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Below is the text of the speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, in Birmingham on 16 June 2011.

Thank you Tony for that kind introduction.

The last time we met was in New York when we were discussing school reform and, in particular, teacher performance.

I remember arguing that teachers had nothing to fear from lesson observation – not only was learning from other professionals the best way to improve, confident performers should relish the opportunity to show what they can do.

After all, I argued, other inspirational professionals are used to being watched while they work – great footballers, I said, like Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs, don’t object to people paying them attention when they do their thing.

Perhaps, in hindsight, I could have chosen a happier parallel – but Tony you are one professional who always performs with effortless grace – thank you.

And thinking of outstanding performances which are a joy to watch, Steve, can I thank you for a brilliant and inspiring speech…

You incarnate the virtues of great leadership.

Clarity of vision.

Generosity of spirit.

Energy in action.

And, above all, clear moral purpose.

Together with Vanni, Toby and the rest of the leadership team at the National College you have responded to every challenge we’ve given you with the enthusiasm, optimism and ambition of great public servants.

I am in your debt.

I mentioned that you bring a clear sense of moral purpose to everything you do, Steve.

Throughout your career you have aspired to give children and young people new opportunities, richer futures, a sense of limitless possibility.

And it’s about moral purpose that I want to speak today.

Knowledge is power

The moral purpose that animates the work we all do. Ministers, officials, school leaders, teachers.

What unites us is a belief that lives can be transformed by what goes on in schools. The precious moments spent in the classroom, the interactions between professionals and students, the process of teaching and learning – can shape futures like nothing else.

Just last week I was talking to one young man at the secondary school nearest to my home, Burlington Danes in London’s White City Estate. A teenager who had been persistently in trouble, going in the wrong direction and who saw in the environment around him no incentive to work hard, no penalty for indiscipline, no encouragement to learn. Until that school was taken in a new direction by a new leader, the amazing Sally Coates.

She made sure every moment every child spent in her school was worthwhile – focussed on learning – with a clear expectation that every child could surpass their family’s expectations. That young man is now on course to study engineering at Cambridge and his life has been transformed immeasurably for the better.

And what Sally has done in Burlington Danes, so many of you are doing across the country. Changing schools for the better, spreading opportunity more widely.

I am uniquely fortunate to be Secretary of State at a time when we have the best generation of teachers ever in our schools and the best generation of heads leading them.

People like Dana Ross-Wawrzynski at Altrincham Grammar Schools for Girls, who not only runs one of the most impressive schools in the country, but is also creating a trust in East Manchester that is already rapidly boosting the performance of a number of other local schools.

Or Ray Ruszczynski at Chellaston Academy, a superb National Leader of Education, working in a collaborative group with Landau Forte Academy and West Park School, as well as providing a wide range of support to Sinfin School.

Or Dame Sue John who has turned Lampton Academy into an inspiring example of how a school can succeed in a tough area, while also spearheading the London Challenge initiative which has so helped improve education in our capital.

Heroes and heroines whose vocation is teaching – the noblest calling I know.

All of us in this hall share something, I suspect. All of us, I am sure, were inspired by a teacher or teachers who kindled a love of knowledge, a restless curiosity, and a passion for our subject when we were young.

And all of us, I believe, want to excite the next generation – as we were excited – by the adventure of learning.

Introducing the next generation to the best that has been thought and written is a moral enterprise of which we can all be proud. Giving every child an equal share in the inheritance of achievement which great minds have passed on to us is a great progressive cause. Shakespeare’s dramas, Milton’s verse, Newton’s breakthroughs, Curie’s discoveries, Leibniz’s genius, Turing’s innovation, Beethoven’s music, Turner’s painting, Macmillan’s choreography, Zuckerberg’s brilliance – all the rich achievements of human ingenuity belong to every child – and it should be our enduring mission to spread that inheritance as widely as possible.

Because it is only through learning – the acquisition of intellectual capital – that individuals have the power to shape their own lives. In a world which globalisation is flattening, in which unskilled jobs are disappearing from our shores, in which education determines income and good qualifications are the best form of unemployment insurance, we have to ensure every child has a stock of intellectual capital which enables them to flourish.

Making opportunity more equal

But there is one area where the sense of moral purpose which guides us as leaders in education must impel us to do more.

As a nation, we still do not do enough to extend the liberating power of a great education to the poorest.

As Barack Obama has persuasively argued, education reform is the civil rights battle of our time.

In Britain, as in the USA, access to a quality education has never mattered more but access to a quality education is rationed for the poor, the vulnerable and those from minority communities.

Each year there are 600,000 students passing through our state schools. 80,000 of them – the poorest – are those eligible for free school meals.

Of those 80,000, in the last year for which we have figures, just 40 made it to Oxford or Cambridge. Fewer from the whole of the population on benefits than made it from Eton. Or Westminster. Or St Paul’s School for Girls.

We know that we are not playing fair by all when, in the last year for which we have figures, just one child from all the state schools in the whole London Borough of Greenwich makes it to Oxford.

My moral purpose in Government is to break the lock which prevents children from our poorest families making it into our best universities and walking into the best jobs.

That is why this Government is spending two and a half billion pounds on a pupil premium to ensure that every child eligible for free school meals has two thousand pounds more spent on their education every year.

That is why this Government is investing in more hours of free nursery education for all three and four year olds and 15 hours of free nursery education for all disadvantaged two-year-olds.

And that is why this Government is investing in an Education Endowment Fund which will, like Barack Obama’s Race to the Top Fund, provide additional money for those teachers who develop innovative approaches to tackling disadvantage.

Because the scandal which haunts my conscience is the plight of those students from the poorest backgrounds, in the poorest neighbourhoods, in our poorest-performing schools who need us to act if their right to a decent future is to be guaranteed.

We still have one of the most segregated schools systems in the world, with the gap between the best and the worst wider than in almost any other developed nation.

In the highest-performing education nations, such as Singapore, around 80% of students taking O-levels get at least an equivalent of a C pass in their maths and English.

And we should remember that Singapore has only been independent for around fifty years, it has no natural resources, is surrounded by more powerful nations, is a multi-ethnic society and its students sit exams in English – even though their first language will be Malay, Tamil or Chinese.

Here just over half of students get a C pass in GCSE maths and English. And the half which fail are drawn overwhelmingly from poorer backgrounds and are educated in poorer-performing schools.

So, at the heart of our comprehensive reform programme for education is a determination to learn from, and emulate, those countries which are both high performers and succeed in generating a much higher level of equity across the school system.

Thanks to the pioneering work of thinkers such as Michael Fullan, Michael Barber and Fenton Whelan, and the data gathered by the OECD through its regular surveys of educational performance, we can identify the common features of high-performing systems.

The best people need to be recruited into the classroom.

They then need to be liberated in schools set free from bureaucratic control.

Given structures which encourage collaboration and the sharing of the benefits innovation brings.

Held to account in an intelligent fashion so we can all identify the best practice we can draw on.

And led in a way which encourages us all to hold fast to the moral purpose of making opportunity more equal.

I want to say a little about each.

We’re getting more superb teachers

We’ve moved quickly to get more high-performing graduates into teaching by funding the doubling of Teach First over the course of this parliament and expanding the fantastic Future Leaders and Teaching Leaders programmes which, with the support of the National College, provide superb professional development for the future leaders of some of our toughest schools.

Shortly we’ll be publishing our strategy for Initial Teacher Training. This will further emphasise our commitment to boosting the status of the profession by toughening up the recruitment process and ensuring that all new teachers have a real depth of knowledge in their subject.

We’ll be making sure this covers the whole spectrum by, for example, providing additional funding for more placements in special schools, so as to give more teachers specialist knowledge in teaching children with special needs.

We will also explore how excellent schools can be more involved in both initial training and the provision of professional development. Contrary to what some have said this is not about excluding higher education from teacher training. There are many excellent centres of ITT and losing their experience is not on my agenda.

But I am keen that we make better use of headteachers’ and teachers’ experience. That’s why I, like Steve, am so excited about the development of Teaching Schools.

I believe Teaching Schools have the potential to generate higher standards than ever before. Over 1,000 expressions of interest and 300 applications is a very positive sign of your enthusiasm. The first 100 Teaching Schools will be designated next month but the partnerships being developed between schools and with higher education are already having a powerful and positive impact on the system.

We’re empowering school leaders to innovate

Putting our best schools in charge of professional development is, though, just one way in which we’re handing you control of the education system.

We’ve reduced central Government prescription for all schools to make your lives easier and give you the space to focus on what really matters.

The hundreds of pages of forms you had to fill in to complete the FMSIS process. Gone.

The vast Ofsted self-evaluation form that took weeks to fill in. Gone.

Performance Management guidance has been cut by three quarters and capability procedures simplified so you can deal with inadequate staff quickly and effectively.

Behaviour and bullying guidance has been cut from 600 pages to 50 so as to give you complete clarity over your powers and duties.

Over the next few months we will be publishing shortened guidance in a whole host of other areas. In total, departmental guidance will be more than halved.

And, I hope you’ve noticed we’ve stopped the endless stream of emails that use to emanate from the Department.

Beyond these changes we’ve implemented for the benefit of all schools, we’ve also given every school the opportunity to take complete control of its budget, curriculum and staffing by applying for academy status.

When I spoke to you last year there were 203 academies. Now there are 704 and a further 814 schools have applied. By the end of the year more than a third of secondaries will be academies. This is a much faster rate of conversion than I, or I think anyone else, had anticipated and testament, I believe, to school leaders’ desire for genuine autonomy.

Many of you who have converted in the past year have already used your freedoms to great effect. For example:

Premier Academy in Milton Keynes has extended payscales – so that good teachers can choose to remain in the classroom rather than move into management to increase their salaries.

And, like other schools such as Wakefield City Academy, they have used resources previously held by their Local Authority to employ a dedicated pastoral support worker on-site to ensure that children with social and educational needs get complete continuity of care.

Others are following some of the larger sponsor groups like ARK and Haberdashers in extending their school day and the academic year.

Yet others like the Kunskapsskolan schools in Richmond are developing exciting new curriculum models.

And many converter academies have found they are able to buy services for a significantly lower cost than those provided by their local authority.

For instance Broadclyst Academy Primary School has cut the costs of their payroll system in half and has ploughed the money back into teaching. Watford Grammar School for Girls and Hartismere Academy have found procuring small improvements to be significantly cheaper and quicker.

This is creating a new relationship between schools and Local Authorities. As we know, in some areas LAs have been genuine drivers of innovation and improvement: they have seen their role as champions of excellence; identifying struggling heads and governors; brokering peer-to-peer support; and forging partnerships with local universities or major employers to drive up standards.

But in other areas this has not been the case. And this is now beginning to change, as LAs react to schools’ new powers by improving the quality of their offer to ensure academies buy back services and engage with local initiatives. As one academy head explained recently to the Guardian:

Under the old regime, nothing had ever been done about some things that weren’t good enough, whereas now, there’s an awful lot of activity at our Local Authority to make sure services are good enough so that we will buy them in.

