Tag: 2015

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, at the BIS Conference Centre in London on 22 January 2015.

Introduction

Thank you for that introduction [Richard Yelland].

It is a great pleasure to be here at the launch of the first ever Education Policy Outlook.

For well over a decade, the OECD has been at the forefront of producing high-quality international indicators which have been instrumental in informing education reforms in countries around the world – including this country.

PISA, PIAAC and TALIS have all given us vital data on our education performance relative to other jurisdictions. The Education Policy Outlook being launched today is a welcome addition to OECD analysis.

These surveys tell a story of remarkable improvement in some countries, and highlight complacency and stagnation in others. This can sometimes be uncomfortable. But it is essential, because understanding why some countries’ education systems succeed and others do not is the best stimulus for improvement.

Here in England, we had our own story of stagnation. PISA and other benchmarks consistently showed that our schools were failing to progress, while those elsewhere – in Poland, Italy and Portugal for example – were rapidly improving. This was of huge concern to this country.

Our long term economic prosperity depends upon an education system with the very highest standards. As research by Hanushek and Woessmann has found, a 25 point increase in PISA scores could raise the UK’s GDP growth rate by 0.5% every year.

Analysis by my own department has shown that the increase in the number of pupils achieving good GCSE grades since 2010 is estimated to add around £1.3 billion to the country’s economy in the long run .

Better schools are the single greatest step we can take towards an economy which is more productive, creates more jobs, and which equips young people with the knowledge they need to succeed in modern Britain.

Our plan

So, what was our response to PISA? Well, since coming to power in 2010, this government has implemented the most significant reform plan for a generation – and learning from the most successful education systems around the world has been central to that plan.

Three key principles which draw on the best international evidence have consistently guided our approach:

– increased autonomy for schools, coupled with

– strong accountability

– all underpinned by a rigorous academic curriculum

This plan is working. Today, a million more pupils are in good or outstanding schools, as judged by Ofsted – England’s schools inspectorate.

The English Baccalaureate – a new performance measure which encourages pupils to take core academic GCSEs, has seen a 64% increase in pupils being entered for those subjects

And 102,000 more 6-year-olds are on track to becoming good readers following our focus on phonics teaching and the introduction of a phonics screening check in primary schools.

But if we are to sustain these improvements, we must stay the course, and continue to learn from the best international practice.

English complacency

I first encountered PISA in 2002, shortly after the results were published for the very first time.

I recall a former Permanent Secretary of the Department for Education telling me at a Public Accounts Committee hearing that the UK had just come fourth in science, seventh in reading, and eighth in mathematics out of 32 participating OECD countries.

It was an apparently remarkable performance that confounded not just my expectations, but those of the late Professor Sig Prais of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

As an expert on education systems around the world, Professor Prais was puzzled that reading and science performance in the UK was so far ahead of countries like Switzerland, a system he knew very well.

Of course, after a tightening of OECD procedures for establishing the quality of the data, which saw the UK’s exclusion from the 2003 PISA study, we began to understand why the UK had looked so good. Analysis of England’s samples for 2000 and 2003 revealed an under-representation of lower performing schools and pupils, which had skewed results.

Then in 2007, like Germany in 2001, we had our own ‘Pisa-Schock’.

It was a bombshell. It saw our mean scores shift decidedly lower than the rosy picture painted in 2001. We ranked 14th out of 57 countries in science, 17th in reading, and 24th in mathematics.

In PISA 2009, the UK mean score hardly changed. With even more countries joining and others improving faster than we were, the UK’s relative position looked even worse, placing us 25th out of 65 in reading, 28th in maths and 16th in science.

But whilst we stagnated internationally, KS2 test scores were rising, and GCSE grades were inflating.

In 1994, the first year in which the A* was awarded at GCSE, 10.5% of grades were either A* or A. By 2013, 22.6% of grades were A or A*.

This steady rise gave us a false confidence that standards had improved, when the reality was quite different – and PISA gave us the evidence.

All this was despite unprecedented levels of public spending. UK expenditure on education increased from 4.9% of GDP in 2000, to 6.4% in 2011, above the OECD average.

So we knew that we had a more fundamental problem with our approach to education than simply spending.

Autonomy

Increased autonomy has been at the heart of this government’s plan for education.

Our academies programme has freed schools from local authority control, and our free schools programme has given successful schools and dedicated groups of individuals the opportunity to establish new schools where they are most needed.

These reforms build on previous education policy in England, but also draw on international evidence. Andreas Schleicher has been very clear – including to our own Education Select Committee – that the evidence from PISA shows that local flexibility and discretion for schools is linked to higher results and standards.

We have taken lessons from 2 countries in particular.

Sweden’s friskola’s have been shown to improve grades, and increase progression to universities.

And parents of friskola children are more satisfied with their children’s education than those with children in municipal schools.

American charter schools enjoy greater freedoms to set the curriculum and hold themselves to account, and have influenced our academies programme.

Schools in England such as the King Solomon Academy, sponsored by Ark, have drawn on the charter school chain KIPP, the Knowledge is Power Programme – and produced excellent results.

King Solomon, like KIPP, serves some of the poorest students, and has reported that last year 93% of students gained 5 or more GCSEs at grades A* to C grades, including English and Maths, proving that with the right methods, the background of a child is, and should be, no barrier to achievement.

It has been one of my greatest privileges as School Reform Minister to visit many wonderful schools which have been created by talented and dedicated teachers, influenced by the international community, and enabled by government policy.

Just 2 weeks ago, I went to visit Michaela Community free school, which opened in September 2014 and is located in the ethnically and economically diverse area of Wembley, north London. Over half of the students speak English as a second language. Nearly a third of students receive free school meals.

I saw a rigorous academic curriculum, superb discipline, and pupils required to answer questions in class in full sentences. I have no doubt that this will become one of the best comprehensive schools in the country.

And the academies programme has turned round hundreds of schools which were previously failing to deliver the quality of education which pupils need and parents rightly expect.

