Tag: Michael Gove

The speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, on 14 November 2012.

Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister who won more elections than any other in history, was once asked what was the most significant thing that he had ever learned about politics.

He paused, a faraway look entered his eyes, and he began to tell a story.

It was, he confessed, not in Westminster, but in Cambridge, that he had learned the most significant single thing about political life.

Baldwin had been walking along the backs, the verdant gardens which border the river Cam and link different Cambridge colleges, with the distinguished father of jurisprudence Sir Henry Maine.

“At the end of the walk,” he explained, “Sir Henry turned to me – and he explained that the most important thing in the development of modern politics had been the move from status to contract.”

And then Baldwin paused,

“Or was it the other way around? D’you know, I can never remember”.

Baldwin’s artful absent-mindedness is proof in its way of political genius.

The British have never trusted intellectuals, and certainly not with power. So any thoughtful politician with ambitions for a long stretch at the top would do well to disguise any intellectual or academic leanings. From Arthur Wellesley to Willie Whitelaw, Ernest Bevin to John Prescott, a certain anti-intellectualism is seen as proof of trustworthiness in political leaders. We prefer to be led by practical men of affairs who have won their honours in battle rather than

those who have grown pale as the midnight oil has burnt out in the lamp-lit library.

This anti-intellectual strain in British life, and thinking, may have protected us from following the sort of ideological fashions that captured continental minds over the last century. As has been pointed out before, both fascism and Marxism were ideas so foolish only an intellectual could have believed in them. But I fear the anti-intellectual bias in our way of life has, at times, become a bias against knowledge and a suspicion of education as a good in itself.

The bias against knowledge was displayed when MPs argued against raising the school leaving age, when trade unions argued against demanding higher qualifications for teachers and when teachers demanded that texts in literature classes be relevant rather than revelatory for their readers.

This bias against knowledge manifested itself most recently when the otherwise saintly inventor Sir James Dyson had a crack at people who want to go to university to learn French lesbian poetry rather than applying themselves to matters technical.

Having devoted as much of my department’s discretionary budget as possible to attracting more teachers into maths and science subjects, including computer science I am certainly no enemy of equipping people with the skills required to master technology.

But I am certainly an enemy of those who would deprecate the study of French lesbian poetry.

Because the casual dismissal of poetry as though it were a useless luxury and its study a self-indulgence is a display of prejudice. It is another example of the bias against knowledge.

As was the recent argument mounted by the Leader of the Opposition that 50 per cent of the population would never make it to university.

He was, effectively, saying that we should ration access to knowledge.

We should believe our society capable of ensuring many more than half our young people are capable of going to university.

He was effectively saying we should ration access to knowledge. I disagree.

When there are still so many schools which are simply not educating children well enough, and where students still aren’t stretched properly, there are clearly many more children capable of enjoying what university has to offer, if only they were all properly taught.

I was recently in Poland – where 73 per cent of young people go on to university. In South Korea, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, 60 per cent, 55 per cent, 55 per cent, 51 per cent, 51 per cent, 50 per cent and 41 per cent of the population go on to university. [The equivalent figure for the UK is 37%].

There are schools in our own country – many of them represented here – where many more than 50 per cent of students will go on to higher education even though many more than 50 per cent of the students arrived at or below the national level of expectation in reading, writing and arithmetic.

The fatalistic assumption that we cannot ensure all schools are that good is another example of our failure properly to value the transformative power of education. As Andrew Adonis says in his superb new book Education, Education, Education: “How many good schools do you have to see to be convinced of the educability of every child?”

We should demand every school is a good school because of the potential of education to power economic growth, advance social mobility and make opportunity more equal.

But it is also important to emphasise that education is a good in itself – beyond – indeed above – any economic, social or political use to which it might be put.

Because education properly understood – a liberal education which includes the disciplines of language, literature and mathematics, science, geography and history, music, art and design – introduces children to the habits of thought and bodies of knowledge which are the highest expressions of human thought and creativity.

Education – properly understood – allows children to become citizens – capable of sifting good arguments from bad, the bogus from the truthful, the contingent from the universal.

These intellectual capacities are vital if we are to keep democracy healthy, social relations civilised, economic behaviour honest and cultural life enriching. But these abilities can only come from the initial submission of the student’s mind to the body of knowledge contained within specific subjects. And these traditional subjects are the best route to encouraging the techniques of thinking which mark out the educated mind.