And some healthy competition isn’t just improving Local Authorities. A study just published by academics at the London School of Economics, looking at academies opened by the last government, shows not only that they have improved significantly faster than other schools, but also that other schools in their locality have seen results improve.

We’re embedding a culture of collaboration

But competition isn’t the main driver of improvement in the system. What we’re seeing, as Steve put it, is collaboration driving improvement but with a competitive edge. Indeed I would go as far to argue that genuine collaboration is harder without that competitive edge to inspire the need to improve.

So I’m hugely encouraged by the renewed focus on partnership between schools I’m seeing at the moment. I’ve already mentioned how impressed I am with some of the alliances put together by aspirant Teaching Schools. But that’s just one area of activity.

For instance, all of the new converter academies have, between them, agreed to support over 700 other schools and we’ve begun the doubling of the National and Local Leader of Education programmes to support fellow heads.

I am particularly pleased to see that a number of these softer collaborative relationships are evolving into hard federations.

I have always thought that many of the best academy chains are those that have grown out of a single outstanding school with a visionary leadership team. Just look at what Dan Moynihan has done at Harris; or Sir Kevin Satchwell at Thomas Telford; or Sir Peter Simpson at Brooke Weston; or our new Schools’ Commissioner Elizabeth Sidwell at Haberdashers.

What these leaders share is that were given a rare opportunity as headteachers of CTCs to use their longstanding autonomy to develop a powerful educational model that could then be readily applied to new schools when the last Government launched their academy programme.

Now, with our offer of academy freedoms to all outstanding schools and leaders we have created the opportunity on a much larger scale for great leaders to expand their vision across a group of schools.

The process of allowing outstanding schools to convert has created a new generation of academy sponsors dedicated to turning round under-performing schools.

For example, Morley High School, led by NLE John Townsley, converted in January and will start sponsoring Farnley Park School in Leeds next year. And Sandy Hill Academy in Cornwall – one of the very first converters – is now in the process of taking on Trevebyn Primary.

I hope many more of you will take advantage of this opportunity over the coming years.

A proper national framework of accountability

Of course in this new educational landscape – where far more schools have significant autonomy and improvement is driven not by Government but by great schools working with others – proper accountability becomes even more important than ever.

That’s why we’re currently overhauling the Ofsted framework to focus on the four core responsibilities of schools – teaching and learning; leadership; attainment; behaviour and safety – as opposed to the twenty-seven different categories in the existing framework.

I am particularly keen that under the new framework Ofsted inspectors are able engage properly with schools, as opposed to focusing too strongly on data alone. I want them to be able to view more lessons; talk to more teachers and hear what students and parents have to say. And I want inspectors to engage not just during inspections but subsequently so that schools feel they have some guidance as well as a judgement.

We also need to change the way we use data in our pursuit of accountability. As Professor Alison Wolf’s review on vocational education has made clear, the introduction of large numbers of vocational equivalents to the GCSE performance tables in 2004 has led to widespread gaming of qualifications. The 4,000 per cent rise in the number of such qualifications taken in just six years is testament to this.

She has proposed measures to combat this issue which we are now implementing – including much tighter criteria for courses that wish to be considered equivalent to GCSE. But this particular problem is symptomatic of a wider issue. As long as most data is hidden from the public and the profession governments can manipulate what they do choose to release so as to mislead.

That is why we’ve already begun a major transparency revolution. We’ve started the process of publishing all the information the Department collects – including an additional 14 million lines of exam data this year. In future this will include more data on how schools are improving the results of the disadvantaged – both those in receipt of the pupil premium and those with low prior attainment.

I don’t expect, of course, that many parents will personally search through all this new material, but we are already seeing third parties finding new ways to present this data. Moreover educational researchers will have an unprecedented opportunity to investigate what’s really going on in the system.

It also means that any new performance measures Government does seek to highlight – such as the English Baccalaureate – will only have an impact insofar as they resonate with parents. Initial surveys suggest this measure does have real resonance. Which is unsurprising as it simply seeks to replicate the sort of academic core that is expected in almost every developed country in the world: for children on both academic and vocational routes post-16.

A moral commitment to helping those most in need

Crucial to a proper framework of accountability is a set of clear expectations for schools. As the OECD say: “PISA results suggest that the countries that improved the most, or that are among the top performers, are those that establish clear, ambitious policy goals.”

In last year’s White Paper we took a tougher line on under-performance than ever before by raising the floor standard for secondary schools to 35 per cent of pupils achieving five GCSEs at A*-C including English and maths. We wanted these standards to be as fair as possible, so schools which show pupils making superb progress from a low basis are exempted.

But that still left 216 secondary schools below this floor. We have taken action, in partnership with many of you in this room, to ensure their performance is turned round.

In the next school year at least 88 schools, and counting, will be placed in the hands of new academy sponsors with a mission to end a culture of poor performance. That is more under-performing schools converted to academies than the last Government ever managed in a single year and more than they managed in their first eight years combined.

So I’m hugely encouraged by our progress. But I don’t believe, and I hope you don’t either, that 35 per cent of kids getting five decent GCSEs should be the limit of our ambition.

To compete with the best in the world, we have to raise our expectations not just once but continuously. In Poland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand more and more students are graduating from school and going on to university. In Singapore more than 80 per cent of young people taking O-levels now achieve 5 passes – the equivalent of C grades in GCSE. In South Korea an incredible 97 per cent of students graduate from high school.

So if we are to aspire to a world-class education system then we need to raise our sights beyond 35 per cent. And in doing so we cannot allow ourselves to have lower expectations for more disadvantaged parts of country. Of course I accept that schools in such communities face harder challenges but I also know that these challenges can be met. Deprivation need not be destiny.

Look at Perry Beeches in Birmingham. 25 per cent of children are on Free School Meals and 41 per cent have special needs. Yet in three years they have moved from 21 per cent five A*-C GCSEs including English and Maths to 74 per cent.

Or Paddington Academy – which jumped from 34 per cent to 63 per cent five A*-C with English and maths in just one year. At Paddington 51 per cent of children are on Free School Meals and 65 per cent are identified has having some kind of special need.

Or Woodside High School in Haringey, a school Steve spoke eloquently about in his speech, where almost no children at all achieved 5 A* to C with English and maths 5 years ago and where over 50% will hit that benchmark this year. Again this is a school where 55% of children are on free school meals and 38% have identified special needs.

Now that we know this level of achievement is possible in schools like these, and in many others similar to them, we must surely make it our expectation for all schools. To do any less, I believe, would be a betrayal of our young people.

So next year the floor will rise to 40 per cent and my aspiration is that by 2015 we will be able to raise it to 50 per cent. There is no reason – if we work together – that by the end of this parliament every young person in the country can’t be educated in a school where at least half of students reach this basic academic standard.

I realise that in stating this aspiration some will criticise too strong a focus on testing. Let me be clear: I do not think the only responsibility a school has is to help students pass exams. An outstanding school will look after the pastoral needs of its pupils; will provide a wide range of extra-curricular activities, and play a role as a broader part of its community. But it must also endow each child with the basic entitlement of intellectual capital any citizen needs to make their way in the world. A GCSE floor standard is about providing a basic minimum expectation to young people that their school will equip them for further education and employment.

Primary

And we must also have a similar level of expectation for primary schools. The last Government’s academies programme was never extended to primaries, even though it was Andrew Adonis’s clear ambition.

And after an initial focus on primary schools in its first five years, the last Government lost momentum. So in the White Paper I also introduced a meaningful floor standard for primaries for the first time: that 60 per cent of pupils should achieve Level 4 in English and maths at Key Stage 2 or make an average level of progress.

Of course primary test scores are more volatile than those in secondaries due to the smaller size of schools, so one has to treat data with additional care. However, analysis of this new floor standard reveals that there are more than 200 schools that have been under the floor for five years or more. Indeed more than half of these have been under the floor for at least ten years.

A further 500 or so schools have been under the floor for three of the past four years.

These schools have let down repeated cohorts of children. Again I appreciate that it is harder to reach this standard in some parts of the country than others. But again we know that it is possible:

Look at Berrymede Junior School in Acton where 58 per cent of children are on Free School Meals and 31 per cent have a special need. Here over 80 per cent of pupils have achieved Level 4 in English and maths in each of the last three years.

Or Woodberry Down in Hackney with 51 per cent on Free School Meals and 34 per cent with special needs where 80 per cent reached Level 4 in English and maths last year.

Or Cuckoo Hall Academy in Edmonton with 37 per cent on Free School Meals and 34 per cent with special needs where an incredible 95 per cent of pupils achieved the Level 4 benchmark last year.

Or dozens of others in similar circumstances. Given that we know it can be done and it is done, we surely must make it our minimum expectation for all primary schools that they will not consistently fall below a 60 per cent floor.

So, as an urgent priority, we will start work on turning around the 200 schools that have most consistently underperformed by finding new academy sponsors for them so that most can reopen from September 2012. We want to work closely with the schools involved and their local authorities to make this happen.

The Education Bill currently working its way through Parliament will give the Department the power to intervene to turn around underperforming schools where authorities are recalcitrant or try to stand in the way of improvement. But wherever possible we want to find solutions that everyone can agree on – as we have done with the vast majority of the secondary schools that will become academies next year.

Beyond this we want to support Local Authorities in turning round the 500 schools who have fallen below the floor in at least three of the past four years. Several months ago I asked Local Authorities to draw up plans showing how they intended to improve their weaker schools. These have now been submitted and some of them are very impressive showing clear leadership and engagement with the problems of long-term underperformance.

In his speech Steve mentioned Wigan’s plans to commission groups of schools to run improvement activity across the authority and he underlined how schools across Manchester are working together to embed the success of the Greater Manchester Challenge. In Devon and Suffolk the Local Authorities have worked to help schools become academies while maintaining a strong network between the schools.

But there will be other local authorities that need some support – financial and logistic – from the centre. So, over the coming months, we will identify areas – either whole authorities or parts of larger authorities – that have a significant number of underperforming schools. We will help these communities dramatically transform primary education in their area.

Conclusion

And there is an urgent need for us all to act.

We have just suffered the worst financial crisis since 1929.

Our economy is weighed down by a huge debt burden.

Europe has major problems with debt and the euro.

Meanwhile there is a rapid and historic shift of political and economic power to Asia and a series of scientific and technological changes that are transforming our culture, economy and global politics.

If we do not have a school system that is adapting to and preparing for these challenges then we will betray a generation.

Our school system needs to have innovation embedded in its way of working. That is what our reforms provide – the opportunity for our school system to adapt rapidly to technological change such as the amazing revolution of iTunesU, whereby Harvard and Oxbridge publish their most valuable content free, extending the scope of knowledge available to all children.

Only by learning from other nations, and by giving school leaders the freedom to shape their own futures, liberated from outdated bureaucratic structures, can we ensure we benefit from the other, increasingly rapid changes technological innovation will bring.

And while globalisation brings many benefits to our citizens, it also bears particularly heavily on the poor and the young.

Across the Western world countries are struggling with youth unemployment at the moment.

