Tag: Nick Gibb

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb at the Education World Forum at Westminster Hall, in London, on 19 January 2016.

Can I start by saying thank you for inviting me to be part of this panel. Since coming to office in 2010, entrepreneurship and enterprise have been cornerstones of this government’s long term plan for the economy.

We have saved businesses £10 billion in red tape, and have extended the doubling of small business rate relief until April 2017. Over 34,000 start-up loans worth £187 million have been provided to people starting their own business. Compared with 2010, there are now 900,000 more small businesses, and employment in small businesses has increased by 1.6 million. Today, business in Britain is flourishing and growing.

Such measures have created a fertile garden for new enterprises to grow, but the extent of such growth is ultimately determined by the number of knowledgeable, skilled and ambitious young people leaving our schools. Highly qualified school leavers are an irreplaceable component of a strong economy.

But what actually constitutes being ‘highly qualified?’ Since 2010, the government has focused on increasing the challenge, and the academic ambition, of our national examinations and qualifications. We have overturned a culture of low expectations that discouraged generations of capable pupils, predominantly from disadvantaged backgrounds, from studying the core academic subjects that would open doors to their future.

It is our belief that all schools should introduce their pupils, up to the age of 16, with an understanding of the world around them. To be given the best chance of success in later life, all pupils should know the rules of mathematics and the natural sciences, great historical events, geographical landmarks, a language other than their own, and enduring works of art and literature. In short, they should be given the gift of knowledge.

Such a message is, perhaps, at odds with the message often delivered at international education forums such as this. There is a common view amongst some educationists that the internet, and the advent of google in particular, makes the teaching of knowledge redundant.

One educationist who is well known on the international stage recently wrote a book promoting ‘new pedagogies’. Chief amongst them was ‘learning to learn.’ He wrote of today’s education, ‘the goal is not to master content knowledge; it is to master the learning process.’

Indeed, the Director of Education at a leading global think tank wrote in a 2010 report: ‘Educational success is no longer about reproducing content knowledge… Education today is much more about ways of thinking which involve creative and critical approaches to problem-solving and decision-making.’

Though such a view may seem forward-thinking and persuasive, I believe it to be profoundly misguided. Those who are most adept at problem solving and decision making, and most easily master ‘the learning process’, are those with a well of background knowledge to draw upon.

An educationist who has shaped my thinking on this more than any other is Daniel Willingham, professor of cognitive science at the University of Virginia. With reference to robust scientific evidence, he explains how the ‘thinking skills’ most prized by schools and employers are dependent upon background knowledge.

In mathematics, pupils can only solve complex problems once they have achieved fluency in the use of algorithms, and memorised their number bonds and multiplication tables. Communication in a foreign language is impossible without having mastered its grammar, and learnt an extensive vocabulary. In studying a historical period, a knowledge of the events is vital before attempting to analyse evidence or explain causes.

One memorable example Daniel Willingham cites is an experiment where good readers with a low knowledge of baseball, and poor readers with a high knowledge of baseball, were both asked to read a text about baseball, and tested for understanding. In this instance, the ability to read was not enough: poor readers with high knowledge performed much better than good readers with low knowledge.

Does this mean that schools should aim to teach all information that pupils are likely to encounter in the working world? No, such an aim is impossible. Schools can equip pupils, however, with a framework of knowledge which enables them to learn more in the future. This framework is what an academic curriculum provides.

It is the consensus of most cognitive psychologists that an individual can only hold 5 to 7 new pieces of information in their working memory at any one time. All other information must reside in long term memory for new knowledge to be understood – or else ‘cognitive overload’ is experienced. This is why, for someone with no background knowledge, browsing the internet is such a barren and fruitless means of learning.

Say, for example, a young tech entrepreneur wants to find out about the advantages of cloud computing. The first paragraph on the Wikipedia page suggests that sharing resources achieves ‘economies of scale’, an unfamiliar term. So the young entrepreneur looks it up, but the definition for ‘economies of scale’ uses another unfamiliar term: ‘variable cost’. The definition of which in turn contains the terms ‘fixed’ and ‘marginal costs’, and so on and so forth in an infinite series of google searches which take the young entrepreneur further and further away from the original term ‘cloud computing’.

The internet is a wonderful tool for those who already possess considerable knowledge. As a means of initial instruction it is not so useful.

