Including more detail in our requirements for subject content will ensure greater consistency and fairness across subjects and between exam boards.

By reducing variability in the system, we can ensure that all young people leave school with qualifications respected by employers, universities and further education.

While making GCSE content more rigorous, we must also correct the structural problems with GCSEs that we inherited.

As today’s report from the Select Committee confirms, the problems with English GCSE generated last summer proved beyond any doubt that the current system requires reform.

Both the Select Committee report and Ofqual recognise that controlled assessment (which counted for 60% of the English GCSE qualification) undermined the reliability of the assessment as a whole.

That’s why I asked Ofqual to review the regulatory framework for GCSEs:

To judge how we might limit coursework and controlled assessment;

And also to reflect on how we could lift a cap on aspiration by reducing the two tier structure of some GCSEs.

I also asked Ofqual to explore how we might reform our grading structure better to reflect the full range of student ability and reward the very best performers.

Ofqual’s consultation sets out how reformed GCSEs can be more rigorous and stretching, and encourage students to develop and demonstrate deep understanding.

It is proposed that coursework and controlled assessment will largely be replaced by linear, externally marked end-of-course exams.

It is proposed that the current two tier system will end except where it is absolutely essential – in maths and science.

In those subjects, Ofqual is consulting on how to improve the current arrangements to deal with the concerns we have expressed about capping aspiration.

Ofqual is also consulting on a new grading system which gives fairer recognition to the whole ability range.

Young people in this country deserve an education system that can compete with the best in the world, a system which sets – and achieves – high expectations.

Today’s reforms are essential to achieve this goal. By making GCSEs more demanding, more fulfilling, and more stretching we can give our young people the broad, deep and balanced education which will equip them to win in the global race.

I commend this statement to the House.

The comments made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 6 June 2013.

We must ensure that in the most tragic cases the right lessons are learned so the same mistakes do not happen time and time again.

The independent SCR panel members are experts in their field and will bring much needed independent, rigorous scrutiny to the system – advising, supporting and challenging LSCBs to do better at completing and publishing SCRs.

It is only by identifying where things do not work that we can help professionals and managers across the country to improve frontline practice, and ensure that the most tragic cases we have seen over the years are never repeated.

The comments made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 17 May 2013.

Good social workers literally save lives; the bad can leave them in ruins. I am delighted that Isabelle Trowler has agreed to lead our reform programme, to challenge as well as to champion the profession so that vulnerable children and families are better protected.

I am also very pleased to announce our support for Frontline, an exciting proposal and a real challenge for the brightest applicants who will have the privilege and satisfaction of helping to improve the lives of the most vulnerable children in the country.

The speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 9 May 2013.

Truth is beauty and beauty is truth

Parents, it is sometimes alleged, don’t want choice in education. Well, many of us here are parents, so let me pose some choices.

You come home to find your 17-year-old daughter engrossed in a book. Which would delight you more – if it were Twilight or Middlemarch?

You see your son is totally absorbed, hunched over the family laptop. You steal a look over his shoulder – and what would please you more – to see him playing Angry Birds, or coding?

Your son says he wants to spend more time with one particular group of friends. Which would be more inspiring – because he wants to improve his pool or because they’re in the cadets and he wants to join?

Your daughter says she wants to compete with the very best, but which is more wonderful – on Big Brother or at the Rio Olympics?

False choices? I suspect those of us who are parents would recognise that there are all too many children and young people only too happy to lose themselves in Stephanie Meyer, while away hours flinging electronic fowl at virtual pigs, hang out rather than shape up and dream of fame finding them rather than them pursuing glory.

And I also suspect that all of us who are parents would be delighted if our children were learning to love George Eliot, write their own computer programmes, daring to take themselves out of their comfort zone and aspiring to be faster, higher or stronger.

Unless, of course, we write for Guardian Education.

Because it is natural for parents to want their children to be happy, fulfilled and successful. Not in a narrow material sense. But through the development of their natural curiosity, talents and potential.