And for all those of us who feel that the moral purpose of our work is to find a fulfilling outlet for the talents of our young people, there is a special tragedy in seeing young lives unfulfilled.

There are things Government can do to ameliorate this in the short term. And we are acting, not least through my colleague Iain Duncan Smith’s work programme.

But if we are to grasp this issue properly then we must deal with the root causes of the problem.

And that is our shared responsibility.

For those root causes can be found in the first years of a child’s life.

We know that a child who struggles at Key Stage One will struggle to do well in their Key Stage Two tests. And we know those children with the greatest difficulties are drawn overwhelmingly from our poorest neighbourhoods.

And we know that those same children who don’t have Level 4 English and maths when they leave primary school are much less likely to achieve five good GCSEs than their more fortunate peers.

And we know that the same young person who doesn’t get the equivalent of five good GCSEs is much more likely to be NEET at 16 or 17 and much less likely to be in secure employment thereafter.

We are fortunate to be in the most fulfilling employment anyone can have. To be engaged in the education of the next generation is to be given a chance to liberate thousands from the narrow horizons which have limited mankind’s vision for centuries.

But if we are to make good that promise then we need to recognise that we will all have to work harder than ever before – work to attract even better people into teaching, work to innovate more determinedly, work to identify talent more zealously, work to collaborate more intensively, work to raise aspirations, standards, hopes…

But in this work lies the promise of a reward greater than is given to any other profession – the knowledge that we have guaranteed the life of the next generation will be better than our own.

Below is the text of the speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London on 11 January 2011.

There could be no better way to start 2011 for me than by welcoming you all here to London.

Because this second decade of the twenty-first century will be characterised by uniquely daunting challenges – but it also holds out amazing opportunities.

The challenges are so daunting because they are global in scope and as testing as any our generation has known.

But the opportunities are even greater because there is the chance – in this generation – to bring freedom, opportunity, knowledge and dignity, material plenty and personal fulfilment to many more of our fellow citizens than ever before.

The great Italian Marxist thinker once enjoined on his followers an attitude he defined as pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

What he meant was that we should be clear eyed about the difficulties we face, but undaunted, determined and resolute in our belief they can be overcome.

Our world does face huge problems.

A resurgent wave of ideologically motivated terrorism and renewed conflicts between peoples threaten millions. Our global environment is threatened by resource depletion and thoughtless exploitation. A dramatically growing, and increasingly youthful, world population chafes against constraints which deny millions the chance to live their dreams. Economic growth has been spread inequitably and nations which are adjusting to reality after years of folly are finding the process, inevitably, painful.

But bumpy, indeed turbulent, as the journey ahead might be, we are also fortunate in knowing what the best route not just to safety, but to plenty, will be.

It is the pursuit of knowledge.

Nothing is so effective a solvent of hatred and prejudice as learning and wisdom, the best environmental protection policy to help the planet is a scientific innovation policy which rewards greener growth, the route to fulfilment for the next generation is dedication to study, hard work and restless curiosity and the single most effective way to generate economic growth is invest in human and intellectual capital – to build a better education system.

So, in that sense, in talking to those who lead the world’s education systems I have the unique privilege of talking to those who will lead the world out of the dark valley we are currently navigating and onto sunlit uplands where opportunity beckons.

It is, certainly, a special privilege to be involved in shaping education policy at the moment. Because as well as laying the foundations for a world which is better, we are also ensuring that we live in societies which are fairer.

For most of our history people have been victims of forces beyond their control.

Accidents of birth – like where individuals were born, both geographically and in class terms, as well as what their parents did for a living – proved overwhelmingly likely to dictate people’s future.

But education is the means by which we can liberate people from those imposed constraints. It allows individuals to choose a fulfilling job, enrich their inner life and become authors of our own life stories.

And that is why education reform is the great progressive cause of our times.

The Education World Forum is so important because it demonstrates our shared belief that we can educate our children to an ever higher standard and achieve the levels of fairness and social mobility that have long eluded us.

In the coming days, we have an opportunity to talk in detail about the issues that we face, share our expertise and strengthen the bonds between our countries. I’m also delighted that many of you will have the chance to see for yourselves the very best of the British education system.

I am pleased that so many young people in Britain today are enjoying a superb education – and pleased that in many areas we have made progress over the years. In particular, I am overjoyed that we have so many great teachers and headteachers who are playing an increasingly important part in transforming our system for the better.

But I am also conscious that in the world of education, by definition, the quest to improve never ends.

Education is a process of continual learning, of crossing new boundaries, exploring new territory, restless curiosity and perpetual questioning.

And as I have been in this job one of the things I have learned is that we can only improve our own education systems if we make them as open to new thinking, as free to learn, as flexible and innovative, as possible.

Because with every year that passes we are privileged to enjoy new insights about how best to organise schools, how best to inspire pupils, how to use new technology, how the brain absorbs knowledge, how teachers can best motivate, how parents can better support, how governments can best invest.

And we are uniquely fortunate that speaking at this conference are two men who have done more than any others to help us understand what works in the world of education. And by listening to them we can see how much further we all have to go.

Yesterday, you heard from a man I recently have described as the most important man in the British education system – but he could equally be the most important man in world education.

Later this morning, you will hear from the man who is vying with him for that accolade.

Neither will teach a single lesson this year, neither are household names, neither – unsurprisingly – are education ministers – but both deserve our thanks and the thanks of everyone who wants to see children around the world fulfil the limit of their potential.

They are Andreas Schleicher and Michael Barber.

Andreas Schleicher is a German mathematician with the sort of job title that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy – head of the indicators and analysis division (directorate for education) at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

On the face of it, a job description like that might seem like the title of the bureaucrat’s bureaucrat – but in truth Andreas is the father of more revolutions than any German since Karl Marx.

Because Andreas is responsible for collating the PISA league tables of international educational achievement. He tells us which nations have the best-performing education systems and then analyses that data to determine why that is the case.

When the first PISA league tables were published they demonstrated, to the amazement of the German political classes, that their education system was nowhere near the position of world leadership they had fondly imagined.

The phenomenon of discovering just how relatively poorly the German education system performed was termed ‘Pisa-Schock’ and it stimulated a furious debate about how Germany could catch up.

In the US, education experts described the 2006 PISA report as our generation’s ‘Sputnik moment’.

The evidence that 15-year-olds in the Far East were so comfortably outperforming American pupils in maths and science sent the same shockwaves through the West as the Soviet Union’s surprise satellite launch in 1957, an event which prompted a radical reform of science education in the US.

But just because you come top in PISA these days doesn’t mean you rest on the laurels Andreas fashions for you. Far from it.

What characterises those nations which are themselves top performers – such as Singapore and Hong Kong – is that they are restless self-improvers.

They have also eagerly examined every aspect of Andreas’s research to see what their principal competitors are doing with a view to implementing further changes to maintain their competitive edge.

Sir Michael Barber is another visionary educationalist.

In the early part of the last decade, he played a direct role in shaping the English education system as a leading advisor to Tony Blair’s government. As a result of policies that he helped introduce – including an uncompromising focus on literacy, floor standards for school performance and higher standards for teacher performance – improvements were undoubtedly made.

But, rather like Tony Blair, Michael has arguably had an even bigger influence globally than at home in recent years. His seminal 2007 report, How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top, which he produced for McKinsey provided those nations that were serious about education reform with a blueprint of what they needed to do to catch up.

And his recent report, How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better, provides further invaluable insights for all nations aspiring to improve their education system or hoping to remain amongst the best.

No nation that is serious about ensuring its children enjoy an education that equips them to compete fairly with students from other countries can afford to ignore the PISA and McKinsey studies.

Doing so would be as foolish as dismissing what control trials tell us in medicine. It means flying in the face of the best evidence we have of what works.

And just as the evidence that Andreas and Michael has gathered has influenced education reformers in North America, Asia and Scandinavia, so it is influencing the Coalition Government here in Britain.

Not least because it shows that we are falling further and further behind other nations. In the last ten years, we have plummeted in the world rankings from 4th to 16th for science, 7th to 25th for literacy and 8th to 28th for maths.

These are facts from which we cannot hide. But while they may encourage a certain pessimism of the intellect, the examples of transformed education systems which Andreas and Michael have highlighted, certainly encourages optimism of the will.

From Shanghai to New Orleans, Alberta to Hong Kong, Singapore to Helsinki, nations which have been educational back markers have become world leaders.

And our recently published schools White Paper was deliberately designed to bring together – indeed, to shamelessly plunder from – policies that have worked in other high-performing nations.

It was accompanied by a detailed evidence paper, The case for change, that draws on the insights generated by successive PISA studies and McKinsey reports.

And it is based on the three essential characteristics which mark out the best performing and fastest reforming education systems in the landmark PISA and McKinsey studies.

Importance of teaching
First, the most successful education nations recruit the best possible people into teaching, provide them with high-quality training and professional development, and put them to work in the most challenging classrooms.

Our schools White Paper was called The importance of teaching because nothing matters more in improving education than giving every child access to the best possible teaching and ensuring that every moment of interaction between teacher and student yields results.

We are committed to raising the quality of new entrants to the teaching profession by insisting they are better qualified than ever before, we are determined to improve teacher training by building on intellectual accomplishment and ensuring more time is spent in the classroom acquiring practical teaching skills, and we plan to establish new centres of excellence in teaching practice – teaching schools modelled on our great teaching hospitals – so that new and experienced teachers can learn and develop their craft throughout their careers.

We have learnt from Finland – a consistently strong performer in PISA studies – about the importance of attracting the very best graduates into teaching, which is why we are expanding our principal elite route into teaching, Teach First, as well as providing extra support for top graduates in maths and science to enter teaching.

And we are increasing the number of national and local leaders of education – superb heads who lend their skills to raise standards in weaker schools – so that the best support the weak in a concerted effort to improve education for all children, not just some.

The principle of collaboration between stronger and weaker schools, with those in a position to help given the freedom to make a difference, lies at the heart of our whole approach to school improvement.

Greater autonomy

The PISA and McKinsey reports clearly show that the greater the amount of autonomy at school level, with headteachers and principals free to determine how pupils are taught and how budgets are spent, the greater the potential there has been for all-round improvement and the greater the opportunity too for the system to move from good to great.

The Coalition Government agrees that headteachers and teachers – not politicians and bureaucrats – know best how to run schools.

That is why we’ve announced a review of our National Curriculum with the aim of reducing prescription and are taking action to shed all unnecessary bureaucratic burdens on schools.

It is also why we’re freeing schools from central and local bureaucratic control by inviting them to become academies.

Schools are taking up our offer because they recognise the huge benefits that being an academy brings – more autonomy, more resources, less bureaucracy and an opportunity to thrive, free from interference from government.

Since the start of the school term in September, more than one school has converted to become an academy every working day. As of last week, more than 400 academies are now open and enjoying many of the same freedoms which are enjoyed by schools in the best-performing education systems. And many more are in the pipeline.

Alongside this, we are also further extending autonomy and choice by making it easier for teachers, parents, academy sponsors and other groups to start their own free schools.