Some of these are truly remarkable success stories. Ryecroft Primary Academy in Bradford, which opened in September 2012, Where 70.3% of their pupils are eligible for free school meals – that’s 3-and-a-half-times the national average. In 2012, just 26% of Ryecroft pupils achieved the expected level in reading, writing and mathematics at key stage 2. Last year, this had risen to 70%, and the school was judged as ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, the schools inspectorate.

Accountability

Since 2010, over 4000 schools have become academies and 255 free schools have opened, all benefiting from additional freedoms but also held to account through an improved framework.

England has, for some time, had a relatively effective accountability framework. Key stage 2 assessments and GCSEs are well embedded in our education system. Despite some problems – particularly the inexorable grade inflation. It has proved valuable to have broad and consistent measures with which to measure pupil attainment and school performance.

But we recognised that we could go further. As Poland has demonstrated in their far-reaching and successful reforms, stronger accountability leads to better results for pupils.

So our new key stage 2 assessments, coming into force 2016, will reflect the more challenging national curriculum and will report a precise scaled score at the end of the key stage rather than so called levels.

We are also reforming GCSEs, making them more rigorous and ensuring they teach the core knowledge demanded by employers, and by further and higher education.

And the new Progress 8 performance measures will shift the focus from students on the C/D borderline, to supporting students of all abilities.

Ofsted, our schools inspectorate, abolished the rating they called ‘satisfactory’ replaced it with the rating ‘requires improvement’. These schools are now monitored and re-inspected within 2 years, not 3, and are improving more quickly than before the change.

Academic curriculum

As the most successful international jurisdictions show, autonomy and accountability are vital elements in a successful education system. But perhaps the part of our plan which has drawn most from best practice overseas has been our programme of reforms to the curriculum.

As we came into government in 2010, Tim Oates, the curriculum expert from Cambridge Assessment, produced a paper entitled ‘Could Do Better’. It provided an extensive survey of the challenges we faced. Tim found that our curriculum lacked clarification, teachers were overloaded, and assessment practices were overbearing. The demands of the national curriculum were so vague that it had become impossible to decipher what children should actually be learning.

For too long, our school curriculum lacked the basic essentials that a good education affords. The 2007 secondary curriculum, produced 3 years before we came into office, featured 29 bullet points on the curriculum aims which barely touched upon what pupils should be doing or learning. Students were being awarded the equivalent of 4 GCSEs for 1 subject, despite some of these courses being far less challenging than a single GCSE, and their options for post-16 study limited.

There was a marked hostility towards knowledge, and an obsession with so-called transferable skills.

The 2 schools of thought – progressivism as opposed to a rigorous focus on knowledge – are represented clearly by Michael Fullan and Daisy Christodoulou.

In Fullan’s ‘A Rich Seam,’ he suggests that education for the 21st century should be led by curiosity and ‘new system economies.’ But his thesis, in my view, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Although it is not entirely clear, I think he is describing a new version of the disastrous ‘child-centred’ approach of yesterday.

I think Christodoulou captures the position we should all subscribe to: ‘To be an active citizen’ she says ‘of a democratic society you have to know about history, the world, sciences, the arts. You have to know about things that most people do not bring to the classroom and which they cannot pick up through experience.’

The work of academics such as ED Hirsch and cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has shown that teaching core knowledge must be central to any effective curriculum. Previous attempts to teach skills without knowledge, or to develop proficiency without practice, were always doomed to failure. Listening to this evidence, we recognised that a new national curriculum was essential in order to restore rigour and to drive up standards in our schools.

And in developing this new, academic, knowledge-based curriculum, we looked overseas to find the best evidence of what works.

The Massachusetts Miracle, as it has come to be known, has demonstrated that a rich knowledge content improves educational achievement and it improves social mobility.

The Common Core State Standards in Massachusetts have helped to place their teenagers above those of other States’ in the US, and equal to those in South Korea, Hong Kong, and other high performing jurisdictions.

Since the early 2000s, the Florida State Literacy Plan has sought to improve reading through phonics and phonemic awareness. They also increased accountability by publicly grading state schools.

Between 1998 and 2013, Florida’s fourth-grade reading and math scores went from below the national average to above it.

Since Shanghai entered PISA for the first time with the 2009 study, they have consistently outperformed every other system in reading, maths and science. Their maths performance is particularly impressive, with 15-year-olds outperforming our own by an average of 3 years.

In September last year, we flew 71 British teachers to Shanghai to see for themselves the quality of Chinese primary-level maths lessons. They saw first-hand the 35-minute, whole-class lessons that place high expectations on every child to follow and learn the content, while providing quick catch up sessions for those who struggle.

And in November last year, 29 Shanghai teachers made the trip to England, to demonstrate how they teach maths to young children.

The large majority of Shanghai pupils progress through the curriculum content at the same pace. Differentiation is achieved by emphasising deeper knowledge and through individual support and intervention. The trend for differentiation in England , by contrast, encourages classrooms being divided into groups, with each group taught a separate curriculum.

Another country in the East – Singapore – has been the inspiration behind our call for UK publishers to produce a higher standard of textbook. TALIS data shows that English teachers are 10 times more likely to feel they are lacking good resources than teachers in Singapore where good textbooks – which provide a systematic approach to building knowledge – are a standard fixture both in the class and at home.

Our recently established maths hubs are implementing the mastery approach of East Asian countries and are also now trialling Singapore-style textbooks. Inspire Maths, published by Oxford University Press (OUP) and Maths No Problem, are now being used in some primary schools to provide structure and support to the new national curriculum.

We aren’t the only ones influenced by East Asia. Tennessee has looked to Shanghai to inform its Teacher Peer Excellence Group project.

Progress in the UK

I am pleased to say that, while we have been keen scholars of international education methods, we can happily share some of our great successes too.

As I have already mentioned, phonics teaching is having a positive impact on literacy.

74% of state school pupils passed the phonics check last year, compared with just 58% in 2012.