In 2013, we reformed the national curriculum in England to put in much of the subject knowledge that previous governments – under the influence of the 21st century skills movement – had taken out. Our mathematics and science curriculum content was based in part on the curriculums of far eastern education systems such as Shanghai and Singapore, where schools still place great value on the mastery of academic subject knowledge. It is no coincidence, to my mind, that their pupils top international league tables such as PISA and TIMSS.

Of course, many argue that whilst pupils in the Far East do well in tests, their formal style of education limits creativity and independent-mindedness. One look at the skyline of Shanghai, or the commercial district of Singapore, should put such arguments to rest. According to the World Intellectual Property Organisations, China, Japan and Korea provided 3 of the 4 top patent offices for the number of patent applications in 2014. Remarkably, China contributed 89% of the worldwide growth in patents filed in 2014, compared with 2013. So much for a formal, academic education limiting a country’s potential to innovate.

And it is this formal, academic education which best equips pupils for work in the modern world. The 2012 PISA survey of financial literacy in 13 OECD countries contained a very interesting finding. Pupils completed financial literacy tasks, on areas such as variable interest rates and inflation. There was a strong correlation between pupils’ performance in numeracy and literacy tests, and pupils’ financial literacy. However, there was no clear relationship between states which offer lessons in personal finance, and pupils’ financial literacy. For pupils from Shanghai, which topped the financial literacy table by quite some margin, mastering mathematics appeared to be the best means of becoming financially literate.

In opposition to the idea that a formal education is the best means of fostering enterprising and entrepreneurial citizens, the individual cases of well-known school or university drop outs are often cited. ‘Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard,’ it is claimed. ‘Richard Branson never completed school,’ they add. Less often is it mentioned that prior to university, each of them received an academic education at an elite private school.

Indeed, 2 Swedish academics recently took on the myth of the untutored business genius in their Centre for Policy Studies paper ‘SuperEntrepreneurs …and how your country can get them’. They analysed the educational background of around 1000 self-made men and women who have earned at least $1 billion. Only 16% of such ‘superenterpreneurs’ from the USA lacked a college degree, compared to 54% of salaried workers.

In addition, superenterpreneurs in the USA were 5 times more likely to hold a PhD degree as the general population. One third of American superentrepreneurs have degrees from one of the top 14 American universities, compared to 1% of the general population. The exceptional stories of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and the Rausing brothers are well known precisely for that reason: they are exceptions. When it comes to producing a new generation of entrepreneurs, an investment in an academic curriculum will always pay dividends.

This brings me to my second point. Any discussion of enterprise and entrepreneurship must consider the great advances in technology that are transforming the world. Schools must respond positively to these advances, but they should do so in a thoughtful and judicious fashion.

As part of our national curriculum reforms, our government has introduced a new computing curriculum into schools, which moves away from everyday computer use – ICT, and focuses instead on understanding how computers work. The curriculum has been developed by teachers and sector experts, led by the British Computer Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, with input from industry leaders like Microsoft, Google and leaders in the computer games industry.

From primary school until the age of 14, pupils will be taught programming languages, computational thinking, and Boolean logic – making this country, I believe, the first in the G20 to teach such a curriculum.

Secondly, instead of proclaiming that educational technology will ‘disrupt’ traditional schooling, we should focus instead on how technology can supplement what teachers already do well. For example, educational technology has the potential to bring enormous efficiencies to the important but time-consuming process of marking pupils’ work.

In this country, the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring at Durham University and the company GL Assessment offer well-honed computerised assessments. These allow a teacher, with minimal effort in terms of marking, to assess a pupils’ understanding with great accuracy, and diagnose areas for further work.

One of the 3 British teachers nominated for the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize is Colin Hegarty, who left his accountancy job in the city to teach mathematics at a London secondary school. I met him last week, and he demonstrated the website he has been developing, which combines instructional videos in mathematics with sophisticated computerised assessment, based on a bank of 400,000 carefully designed questions. Such programmes have the potential to improve radically the way in which teachers assess the strengths and weaknesses of their pupils.

Similarly, computer apps provide excellent tools for quizzing pupils about key facts and information. As cognitive scientists such as Robert Bjork have demonstrated, frequent quizzing reinforces the place of knowledge in our long-term memory. No longer do pupils revising for examinations have to use flashcards: they can use computer apps such as Quizlet or Memrise on their smartphone instead.