In Sweden, free schools have driven up standards in those schools but also in neighbouring schools too.

And as the OECD points out, two of the most successful countries in PISA – Hong Kong and Singapore – are among those with the highest levels of school competition.

But while increased parental choice can help tackle ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, which continues to blight the life chances of many children from deprived backgrounds in particular, it does not need be the enemy of cooperation.

Our plans foresee schools collaborating on a scale that has never been witnessed before, which is why all new academies are also working with weaker schools to help them improve.

And this week will see a major advance in that drive.

We will identify those of our schools most in need of support – those where attainment is poor and where students are not making progress.

These are the schools whose children most need our help – those underperforming institutions where opportunity is restricted.

We will work with these schools – all of which have great potential and all of which will have staff ready to accept the challenge to improve.

We will provide them with extra resources.

But on condition they work with us to develop tough, rigorous, immediate plans for improvement.

Those plans will involve weaker schools being taken under the wing of high-performing schools, entering academy chains, changing the way they work, implementing reforms to the curriculum and staffing and putting in place new, tougher approaches to discipline and behaviour.

This drive will be led by an inspirational former headteacher – Liz Sidwell – who has experience of the state and private sector and who has helped turn round underperforming schools as well as setting a benchmark for excellence in the state system.

Proper accountability
The reason we’re able to identify great heads like Liz – and the schools which need her help – is that we have, over time, developed ways of holding schools, and education ministers, accountable for the money they spend.

Because the other, central, insight from the PISA and McKinsey reports into what makes great education systems so successful is that they all use data to make schools accountable and drive improvement.

Data allows us to identify the best so we can emulate it, and diagnose weaknesses so we can intervene before it’s too late.

I know that some in the education profession fear that data has been used – perhaps I should say abused – to constrict the autonomy which we know drives improvement.

But the lesson from PISA is that autonomy works best when it’s combined with intelligent accountability. That means making comparisons which are fair. And trying to limit the extent to which measurements can be ‘gamed’ by those in the system.

It’s because it’s so important that the public can make fair comparisons between schools that we are revamping performance tables to place more emphasis on the real value schools add as well as the raw attainment results they secure.

Pupils need qualifications to succeed in life, so I won’t shy away from saying we expect more and more young people to leave school with better and better qualifications. That is non-negotiable.

But we must also recognise that schools succeed when they take children from challenging and difficult circumstances and ensure they exceed expectations and progress faster than their peers.

And because we want to limit the extent to which accountability mechanisms are ‘gamed’ we will also ensure much more information is put into the public domain so that schools can be compared on many different criteria.

That will help schools which believe they have special qualities, undervalued by current performance tables, to make the case for their particular strengths.

And I expect that we will see new performance tables drawn up, by schools themselves, by active citizens and by professional organisations which will draw attention to particular areas of strength in our school system.

In this year’s performance tables we are introducing a new measure – the English Baccalaureate – which will show how many students in each school secured five good passes in English, maths, science, languages and one of the humanities.

It’s been introduced this year to allow us to see how the schools system has performed in the past – in a way which manifestly can’t have been gamed.

And I expect it will reveal the way in which past performance tables actually encouraged many many great schools and great heads to offer certain non-academic subjects rather than more rigorous academic subjects.

I am open to arguments about how we can further improve every measure in the performance tables – including the English Baccalaureate.

But I am determined to ensure that our exam standards match the highest standards around the world.

And in other high-performing nations there is an expectation that children will be tested in a wide range of subjects at 16.

In Singapore children sit compulsory O Levels in their mother tongue (which will be Chinese, Malay or Tamil), in the English language, in maths, in combined humanities, In science and in at least one other subject.

In Germany graduation to sixth form follows on from passing exams in German, maths, English and three other subjects.

In Alberta there are compulsory tests at age 15 in maths, science, English, French and social studies.

In France the brevet diploma is awarded at age 15 depending on performance in tests of French, maths, history, geography, civics, computer science and a modern foreign language.

In Japan there are tests at age 15 in Japanese, social studies, maths, science and English.

In the US at age 17 there are exam requirements in English, maths, science and social studies.

And in the Netherlands at 16, 17 or 18 students are expected to pass tests in Dutch, English, social studies and two other subjects – such as science, classical culture or a second modern foreign language.

England’s current expectation that only English and maths be considered benchmark expectations at 16 marks us out from other high-performing nations.

I am delighted to have a debate about how we both broaden and deepen our education system, but we cannot be in any doubt that while reform accelerates across the globe no country can afford to be left behind.

I’m in no doubt that what we are attempting in England adds up to a comprehensive programme of reform for schools here – but if we are to learn one thing from the groundbreaking work done by Andreas Schleicher and by Sir Michael Barber, it is that whole-system reform is needed to every aspect of our education system if we are to build a truly world-class education system.

It is only by paying attention to improving teacher quality, granting greater autonomy to the front line, modernising curricula, making schools more accountable to their communities, harnessing detailed performance data and encouraging professional collaboration that a nation can become one of the world’s top performers.

The evidence shows us it can be done.

And the challenge facing us in 2011 is to follow the path which the evidence, so patiently acquired by Andreas Schleicher and by Sir Michael Barber, tells us can liberate our children.

What better New Year’s resolution could any of us make this week.

Below is the text of the speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 23 February 2012.

When I was a news editor at The Times I recognised that each branch of journalism had its own favourite phrases: cliches to some, comforting and reassuring prose landmarks to others.

Footballers would always have “intelligent” (or “cultured”) left feet. Restaurant reviewers would sooner or later find a pudding – but never any other course – “toothsome”. No political correspondent ever quotes a “junior” backbencher, ever refers to the 1922 Committee without reminding us that it is “influential”; or ever fails to remind readers, uncertain about which issue decides elections, that “It’s the economy, stupid”.

For TV reviewers the one genuinely indispensable favourite phrase is the praise offered to those rare television programmes which are “worth the licence fee alone”.

Considering that a boxed-set of Borgen sets you back just thirty pounds and the licence fee is four times that amount, it’s a rare programme which actually deserves that praise.

But this month we’ve been privileged to see one series which undeniably does.

The BBC’s three documentaries – Protecting Our Children – recently screened on BBC2 are in the very highest traditions of public service broadcasting.

They show, unsparingly, and without fuss, the reality of life for social workers and their clients in Bristol. Thought-provoking, unsentimental and humane, they are gripping yet uncomfortable viewing.

They also remind us that public service broadcasting is at its best when it reminds us of what those in public service are doing for all of us.

And no-one watching this series can be anything other than impressed with the calmness, patience, compassion, good judgement, professionalism and nobility of those in social work.

By giving an honest account of the fantastic job social workers do, the BBC is helping to bring a little balance to the media conversation about social work. A conversation which has been dominated for far too long by caricature, finger-pointing, recrimination and misjudgement.

The reality of Social Work

We ask social workers to operate in conditions most of us know nothing about; to engage with people in desperate need; to make extremely finely balanced ethical and practical judgements; to retain the trust of adults while thinking always of the best interests of children; to navigate bureaucracy and cope with heavy workloads. All the while knowing that if a mistake does occur then their career, indeed their professional status, may be ruined for ever.

So I am very glad that, today, Andrew Christie – one of the finest social workers in the country – has given me the opportunity to place on the record my gratitude to his profession and my admiration for the vital and under-appreciated work social workers do.

I’d like to think, and I’m sure I’ll be told if I’m wrong, that we are now moving towards a more mature relationship between social workers and central Government.

Building on foundations laid by my predecessor, Ed Balls, we now have a new College of Social Work, we have a prestigious new route into the profession for career-changers who’ve been successful in other fields, we’ve had superb work by Moira Gibb on how to improve support and training for the profession and ground-breaking reports from Professor Eileen Munro, which pave the way for progress to a more thoughtful development of improved practice.

Shortly we’ll be publishing the job specification for the role of Chief Social Worker – a new role which, like the Chief Medical Officer, will help bring balance and authority to the national debate on the profession does its job.

And we remain committed to publishing serious case reviews to encourage an informed debate when something goes wrong – as it inevitably will. A debate which will demonstrate that, if there is fault, it will very often reside not with social workers but with others – whether police, lawyers or whoever – and that far more important than any allocation of responsibility is a commitment to learn from the past so we can all do better in the future.

And it’s about learning from the past that I want to talk today.

Specifically, learning from the experience of those who have tried over the years to improve our child protection and adoption systems.

The relationship between care and disadvantage
One of those I have learnt most from is Martin Narey – Chief Executive of Barnardo’s for five years – a dedicated professional with a very special combination of moral courage and intellectual rigour.

Martin has come under fire for making one argument in particular.

He has been frank in acknowledging that earlier in his career he believed having children in care was a sign of failure. And believed that being in care condemned children, more often than not, to failure in the future.

But he has explained that, over time, he came to realise that the poor outcomes faced by looked after children were not a consequence of them being in care – they were a consequence of what had happened to them before they were taken into care.

It was the abuse or neglect they may have witnessed or endured in their earliest years which will have blighted their future. Neglect will have arrested their cognitive development; abuse will have made it more difficult for them to form secure relationships; the fatal mix of the two will have harmed them emotionally, intellectually, socially and personally.

Children and young people do not encounter disadvantage because they have been in care. They are in care because they have had to be rescued from disadvantage.

Martin also came to realise something else. Taking a child into care is not a failure on the part of social workers – but leaving children at risk of neglect or abuse is something none of us should wish to encourage.

Understandably, social workers do everything they can to keep families together. And, understandably, they fear being branded child-snatchers, do-gooders or anti-family if they initiate care proceedings.

But it is far better if social workers follow their instincts to intervene and rescue rather than acquiesce in abusive or neglectful parenting in the hope things will improve.

Because we know just how much damage is done to a child every day it spends in a home where there is no security, safety and certainty of affection.

Better to take children into care than allow them to be abused
So let me underline this. We in Government will back social workers who take children into care. We believe Martin Narey’s diagnosis of the problem is correct – and we know there are far too many children spending too long in homes where they are not receiving the care they need.

We do not regard more children being taken into care as a problem with social work which the profession must address. It is a problem with parenting, which our whole society must address.

My overriding approach to Government is to leave well alone when things are going well: to leave good schools, good parents, good companies to get on with it when they are doing a proper job. But when things go wrong – when cartels frustrate consumer choice, when schools fail their students and, most of all, when adults are neglecting, or abusing, children – then we should intervene, early and energetically, to put things right.

There is strong evidence that, in recent years, there has been too much reluctance to remove a child from circumstances of consistent and outright abuse and neglect – or to return them to those circumstances later.

Harriet Ward’s research into at-risk infants last year provided some horrifying examples of children left unprotected in dangerous and damaging environments:

– a baby whose parents so persistently forgot to feed her that she ceased to cry;

– a two-year-old left to forage in the waste bin for food;

– a three-year-old who could accurately demonstrate how heroin is prepared.

All these children remained with their birth parents for many months without being taken into care. Who knows how much damage they suffered, and how many children like them all over the country are suffering still?