Tom Bennett and his excellent ResearchED conferences are packed with teachers demanding to know ‘what is the evidence’ behind teaching methods.

More students are studying core academic subjects: A level maths is now the number one choice at A level, and we have seen an increase in exam entries for further maths and all the science subjects.

And crucially, we have more girls taking science and maths subjects compared with 2010: 1,000 more taking physics A level, 2,000 more studying maths A level, and 13,000 more girls are taking physics GCSE than in 2010.

Computing has been completely overhauled, so that pupils will now be taught the fundamentals of coding before they leave primary school.

This will provide children with the knowledge and skills required for rewarding careers which are currently deprived of qualified candidates.

Conclusion

These changes are ensuring that every child leaves school prepared for life in modern Britain.

For me, however, there is 1 litmus test that we have yet to pass.

Professor Zhang, of Shanghai Normal University, and an expert in comparative education, believes that the key to improving is to look at one’s own system through an international prism.

According to Professor Zhang, one of the most important reforms of the past 30 years in China has been the establishment of an ‘open door policy and learning from the world.’

This has enabled scholars and professors, as well as ordinary school teachers, to study in other countries, bringing new educational ideas, knowledge, and approaches to teacher education and training.

Andreas Schleicher has said that if you were to ask any East Asian educationalist the top 10 Western academics, they would be able to do so straight off.

I fear that too few Western educationalists could do the same about their East Asian peers.

It is not until we can do this, and adopt the best teaching methods and systems from around the world, that we can expect the UK to climb those international tables, and implement long-lasting change for the next generation.

Thank you.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, at the Music Education Expo in London on 12 March 2015.

Good morning. It is a great pleasure to be here today at the Music Education Expo in the Barbican, home to world-class music, theatre, art, dance and film.

And it is a fitting venue in which to be speaking about the importance of music education. As music teachers and others involved in music education, your work helps to build a love of music among pupils.

Building this love of music in schools is crucial. Because music shouldn’t be the preserve of those who can afford it, whose parents play instruments themselves or listen to music at home. This government’s plan for education has focused on raising standards for all and narrowing the gap between disadvantaged students and their peers. In the same way that high-quality schools are essential to meet this goal, so too is high-quality music education in schools.

Music is an important subject in its own right, combining intellectual rigour with creativity. The academic opportunities offered by music are clear – in 2009, 18.6% of pupils who achieved an A grade for music A level went to Oxbridge. Only 5 subjects had a higher progression rate.

The wider educational and social benefits of music are also clear. ‘The Power of Music’, recently published by Professor Susan Hallam, points to the positive effects of different aspects of music teaching and training on verbal instruction, reading and comprehension, motivation, communication and behaviour.

Senior teachers and heads in schools often speak of these benefits. As the assistant headteacher of Hackney New School, which offers all children music lessons, recently said:

Music has undoubtedly had a huge impact. Not only are pupils enjoying school more, but almost without realising it they are gaining confidence, resilience and team working skills which they then bring into other subject areas.

The ABRSM Making Music survey in 2014 found that there are particular disparities in music: children from less well-off backgrounds are less likely to play a musical instrument and less likely to have had music lessons. 40% of children from lower socio-economic groups who have never played an instrument said they had no opportunity to learn at school.

That is why when we came into government in 2010 we set out high aspirations. In the remit of the ‘Review of Music Education in England’ by Darren Henley, we stated that “every child should receive a strong, knowledge-based cultural education and should have the opportunity to learn and play a musical instrument and to sing”. Music education was patchy across the country and we wanted to change that so every pupil could benefit. The Henley Review and the subsequent National Plan for Music Education were the starting point for our approach, and set out the direction of our reforms.

Through our curriculum review, music remained a statutory subject in the national curriculum, so every child in maintained schools must study it from age 5 to 14. The new national curriculum, introduced in September, is particularly important to tackle disadvantage as the focus is on setting high expectations for everyone and ensuring that children have access to all of the national curriculum.

Alongside the new national curriculum, we have also reformed GCSEs, A levels and vocational qualifications. The greater rigour and focus on knowledge and skills in the study of music throughout key stages 1 to 3, including exposure to a wide range of music and composers, and teaching children how to read and write music using standard staff notation, will mean that music is an option for more pupils at GCSE. And the new more rigorous GCSE will in turn better prepare students for progression to A level and beyond.

Across all subjects, the importance of high-quality teaching is known to be the crucial factor in delivering better outcomes for pupils. We are fortunate to have some excellent music teachers working in our schools and I was lucky enough to present Classic FM’s primary school music teacher of the year award to Katie Crozier last year. Katie teaches at 2 schools in Huntingdonshire and has delivered significant improvement for pupils there. At her school, where she has taught since 2008, she has transformed the approach to music: the school has gone from having no orchestra and a choir of 8 members to a 50-member orchestra and a choir of 100 singers.

While there is already a great deal of good practice, we also want to make sure there is support available for teachers who may need it – in particular, practical help for non-specialist primary school teachers. I am delighted that Classic FM and the ISM are going to compile, and give schools access to, a new list of 100 pieces of classical music that every child should be familiar with by the time they leave primary school.

Being familiar with the best known classical works is as important as reading the canon. Music has been important to me personally and my suggestions for pieces to include would range from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to Parry’s setting of ‘I was glad’ and Allegri’s ‘Miserere’, which I still remember singing as a choirboy. I very much hope there will be strong engagement from those within music teaching with ISM and Classic FM as they develop the list.

These initiatives highlight that our ambitions cannot be achieved by acting alone. That is one of the key reasons behind the music hubs which we established in 2012 as part of the national plan. The hubs are helping to ensure that every child has the opportunity to learn instruments through whole class teaching, that there are clear progression routes available and affordable to all young people, opportunities to play in ensembles and to sing regularly, including in choirs or vocal ensembles.

In their first year, the hubs gave nearly half a million children the opportunity to learn an instrument for the first time, as well as working with almost 15,000 school choirs, orchestras and bands. 80,000 disadvantaged pupils took part in instrumental ensembles and choirs. Last year, the hubs were working with more than 60% of primary schools and more than 50% of secondary schools on their singing strategy, and 50,000 more children were receiving whole-class ensemble music teaching as a result of the hubs’ work.