And even apparently frivolous exercises – like the study of French lesbian poetry – can develop the mind in a way every bit as rigorous and useful as any other study.

Not, of course, if the study of these tests are faddish exercises in rehearsing sexual politics. But if the study of poetry occurs within the discipline of proper literary criticism, with an understanding of metre and rhythm, an appreciation of the difference between sonnet and villanelle and a knowledge of the canon so we know where influences arose and how influences spread then there are few nobler pursuits.

And the study of what great and original minds have thought, expressed in forms designed to capture the sublime, the beautiful and the original can awaken sympathies and encourage reflection in a way which nothing else can. It can ensure we live lives more full and see human existence in all its multi-coloured richness.

So – having come out – through the medium of French lesbian poetry – as an unapologetically romantic believer in liberal learning – education for its own sake – let me now explain why the best way to advance this liberating doctrine is through… regular, demanding, rigorous examinations.

Now some people will say that if I believe in the adventure of learning and the joy of discovery, how can I possibly be a fan of testing and examining? It’s like professing a love of cookery – hymning the beauty of perfectly baked souffles or rhapsodising over richly unguent risottos – and then saying the most important thing about food is checking the calorie count in every mouthful. Isn’t an obsession with measurement the enemy of enjoyment, the desire to assess and examine the death of learning for its own sake?

I understand the argument.

There is – always will be – something forbidding about the examination hall. The stern invigilator, the merciless march of the clock hand as the seconds tick away, the series of escalatingly difficult questions some unknown figure has designed with the specific aim of judging us – these are not what we would normally think of as agents of liberation.

But they are, just as much, if not more so, than any aspect of education.

Firstly, exams matter because motivation matters. Humans are hard-wired to seek out challenges. And our self-belief grows as we clear challenges we once thought beyond us. If we know tests are rigorous, and they require application to pass, then the experience of clearing a hurdle we once considered too high spurs us on to further endeavours and deeper learning.

One of the biggest influences on my thinking about education reform has been the American cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham who has published the definitive guide to weighing evidence, especially scientific evidence, in the debates around education reform.

In his quite brilliant book “Why Don’t Students Like School”, he explains that students are more motivated to learn if they enjoy what he calls “the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought”. And that is what exam success provides.

Second, exams matter because the happiness I have described sustains future progress. We know that happiness comes from earned success. There is no feeling of satisfaction as deep, or sustained, as knowing we have succeeded through hard work at a task which as the upper end, or just beyond, our normal or expected level of competence. The craftsman’s contentment in an artefact fashioned more elegantly than he could ever have hoped, the singer’s joy when she has completed an aria which stretches the very limits of her range, the athlete’s joy at his personal best, all of these are examples of the deepest human happiness which any of us can achieve for ourselves.

Third, exams help those who need support to do better to know what support they need. Exams show those who have not mastered certain skills or absorbed specific knowledge what more they need to practice and which areas they need to work on.

For all these reasons exams pitched at a level which all can easily pass are worse than no exams at all. Unless there is stretch in the specification, and application is required to succeed, there will be no motivation, no satisfaction and no support for those who need it.

The fourth reason exams matter is that they ensure there is a solid understanding of foundations before further learning starts. And it is important that we appreciate that exams cannot simply be exercises in displaying skills or techniques divorced from mastery of a body of knowledge. Subjects are nothing if they are not coherent traditional bodies of knowledge, with understanding and appreciation of basic facts and simple concepts laying the ground for understanding of more complex propositions, laws, correlations and processes.

Daniel Willingham again makes the point powerfully in his work when he points out that, “research from cognitive science has shown that the sort of skills that teachers want for students – such as the ability to analyze and think critically – require extensive factual knowledge”.

I can think of no better development of this argument than the case made by Professor Lindsay Paterson to the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association in 2010.

“Why,” he asked, “do we test students on their knowledge of quadratic equations? It’s not because they are like a sort of Sudoku puzzle, sufficient in itself and pointing to nothing beyond itself. It’s because quadratics relate in several ways to more general principles; to the properties of all the higher order polynomials, to the properties of graphs, to the workings of calculus. And these, in turn, lead to the highest reaches of the mathematical discipline, to measure spaces and topology and functional analysis.”