This cannot be allowed to continue. The welfare of a neglected or abused child is more important than the rights of their parents, more important than the schedules of the courts, more important than ticking boxes on forms and much more important than the old saw that blood is thicker than water.

It is emphatically not the case that care is worse than a neglectful or abusive home. On the contrary, the research is undeniable: care is not perfect but, for some children, it can make life an awful lot happier. And, for some of the most vulnerable children, the sooner they are taken into care, the better.

A study by DEMOS in 2010, commissioned by Barnardo’s, showed conclusively that care improves the lives of many vulnerable children and young people. But those children whose entry to care is delayed by indecision or drift, risk longer exposure to damage and neglect; increased emotional and behavioural problems; and more placement disruption and instability.

Nor should we assume that returning a looked after child to their family is necessarily in that child’s best interests. A recent University of York study found that maltreated children who remained in care did better than those who were sent home to their families.

Research by Professor Elaine Farmer looking at children taken into care and then returned to their parents found that, two years after the children had been sent home, 59 per cent of them had been abused or neglected again.

We cannot let children down in this way.

I want social workers to feel confident that they can challenge parents in homes where there is alcohol or drug dependency, where there is no proper interaction between adults and children, where there is domestic violence, where boundaries between adult behaviour and children’s conduct are not properly policed.

And I want social workers to feel empowered to use robust measures with those parents who won’t shape up. Including, when an adult is not providing the home a child needs, making sure that child is removed to a place of greater safety.

Adoption and other permanent solutions

But where should that place be?

Well the most important thing is to find adults equipped to care, in circumstances that provide stability.

Sometimes that will mean fostering – and if there are one group of people who rival social workers in their unselfish commitment to helping our most vulnerable young people then they are foster carers…

But more and more often it should – must – mean adoption.

Because adoption provides what abused and neglected children need most – stability, certainty, security, love.

Of course I’m parti pris.

I was adopted at the age of just four months – given the stability, security and love which allowed me to enjoy limitless opportunities.

My experience of adoption has shown me how – whatever your start in life – being brought up by adults who love you, who are now your parents, is transformative.

Adoption is – in every sense of the word – for good. And the readiness of adults to make such a firm and unselfish commitment for a child they cannot know is, to my mind, an inspirational example of humanity at its best.

Adoption does not finish at the child’s 16th or 18th birthday, any more than biological parenthood does.

My adoptive parents are just as much my parents now that I’m a grown-up with my own children, as when I was a child myself.

And of all the possible permanent solutions, adoptions are the most likely to last. A study in 2010 by the University of York, called “Belonging and Permanence”, found that just 11 per cent of adoptions were disrupted after 3 or more years – compared to 28 per cent of fostering placements. When a child is adopted quickly, before their first birthday, the breakdown figure is only about 2 or 3 per cent.

Adoption gives a vulnerable child a home, and a family, for life.

Adoption rates have fallen

That is why it troubles me – more, angers me – that so few children today are benefiting from that generosity and humanity.

The decline in the number of children being adopted means a cruel rationing of human love for those most in need.

Adoptions have fallen by 17 per cent over the last decade.

The number of children adopted in England last year was the lowest since 2001. Only 3,050 children found new homes by adoption last year, just 2 per cent of them under the age of one.

These figures are even more remarkable when the number of children finding permanent routes out of care has actually increased. And we need to be careful that alternative solutions like special guardianship or residence orders are not used as a substitute for adoption when it would be the best option for a particular child.

As I pointed out earlier, the fact that more children are now being taken into care is not a problem we should lay at the door of social workers – but it is a problem if children in care are not found a proper home quickly.

I was lucky enough to be with my adoptive mother within four months of my birth. But many of those children available for adoption today have complex and challenging needs – and the average time between a child entering the care system and being adopted is now over two-and-a-half years.

What’s more, this average hides huge variations across different regions. Last year, five local authorities placed every single child within 12 months of their adoption decision.

But another four local authorities placed fewer than half its children in need of adoption over the same timescale.

We need a system that works for all children, regardless of where they live. A system which is quick, effective and robust.

Making sure the whole system works and improves for children
When a child can’t stay with their birth family, then the longer they wait for a permanent adoptive place, the more damage they will suffer – and the harder it will be to form a bond with a new family.

That is why it is so important to tackle delay throughout the system. We need to speed up care decisions, and work with local authorities to ensure they speed up their processes too.

In October last year we published new performance tables and we’re currently working hard to make this data more valuable for local authorities in identifying best practice and areas of weakness.

As we are here in the Isaac Newton Centre, I must pay tribute to the work that Andrew Christie, as Executive Director of Children’s Services for the three boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham, Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea, has been doing with us to work out how local authorities can speed up decisions for the child at every stage.

As we develop our proposals further, I look forward to seeing similar leadership from every Director of Children’s Services, every Lead Member for Children, and every Family Court Judge.

Finding and assessing adoptive parents

Happily, there are now clear signs that more children are moving through local authority and court processes and being placed for adoption.

And I am sure that the reforms which will follow David Norgrove’s report into the Family Justice System will encourage that trend.

But as a consequence, we have an immediate and pressing challenge. We need radically to increase the supply of adoptive parents who are ready to give these children the love and stability they need.

I entirely reject the argument that there are too few people willing to adopt. I think there could be a vast supply: parents with their own children; couples – heterosexual and homosexual – unable to have children of their own; single individuals, both men or women.

But the barrier which looms between these prospective parents and their potential children is a process of recruitment and assessment which turns enthusiasm into exhaustion and optimism into despair.

Too many examples of the assessment process going wrong
We have been overwhelmed by stories from adopters and prospective adopters, telling us that the current system actively drives them away.

Let me mention a few examples:

Like the woman who made her first inquiry about adoption three and a half years ago. After meeting a social worker in her home and spending four days on a preparation course, she applied to adopt. It was another seven months before the assessment process even began – a process which took 15 months to complete. She was eventually approved to adopt, but that was well over a year ago – and she is still waiting to be matched with a child.

Or the white couple in London who knew that there were lots of black children in care and that those children have to wait 50% longer on average to be adopted. The assessment process dragged on for months, their files were lost, then they were told that the idea of their adopting a black child could not be countenanced.

Or the couple who had already adopted a daughter from abroad, and who wanted to add another child to their family. Eighteen months after their first enquiry, they are only now attending their first preparatory meetings. In the interim, hearing nothing, they chased up repeatedly only to discover that their address had been lost, and no effort made to find it. Despite repeated enquiries, they have been told nothing about how the assessment is decided, nor what particular qualities are sought in prospective adopters. In their own words, they feel that the “assessment of prospective adopters is based on the subjective opinion of a small group of people and…success is wholly dependent upon conformity to whichever set of political or social values happen to be flavour of the month”.

Or the couple wanting to adopt a child whom they already knew and loved, but who were turned down because one of them had not yet given up smoking for a long enough period.

Or the remarkable adopters of five disabled children who, just a few months ago, when they were ready to adopt a sixth, were turned away by nine local authorities because their previous assessments were out of date. When they persuaded the tenth local authority to give them a fast track re-assessment, they were told that a further adoption could not take place until they bought a new electric kettle with a shorter lead.

I could go on.

But I can’t continue without asking one fundamental question.

When so many children are in such desperate need of a loving home, and are waiting for months and years to find one, how can we treat would-be adopters this way?

The flaws in the assessment system

The current system of assessment has become bloated. Assessments regularly run to over 100 pages. They include huge areas of repetition and an astonishing amount of trivial detail, which seems to bear dubious relevance to adults’ capacity to be loving parents.

Highly trained social workers spend hours asking questions like whether there is a non-slip mat in the shower, whether the prospective adopters have a trampoline in the garden and, if so, whether it has a safety net.

A three page pet assessment form has been extended by one voluntary organisation to include a six page dog assessment – nine pages of forms to manage the risk of an adopted child living with a pet.

The quantity of material gathered has been confused with the quality of analysis – and there is no direct correlation between the two.

Understandably afraid of something going wrong, successive governments have tried to eliminate risk by maximizing form-filling.

But while they were right that risk has to be managed – adoption is too profound a step for us not to take care – we cannot eradicate risk with excessive bureaucracy. We must instead take steps to manage it, proportionately and sensibly.

I would like to take this opportunity to state that if something does go wrong (which we all know is bound to happen at some point) I have no intention of condemning social workers for decisions and recommendations which were sensible and sensitive at the time.

No system can be perfect – and it would be utter nonsense to pretend otherwise.

The Action Plan on Adoption

But we can do much better. That’s why, next month, we will be bringing out an Action Plan on Adoption.

We know that more bureaucracy is not the way to secure better outcomes for vulnerable children. And we know that the current system is leaving many children waiting for years to be adopted, and many would-be adopters disheartened and discouraged.

We need a system which helps professionals to assess prospective adopters, with better analysis and less form-filling;

We need a procedure which can be completed at speed, and which will not drive so many would-be adopters away;

We need to slim down pre-adoption assessment, and beef up adoption support;

And we need performance indicators which can help local authorities to measure how they’re performing against each other and improve.

As Jonathan Pearce, Chief Executive of Adoption UK, has pointed out, “it is rare to find an agency that is failing across the board”.

Equally, even the best performers always have scope for improvement.

I know that demanding a process which can be completed more speedily will mean that I run the risk of being called cavalier.

But I don’t mind. What I believe would be cavalier would be to allow the continuation of an adoption process which is so slow, so inefficient, that we condemn thousands of children to a life without parents.

A group of sector experts (including the CVAA, ADCS and BAAF) is already working hard on redesigning the assessment process to achieve this radical ambition, and we look forward to working with them over the coming weeks and months.

Matching children with adoptive parents

Another area which will need particularly close scrutiny is how to meet the challenge of matching children with adoptive parents.

This can be the most vital stage of the whole process. But all too often, it fails.

Many children waiting for adoption never get adopted. Many parents cleared to adopt never get the chance. And even when a successful match is made, parents and children have still had to endure an agonizing wait because the process just takes too long.

However conscientious they may be, practitioners who wait too long for any particular child, holding out for a perfect parental match, are not acting in that child’s best interests.

And we must bear in mind that matching a child to parents cannot be simply an intellectual process. We need to be more flexible and encourage would-be adopters to be flexible. The child they might go on to love and cherish may not be the child they first imagined – and I welcome the experimental adoption parties which BAAF has recently introduced to give potential parents and children the chance to meet.

The task of finding the right adoptive family is all the more important for children with challenging needs. Most often, the children who wait the longest to be adopted are siblings (including about 75 groups of three or more), children with disabilities or children from ethnic minorities.

These children are the most difficult to place – and that’s why it’s all the more important to welcome with open arms prospective adopters who are ready and eager to give them a home.

The Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies is already developing a proposal for a Social Impact Bond focused on finding adopters and providing adoption support for hard to place children.

Innovative initiatives like this could achieve real improvements for the most vulnerable children, and we look forward to seeing how these plans develop.

One particularly sensitive element of the matching process is, as you all know, matching by ethnicity. Which is much more complex than simply race.