It is natural for any of us to feel a sense of pride at our child’s graduation, passing out parade or personal best.

We all harbour high hopes for our own children, and we know they are happiest when they succeed in any endeavour beyond their own expectations.

R.H. Tawney, the great progressive thinker, argued that, ‘what a wise parent would wish for their children, so the State must wish for all its children.’

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield

And that is why, under this government, the Department for Education is setting higher expectations for every child. Because that is what parents want. It is what makes children happier by introducing them to levels of accomplishment they may never have envisaged. And it is what the overwhelming majority of teachers – who believe in the nobility of their vocation – are doing every day.

But what makes the setting of higher expectations more difficult is the culture of excuses and low aspirations which some in the education establishment still defend.

Most recently we had 100 academics from university departments of education writing to a newspaper objecting to the new draft national curriculum. Their concerns? The curriculum expected too much of young people, too young and by seeking to get children to know more, they would enjoy themselves less.

The assumption lying behind the letter was that the level of aspiration embodied in the current curriculum, its associated teaching methods and our national examinations was already high enough.

Well, that is not an assumption I share.

As Dr Johnson once observed of two women arguing from the windows of houses on opposing sides of a street – ‘they will never agree, Boswell, because they are arguing from different premises’.

And I have a different starting premise from those 100 academics who are so heavily invested in the regime of low expectations and narrow horizons which they have created.

I believe we need to ask more – much more – of our education system.

Earth hath not anything to show more fair

Let’s begin with English.

Earlier this week one of our best-loved writers – certainly in the eyes of my daughter – regretfully acknowledged a terrible truth about English students.

Jacqueline Wilson revealed that the fan letters she received from English boys and girls were invariably worse-written than letters from foreign students. Fans from abroad, she said, would apologise for their poor English. But their English was better than the English of the English.

Jacqueline Wilson is not – by any measure – a reactionary nostalgist in the republic of letters. Her work deals – unsparingly and in detail – with divorce, mental illness, life in the care system and growing up poor. We’re not talking pixies dancing under the Faraway Tree, here.

But despite – indeed perhaps because of – her interest in the real lives of today’s children, rather than the imagined existences adults conjure for them, she chose to speak out about one of the scandals of our times.

As have other children’s writers – such as Susan Hill – who are also eloquent in their concern about the failure of so many young people to use the English language with confidence.

Why is it that after seven years of compulsory schooling, one in seven children still can’t read and write properly?

Why are there around 500 primary schools where more than a third of children can’t read and write properly?

It is not as though the level of literacy we expect at age eleven is impossibly demanding.

Under the system – as currently constituted – you’re assessed to be scoring well if you get what’s called a level 4 in English at the end of primary school.

But even this – supposedly secure – foundation isn’t anywhere near good enough. Nearly a third of children who get at least a good level 4 in English and maths fail to go on to secure five A*- C passes including GCSE English and maths – the minimum level of literacy and numeracy required for future employability.

We’ve taken action to deal with this scandal.

We’ve introduced a screening check at the age of 6 to make sure children are recognising and blending letter sounds to read words fluently. It’s designed to help identify those who may have reading difficulties and ensure they are supported in their reading.

In the trial we ran, more than a third of teachers said it had helped them identify issues they would not otherwise have spotted.

But the usual suspects in the unions objected to this means of raising expectations at the start of primary school. Just as they have objected to our desire to ensure that children are properly literate at the end of primary school.

We are introducing a basic test of competence in spelling, punctuation and grammar at the end of primary school.

But again the unions – and their allies – have objected to the suggestion that 11-year-olds should be able to spell words in Standard English, use full stops and commas with confidence, or deploy adverbs appropriately.

One of the critics – Michael Rosen – attacked the proposed assessment in his column, ‘Letter from a curious parent’, in the Guardian.