“In other words,” Professor Paterson goes on to say, “quadratic equations are propaedeutic, a way of starting on important paths that have no intrinsic limit even if most students will choose not to go very far along them. Worthwhile assessment of a student’s knowledge of quadratics will therefore have to make sure that these principles are laid down.”

Professor Paterson is right in my view that assessment must not be seen as an end in itself – it must prepare the way for future learning – and that is why it is so important that the assessment we conduct at the beginning of primary schools prepares students for the rest of their time in primary, why the assessment at the end of primary schools must be credible in the eyes of teachers in secondary schools why the assessment at the end of secondary will depend for its success on the approval of those engaged in higher or further education and why the success of any technical or vocational assessment depends on satisfying the requirements to practice trade or profession.

That is why we need to ensure that students at the end of year one in primary are able to decode fluently so they can read for pleasure – and the phonics test provides that guarantee.

It is also why we need to ensure that students at the end of primary are numerate and secure in the basics of English. Which is why my colleague Liz Truss rightly removed calculators from Key Stage 2 maths tests to ensure facility in arithmetic and why we must have a test of spelling, punctuation and grammar in Key Stage 2 English tests to guarantee basic literacy. Otherwise progress in the next stage of education will be fitful and fragile

And the same principle applies to any replacement for GCSEs and for reformed A levels. Both need the involvement of those subject experts, learned societies and university academics who understand and appreciate what is required to make progress in any subject area.

And of course the same principle applies to vocational and technical courses – which is why Doug Richard’s forthcoming review of apprenticeships will emphasise the vital importance of an external assessment of competence in a practical field.

And that takes me to the fifth reason exams matter – they signal to those who might admit an individual to a position of responsibility that the individual is ready to take on that responsibility. Whether it’s the driving test that allows an adult to take to the road or a completed apprenticeship which allows an electrician to rewire a building or the pre-U examination that confirms a candidate is ready for the rigours of a physics degree, the examination is a guarantee of competence.

Now I’m aware that some will argue that the problem with exams as a preparation for deep thought and rounded study is that exam preparation involves dull memorisation, stress and an excessive concentration of mental effort and at the end we forget everything we learned the moment the test is over.

But the precise opposite is the case.

Which brings me to my sixth reason to support exams. They facilitate proper learning and support great teaching.

As Daniel Willingham demonstrates brilliantly in his book, memorisation is a necessary pre-condition of understanding – only when facts and concepts are committed securely to the memory – so that it is no effort to recall them and no effort is required to work things out from first principles – do we really have a secure hold on knowledge. Memorising scales, or times tables, or verse, so that we can play, recall or recite automatically gives us this mental equipment to perform more advanced functions and display greater creativity.

And the best way to build memory, as Willingham explains, is by the investment of thought and effort – such as the thought and effort we require for exam preparation and testing.

Because tests require students to show they have absorbed and retained knowledge – and can deploy it effectively – they require teachers to develop the techniques which hold students’ attention and fix concepts in their minds. That will mean deploying entertaining narratives in history, striking practical work in science and unveiling hidden patterns in maths. Tests drive creativity at every level.

And more than that – they drive equality. The seventh reason we need exams is to ensure our society is ordered on the basis of fairness. And merit.

Whether or not Stanley Baldwin was paying attention, Sir Henry Maine was right. The most important political development in modern times – indeed the hinge point at which a society becomes modern – is the move from status to contract.

In pre-modern societies power, and access to power, depended on status. Rank was a matter of birth. Patronage was dispensed via clan or feudal ties. Offices, administrative responsibilities, even university positions, were handed out on the basis of who you knew not what you knew. Before our great period of domestic social reform in the reign of Queen Victoria, army commissions were bought and sold between men of wealth and connections, English universities were clerical closed shops which allowed noblemen to indulge in dissipation and dons in politicking but contributed almost nothing to learning while public administration was an exercise in dividing spoils between clans and clients.

But in the 19th century the importance of status gave way to the primacy of contract. That meant power and patronage were dispensed on the basis of due process and the rule of law. And that meant a basic contract between the state and individuals was established – access to positions of influence depends on objective measurement of merit.