One highly successful UK educational technology export is Show My Homework, a cloud-based homework software, which allows teachers to post homework assignments online so that children (and perhaps more importantly parents!) can check what work they should be doing. It is now used in over 1000 schools, and has 2.5 million users worldwide.

In the cases of computerised assessment, quizzing apps, and useful teacher tools, educational technology is used to supplement what teachers already do. This does not mean, however, that computers can replace the work of teachers. Teaching is an unavoidably human activity. A computer may supplement the work of a teacher, but it will never supplant it.

One well-known educationist shot to fame a few years ago with a popular TED talk, extolling the ability of pupils to learn from the internet independently. He asked in his talk: ‘if there’s stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head?’, and added ‘I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own.’

There is considerable empirical evidence from classroom studies, however, that web-based learning does not improve pupil outcomes. Professor John Hattie from the University of Melbourne published ‘Visible Learning’ in 2009. This seminal book brings together 800 meta-analyses of academic research in order to judge the impact of 138 different teaching methods and school interventions.

Amongst all 138 interventions, web-based learning was in the bottom quintile of effect sizes, ranking well below Professor Hattie’s threshold for an effective intervention. By contrast, teacher-led interventions, such as Mastery Learning or Direct Instruction scored very highly. Teachers will always remain the pre-eminent means of ensuring that a pupil succeeds: a teacher not only brings knowledge to the classroom: she brings motivation, personality, and ongoing support.

Last year’s OECD report into school computer use appeared to confirm that, whilst an extremely important aspect of modern schooling, computers are not the magic bullet of education reform. The 5 countries where pupils spend the least time using the internet in school – Poland, Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai and South Korea – are all amongst the world’s highest achieving jurisdictions.

No education minister should fill schools with the latest technologies and expect that they, on their own, will spark an education revolution. Such practices will not provide a country with a new generation of entrepreneurs. In fact, by allowing educational technology to crowd out the timeless benefits of a knowledge-based curriculum and high-quality teacher instruction, it may well mitigate against such an aim.

The optimal mixture of knowledge, attitudes and character traits which will produce an enterprising and entrepreneurial population will always be a subject of debate. As school ministers, however, we underestimate the importance of knowledge at our peril.

We must draw the entrepreneurs and business leaders of tomorrow from all quarters of society, irrespective of birth or background. And that is why all children should be taught the core academic curriculum which will enable them to carry on learning for the rest of their lives.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, at the Politeia Conference in London on 30 November 2010.

Introduction

I am delighted to be here today. Sheila Lawlor and Politeia have been and remain hugely influential in steering public policy debate gently in a right of centre direction, particularly in social policy areas such as education.

I studied Latin at secondary school in the state sector, to O level – the grade you don’t need to know. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. It equipped me for life. And it is for this reason, that the decimation of the teaching of Latin in the state sector over the last few decades is so alarming.

So I thank you for putting on today’s conference – about how schools can take advantage of the new freedoms that the Government is giving to teachers, to bring Latin to more state schools and to primary schools in particular.

And I thank Professor Pelling and Dr Morgan for their pamphlet and for the passion of their arguments and the growing groundswell of support for Latin all of you are leading.

Latin’s importance

Latin is important.

Ed Hirsch talks about the importance of cultural literacy and the importance of knowledge in building upon knowledge. Latin is so prevalent in our culture, in our political and legal systems; in our religious and spiritual institutions and thinking; in medicine, botany and horticulture; and in our art and architecture. The Roman Empire is around us every day – from the way our towns are laid out to the literature we read. Virgil and Ovid should be seen as the start of a great tradition of Western literature leading to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and Eliot. Latin gives us a direct link to our own past – and dare I say it, an insight into how politics and power have always worked.

And Latin shows us how the mechanics of language works. The English we speak today descends in part from the Vulgar Latin spoken by workers, merchants and legionaries. English is so riddled with exceptions to the rule that we need Latin to bring sense, order and structure to grammar. Latin gives us the skills to learn not just Romance languages like Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French – but the aptitude and confidence to learn new tongues beyond Western Europe.