On a recent school visit to Redbridge Primary School, I was able to see first-hand their whole-class ensemble teaching programme, which they offer to pupils for 3 years, first hand.

The positive impact the hubs are having is clear. That’s why in July last year we announced further funding for music hubs – an extra £18 million for music programmes, bringing the government’s investment in music education to more than £270 million since 2012.

Government support also continues for the Music and Dance Scheme, that supports the exceptionally talented at 21 music and dance centres of advanced training and 8 specialist schools, including the Royal Ballet School, which I visited recently, the Purcell School and the Yehudi Menuhin School. Programmes such as the National Youth Music Organisations, Music for Youth and In Harmony, a national scheme which focuses on offering children in 6 deprived communities an intensive orchestra experience, also give important opportunities to children up and down the country.

I was fortunate enough to attend the schools prom series, run by Music for Youth, at the Royal Albert Hall back in November, and enjoyed listening to performances by a wide range of ensembles, from the Glantaf Duo from South Glamorgan to the Wessex Youth Orchestra from Dorset.

In addition to government-funded schemes, I am pleased to see other organisations working in this area to increase opportunities in music for young people – such as the National Orchestra for All. NOFA was founded by a Teach First participant in 2011 and takes 150 musicians each year from schools in London and the west Midlands to form a full orchestra, which rehearses and performs in venues such as the Southbank Centre and the Royal Academy of Music.

The government’s free school programme has also unleashed innovation in music teaching, with a number of schools offering a specialism or focus in music such as West London Free School, East London Academy of Music and Hackney New School.

There is a great deal to celebrate and to be proud of in our performance in music – from the great classical composers of past and present, to the string of UK artists who top the charts worldwide. And in 2 years’ time, Sir Simon Rattle will return to England to the London Symphony Orchestra here at the Barbican.

A strong and rigorous music education is as important a part of being well educated as learning about science, history and literature. I hope our commitment to music education in schools is clear. We want to ensure this success in music continues and I am confident that our reforms have set us off in the right direction.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister for Schools, at the Policy Exchange in London on 11 June 2015.

When introducing the second reading of his great Education Act in January 1944, Rab Butler addressed a common objection of the time to the expansion of secondary education which he was about to oversee: ‘Who will do the work if everybody is educated?’

Butler’s response was characteristically uncompromising: that ‘education itself will oil the wheels of industry and will bring a new efficiency, the fruit of modern knowledge, to aid the ancient skill of farm and field’.

The view he was standing against – that a rich education for all is unnecessary, and perhaps even undesirable – is one which has sadly been repeated many times over the past 70 years in different forms. Today, it is more likely to be heard as a denial of the value of rigorous, academic subjects for the most disadvantaged students.

This is an idea which those of us committed to social justice should reject. If we are to deliver a fairer, more socially mobile society, we must secure the highest standards of academic achievement for all young people, and especially those from the least advantaged backgrounds.

Academic decline

Many of us have always seen this denial of the value of academic disciplines for the dangerous falsehood that it is. The data shows, however, that this was not sufficient to prevent a precipitous decline in the study of academic subjects in the years prior to 2010.

By 2010, just 43% of the cohort took a GCSE in a foreign language. In history, the figure had fallen to 31%, and in geography to 26%.

Instead, schools had been tempted to teach qualifications which attracted the most points in the performance tables – not the qualifications that would support young people to progress. The number of so called ‘equivalent’ qualifications taken in schools up to age 16 exploded from 15,000 in 2004 to 575,000 in 2010.

Year after year, disadvantaged young people were encouraged to take less demanding qualifications so that the ‘powers that be’ in the education world could congratulate themselves on their performance whilst failing to prepare pupils for success in later life.

In 2011, we asked Professor Alison Wolf to conduct a review into vocational education. Her findings were stark: that many young people had previously been encouraged to take vocational qualifications which were of no, or even negative, value in the labour market. What’s more, the students being let down in this way by our education system were disproportionately from poorer backgrounds.

Progress

Since 2010, we have made rapid and significant progress to address this decline in academic standards.

We introduced the new English Baccalaureate performance measure, showing the proportion of pupils in a school entering and achieving a good GCSE in English, maths, science, history or geography, and a foreign language. Schools have risen to this challenge. The proportion of pupils entering the EBacc has risen from 23% in 2012 to 39% today, and the percentage achieving it has increased from 16% to 24% over the same period. Last year, almost 90,000 more pupils were entered for the EBacc compared to 2010.

We have also acted swiftly to implement Professor Wolf’s recommendations. To ensure that vocational qualifications are demanding and high quality, we have removed over 3,000 low-value qualifications from performance tables and introduced rigorous new standards and qualifications. Recognising the vital importance of GCSE English and maths, we have introduced a requirement for young people who fail to secure a C in GCSE English or maths at 16 to continue studying those subjects as part of their course in further education.

But the scale of the challenge we inherited in 2010, and the importance of these academic subjects to the future strength of our culture and economy, means that we need to do more.

Overall, disadvantaged pupils remain half as likely to be entered for the EBacc as their non-disadvantaged peers. 23% of pupils eligible for the pupil premium were entered for the EBacc, compared with 45% of all other pupils.

This gap persists even among the most able pupils. Just last week, the Sutton Trust published analysis which looked at the GCSE performance of pupils who had previously scored in the top 10% nationally at the end of primary school. They found that, even within this group, pupils who had received free school meals were significantly less likely to be taking history, geography, a language, or triple science at GCSE than their peers.

These children, who showed such early promise, have been let down by our failure to offer every pupil the chance to benefit from a core academic curriculum.