Mr Rosen criticised the test on the basis that there was no such thing as correct grammar, but if you were perverse enough to want to ensure children knew how to use Standard English you could of course devise some form of assessment. However, such a test was only ever accessible to a minority because when a comparable test of grammatical knowledge existed in the past, only a minority of students passed that. So this new test was clearly a fiendish exercise to brand hundreds of thousands of children as failures so that they were reconciled to a future of supine wage slavery.

I could argue that nothing is more likely to condemn any young person to limited employment opportunities – or indeed joblessness – than illiteracy. I could point out that the newspaper Mr Rosen writes for has a style guide, a team of trained sub-editors and a revise sub-editor as well as a night editor and a backbench of assistant night editors to ensure that what appears under his – and everyone else’s – byline is correct English. I could observe that it was a funny form of progressive thinking that held that the knowledge which elites have used to communicate with confidence and authority over the years – and which they pay to ensure their children can master – should be denied to the majority of children.

But I will abjure such Ciceronian rhetorical tricks.

And quote instead from John Blake of Labour Teachers. He said Michael Rosen’s column should be renamed ‘Letter from a conspiracy theorist’ and was ‘basically an argument that poor kids can’t possibly learn to write properly’.

Which strikes me as a fair summary. And a revealing insight into the depth of the low expectations on one side of the education debate.

But what is equally revealing – and much more optimistic – is that the person calling out Michael Rosen is not a Tory MP or a conservative commentator but a teacher – a Labour teacher.

And the reason why I am confident that we can set higher expectations for our children is because there is a culture of higher and higher expectations now being driven in more and more classrooms by the best young generation of teachers ever.

Teachers like those working in the London Academy of Excellence – established by Brighton College and its partners to ensure more disadvantaged children from the poorest parts of London made it to elite universities.

Or those at Ark’s King Solomon Academy, also in one of the poorest parts of London, where all children – all children – are expected to read the Bible, Jane Austen, Shakespearean pastoral comedy such as As You Like It, a Shakespearean tragedy and Primo Levi alongside George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Erich Maria Remarque and Malcolm Gladwell.

And if you think that reading list is at the upper end of expectations, then consider what they teach at Barnes Primary School and Thomas Jones Primary – with one of the most disadvantaged intakes in London.

At Barnes students in year 5 – aged 9 or 10 – study Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and read works by Beverley Naidoo, Leon Garfield, Neil Gaiman and Ian Seraillier, Elizabeth Laird and Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

In year 6 – aged 10 or 11 – they study the Edwardian ballad The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, Street Child by Berlie Doherty, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Macbeth, Ted Hughes, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights and Kevin Crossley-Holland’s translation of Beowulf.

At Thomas Jones – where a majority of students come from homes where English is not spoken as the first language – they set an even more ambitious range of texts to study in Year 6 – including not just Pullman, Golding, Oscar Wilde, Kenneth Grahame and both A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, but also Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and The Tempest as well as poems by William Blake, Rupert Brooke, Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson and a Shakespeare sonnet.

This level of ambition – set and achieved by teachers without any direction by government or its agencies – is all the more impressive when you consider how relatively low expectations have been set in our existing national examinations.

In the most recent year for which we have figures almost 280,000 candidates studied a novel – one novel – for the AQA GCSE. The overwhelming majority – more than 190,000 – studied Of Mice and Men. The overwhelming majority of the rest studied other 20th century texts including works such as the Lord of the Flies which – we should note – are considered appropriate for primary children in the best schools. The numbers studying novels written before 1900 are tiny in comparison – 1,236 studied Pride and Prejudice, 285 Far From The Madding Crowd and 187 Wuthering Heights. Added together that is fewer than 2,000 candidates – less than 1% of the total.

The situation is even worse in drama. 16,929 candidates chose An Inspector Calls, 991 Pygmalion and 563 Hobson’s Choice. All great plays – but all written in the 20th century – indeed in the case of Priestley’s classic first performed after the end of the Second World War. Just one candidate out of more than 18,000 chose to study a pre-twentieth century play – She Stoops to Conquer.

Of course AQA are not the only board offering an English Literature GCSE.