Thanks to army and university reforms, and indeed to the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the civil service, entry to positions of responsibility became dependent on ability. Indeed on tests. To this day promotion in the army and entry to the civil service depend on examinations – and that is why we still have the best officer corps and the best civil servants in the world.

Examinations are, we can see, a key weapon of progressives everywhere. In place of privilege they supply talent, rather than office being dispensed by arbitrary and unfair means, it is distributed to those who show application and merit.

In the case of universities, entry by competitive examination dissolves the power of patronage networks and establishment connections.

In America the use of scholastic aptitude tests opened up access to colleges which had in the past arbitrarily blocked minority students. The academic test was a tool of the civil rights struggle.

Colleges which had uses quotas to limit, say, the number of Jewish students or placed undue reliance on lineage and connections in allocating places had to accept students on the basis of test scores and real ability.

And in this country, over the last few years, tests have also helped overcome prejudice and advance equality.

Many people would accept that – in broad terms – assessment can achieve all the things I’ve listed – it can motivate, convey a sense of accomplishment, identify weaknesses that need support, lay the foundations for future study, guarantee competence in a field and acknowledge application and real merit.

But some will say that continuous assessment, teacher assessment, internal assessment, controlled assessment can and do provide all the benefits I seek without any of the demoralising, depressing and distorting effects of external examination, let alone the further problems generated by league tables.

I am as it happens a huge fan of teacher assessment – properly designed and administered – but teacher assessment alone cannot bring the benefits proper external testing can secure.

We know that external tests are integral to balanced assessment.

The evidence shows that in teacher assessment of English achievement there is a tendency for ethnic minority children to be under-marked and students from non-minority backgrounds to be more generously marked. With external testing there is no opportunity for such bias – the soft bigotry of low expectations – and tests show ethnic minority students performing better. So external tests are not only a way of levelling the playing field for children of all backgrounds they are a solvent of prejudice.

We also know that the sorting of test results into league tables is another progressive development in education.

In the past, before the clarifying honesty of league tables, schools were judged on hearsay and prejudice. Schools with challenging intakes in disadvantaged communities were written off as sink schools. But many of them were performing well – better than other schools with more privileged intakes which were coasting. But their success – particularly at primary level – could not be effectively established. Now, thanks to Key Stage Two league tables, we can see that there are many primaries – Durand Academy in Lambeth, Cuckoo Hall in Enfield, Conway Primary in Birmingham, Hope Primary in Knowsley – which have very challenging intakes but which outperform most other schools. The children in those schools – and the teachers too – are now recognised as huge and unambiguous successes thanks to league tables. Testing has overcome prejudice.

And testing and league tables don’t just help us to overcome prejudice – they actively advance equality. League tables enable us to identify high-performing schools and the factors that generate their success. They allow us to capture and then disseminate innovation and good practice. They allow us to identify those schools which are falling behind and failing their pupils – as we have this week – and provide them with the support they need to do better. More often than not that support is coming from those schools we have identified – through testing and league tables – as successes. Without tests and league tables we would have no effective means of helping poor students succeed – we would be grappling in the dark for tools whose design we could not replicate to solve problems we could not identify for students we did not know how to locate.

Now, I know that league tables can be corrupted. Too much reliance on one measure as a target – however well-designed that single target may be – will mean gaming can occur.

But we can limit – if not entirely eliminate – gaming by reforming our exams and accountability system.

Which is what we are doing.

We’ve already diversified the ways in which schools can be judged, by publishing more and more data allowing new league tables to be constructed so all schools can be ranked on their performance in – say – art, music, drama and dance.

We’ve developed our own measure in the DfE – the English Baccalaureate – which has helped counteract the temptation schools faced simply to offer the easiest subjects available to maximise the number of students getting five good GCSEs. It has created a parallel incentive to offer students those subjects which facilitate progress on to higher and further education.

But there are still nevertheless problems with the concentration all these measures generate on the C/D borderline. Which is why we will be consulting soon on what a future – more intelligent – accountability system would look like. And I would welcome as many views as possible as to how that might develop.

But I would say that – in my experience so far – intelligent accountability – and good teaching – are not served by over-reliance on modular assessment, coursework and controlled assessment. All are subject to gaming and all take time away from teaching and learning. Teachers tell me that controlled assessment can take up to six weeks out of GCSE English teaching – to no-one’s benefit.