This culture of low expectations has afflicted whole local authority areas. Despite our reforms, fewer than 10% of pupils in Knowsley achieve the EBacc, compared to 30% in Halton in the north-west, 35% in Westminster and 34% in Hackney. These disparities are not simply explained by social circumstance – in all 4 local authorities, the proportion of pupils identified as disadvantaged is between 40 and 56%. This is simply unacceptable.

Today, I would like to set out this government’s plan to address this challenge by strengthening academic standards further.

But first I want to defend our emphasis on academic subjects against 4 criticisms.

Low expectations

Some have argued that we cannot expect disadvantaged pupils to take academic subjects, or to be motivated by their study. In 2011, an Associate Director of the Institute of Public Policy Research said that:

The problem [with the EBacc] is that very few students from disadvantaged backgrounds actually take those subjects, they won’t be motivated to take them. Ministers are now [effectively] incentivising schools to focus their efforts on middle-class children who do well in these subjects.

This is a concern which was difficult to sustain in 2011, and has now decisively been proved wrong. ‘Outstanding’ schools across the country are demonstrating that a rigorous academic curriculum is the way to overcome educational disadvantage, not an inevitable victim of it.

King Solomon Academy, situated in the heart of a disadvantaged community in Paddington, is one of these schools. 67% of GCSE pupils at King Solomon Academy are eligible for the pupil premium, but despite this, 93% of pupils entered the EBacc, and 76% of pupils achieved it in 2014.

Rushey Mead School in Leicester is yet another example of an ‘outstanding’ school where they have high expectations for all their pupils. 33% of the school’s intake is eligible for the pupil premium, 72%, are entered for the EBacc, and 42% achieve it, well above the national average.

These schools show that all pupils, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, can find academic subjects motivating.

We should never lower our expectations because too many young people are failing to reach them. Rather, we must raise standards by supporting teachers and turning around schools which are struggling. The government is determined to rise to this challenge.

A broad curriculum

It has also been suggested that our emphasis on academic subjects in the national curriculum, and especially the introduction of the EBacc, ‘crowds out’ the study of other important subjects, particularly the arts.

We should acknowledge that the curriculum always involves trade-offs: more time on one subject means less time on others. Over the years, I’ve been asked to add scores of subjects – from intellectual property, to Esperanto, to den building – to the national curriculum. Many of these are important and interesting.

The question, though, is always whether they are sufficiently important to justify reducing the time available for the existing subjects in the curriculum, and I make no apology for protecting space for the English Baccalaureate subjects wherever possible.

That is not to say, of course, that subjects outside the English Baccalaureate have no place in schools. The EBacc is a specific, limited measure consisting of only 5 subject areas and up to 8 GCSEs. Whilst this means that there are several valuable subjects which are not included, it also means that there is time for most pupils to study other subjects in addition to the EBacc, including vocational and technical disciplines which are also vital to future economic growth. The vast majority of pupils will rightly continue to take the opportunity to study further academic GCSEs or high value, approved vocational qualifications at KS4 alongside EBacc subjects.

Indeed, the government has consistently promoted high-quality arts and cultural education. Music and art are statutory subjects in the national curriculum, and we are spending over £270 million in music education programmes between 2012 and 2016. And we’re spending in this period over £113 million on the Music and Dance Scheme, and over £19 million on a range of cultural education programmes.

The supposed choice between a core academic curriculum on the one hand, and the study of a broad range of subjects on the other, is a false one. Before they begin to specialise, we have to ensure that all pupils have the chance to establish a solid academic foundation upon which they can build their future. Several high-performing countries, including South Korea, Japan and the Netherlands, ensure that a core curriculum of academic subjects is studied and then examined at the age of 16.

Success in the modern economy

Others have argued that, in today’s economy, when we cannot predict the jobs of tomorrow, a core academic curriculum is no longer relevant. In his new book, ‘Creative Schools’, the educationalist Sir Ken Robinson writes:

The old systems of education were not designed with this world in mind. Improving them by raising conventional standards will not meet the challenges we now face.

This argument – that the world today is fundamentally different, so high standards in academic subjects are now less important – is not new. As the American education historian Diane Ravitch has pointed out, educationalists such as William Heard Kilpatrick were predicting the same decline in relevance of academic subjects a hundred years ago:

There is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st century skills movement… If there was one cause that animated the schools of education in the 20th century, it was the search for the ultimate breakthrough that would finally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content.

Sir Ken is correct to recognise the value of flexibility and creativity to success in life and the labour market. But he is wrong to suggest that the best way to foster these attributes is to reduce the emphasis on core academic subjects. As Tom Bennett, a teacher and founder of the superb ResearchEd conferences, put it in his excoriating review of Sir Ken’s latest book:

Is there anything more sad than the sight of someone denying children the right to an academic curriculum and the fruits thereof, than from someone who is the very pinnacle of such an education?

By contrast, the best preparation for securing a good job is a solid grounding in core academic subjects: Professor Wolf describes achieving at least a C at GCSE in English and maths as of ‘critical importance’ to employment. And University College London ‘considers experience of learning a foreign language a vital element of a broad and balanced education’.

This isn’t a debate between academic subjects on the one hand, and vocational qualifications on the other. It’s about ensuring that all school children up to the age of 16 are properly educated in those academic subjects that best equip them for their future; either for high-quality vocational education after 16, or further academic education until ultimately going on to engage in training for a vocation.

Anti-intellectualism

Finally, and perhaps most perniciously, some even suggest that a core academic curriculum represents a kind of elitism – as if the study of Wordsworth’s poetry or Rutherford’s Standard Model is for some people, not others.

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educationalist with a commitment to the education of the poor. But his vision of an effective curriculum differs sharply from my own. He believed that the traditional model of education, in which a teacher communicates knowledge to his or her pupils, is oppressive because this deprives them of the opportunity to challenge received wisdom and develop their own contrary perspective.

Freire was of course right that society’s culture and body of knowledge is disproportionately the product of those who have themselves benefited from a rigorous academic education. And in the past, unequal access to such an education has meant that the leading lights of literature, science and the arts have often come disproportionately from advantaged backgrounds.