I won’t deny that an ethnic match between adopters and child can be a bonus. But it is outrageous to deny a child the chance of adoption because of a misguided belief that race is more important than any other factor. And it is simply disgraceful that a black child is three times less likely to be adopted from care than a white child.

I heard, recently, of a foster carer whose local authority refused to let her adopt her foster child. The child was happy, and contented – she loved him, and he loved her. But she was white, and he was black. And the local authority insisted that he would have to be moved to black adoptive parents.

Eventually, when no black adopters could be found, common sense prevailed and the adoption went ahead. But only after the mother had endured a nightmare lasting two and half years – during which, as she said, “each morning I thought my son would be removed because another family had been found”.

This mother is by no means the only adopter told that she cannot adopt a child with a different skin colour to her own.

And although the new guidance I issued to local authorities last year explicitly addressed this issue, evidence suggests that too many have failed to change their practice.

If there is a loving family, ready and able to adopt a child, issues of ethnicity must not stand in the way.

I won’t say too much now, in advance of the action plan – but I can promise you that I will not look away when the futures of black children in care continue to be damaged.

Conclusion

Adoption transforms the lives of some of the most neglected children in our country. It is a generous act – and it can achieve incredible results.

I know this from the advice of experts, the statements of parents, the stories of children and from my own experience.

That’s why we are determined that adoption should happen more often and should happen more speedily.

By changing our attitude towards adoption, reducing the unnecessary bureaucracy of the assessment process and freeing up professionals to rely on their own judgement, I feel confident that we will be able to create a more efficient and effective adoption system.

I know that some supporters of adoption will have heard this before, and will be sceptical.

But I can assure you that I will not settle for a modest, temporary uplift in adoption numbers, nor a short-lived acceleration in the process. Nothing less than a significant and sustained improvement will do.

The most neglected, the most abused, the most damaged children in our care deserve nothing less.

Below is the text of the speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, in Nottingham on 13 September 2011.

It’s a special pleasure to be here in Nottingham this evening – it gives me an opportunity to say some very heartfelt thank yous.

To Vanni Treves, Toby Salt, and, above all, Steve Munby, for the visionary leadership they have shown at the National College;

To their team – some of the most gifted and committed people in education today;

But above all to you – the heads of the first 100 Teaching Schools.

You are 120 of the best school leaders in England – which means 120 of the best school leaders in the world.

And 120 of the most important people in this country.

The history of educational improvement in this country has sometimes been written with references to parliamentary Acts – whether it’s Forster’s, Fisher’s, Butler’s or Baker’s.

And implicit in that narrative has been the assumption that educational improvement in this country has been driven by politicians – usually Liberals or Conservatives.

Whereas of course, the truth is entirely different.

Educational progress in this country has not been driven primarily by politicians.

It’s been driven, generation after generation, by teachers.

And especially headteachers.

People like you.

From Arnold of Rugby to Wilshaw of Mossbourne,

From Roxburgh of Stowe to Wilkins of Outwood Grange,

From Rae of Westminster to Ross-Warzynski of Altrincham…

The pioneers who have redefined what we think of as excellence in education have always been teachers…

And the reformers who have consistently raised our expectations of what education can achieve have always been headteachers…

But there has been one change – even in my lifetime…

The biggest names in contemporary education

The most influential leaders

The bravest reformers

Are now, overwhelmingly, in the state sector not the private…

So when people ask me the question – how will you improve our state schools

I always answer – by relying on our state schools…

And, specifically, by relying on you in this room.

So – no pressure there….

And, looking around this room, I feel a special sense of confidence that in your hands state education is in the right hands.

Every time Governments have given great leaders more room to exercise autonomy, they’ve taken an inch of freedom and made a mile of difference to thousands of young lives.

Look at the City Technology Colleges set up after 1988. These all-ability comprehensives enjoyed much greater independence than other schools. Headteachers exercised new-found power to extraordinary effect. Despite being overwhelmingly located in poorer areas, the CTCs achieved – and continue to achieve – great results: the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals in CTCs who earned five or more good GCSEs at grades A* to C is more than twice as high in CTCs as it is for all maintained mainstream schools.

Of course, the autonomy enjoyed by schools like the CTCs, and indeed Grant-Maintained Schools, was eroded after 1997.

But the best minds in the last Government knew that was a mistake. And when they were given the chance to shape policy we saw autonomy return and school leaders back in charge.

Andrew Adonis knew it was headteachers, not councillors, not ombudsmen, not advisers or consultants, who made schools succeed. So he cut through the red tape, and established the London Challenge, Black Country Challenge and Manchester Challenge. In every case strong heads were teamed with schools in challenging circumstances and they achieved great results.

Alongside those school improvement programmes, another, even more radical set of changes gave school leaders an even greater opportunity to make a difference.

The Academies programme gave great heads the chance to totally transform underperforming schools by taking them out of the local authority embrace, bestowing on them all the freedoms CTCs had, and then giving them the chance to take more schools under their wing through chains and federations.

And those Academy chains have achieved amazing things. School leaders like Dan Moynihan at Harris, Barry Day at Greenwood Dale, David Triggs at AET and Paul Edwards at the School Partnership Trust have spread excellence far beyond their own individual schools and transformed hundreds of lives for the better.

And inspirational as those individuals are, they are not exceptional. We know that given the right level of independence many, many school leaders can match them.

The evidence proves that if you empower those at the frontline they can exceed your expectations. A few months ago, academics at the London School of Economics published a landmark assessment of the Academies programme.

They found three things. First, that “Academy conversion generates… a significant improvement in pupil performance.” Second, that this improvement is not the result of Academies ‘creaming-off’ pupils from nearby schools: the fact that more middle-class parents want to send their children to their local Academy is a consequence of the school’s success, not a cause. And thirdly, beyond raising standards for their own pupils, Academies also tend to raise pupil performance in neighbouring schools.

Like CTCs and the Challenge schemes, Academies showed what amazing things can be achieved when heads are put in the driving seat.

And the international evidence confirms this.

The highest-performing education systems are those where government knows when to step back and let heads get on with running their schools. Rigorous research from the OECD and others has shown that more autonomy for individual schools helps raise standards. In its most recent international survey of education, the OECD found that “in countries where schools have greater autonomy over what is taught and how students are assessed, students tend to perform better.”

In Singapore, often considered a model of authoritarian centralism, the Government has nonetheless deliberately encouraged greater autonomy in the school system – and dramatic leaps in attainment have been secured as a result. Schools where principals are exercising a progressively greater degree of operational freedom are soaring ahead.

In Alberta, Canada, a diverse range of autonomous schools offer freedom to professionals and choice to parents. As a result, Alberta now has the best performing state schools of any English-speaking region.

And in America – where the Charter Schools system implemented by New York and Chicago is one of the most radical models of school autonomy – headteachers are turning around the lives of hundreds of thousands of the most deprived children. To take just one example… Harlem Success Academy 1 in New York has a pupil intake of amongst the most disadvantaged in the state. Yet the school now performs at the same level as New York City’s gifted-and-talented schools – all of which have tough admissions requirements, while Success randomly selects its pupils by lottery. With New York and Chicago leading the way, more parents across America are demanding Charter Schools in their local areas.

Freedom works; and the word is spreading.

And what is also spreading – and with your help will spread even further – is the superb practice your schools exemplify.

When one looks at the best heads and the best schools in the country, several common characteristics leap out.

First, uniformly high expectations.

Our nation has suffered for generations because we’ve presumed that only a minority are capable of academic excellence. But the amazing performance of the best state schools proves otherwise.

As the Prime Minister pointed out last week, when comprehensives such as Walworth Academy in South-East London and Burlington Danes in Hammersmith, with almost half their students on free school meals, can get 70 and 75 per cent of their students to pass five good GCSEs including English and Maths, then its clear politicians have been consistently underestimating what our young people are capable of.

But you know that. Great heads, like you, recognise that giving many more young people a rigorous academic foundation will provide them with the basis for a brighter future, whatever they choose to do.

The OECD has reminded us today that the higher the level of academic knowledge, the greater the economic, professional and cultural opportunities open to any child.

And as Alison Wolf pointed out in her ground-breaking report on vocational education, premature specialisation, particularly the abandonment of core subjects before the age of 16, limits the opportunities all children deserve to enjoy.

RH Tawney was right when he said: “what a wise parent would wish for their children, so the state must wish for all its children.”

And any wise parent today will be aware that both prestigious universities and discriminating employers especially value students with qualifications in rigorous subjects such as Maths, English, the sciences, foreign languages and the humanities.

So inspired by the example you have set, we looked for ways to work with the grain of parental expectations and to meet the demands of employers and colleges.

Together I believe we can encourage more state schools to give their pupils an even more rigorous academic grounding. Which is why we have introduced the English Baccalaureate: a suite of rigorous GCSEs that, we believe, gives every young person more choices in the future.

I know that many of you agree: the proportion of pupils receiving the E-Bacc at the schools represented in this room is much higher than the national average.

The E-Bacc has already prompted a welcome uptake in the number of pupils choosing to study history, geography, foreign languages and the sciences.

There has been a particular increase in the number opting to study the three separate sciences at GCSE. In a recent survey undertaken by the Department the numbers doing physics chemistry and biology GCSEs appears to have risen by more than 100 per cent.

Of course, as I have learned during my short time in this job, no good deed goes unpunished.

And schools like yours, which perform superbly academically and thus give children amazing opportunities, are sometimes damned as exam factories. Gradgrindian institutions where children are shackled to their desks until they’ve managed to clear the C/D borderline and then starved of any access to culture, enlightenment or entertainment until they’ve got their A*.

But the truth we all know is that, overwhelmingly, those school that do well in exams are those schools that have also got other things right.

Schools that understand that citizenship is not simply a subject that you teach for one hour a week, but far more an approach towards others which you embody every minute of the school day.

Schools that encourage their staff and their pupils to see themselves as a part of a wider community; to volunteer; to show respect for others; and to exhibit the qualities that exemplify great citizens of the future.

Schools that can see the importance of competitive team sport extending beyond physical fitness – into character building and an ambition to be the best.

Schools that appreciate the need to foster creativity – in graphic art, in design, in music, in dance, in drama and in literature, while at the same time recognising that their pupils can only truly be creative when they’ve mastered the basics.

Schools like your schools.

These virtues, these values are obvious to any visitor – well before you’ve had the chance to inspect the pupil attainment stats and see how performance compares with Fisher Family Trust expectations.

That’s why I think its important for me, as a politician, to emphasise that the most important things that happen in a school can’t be captured in national curriculum programmes of study and will never be measured in league tables, can’t be legislated for, regulated into existence or implemented as part of a National Strategy.

What they can be, however, is observed, applauded, celebrated and replicated.

Which is why your role is so important.

Because Teaching Schools can exemplify these virtues, evangelise for these values and ensure they become widespread.

You can show that what is sometimes called the tacit – or hidden – curriculum is as important in making a school outstanding as performance in any test demanded by the national curriculum.

I want to work with you – and the National College – to spread great practice in these areas.