If we develop a more intelligent approach towards accountability – and exam design – then I think we can reap all the many benefits that exams can bring.

And I know – of course – that there is more – much more – to education than the academic learning that can be assessed in examination.

I am passionate about music, endlessly interested in the visual and dramatic arts, convinced of the power of sport to transform lives, an unapologetic fan of dance – classical and modern – as well as an advocate for greater involvement in social action by young people.

But there is no evidence that those schools which excel academically – and get good exam results – neglect any of these activities. Quite the opposite. The more impressive any school’s academic results the more certain I will be when I visit it that it will have a great choir, orchestra or band, a superb arts department, successful sports teams, a wealth of after school clubs, regular student productions and an impressive commitment to the broader community.

Critics sometimes talk about certain schools as exam factories – dull Gradgrindian institutions which churn out great GCSE and A level passes but which are otherwise joyless prison houses of the soul where the cultivation of whole child is neglected if not actively scorned.

But I have to say I have never encountered such a school – either in visits or Ofsted reports. Because they don’t exist. Schools which are academically successful are invariably successful in non-academic areas. Whereas the converse – sadly – is not always true.

And that brings me to my final argument. Schools that take tests seriously take students seriously. Schools that want exam success want their students to succeed. And schools that pursue academic excellence give their students the potential to beat the world.

 

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 2012.

Education for economic success

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.

The speech made by Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, in Birmingham on 26 March 2012.

Good morning – and thank you for the very kind invitation to come to Birmingham this morning. My last visit here was made memorable by the warmth of the welcome I received from Ninestiles School, a secondary in a challenging area which has made fantastic progress under the leadership of Chris Quinn. It was a pleasure for me to talk to the students there and especially one sixth former – Cameron Kigonaye – whose parents are from Kenya and Cameroon and who is now course to read law at Oxford. It was a reminder of just how much latent talent we have in this country.

I visited another outstanding school in challenging circumstances earlier this week – Freemantle Academy – in one of the most deprived parts of Southampton.

The head there, Kevin Barratt, became a teacher after a successful career in consulting engineering – something that has proved useful in helping design the new buildings he has delivered for his school in record time. I was intrigued as to why Kevin had left one high-paying profession for another profession and why, having become a teacher, he wanted to become a head. “Simple, really” he replied. “I wanted to help children. And being a head gave me the chance to help more children.”

In one sentence Kevin, I am certain, spoke for everyone in this room.
The reason we work in education is because we want to help children.
And the reason people take on leadership positions is they want to help as many children as possible. That is the central moral purpose that brought all of you into education.

And it is what animates the work of the leaders whose schools I have been fortunate enough to visit in the last year.

The magificent seven

Like Amanda Philips in Old Ford Primary in Bow – whose students come from one of the poorest parts of one of the capital’s poorest boroughs but who leave with the sort of love of literature you’d expect of English undergraduates.

Or Yasmin Bevan in Denbigh High in Luton- whose students again come from some of the most challenging areas of one of our most ethnically diverse cities and who again excel – securing superb results in the GCSEs which set them on course for the best universities.

Or Pete Birkett – who leads the Barnfield Federation – whose studio school is delivering an amazing technical and academic education for those students – overwhelmingly from disadvantaged homes – who have struggled most at primary…

And then there’s Jerry Collins from Pimlico – the head who has recorded the fastest progress yet in taking a school from categories to outstanding – and who is now devising a whole new secondary curriculum designed to ensure his students – again overwhelmingly from disadvantaged backgrounds – can out-compete privately educated children.

Or Patricia Sowter – at Cuckoo Hall in Edmonton – whose students come from one of the poorest areas of the Labour borough of Enfield and who secures for every student – including those with special needs – Level 4 at Key Stage Two.

Or Greg Wallace at Woodberry Down -whose students are drawn from the poorest parts of Hackney and who have benefitted hugely from a rigorous approach to reading in the early years which makes them enthusiastic devourers of every book they can get their hands on by years 4, 5 and 6.

And I cannot miss out Barry Day – in Nottingham – who again draws his students from the most challenging neighbourhoods in an ethnically diverse city – and who generates outstanding academic results in an environment where grace, civility and cultural ambition are expected of every child.