But it is exactly for this reason that we now need to extend the benefits of a rigorous academic education to all. The body of academic knowledge belongs to everyone, regardless of background, circumstance or job.

This is not a political issue of left and right, but rather a choice whether to stand behind aspiration and social justice, or to take the easier route of excuses and low expectations.

It is striking, therefore, that the government’s commitment to academic rigour receives support from many politicians across the political spectrum. Diane Abbott has proved to be one of the most eloquent supporters of our approach, and has spoken out powerfully in favour of a core academic curriculum:

Precisely if someone is the first in their family to stay on past school leaving age, precisely if someone’s family does not [have] social capital, and precisely if someone does not have parents who can put in a word for them in a difficult job market, they need the assurance of rigorous qualifications and, if at all possible, core academic qualifications.

This view is reflected in parents’ hopes for their children. In 2010, the Millennium Cohort Study found that 97% of new mothers wanted their child to go to university. A core academic education remains an aspiration for all, and the government is determined to stand with parents and teachers to make it a reality.

To those who criticise our focus on academic subjects, or suggest that the EBacc is a Gradgrindian anachronism, I have a simple question: would you want your child to be denied the opportunity to study a science, history or geography, and a foreign language?

Next steps

It is for these reasons that the government will take further steps to restore academic subjects to the heart of the curriculum in all schools.

We are reforming GCSEs and A levels so that they are more rigorous, and provide better preparation for employment and further study. GCSE students taking modern languages will now have to translate into the target language accurately, applying grammatical knowledge of language and structures in context. GCSE students in maths will have to know how to develop clear mathematical arguments and solve realistic mathematical problems.

A level maths students are now required to study both statistics and mechanics. For both A level maths and further maths, there is a greater focus on mathematical problem solving and modelling, and language and proofs to ensure students understand the underlying mathematical concepts.

We are working with teachers and publishers to increase the use and availability of high-quality textbooks in schools. Good textbooks provide a structured, well-honed progression through a subject’s content. They also ease workload for teachers, who no longer need to spend whole evenings and weekends preparing ad-hoc resources. Despite these benefits, textbooks are now a rare sight in English classrooms: only 10% of primary maths teachers here use a textbook as the basis for their teaching, compared to 70% in Singapore and 95% in Finland. I have challenged textbook publishers to do better, and am determined that we will secure high-quality resources to underpin an academic curriculum.

We are improving standards of mathematics by supporting schools to adopt the proven mastery approach to teaching maths. The mastery model emphasises whole class teaching, systematic progression, and – crucially – the expectation that every child can succeed in mathematics. This approach is informed by teaching methods in Shanghai, where 15-year-olds significantly outperform their English peers. Shanghai tops the PISA table for performance in maths and students there are on average 3 years ahead of their counterparts in England.

And just to emphasise its importance for success in later life, Shanghai also came top in the PISA table in financial literacy, scoring significantly higher than the second-placed Flemish community in Belgium.

All of these measures will continue to raise academic standards, so that every pupil receives the education to which they are entitled. In due course, we will also set out details of our expectation that secondary school pupils should take English Baccalaureate subjects at age 16. In doing so, we will listen closely to the views of teachers, headteachers, and parents on how best to implement this commitment. And we will ensure that schools have adequate lead in time to prepare for any major changes.

For some schools already leading the way, such as King Solomon Academy and Rushey Mead School, this change will pass by unnoticed. But for others, where only a small minority currently achieve the EBacc, there is no doubt that this will be a significant challenge. We will support these schools to raise standards, but make no apology for expecting every child to receive a high-quality core academic education.

Together, these measures will give more pupils the preparation they need to succeed – whether that’s getting a place at a good university, starting an apprenticeship, or finding their first job. They will provide the foundations of an education system with social justice at its heart, in which every young person reaches their potential.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, on 28 March 2015.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, after being scolded by her teacher for knowing how to read before she has been taught at school, 6-year-old Scout is consoled by her brother. Jem explains:

Don’t worry… Our teacher says Miss Caroline’s introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It’ll be in all the grades soon. You don’t have to learn much out of books that way – it’s like if you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?

Jem continues:

I’m just trying to tell you the new way they’re teachin’ the first grade, stubborn. It’s the Dewey Decimal System.

Scout goes on to reflect that:

The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at us on which were printed ‘the,’ ‘cat,’ ‘rat,’ ‘man,’ and ‘you.’ No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic revelations in silence.

While Jem may be confusing the Dewey Decimal library classification system with John Dewey, the progressive educationalist, Harper Lee is of course satirising the ideology that gripped the US (and then, alas the UK) education system particularly from the mid-20th century onwards. Confidence in direct instruction was lost and replaced with a misguided belief in children’s ability to discover knowledge for themselves. One aspect of this was a move away from systematically teaching children to read through phonics and the introduction of learning to read by looking at words – what we all know now as ‘look and say’.

It took Rudolf Flesch and his seminal book Why Johnny Can’t Read to call into question this approach in the 1950s. As Flesch wrote in the introduction to the book:

Do you know that the teaching of reading never was a problem anywhere in the world until the United States switched to the present method around about 1925?

He continued:

ever since 1500 BC people all over the world – wherever an alphabetic system of writing was used – learned how to read and write by the simple process of memorising the sound of each letter in the alphabet.

The success of phonics versus ‘look and say’ has been contested since and that is why it’s so important that we are here today. I am grateful to the Reading Reform Foundation for convening this discussion and for your work advancing phonics in the UK since the late 1980s. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank all of the experts in this field who continue to contribute to the debate in support of phonics and who have taught me so much over the last 10 years – Ruth Miskin, Jennifer Chew, Sue Lloyd, Debbie Hepplewhite and Marlynne Grant to name but a few.