Edexcel also offer English Literature GCSE. And they have a different record from AQA. Not a single one of their candidates studied a pre-20th century novel or play.

When our exams are still pitching expectations so low it is no surprise that reform-minded teachers want change.

I was delighted to read one English teacher in the TES recently – Amy Winston – welcome the more stretching content in the new national curriculum for English. She particularly approved of the expectation that all students should study Romantic Poetry. And I am delighted by the prospect of more students enjoying the opportunity to get to know Keats, Byron, Shelley and above all Wordsworth.

But I acknowledge not every teacher is as sanguine as Amy Winston. Another influential English Teacher, Joe Kirby, has taken me to task in his well-read blog ‘Pragmatic Education’

He argues ‘the secondary curriculum in English schools is not strong enough to raise the bar and close the gap in GCSE attainment. Its lack of substance and specificity since 2007 has played a part in the neglect of rigour: neither the 2007 nor the proposed 2014 English curriculum specifies a single literary text.’

I have to weigh carefully the concern from a gifted and idealistic young teacher that we are not being rigorous enough and we should consider specifying more content. We are currently reflecting on all the arguments made in our consultation on the new curriculum. But I take particularly seriously the concerns idealistic and ambitious teachers such as Joe Kirby have about the teaching practices which our current examination system encourages.

He, and many others, are deeply worried about what he calls, ‘the enacted school curriculum: what actually gets taught in classrooms.’

‘Schemes of work in schools,’ he explains, ‘are admired based on how relevant and engaging they are as opposed to how rigorous and challenging they are. In principle, there is no trade-off between relevance and rigour; in practice, there is all the difference in the world: the difference between teaching transient vampire books or transcendent Victorian novels.’

Kirby is right – Stephenie Meyer cannot hold a flaming pitch torch to George Eliot. There is a Great Tradition of English Literature – a canon of transcendent works – and Breaking Dawn is not part of it.

Kirby’s challenge to us in government is clear. And it is reinforced by the arguments of other influential teacher-bloggers like Andrew Old and Matthew Hunter. Our new draft curriculum, criticised by the unions and their allies for being too specific and too content heavy may actually – in some areas – not be specific and content-rich enough.

History is now – and England

The one area of the national curriculum which has come under heaviest criticism from the unions and their allies for packing in too much content has – of course – been the history curriculum.

I’m not surprised by the intensity of the criticism. As my old friend Kenneth Baker also found out, there is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history.

There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don’t tend to command much column space in the broadsheets or get onto Start The Week.

Whereas historians – and indeed commentators and politicians and ideological pressure groups – all find it easy to get a platform if they can contribute to the debate about what our schools should teach about who we are as a nation.

I have enjoyed reading – and hearing from – the different partisans. Those distinguished voices like Richard J Evans, David Priestland and David Cannadine who have, to various degrees, been critical. As well as those equally distinguished voices such as JCD Clark, Jeremy Black, Anthony Beevor, David Abulafia, Niall Ferguson, Simon Jenkins, Andrew Roberts, Amanda Foreman, Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Chris Skidmore, David Starkey and Robert Tombs who have been, to various degrees, supportive. And I have particularly enjoyed listening to my friend and colleague Tristram Hunt who has, in various degrees, at various times, been both supportive and critical.

But what has – to an extent – been missing from this debate is an appreciation of how history is being taught in many of our schools now. In particular, the teaching practice which constitutes what Joe Kirby calls ‘the enacted school curriculum – what actually gets taught in classrooms.’

And here the reality is – if anything – even more concerning that what the exam system has done to English.

Take the lesson plans outlined in Primary History – the journal of the Historical Association. These are not marginal influences on classroom practice. These are the resources produced by the most influential subject association which speaks for history teachers.

In their Autumn 2012 issue of Primary History, the Historical Association suggest students learn about the early Middle Ages by studying the depiction of King John as a cowardly lion in Disney’s ‘Robin Hood’. If that proves too taxing then they are asked to organise a fashion parade or make plasticine models.