The reason I mention these – and I could mention many more – is that I don’t think any leader in education should give a speech – or appear in public to talk about education – without celebrating success and giving a shout-out to those who’ve achieved it.

But there’s a special reason I mention these magnificent seven today.
And it goes to the heart of the moral purpose of this Government.
I’ve said in the past – will say again – and the evidence backs me up when I say it.

We have the best generation of young teachers ever in our schools.
We have the best generation of heads ever in our schools.
And our whole school system is good- with many outstanding features.

But our education system – our country- is still held back by two weaknesses.

We have – for generations -failed to stretch every child to the limit of their ability.

And we have – for all our lifetimes- failed the poorest most of all.
And tackling these problems for me isn’t just business, it’s personal.

When you spend the first months of your life in care. When you know your life could have taken many, very different, courses. But you know that education liberated you to enjoy opportunities your parents could scarcely have dreamt of, then you know that it’s a sin not to do everything in your power to help every child transcend the circumstances of their birth to achieve everything of which they’re capable.

Which is where the magnificent seven come in.

Every single one of them proves -every single day of their lives – that deprivation need not be destiny. That the assumptions of a generation ago of what students were capable of were narrow, limiting and unfair.
And that with great teaching – and that’s really it – we can democratise access to knowledge, find the talent in every child and make opportunity more equal.

We’re all in this to help children- as many children as possible.
But when there are schools where more than forty per cent of children don’t reach an acceptable level of reading, writing and maths then there are more children who still need our help.

And when children eligible for free school meals are in schools where they fall further and further behind their peers at every stage of their education then there are more children who still need our help.

And when children from wealthy homes who go to schools in comfortable areas are getting the GCSEs that give them a wide choice of futures – and poorer children going to schools in poorer areas aren’t getting those GCSEs then there are more children who still need our help.

The terrible temptation of fatalism

Yet from some quarters in the political world there’s still a lack of rooted determination to make all our schools excellent, because there are individuals who have succumbed to the terrible temptation of fatalism.
They believe that there are some children who cannot be expected to succeed.

They hold that there are some students who will never transcend the circumstances of their birth.

For some – usually on the right – there can only ever be a small percentage of children who either can – or even deserve – to make it to the top. They see society either as a pyramid or a bell curve. Those with the intelligence to make something of themselves are the minority at the far right of that bell curve – the cognitive elite – those with a higher than average IQ who are – by definition – only ever a minority of the population.

Sometimes injustices, or inefficiencies, mean that those at the far right of the bell curve do not make it to the top of the pyramid – but beyond ensuring that the minority who are smart are also the minority who are rich there is nothing much more to be done.

For others – usually on the left – the existence of material inequality determines everything – and as long as there are differentials of wealth and background you can never expect real progress to be made.

From their point of view, poor children cannot succeed because their circumstances prevent it. Poor children will lag behind their wealthier peers in any school that educates both. And a school with a large number of poor children will be so weighed down – or held back – by the socio-economic background of its intake that those children will always be at a disadvantage.

Only if every school has as close to an identical intake as possible will every child have as close to an identical chance as possible. You cannot solve in the classroom the problems created by fundamental class divisions. Both the Bell Curve Right and the Class Struggle Left agree on more than they might like to admit.

Both agree that there are some children who won’t succeed because of their background.

Both would say of our weakest schools – where poor students from poor homes do poorly – well, what do you expect?

Both of them, however, are wrong.

We know they’re wrong because there are schools in this country with very challenging intakes – with a higher than average proportion of children with special needs, a higher than average number eligible for free school meals, a higher than average number who don’t have English as a first language – that outperform schools with much more favoured intakes in much wealthier areas.

Schools such as those I mention run by the Magnificent Seven, and by so many others of you here in this hall.

More than that, many of these schools prove that there need be no difference in performance – none – between students from disadvantaged circumstances and students from wealthier homes.

No such thing as an attainment gap

There is no such thing as an attainment gap at Cuckoo Hall or at Thomas Jones Primary in North Kensington. In both schools exactly the same percentage of children eligible for Free School Meals reach an acceptable level in English and Maths as children from wealthier homes – and in both cases that is 100%.