And I have asked Ofsted to ensure that is made easier. By using its reports to celebrate more often what is special about our best schools – by moving away from verdicts based on data to judgments based on wide, extensive and nuanced observation.

But let me be clear – that is not a retreat from telling hard truths to administering soft soap.

Your schools are all rated ‘outstanding’ in Ofsted’s ‘teaching and learning’ category. But it is a worry to me that so many schools that are still judged as ‘outstanding’ overall when they have not achieved an outstanding in ‘teaching and learning.’ I intend to ask the new Chief Inspector to look at this issue and report back to me with recommendations.

These are just a few of the ways in which you have influenced our approach.

And I want schools across the country to learn from you too. That’s why I am absolutely delighted that you have decided to take up our offer of becoming Teaching Schools.

There is a growing trend amongst world-leading education systems toward more classroom-based teacher training. Research undertaken by McKinsey’s in 2010 looked at eight high-performing education systems around the world. What they found was that the best systems embed professional and talent development in schools.

And that’s no surprise to me. Because that’s where the real experts in education – teachers and leaders – tend to be found.

In Finland trainees receive extensive classroom teaching practice under the guidance and supervision of experienced teachers.

In Singapore I saw trainees learning how to improve their craft and strengthen their classroom management skills by observing the very best teachers at work in the classroom.

In China I found that every classroom was treated as an open space with teachers welcoming observation so they could learn from watching others, and being watched themselves.

All of these nations currently outperform us educationally and the emphasis they place on both intensive school-based classroom training and continual school-based professional development is at the heart of their success.

Higher education institutions will continue to make a significant and important contribution to teacher training. But we want schools to play a much bigger role.

As employers, schools should have greater responsibility for recruitment; be more involved in the provision of quality placements; and have more say in the development of content for training.

There are already ways for schools to be involved in teacher training, and some of you here today are participating in these schemes. But we want to make it easier for more schools to get involved. So we will allow schools to recruit trainees and then to work with an accredited teacher training provider to train them to be qualified teachers.

Schools will be expected to employ these trainees after graduation. So there will be an incentive on the part of the schools to recruit the very best – thus driving up the standard of prospective teachers further.

And the enhanced prospects of securing a job in a great school will entice even more high-quality applicants.

And as a further incentive to attract top graduates into the schools that most need them, trainees who are recruited and selected by schools with a high proportion of pupils on free school meals will receive a larger bursary than other trainees.

Having a more direct involvement in initial teacher training means that schools will also get a greater say in shaping what teachers learn.

And I want your views on how we can, together, improve the subject knowledge of teachers in critical areas.

The science and maths communities have been clear that they would like to see much more teaching of science as three separate subjects in secondary school.

It provokes the question why the National Curriculum for science is not currently divided along subject lines. Why should we have a science curriculum that’s split into areas like ‘The Environment, Earth and Universe’ and ‘Organisms, Behaviour and Health’? Why not have biology, chemistry and physics? Of course, I don’t wish to pre-empt the National Curriculum Review, but I do want your views on how we can ensure the quality of science teaching continues to improve.

If our National Curriculum Review does conclude that science should be taught as three distinct subjects, this would obviously have knock-on effects on teacher training and the way that courses are funded. Many members of the science community argue that teacher training has hitherto focused too much on general science teaching, and that this has encouraged generalists at the expense of specialists. The physics community have found this particularly problematic. They say that many physics and engineering students want to train as physics teachers – or physics and maths teachers – but are put off by the way that training is currently organised, because many physicists and engineers do not want to teach chemistry or biology.

At a time when we desperately need more physics teachers, it makes sense to think of ways we can make entering the profession more attractive. With only 0.4 per cent of engineering graduates going into teaching, we need to look at how we might tap in to that pool. The Institute of Physics’ new pilot PGCE in Physics and Maths is exactly the sort of innovation we need and we strongly support it. We want to see more such innovations and, as Teaching Schools will have a greater involvement in course development, we look to you for new ideas.

Another topic on which I’d be interested to hear your thoughts is the issue of specialist primary teachers. Most state primary teachers are trained as generalists. But some of the best state primary schools in the country insist on discrete subject teaching in KS2. And one of the things many parents value about private primaries is that they often have specialist teaching from an early age. Obviously, I am alive to the practical difficulties of demanding too high a degree of specialism in, say, small rural primaries. Nonetheless, I think the idea is worth exploring further, and I will be discussing with the TDA how we could prioritise courses that train primary specialists – especially in maths and science.

Improving ITT is crucial, but while I am evangelical about the need to attract even more high quality people into teaching I am equally determined to improve the support we give to those already in the profession.

And I believe no institutions are better placed to provide superb continuous professional development for teachers than your schools.

At the moment, too much CPD provision is, frankly, a bit scattergun. There are a lot of great programmes being delivered, but there are also a number of less good schemes. It’s difficult for every school to know what constitutes a worthwhile investment. That is one reason why we see the level of spending on CPD vary so much between schools.

Teaching Schools can help, not only by advising other schools on great CPD services they’ve used, but also by providing such services themselves.

Teaching Schools can use their close relationships with other schools to develop CPD programmes that genuinely fit existing demand. And other schools will choose whether or not to take advantage of these programmes, making Teaching Schools accountable to their peers.

As with initial teacher training, the National College will be responsible for quality assuring the work Teaching Schools do, and will remove accreditation from any school not meeting the standards. CPD is yet another area where we’re moving to a model that puts schools in control. We’re letting heads buy in – and help create – the services they really want.

And one area where we are convinced the demand exists for improved support is at the level of middle leadership. Specifically at department head level.

That is why we are introducing a new programme – Specialist Leaders in Education – to ensure outstanding middle leaders, whether heads of department or those at assistant and deputy level – can help other schools and in turn prepare themselves to step up to the next level.

There will be 1,000 SLEs in the first year, rising to 5,000 by the end of 2014. Part of Teaching Schools’ role will be ‘talent spotting’ the best senior and middle leaders and helping them earn SLE status. This will involve providing them with training, mentoring and support – while at the same time deploying them to improve neighbouring schools. Through such programmes, the wealth of knowledge, wisdom and experience in this room will be passed on to the next generation of heads.

One in four existing headteachers will be eligible to retire in the next four years. We need to ensure that there are enough dynamic, committed young headteachers to take their place in the future. And with our SLE programme we can help ensure that succession planning in all schools becomes easier. So more gifted professionals can take on the special responsibilities, and enjoy the special sense of pride, that comes from being a headteacher.

Of course for all of us in education the driving moral purpose behind our work is the belief that every child has a talent which deserves to be identified, nurtured and stretched.

And we all know that children only have one chance at education.

That’s why I have made it clear that this government will not allow underperforming schools to simply carry on as before. That’s why we’ve raised floor standards and why we’re taking new powers in the education bill to intervene when schools are in trouble.

Where children are being failed, action will be swift. And Teaching Schools will be central to our reforms. You all have the capacity to help enhance the leadership, improve the teaching and fix the behaviour problems in our most challenging schools.

And it’s not only in our most challenging schools that you can have a transformative effect. As the Prime Minister pointed out last week, there are far too many coasting schools in the country, with a level of performance we still term satisfactory but we all know isn’t good enough.

Teaching Schools have the capacity to form partnerships with these schools, providing them with advice and support. Many of these schools will themselves have the capacity to improve but they need encouragement, a guiding hand, and the setting of higher expectations. We’ll be saying more, shortly, about how we ensure progress is made. But your role will be critical.

Looking at the road ahead can sometime be unnerving. The enormity of the challenges we face can be daunting: for all the advances we have made – and are making – in education, thousands of children are still being failed. And events such as the summer riots can test our faith further: schools are being confronted with a more complex set of challenges than ever before.

Yet looking around the room today, it’s impossible not to be optimistic about the future. Each one of you is living proof that one person can make a difference to the lives of thousands. And by listening to you, by trusting you, by handing power to you, there’s no limit to what we can achieve.

Below is the text of the speech made by Michael Gove, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath, in Westminster Hall on 17 December 2008.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) on securing the debate and the hon. Members for Croydon, Central (Mr. Pelling) and for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) on their speeches, both of which contained much good sense.

I draw attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Interests. As a journalist, I write for The Times and have been an executive of that newspaper as news editor. I am committed to the principle of free expression and the freedom of the press. That is not only a consequence of my professional career and vocation, but because I believe that it is only through an effective free press that the exercise and abuse of power can be monitored effectively.

While this country has the police, the courts and a system designed to track down and punish those who do wrong, the press has historically played an invaluable role in bringing such people to the attention of the courts and the police. Sometimes the press is needed to draw our attention to the failure of the authorities in the pursuit of wrongdoing, extremism or other activities that threaten the public interest. Only this week, The Times pointed out that someone who has connections to Islamist extremism that might concern us all has been employed as an adviser to the Metropolitan police’s Muslim contact unit.

Not just newspapers, but other institutions that exercise a journalistic or quasi-journalistic function have exposed extremism in public life. Think-tanks such as Policy Exchange, which I used to chair, and the Centre for Social Cohesion have pointed out the extent of extremist influence—particularly but not exclusively Islamist extremist influence—in British public life. Because of the international nature of the extremist threat, there are examples of the press being more effective than states or international institutions in exposing such dangers. An example is the work of Claudia Rosett at The Wall Street Journal in exposing the failure of the UN effectively to police sanctions against Saddam Hussein. In all those areas, free expression and a free press have been vital in exposing abuses.

The right hon. Member for Rotherham pointed out that it is of particular concern to all of us who are attached to the freedom of the press that individuals who have been alleged to have links to extremism have used British courts to close down the investigation or publication of allegations that are in the public interest. He mentioned the examples of Khalid bin Mahfouz and Mohammed Sawalha, a British resident who tries to close down legitimate investigation into extremism on the internet.

As the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for North Norfolk pointed out, there is in effect a public interest defence in law for the sort of investigative journalism that I am sure we would all applaud. The Reynolds defence offers journalists and newspapers a form of qualified privilege. That is qualitatively different from the sort of privilege enjoyed in courts and by Members of Parliament because it allows newspapers the comfort that it is legitimate for them to publish allegations provided that the process followed demonstrates that the journalism they are engaged in is of high seriousness, that appropriate steps have been taken to ensure that the allegations are in the public interest and that they are being properly investigated. They do not subsequently have to prove justification to the same threshold required in other cases.

A problem with the Reynolds defence is that instead of being an aid to free expression, according to some it has become an obstacle to free expression. The guidance that the courts originally gave newspapers to help them publish material in the public interest has become another set of hurdles that they have to clear. The hon. Member for North Norfolk pointed out that Jameel and others v. Wall Street Journal Europe Sprl made it perfectly clear that the Reynolds defence should help, not hinder, free expression.

There has been only sporadic implementation of that defence and a misunderstanding of it in many courts. That is why at the very least it is worth exploring whether we can enshrine the principles of the Reynolds defence in statute. That would send a clear signal from Parliament to the courts that the Reynolds defence is in effect as a public interest defence that allows the publication of material that should be part of public debate, particularly when serious issues such as extremism and terrorism need to be investigated.