Alternatively, students can help create ‘an interactive powerpoint based on well-known animated aquatic characters: for example, Nemo’. Or if Disney’s clown fish is an inappropriate subject for reflection, then teachers can turn to guidance on ‘Primary pedagogy and interactive power point’ where it is suggested that a project about rail travel, should focus on the – no doubt – highly influential historical character of George Stephenson’s friend, Eddy the Teddy.

If finding out about Nemo and investigating Eddy prove too much then there are other approaches which are encouraged.

Students are invited to become ‘history detectives’. Which sounds potentially promising. But the lesson plan outlined doesn’t actually involve any real history, just pretend detective work. Students are asked to investigate the death of a fictional ‘John Green’ by drawing up a ‘cunning plan’ which involves asking to study up to three clues. I couldn’t help thinking as I read the lesson plan that I’d seen this exercise played out in front of my eyes before. Maybe Mr Green was killed in the library with a candlestick by Professor Plum. Or maybe proper history teaching is being crushed under the weight of play-based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture.

It would be bad enough if this approach were restricted to primary schools. But even at GCSE level this infantilisation continues. One set of history teaching resources targeted at year 11s – 15- and 16-year-olds – suggests spending classroom time depicting the rise of Hitler as a ‘Mr Men’ story.

If I may quote – ‘The following steps are a useful framework: Brainstorm the key people involved (Hitler, Hindenburg, Goering, Van der Lubbe, Rohm…). Discuss their personalities / actions in relation to the topic. Bring up a picture of the Mr Men characters on the board. Discuss which characters are the best match.’

I may be unfamiliar with all of Roger Hargreaves’ work but I am not sure he ever got round to producing Mr Anti-Semitic Dictator, Mr Junker General or Mr Dutch Communist Scapegoat.

But I am familiar with the superb historical account Richard J Evans gives of the rise, rule and ruin of the Third Reich and I cannot believe he could possibly be happy with reducing the history of Germany’s darkest years to a falling out between Mr Tickle and Mr Topsy-Turvy.

There’s been passionate – and welcome – debate about what should be in – or out – of the national curriculum. There are criticisms flying about the absence of Voltaire or a failure to give due prominence to the Manchu acquisition of the Mandate of Heaven. These complaints sit alongside, or come from the same quarters, as criticisms about the inclusion of the Anglo-Saxons or Oliver Cromwell. But in this debate there is precious little attention given to what has actually gone wrong in too many of our classrooms.

The draft history curriculum is a direct attempt to address the failure – over generations – to ensure children grow up knowing the story of our islands. It is inspired by existing good practice in the best schools – state and independent. Whether it’s the curriculum developed here in Brighton College to give students an holistic understanding of our history, geography and culture or the content-rich core knowledge history curriculum of Pimlico Academy, there is ample evidence, generated by great teachers, that facts, stories, chronology, a connected narrative and a focus on great men and women can inspire and engage students of all backgrounds.

And while some good individual points have been made by constructive critics of our draft, I have to record that, amidst all the debate which the draft history curriculum has stimulated, no coherent single alternative model has emerged as a superior rival.

I will, of course, weigh carefully all the submissions we’ve received about how the curriculum might be improved. But it won’t be improved by taking out Clive of India and Wolfe of Quebec and replacing them with Eddy the Teddy and Finding Nemo.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

And, of course, whatever changes we make to the set of documents we call the national curriculum to generate higher expectations, we must also ensure we align all the influences on what is actually taught – the enacted curriculum – to reinforce this culture of greater ambition. That means ensuring Ofsted inspections and GCSE examinations reinforce a drive for higher standards.

Sir Michael Wilshaw has already taken a series of important steps to entrench higher expectations – with his new inspection framework placing much more emphasis on high-quality teaching. He has also made luminously clear that the explicitly didactic and determinedly academic teaching methods which – shamefully – were considered poor teaching practice by Ofsted in the past are now welcome back. The only criterion that counts is pupils making progress.