What I came to appreciate from you and from my experiences is the importance of teaching reading. This was highlighted to me on many occasions but one which stands out was a visit to a primary school in 2009 where I observed a one-to-one reading lesson with a girl in her last year of primary school, aged 11. The teacher showed the pupil simple words on flashcards, but the girl struggled with most of them. When she managed the word ‘even’, I asked if she could still read the word with the first ‘e’ covered up; she could not. The problem was clear. For the same reason that “Johnny couldn’t read … for the simple reason that nobody ever showed him how”, this girl could not read because she had never been taught to read. Instead, she had been drilled to recognise the word ‘even’.

Sadly, this case was not an anomaly. Too many other pupils had similar experiences and expectations that were set far too low. In 2010, 1 in 5 children left primary school unable to read at the expected standard and 1 in 11 children left primary school with a reading ability no better than would be expected of a 7-year-old.

This was inexcusable. Poor literacy disadvantages young people during the course of their education and continues to hold them back throughout adult life. The OECD Survey of Adult Skills published in 2013 showed that unemployed adults are twice as likely to have poor level of literacy as those who are in full-time employment. In their summary of England and Northern Ireland’s results, the OECD highlighted the fact that England was the only country that participated in the survey where young adults did not have better literacy skills than those approaching retirement age.

It is also concerning that the UK ranked 47th out of 65 OECD countries on a measure of the number of young people who read for enjoyment. Six out of 10 teenagers in the UK regularly read for pleasure, compared to levels as high as 90% in countries like Kazakhstan, Albania, China and Thailand. The difference in reading ability between those pupils who never read for enjoyment, and those who read for even half an hour a day, is equivalent to a whole year of schooling at age 15. That is why the initiatives we announced on World Book Day earlier this month to encourage reading for pleasure – from book clubs to library membership – are so important.

But to address the root cause of these challenges, the effective teaching of reading in our schools is crucial. In government, as we have delivered far-reaching reforms to our education system, we have made sure that these are grounded firmly in evidence. And with regard to the effective teaching of reading and raising standards of literacy, a substantial body of evidence shows that systematic synthetic phonics is the most effective way to teach all children to read, and that’s why we changed the national curriculum to make the requirements for phonics clearer.

To quote one report from the Australian National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy:

The evidence is clear […] that direct systematic instruction in phonics during the early years of schooling is an essential foundation for teaching children to read. […] Moreover, where there is unsystematic or no phonics instruction, children’s literacy progress is significantly impeded, inhibiting their initial and subsequent growth in reading accuracy, fluency, writing, spelling and comprehension.

We have made significant progress, with an increasing number of schools recognising that phonics teaching is the most effective approach. The new national curriculum, introduced in September last year highlights the importance of phonic knowledge and the decoding of words. Between 2011 and 2013, the government provided match funding to schools for phonics training and resources. More than 14,000 schools benefited from the £23.7 million we made available. We have published core criteria for effective phonics programmes and the catch up premium, worth £500 per pupil, also supports secondary schools to support pupils who did not attain level 4 or above in reading at the end of key stage 2. I would like to thank Gordon Askew for all the work he did in that period to support the department.

One of the most important developments has been the introduction of the phonics screening check for pupils at the end of year 1 in 2012. The check measures how many of 40 words and non-words pupils can decode successfully and helps to identify who may need further support. In 2012, 58% of pupils taking the check met the national standard. In 2013, it was 69% and by 2014, the proportion of pupils meeting the standard had risen to 74%: equivalent to 102,000 more 6-year-old children on track to read more effectively.

These results are encouraging. In 611 primary schools, some in the most deprived parts of the country, at least 95% of pupils met the expected standard in 2014, and many schools have recognised the positive impact the teaching of phonics has on reading and literacy. For example, Ark academy chain has set itself a target of “100% of pupils being proficient early readers” and in 2014 2 Ark schools achieved a 100% success rate – Ark Conway and Ark Globe. I have seen some of the strengths of the Ark approach for myself. On a recent visit to Ark Priory Primary in Ealing, I was impressed that the year 1 pupils were reading novels such as Horrid Henry.

Despite the improvements that have been made, there is significant disparity between local authorities, with some achieving a success rate of more than 81% in 2014 – from Darlington and Harrow to Solihull, and others not reaching even 70% – including Derby, Leicester, Norfolk and Nottingham. Additionally, children who do not meet the national standard in year 1 retake the check at the end of year 2 and in 2014, 12% of pupils had still not met the expected standard of decoding by the end of year 2 – 71,000 children.

That is why we are determined to do more. The Phonics Partnership Grant Programme, announced in February, will see 12 to 15 networks established. Led by schools excelling at phonics teaching, the groups will work across schools to improve the quality of phonics teaching. Given the value of the phonics screening check as a diagnostic tool to identify whether pupils need further support, this week we said that we will run a pilot to extend the retake to year 3. This will be a voluntary pilot working with 300 schools, including some junior schools. Year 3 pupils will retake the check if they have not achieved the expected standard at the end of year 2 in summer 2015 (having initially taken the check at the end of year 1 in 2014). I hope this pilot will help us to understand why pupils still do not meet the standard, and the kind of support and interventions schools offer pupils who don’t meet the standard by the end of year 2.

I am confident that the pilot will help us to further develop our evidence-based approach to policy-making and the successful implementation of teaching phonics in schools.

With success in the basics of decoding words, pupils will be able to move on to reading with increased fluency and speed, which will enable them to develop a love of reading for pleasure and the habit of reading for pleasure. At key stage 2 I want us to reach a position where every child is routinely reading 5 children’s books a month. In short, we will continue to champion the importance of what could not be a more worthwhile objective: fluent reading.

Thank you.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, on 27 March 2015.

Good morning.

It’s a pleasure to be here today at the Harris Primary maths conference. This government’s education reforms have been the most radical for a generation. And the growth of the Harris Federation of academies and free schools to a chain of 36 primary and secondary schools has been one of the great successes of the last 5 years. Our approach to deliver greater autonomy for schools through academisation was based on clear evidence from around the world that in the most successful school systems schools are autonomous and accountable.