Dr. Evan Harris (Oxford, West and Abingdon) (LD): The hon. Gentleman has set out some components of the Reynolds defence. I believe that part of that approach of responsible journalism is to report the denial of the allegations by the accused. That is not a requirement, but I am interested to hear his view on the matter.

Michael Gove: The hon. Gentleman is right that broadly 10 principles are outlined in the Reynolds defence, one of which is the strong suggestion that an effort should be made to secure the response of the individual against whom allegations are made. It is a basic principle of good journalism that the other person’s case should be heard.

I would not wish to erect those 10 principles into 10 absolute hurdles. Discretion should be exercised in the courts and any change to the law should acknowledge that. The important points are whether the material that is published is in the public interest, whether the case is urgent and important enough to justify publication and whether overall the journalists, the newspaper or the blog can demonstrate that they have done everything in their power to ascertain the truth and importance of the allegations that are published.

On costs, the point has been made that conditional fee agreements can raise profound questions of a chilling effect on publication. Indeed, Lord Hoffman has pointed out that freedom of expression may be seriously inhibited by conditional fee agreements. The hon. Member for Croydon, Central has pointed out that they can be helpful to individuals without resources who have been defamed. I do not wish to see the end of them, but it is important that an effort is made not to perpetuate the chilling effect on publication in the ongoing review into the costs of civil judgment. In particular, small and independent newspapers, think-tanks, research groups and other organisations that are vital components of a free and rigorous culture of debate and accountability must be protected in any structure that we create.

Finally, it has been pointed out that internet publication can lead to links being created to articles that were published and brought into the public domain four or five years previously because they remain on an internet archive. That may be done to substantiate a point that is being made afresh. An individual who creates such a link to material that is already in the public domain can be sued. At the very least, it is questionable whether we should allow the courts to pursue an individual who in all innocence creates a link to an article that has not been the subject of a defamation action. That individual may be sued because of the desire of another to pick off a weak link who he considers to be rich pickings and a suitably unprotected victim. In those circumstances, it would be appropriate for the court to ask, “Why did you not go for the big boys first?”

Below is the text of the speech made by Michael Gove, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath, in Westminster Hall on 17 April 2007.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Olner.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman) on securing the debate. As the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) pointed out, my hon. Friend made a brilliant speech in the debate on the Queen’s Speech, in which he outlined the scale of the challenge that our society faces. That challenge is not one of religious separatism, but one of ideological division, and here I must take issue with what the hon. Member for Hazel Grove said in his fascinating, wide-ranging, but in some respects misconceived remarks. He was right to stress the importance of community initiatives. He was, as ever, right to stress the importance of pluralism and to recognise that one size does not fit all when we are dealing with the various problems that we have all had an opportunity to analyse in the debate. However, he was wrong to suggest that the problem is an explicitly religious one, and to draw the historical comparisons that he did.

I should point out that, when the hon. Gentleman said that we no longer believed in one version of British history that saw us moving towards a golden future, he was disavowing a grand Liberal tradition. That version of history, which saw us moving towards a more liberal future, which used to be known as Whig history, and was the product of Macaulay and Trevelyan, used to be the guiding light of his party. It is a pity that it is no longer. One of the insights of Macaulay, Trevelyan and other Whig historians is that what has made Britain great is not just our respect for pluralism and tolerance, but a belief in liberty, rooted in our historic institutions. Those institutions are challenged by the specific ideology outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe.

Islamism is distinct from Islam. Islam is a great faith that has nourished millions for hundreds of years. To this day it contributes intellectually and spiritually across the globe to enriching the lives of a great many people. No one on the Conservative Benches would want to criticise Islam as a faith. Indeed, it has enriched this country. Islamic scholars and tens of thousands of British Muslim citizens make Britain a better and more tolerant place today, but the best of those—in fact, the majority of them—also recognise that those who call themselves, sometimes, Islamists or jihadists, or who use another name, such as Salafists, and who follow the specific Islamist ideology are following a 20th-century totalitarian aberration that is intended to undermine the very tolerance that makes Britain both a safe and a warm house not just for its Muslim citizens but for all citizens. If we are to ensure that toleration will survive in this country, and protect pluralism and liberty, we need to be aware of the precise nature of the threat. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe deserves praise for drawing attention to that challenge in this House and elsewhere.

Andrew Stunell: The hon. Gentleman was kind enough to address his remarks to me, and of course I acknowledge the points that he was making about the hon. Member for Wycombe, who has rightly set out his stall on the matter. I hope that I conveyed the point that I wanted to make, which is that confronting the extremists is not the major job that we have. We must address the society.

Michael Gove: Both go hand in hand, and we cannot effectively champion the interests of moderate Muslims and of our pluralist, tolerant and liberal society, unless we show a determination to tackle extremism. It is the extremists who, in the past, have crowded out from the debate the moderate voices in the Muslim world. I am thinking particularly of the voices of female British Muslim citizens, which have been stilled and silenced as a result of extremists operating not just in mosques but more broadly in our society.

I want to say a word of appreciation about my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) and congratulate him on his speech. He brings huge expertise and great integrity to the debate. In his professional career before he joined us in this House he spent many distinguished years serving this country and defending its interests. While he has been in the House he has proved himself a dedicated public servant, and whenever he speaks on such issues it behoves all of us to pay close attention to the expertise and integrity that he brings to bear on them, as he did so effectively today.

I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) on his speech. Rather than inhabiting a constitutional Never Land, all that he did was stick up for those Enlightenment values that are the best protection for all minorities. In that respect I am delighted that his comments found a ready answering call in all my hon. Friends’ speeches.

When we are talking about integration and cohesion it is important for all of us to choose our words carefully and to tread with care. With your permission, Mr. Olner, I want to make a brief apology to the House. On a previous occasion, in December 2005, I had an opportunity to question the Home Secretary about his strategy for preventing extremism. I believe that several individuals whom the Government had asked to work with them on preventing extremism were themselves linked to extremist groups. I took the opportunity to raise in the House the names of some of those individuals. One of them, a gentleman called Ahmad Thomson, is a Muslim convert who was involved in holocaust denial, and I believe that it was right to draw attention to his involvement and that of several others whose enlistment by the Government in their fight against extremism seemed to be mistaken.

However, even as I was pointing out that the Government had made a mistake, I myself made a mistake. One of the individuals to whom I drew attention was Mr. Khurshid Ahmed. I remind the House that the gentleman to whom I drew attention has exactly the same name as another Khurshid Ahmed who is indeed linked with extremist activity, and who operates primarily in Pakistani politics but also has a link with institutions in this country. The Khurshid Ahmed who served on the preventing extremism together group is an admirable individual. I have now had the opportunity of meeting and working with him on several occasions.

When I discovered my mistake, I immediately wrote to Mr. Ahmed and to the Home Secretary to apologise and to put the record straight, but I have received representations from Mr. Ahmed’s Member of Parliament, the hon. Member for Dudley, North (Mr. Austin), who asked me to use any opportunity to place on the record in Hansard an acknowledgment of my mistake and to underline what I said in my letter, which was that Mr. Ahmed has done considerable work to further integration and cohesion in our society, and that he deserves nothing but the highest praise for his many years in public life. I am happy to use this opportunity to state on the record, for the benefit of Hansard and those outside, my appreciation of Mr. Ahmed’s work and of the calm, diligent way in which the mistake was brought to my attention by the hon. Member for Dudley, North, whose own contribution to fighting extremism in his area of the west midlands also deserves to be noted with credit by the House. I placed copies of the letters that I wrote in December 2005 to the Home Secretary and to Mr. Khurshid Ahmed in the Library earlier today.

I mentioned that it is important to acknowledge our mistakes, and I believe that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, in her conduct since taking on responsibility for integration and cohesion matters, has acknowledged that the Government made errors in the past. She did that not in a breast-beating way, but in an appropriately respectful fashion. Before sitting down and allowing the Minister to reply to the many questions that have been put by my hon. Friends,

I would like to acknowledge that the Government have moved but also to indicate that there is still some way to go.

I believe that the Government have accepted that, before the fateful events of 7 July 2005, they had fallen down on the job when it came to questions of integration and cohesion, and of extremism, specifically within the Muslim community. They have acknowledged that the principle of the covenant of security—that unless someone is actively engaged in violence against the state, their activities would be tolerated, no matter how extreme their preaching—was a mistake. More than that, I believe that the Government have acknowledged that some of their chosen partners in the Muslim community and elsewhere were not as well chosen as they might have been.

The Secretary of State was absolutely right to point out recently that Muslim organisations that boycott holocaust memorial day should no longer receive public money. I also note with approval that recently she has been showing a willingness to work with the Sufi Muslim Council, the British Muslim Forum and especially the Fatima Women’s Network, all of which are more moderate Muslim organisations.

The Government’s greater openness to working with moderate, mainstream organisations is to be welcomed, but it provokes a couple of questions. First, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe pointed out, the Government still seem to be taking a disjointed and far from synoptic approach. I mention one area that he did not, which comes under the rubric of the Department for Education and Skills. Why is it that the Government’s adviser on the teaching of Islam in higher and further education, Dr. Ataullah Siddiqui, is linked with the Islamic Foundation and the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, both of which are institutions that were set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami party, an explicitly Islamist organisation, and its supporters? In other words, why is the man who is charged with checking extremism on Britain’s campuses in fact linked with a body that was set up by a separatist Islamist organisation?

Secondly and more broadly, I welcome again what the Secretary of State said about seeking to encourage mosques to register with the Charity Commission and, as a result, receive not only help with fundraising, but a higher level of oversight and help with governance. What, however, do we do with mosques that explicitly reject that kind offer because they wish to carry on with extremist preaching and teaching? How do we ensure, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe said, that the flood of extremist Wahabi literature and, indeed, Saudi money into certain mosques is effectively checked so that the process of indoctrination in an extremist ideology is scrutinised and we deal effectively with teaching that might encourage a new generation of people who believe in separatism and division?

In that regard, I am very interested in my hon. Friend’s question about the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board. Why is the Muslim Association of Britain—the UK branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organisation—on an equal footing with the British Muslim Forum and the Muslim Council of Britain? Why is Finsbury Park mosque, which used to be the haunt of Abu Hamza, now run by the Muslim Association of Britain’s Dr. Azzam Tamimi? Why, having got rid of one extremist, do we have another version of extremism in control?

I have a final request for the Minister. I appreciate that time is pressing and that she has a limited amount of time in which to answer all our questions, but can she prevail on the Secretary of State and the Cabinet to ensure that we have a full-day debate on this issue in Government time? Given the setting-up of the commission, the Secretary of State’s announcements and, crucially, the prospect of significant changes in the Government machinery for dealing with this most sensitive of issues, as well as the Government’s fitful record of implementation, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Newark referred, we need the Government to give a clear statement in their own time on precisely what the new strategy is. That will give those Opposition Members who wish to see them and our multi-ethnic society succeed an opportunity to make an effective contribution to this ongoing process.