I have myself seen far too many lessons where teachers have felt they need to conform to an outdated model of how children learn. Teachers have felt they need to organise group work in which students talk to each other rather than learn from their teacher or texts. Worksheets, extracts and mind maps replace whole books, proper sources and compelling conversation. Young people on the verge of university study are treated as though they have the attention spans of infants.

This approach is not just constricting the initiative and talent of great teachers by diminishing the power of teaching, it also runs counter to the very best recent research on how children learn. The work of the best cognitive scientists, such as Daniel T. Willingham, emphasise the importance of teachers using gripping narratives to hold attention, underline the power of memorisation as a precondition of understanding, and stress that it is through the accumulation of factual knowledge that the conditions are created for creative and critical thinking.

So if your school, or you as a teacher, are told that your lesson must conform to a particular pattern to pass muster with the inspectors, just say ‘no’. Because Sir Michael could not be clearer – you are free to teach as you wish – the only thing that matters is that students learn.

Tis not too late to seek a newer world

And we have taken every step we can so far to free teachers from the constraints of outdated curricula and old-fashioned teaching methods. That is why we have disapplied – in other words, abolished – the national curriculum programme of study in ICT.

It was a boring set of documents that encouraged boring teaching of boring tasks in a field which should be one of the most exciting in education. The ICT curriculum we inherited was a tedious run-through the use of applications which were becoming obsolete even as the curriculum was being written. For children who have become digital natives and who speak fluent technology as an additional language, the ICT curriculum was clearly inadequate.

So we have ditched it. And in its place we have asked teachers, tech experts and tech companies to draw up an alternative computer science curriculum which teaches children how to code – so they can design new applications instead of simply being asked to use tired old software.

Thanks to the work of Ian Livingstone, the British Computer Society and gifted teachers across the country excitement – and innovation – are returning to one of the most important – and testing – intellectual disciplines in modern education.

Technology will change our lives in ways we cannot anticipate in the years to come, and it will certainly transform teaching as the revolution in higher education is proving.

But one thing we can be certain of is that the acquisition of coding skills, the ability to think computationally, and the creativity inherent in designing new programmes will help prepare all our young people better for the future. It will be impossible to call yourself educated in years to come unless you understand, and can influence, the changes technology brings.

The glory of the garden it abideth not in words

And I also think it will be impossible to consider any education system – or school – fit for the modern world if it does not provide a clear pathway to high-quality technical and vocational study.

And high quality is the crucial qualifier.

Because our biggest problem in vocational and technical education has not been lack of money, an absence of political attention, or a shortage of pious appeals to establish parity of esteem.

Look at how well equipped many of our further education colleges are. Consider how much ministerial and administrative energy has been devoted to making and remaking agencies to supervise vocational education – from the MSC through to TECs and then the LSC followed by the YPLA and SFA and now the call to give LEPs a bigger role. And read back through the many, all too many, ministerial speeches when politicians talk about the importance of vocational education and promise to make people respect it more.

But the central problem with vocational education was never addressed.

Many vocational qualifications were not respected because they were not as rigorous as academic qualifications. Genuinely high-quality technical and vocational courses – such as the apprenticeships offered by organisations such as BAE or Rolls-Royce – have always been over-subscribed. Colleges which offer genuinely demanding courses in areas which the economy needs such as cooking or construction enjoy no shortage of applications.

Sadly, however, there have been far too many qualifications which were badged as vocational which were of marginal value to the students who acquired them. As Alison Wolf pointed out in her ground-breaking report on vocational education – far and away the best thing ever written on the subject – under the last government hundreds of thousands of students received little or no benefit from vocational qualifications which had little or no labour market value.

The last government lied to students. It told them the courses they were studying would prepare them for the world of work. It congratulated itself on the number securing passes. But the truth, as Professor Wolf pointed out, was that. ‘Many of England’s 14- to 19-year-olds’ did not ‘progress successfully into secure employment or higher level education’ because they had been denied ‘the skills that will enable them to progress’.