There are more than forty primaries across the country which have achieved the same – eliminating any attainment gap between rich and poor. The same has been done at secondary level as well. At Paddington Academy, which has an especially challenging intake, there is no difference in pupil performance on the basis of background.

These schools demonstrate on the ground what brain science is telling us in learned journals and best-selling paperbacks. There is nothing determined, fixed or immutable about a child’s chances of success.

Neither the genetic or material inheritance of any child need automatically determine how far they will rise, or what achievements they might secure.
In Matthew Syed’s ‘Bounce’, in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ and – most comprehensively of all – in David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us, the evidence shows that hard work, application and properly directed activity can produce phenomenal results in almost any individual.

If an individual has the will, if we as society have the will, we can achieve far, far more than we may have ever imagined.

Shenk shows us that genes do not immutably dictate our destiny – it is the interplay between what we inherit and the environment and culture in which we grow up which determines what we become.

He, and Syed, and Gladwell, all prove with countless examples that effort and application can generate success in almost any field. And if children are educated in an environment where hard work is expected, where every child is assumed capable of success, and no excuses are allowed for failure, then children will succeed – from any background.

What Shenk, Syed and Gladwell believe is what the best schools ¬ in this country and across the world – are putting into practice.

In King Solomon Academy in Lisson Grove – in the top 10 per cent of the most deprived schools in London – it is expected that every student – every student – will make it onto higher education.

The school hours are longer – the homework is demanding – the expectations pitched deliberately high. Children study Shakespearean tragedies in depth, Jane Austen, Aldous Huxley and Primo Levi.

In Pimlico Academy – which again draws students from some of the toughest parts of London – every young person is equipped with a level of cultural literacy designed to make university natural. They study the Renaissance architecture of Brunelleschi and Bernini alongside the role of Archbishop Laud and Henrietta Maria in provoking the English Civil War.
In Thomas Jones, a primary, children who are ten and eleven – again drawn from some of London’s most challenging areas – are called scholars and taught what scholarship means – through the medium of works by Dickens, Wilde, Blake, Larkin, Matthew Arnold and Tennyson.

These high expectations – and the hard work required to meet them – generate not just statistically astounding results, they also transform the lives of children from the poorest homes.

They are given access to the same cultural heritage wealthier children expect as of right, they are capable of exceeding the performance, in any test of knowledge or ability, expected of far wealthier children, they are set for success in any field.

It is because we cannot allow children to suffer – when we know they can achieve so much more – that we are pressing ahead with our reform programme.

And it is because all of you I know are dedicated to making opportunity more equal that I am so grateful for your support in this work.

The World at an inflection point

And lest anyone think we should slacken the pace of reform – let me reassure them – we have to accelerate. Over the next ten years the world we inhabit will change massively. We are at an inflection point in the economic and educational development of nations.

Technology will change out of all recognition how individuals work, how we teach and how students learn. Millions more across the globe will go onto higher – and post-graduate education.

Globalisation will see the number of unskilled or low skilled jobs in this country diminish further and the rewards to those with higher level qualifications continue to soar further ahead.

We cannot ignore, wish away or seek to stand aside from these developments. Not least because they promise a dramatic step forward in the unleashing of talent, the fulfilment of human potential and the reach of our creativity.

So we need to have an education system equipped for that world – one which equips young people for all its challenges – and opportunities.
We need to cultivate higher order thinking skills and creativity.
We need to be adaptable and fleet-footed. We need to welcome innovation and challenge as a way to ensure we lead rather than meekly follow.

And it’s a consciousness of the changes which are sweeping across the world which drives our education reform programme.

We need to ensure every child achieves their fullest potential because we need every mind motivated to succeed if our society as a whole is to prosper.

The five pillars of reform – a vision beyond 2020

And it’s an awareness of the scale of reform needed which is driving change in each area of our policy programme.

In funding
In human capital
In the curriculum and qualifications
In accountability

And in the structures we create to drive innovation and excellence.
In funding – we must over the next ten years move away from a system in which no-one ¬ literally no-one – can explain why schools receive the sums they do. Where pupils with the same needs in different parts of the country receive wildly differing sums for their education. Where the amount spent to help the poorest is arbitrarily distributed and where accountability for how money is spent is opaque and confused, to a much more rational system with a set amount for every child – related to their age – and course.