The Harris Federation is also part of another of the evidence-based approaches we have put at the heart of our education reforms – mathematics for mastery. In early years teaching, Harris schools use Singapore maths and beyond the early years, Harris primary schools have adopted the effective mathematics curriculum, which combines Singapore and Shanghai approaches, and use maths no problem textbooks.

As part of the second wave of the Shanghai teacher exchange, last week I was fortunate enough to observe a lesson at the Harris Primary Academy in Chafford Hundred, Essex, led by Lin Lei. In a 35 minute lesson, with all pupils facing the teacher and engaged throughout, Lin taught all of the pupils to carry out complex types of long multiplication through clear explanation of calculation methods.

Some of you may have already heard me tell that story (perhaps even more than once) since I observed the lesson last week! But I think that reflects something truly positive – that we are undergoing a transformation in our approach to maths and how it is taught in schools.

That transformation is so important, because our performance in maths had been stagnating over a number of years. From 2005 to 2010, while in opposition I visited hundreds of schools across the country. What I learnt from these visits was that few pupils at primary or secondary school knew their times tables. Long multiplication and long division were rarely taught, with inefficient methods such as the grid method for multiplication and chunking for long division commonplace in classrooms, neither of which are used in the Far East. When I showed visiting members of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission they were bemused.

I have also spent time reviewing grade E and F scripts of all 3 main exam boards maths GCSEs. What this exercise revealed was that most of the problems came down to a lack of knowledge of how to carry out basic arithmetic: pupils couldn’t multiply numbers of more than 1 digit. This was a result of the approach to teaching maths.

For too long we set expectations too low for pupils. An approach of differentiation in primary schools saw classes being taught in different groups, pupils expected to progress at different rates and acceleration on to new topics for those doing well rather than consolidation. An over-emphasis on concepts at the expense of practice, fluency and, through that, understanding meant that too many pupils simply did not know how to perform calculations. Using textbooks became unpopular, with only 10% of maths teachers in England using a textbook for core teaching, compared to 70% in Singapore and 95% in Finland according to TIMSS 2011.

This stagnation was reflected in our international performance in maths. Coming 24th in the PISA maths tables in 2012 was equivalent to a 3 year difference between the performance of our 15-year-olds and those at the top of the table – in Shanghai. And take up of the study of maths post-15 in England was among the lowest throughout the OECD.

Education was failing pupils – too often those from poorer backgrounds – and denying them the opportunities that come with the study of maths. Only a solid grounding in the basics of maths will allow pupils to do well at the next level and proceed to further study such as A level. People with an A level in maths go on to earn 7 to 10% more than similarly educated people without the qualification and it opens doors to a whole range of interesting careers. We want to inspire young people to recognise the importance of maths and the opportunities it can offer, and continue studying it to the highest level so that they can compete with the best in the world and succeed throughout their education and careers.

That is why we have attached such importance to maths, along with STEM subjects more widely. We have introduced the 34 new maths hubs and £67 million announced by the Prime Minister for STEM teaching will improve the skills of 15,000 existing teachers, and recruit an additional 2,500 specialist maths and physics teachers over the next Parliament.

We have come a long way already. Here we are today talking about mastery – which embodies the idea that every pupil can do well and achieve high standards in maths. Mastery is the model of the high-performing Asian systems such as Shanghai, Singapore and South Korea. It delivers a meticulous approach to arithmetic, whole class teaching and focused 35 minute lessons. Frequent practice allows pupils to consolidate their understanding, and pupils are assisted through immediate and tailored in-class questioning and scaffolding techniques. Homework is frequent, and simply and quickly marked.

The mastery approach also uses high quality resources and teaching tools – especially textbooks. Great effort and collaboration goes towards perfecting lesson design, with close attention to effective teaching methods. Whole lessons are devoted to thorough teaching of small steps of calculation – the use of the zero, for example in long multiplication.

We have introduced a new national curriculum, which is more detailed and more demanding, to reflect the mastery approach. Year 1 pupils are introduced to all 4 functions and to basic fractions. In year 2, basic columnar addition and subtraction is studied, with carrying and borrowing in year 3. In year 2 the teaching of times tables begins, and pupils are expected to know all of the times tables up to 12 x 12 by year 4.

Instant recall of facts like times tables is crucial because the working memory is small and so they need to be committed to long term memory, as explained by Daniel Willingham in his book ‘Why don’t students like school’. Such recall from long term memory is essential to be able to add fractions, and perform long multiplication and division, which pupils will be taught in year 5 and year 6. The year by year approach sets out greater clarity and the focus on fluency in the essentials of maths allows time for pupils to practise more to ensure deep knowledge. We are also expecting the majority of pupils to move through programmes of study at roughly the same pace.

We have made important changes to testing. The new key stage 2 tests will assess pupils’ mastery of mathematics and the first of these new tests will be taken in summer 2016. At secondary level, reformed maths GCSEs will be more challenging qualifications, sat for the first time in 2017, with teaching beginning in September this year. While A levels will only introduce a small amount of new content, students will be required to have a deeper understanding of the mathematics they are taught. We have also focused on progression to A level, which has increased by 13% since 2010, meaning maths is now the most popular A level.

There is no doubt that we could not be delivering these reforms to maths without the work and dedication of schools and school groups like Harris and others who are also here today.

Through the maths hubs programme, you have been taking part in the Shanghai teacher exchange, which provides an important opportunity to learn from teachers in one of the best systems in the world, as you implement teaching for mastery in your schools. The most recent exchange came to an end on Friday, and was a resounding success. Across the maths hubs, schools are also trialling Singapore textbooks, which provide a coherent, structured programme and benefit teachers, pupils and parents.

The next step to help spread and embed mastery is to develop a cadre of 140 primary mastery experts, who will support 3,500 teachers across primary schools to introduce teaching for mastery of mathematics effectively.

I am grateful to all of you for being part of these reforms. They are an important example of how we have looked to the evidence of what works to deliver better outcomes to inform our policymaking. I am confident that the reward we reap from this approach will be a better quality maths teaching in our schools, higher standards of attainment among pupils and greater opportunities for them as a result.

Thank you.