Many of these qualifications were judged as ‘worth’ two or more GCSEs but they had no proper, rigorous, external assessment and required no demonstration of mastery of any skill directly applicable to the workplace.

The only way to rescue vocational education from its devaluation has been to make vocational qualifications more rigorous. That is what we have done – following Professor Wolf’s lead by counting only rigorous vocational qualifications in school performance tables, making apprenticeships more demanding and introducing a new – explicitly aspirational – measure of vocational accomplishment: the technical baccalaureate.

I apply to vocational education the same principles I apply to academic education – we should be setting expectations higher, demanding greater rigour, applauding genuine effort.

And I also apply those principles to the other element I count as essential in a rounded education – the development of character.

I don’t believe any person is truly educated unless they have learnt self-discipline, self-control, self-reliance, respect for others, how to work in a team, how to defer gratification, how to cope with reverses and the importance of service to others.

I don’t believe you can create a national curriculum programme of study in building character. Nor should we attempt to test, measure, or direct how character is developed. Indeed if the state were to prescribe how individuals were to become self-reliant and self-disciplined then we would be disappearing up our own oxymoron.

But just because the state should not dictate that does not mean we should be silent. We need to support schools in the many different ways they choose – every day – to develop and build the character of their pupils.

That can sometimes mean getting the state out of the way.

Removing the absurd health and safety rules which prevent students going on expeditions or enjoying work experience.

Overhauling the CRB regime which makes enlisting volunteers to help with competitive sports more difficult.

Getting rid of the rules which limit the length of the school day and term and so make it more difficult to provide drama, musical performance, debating, chess, dance and sport alongside the core academic curriculum.

It can also mean knocking heads together.

Working with the MoD and independent schools to get more cadet forces in state schools.

Providing funding for charities like Debatemate which can then work with philanthropic sponsors to get debating going in state schools.

Or getting county sports partnerships and sport governing bodies to see the potential to foster more competitive sport in the additional PE funding we’re providing to primary schools.

But above all it means recognising that character is learnt from observing, and emulating, admirable adult role models. That is why we are giving more power to heads to demonstrate leadership in their own schools.

It’s also why we’ve strengthened the hand of heads and teachers when it comes to enforcing discipline and attendance. And it’s why I want to ensure we attract even more talented and idealistic people into teaching

Westward look, the land is bright

I have a clear view of what an educated person should be – literate, numerate, historically aware, culturally curious, engaged by science and technology, aware of the demands of the workplace, ready to take their place as an active citizen in an open democracy.

I will – as long as I am in this office – argue that our expectations in each of these areas should be higher – for all our children. But in my ideal education system the requirement for me – or any politician – to enter this debate should recede over time.

Because I want the loudest – and clearest – voices demanding higher educational standards to come, increasingly, from teachers.

And, increasingly, they are.

I am delighted that there are so many examples of teachers leaving politicians behind in the race for higher standards.

I admire what Richard has done here – by setting higher expectations in the study of our past and culture than any politician has. I am in awe of the achievements of schools such as Thomas Jones and Barnes Primary. I applaud the challenge a former Brighton College head, Anthony Seldon, has laid down to expect more from schools than just academic excellence.

And I celebrate the growing attention given to advocates for excellence like John Blake, Andrew Old, John Kirby and Matthew Hunter who speak for the emerging majority of aspirational and idealistic teachers dedicated to higher standards. They have much more to contribute to our children’s future – in every way – than the tired union agitators whose melancholy long withdrawing roar we still hear – amplified by the media – every Easter.

And thanks to the changes another great teacher, Charlie Taylor, is making to teacher training and the hopeful signs which suggest a new Royal College of Teaching would rigorously police standards, there are many reasons for optimism.

There is still some way to go, of course.

As long as there are people in education making excuses for failure, cursing future generations with a culture of low expectations, denying children access to the best that has been thought and written, because Nemo and the Mister Men are more relevant, the battle needs to be joined.

But the people who will win it are teachers, and that is why it is so encouraging that so many, including all of you here, are fighting for our children’s future with such passion.