With an additional sum – the pupil premium – for every poor child and special support for schools in exceptional circumstances or children with special needs. Money should more transparently follow students, schools should be freer to expand, and accountability for what is done with that money must be clearer. If we move to such a system – the unfairness of our current funding arrangements will become a thing of the past.

On human capital – we must continue the trend we’ve seen over the last fifteen years of recruiting more talented people into teaching – no education system can be better than its teachers.

So we need to remove one of the biggest barriers to people staying in teaching – poor behaviour and discipline – which we’re doing with reforms to make detention simpler, exclusion easier and fairer, attendance easier to police and adult authority unquestioned.

We also need to support the best students, particularly in disciplines such as maths and science, to come into the classroom – which we’re doing by paying them more.

We need to ensure they are prepared better for the classroom – which we’re doing by reforming teacher training to reward those institutions with the highest standards.

And we need to ensure there is high quality and well-funded continuous professional development – which we’re doing through the National College, Teaching Schools, the growth in academy chains and the work of organisations like the Prince’s Teaching Institute.

And if we embrace these changes media and political criticism of professional standards in teaching will become a thing of the past.

On the curriculum and qualifications:
We need to encourage much greater creativity – led by teachers -which is why we’re allowing academies total curriculum freedom and stripping back prescription in the national curriculum for non-core subjects.
We need to move away from an expensive and time-consuming culture of proliferating external examinations – modules, re-sits and retakes – towards fewer high quality qualifications overseen and conferred not by commercial organisations but by institutions of academic excellence such as our best universities.

We need to see innovation in new areas such as computer science.
And we also need to ensure a higher level of cultural literacy and greater familiarity for all students from all backgrounds with the best that’s been thought and written globally.

And if we ensure we deliver these changes concerns about dumbing down and sheep and goat divisions between academic and vocational will become a thing of the past.

On accountability:
We need more data not less. We must move away from reliance on just one or two benchmarks to a rich and nuanced account of achievement. Every month, week, day and hour we have data about the economic performance of the nation.

But for years we have only two reliable – and publicly shared – data sets about our children’s development – at 11 and 16 – based on levels which few parents understand or GCSE performance narrowly measured.
We need to know more about how our children are doing. Which schools are succeeding – and why. Which pedagogies are working – and why. Which leaders are proving transformational – and why. And that data will of course be complemented by thoughtful inspection from professionals.

Which is why I want Ofsted to be run by, with, and for school leaders.
And why I think Michael Wilshaw is absolutely right to say he wants more and more inspection to be done by and with the people in this hall – not to them. And if we secure those changes then accountability as a crude filter will become a thing of the past and instead it will be a powerful means of continual self-improvement.

And on our structures:
I think we need to welcome innovation and flexibility. That’s why I am delighted so many of you have chosen to become academies – more than 40% of secondaries now enjoy academy freedom and now more primaries are applying than secondaries every month.

That’s why I am delighted that free schools are up and running – and more are opening – led by great heads and pioneering new ways of teaching and learning.

It’s why I welcome the injection of new thinking which has come into communities where under-performance has been entrenched as more and more academies – many represented in this hall – open their own free schools, sponsor existing schools and enter new partnerships and federations.

Because access to the education children need is still rationed by the inflexible structures we all inherited.

Just a few days ago we had the annual recording of how many parents had failed to secure a place for their child at the school they hoped for.
Under the system we want to build – with good schools expanding, sponsoring others, new entrants providing choice and challenge and parents empowered to choose – the annual wrangle over admissions and the creation of fixed hierarchies of schools will become a thing of the past.
But the thing which I wish most of all to consign to the past is the fatalism which holds that this country cannot be the best-educated in the world, the fairest and the most open.

Because I know how offensive that is to the people in this room – how belittling of their talent, how dismissive of their ambition, how ignorant of the moral purpose which drives you to all work so hard.

We all know the truth of the words of Martin Luther King in his letter from a Birmingham jail:

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability – it comes through tireless effort – and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. I am an enemy of all the forces of social stagnation.

And there are no better allies to have in defeating those forces than all of you in this room. It is to defeating those forces that I know all your amazing hard and tireless work is dedicated – for which I thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could go on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you all for coming along this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology

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

Resitting

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

Early entry

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

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

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

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

The role of Ofqual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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