So when people urge schools to teach a modern language rather than Latin, there need not be an either/or. Learning an ancient language equips you to learn a modern language and vice versa. And learning any language, new or old, helps give young people the academic hunger, thirst and confidence to keep on exploring the world around them.

That’s what makes the decline in the studying of languages at GCSE-level such a tragedy.

The numbers studying Latin at GCSE in state schools, remain pitifully small – just 2,868 this year. Overall there were just 9,360 GCSE entries for Latin – 70% of them taken in the independent sector, where just seven per cent of pupils are educated.

And the proportion studying a modern language overall has fallen from 79% in 2000 to just 44% in 2009 – and when you take out the independent sector that 44% falls to 39%.

This is all at the precise moment when globalization is demanding that we need to keep up with the rest of the world. Business continues to complain about the paucity of foreign language skills amongst school leavers and graduates. Ignorance of languages breeds insularity and it means an integral part of the brain’s intellectual function remains undeveloped.

Reform – creating opportunities for Latin

That’s something we’re determined to put right.

Our white paper has a clear vision at its heart – that high quality teaching is the single biggest determinant of a pupil’s achievement.

All the evidence from different education systems around the world shows that the most important factor in determining how well children do is the quality of teachers and teaching.

And the latest McKinsey report just published, entitled ‘Capturing the Leadership Premium’ – about how the world’s top school systems are building leadership capacity – cites a number of studies from North America, including one saying that:

… nearly 60% of a school’s impact on student achievement is attributable to principal and teacher effectiveness. These are the most important in-school factors driving school success, with principals accounting for 25% and teachers 33% of a school’s total impact on achievement.

This is why, when you read the White Paper, you will see that its constant theme is the importance of the profession and helping to liberate that profession from over-centralised initiatives, from over-prescription and from too much bureaucracy and red tape.

And in that liberty lies opportunity for those who believe in promoting Latin.

You will already have noted our determination to increase the autonomy of schools through expanding the academies programme and giving teachers and headteachers more control over their own destiny. The OECD cites autonomy combined with rigorous and objective external accountability as the two key factors that high performing jurisdictions have in common. Again, in that autonomy lies opportunity – as the proposed West London Free School is doing. It intends to make Latin compulsory for all at age 11-14 – exactly the sort of freedoms which these reforms have opened up.

But also in the six months since the new coalition government was formed, we’ve already begun to take forward a series of reforms to bear down on unnecessary burdens and bureaucracy – granting schools greater freedoms; extending teachers’ powers to enforce discipline; more classroom autonomy; rigorous qualifications, valued by universities and employers; and the right targets and measures, which don’t create perverse incentives to shy away from academic subjects.

These are the freedoms that should assist professionals who wish to reintroduce Latin into the curriculum.

We will slim down the national curriculum. At present the national curriculum has in it too much that is not essential or which is unclear and there is too much prescription about how to teach.

We need a new approach to the National Curriculum so it specifies a tighter, more rigorous model of the knowledge which every child should be expected to master in core subjects at every key stage.

It is our view that in a school system that moves towards a greater degree of autonomy, the National Curriculum will increasingly become a benchmark against which schools can be judged rather than a prescriptive straitjacket into which education is squeezed – a straitjacket which has been squeezing Latin out.

We will be launching the Curriculum Review very shortly – but it will, of course, be looking at languages in primary schools as well as secondary schools. We made it very clear when we announced that we would not be implementing the recommendations in the Rose Review that those primary schools that had made preparations for the introduction of languages at Key Stage 2, or were already teaching languages, should continue to do so. Languages are hugely important and under this government will become more so, not less.

We are also introducing the new English Baccalaureate, to recognise pupils who achieve good GCSEs in English; maths; science; a humanity, such as history or geography; and a foreign language – modern or ancient.

Reintroducing the importance of a broad range of academic subjects as a measure of standards in our schools will provide an incentive for schools to refocus on encouraging more young people to study a language. And since we include ancient languages in that measure, this is a real opportunity for the Latin lobby to promote the teaching of Latin in schools.

Conclusion

One of the overriding objectives of the Government is to close the attainment gap between those from wealthier and poorer backgrounds.

The fact that the opportunity to learn Latin is so rare in the state sector is one of a range of factors that has led to the width of that gap. Spreading these opportunities is part and parcel of closing that attainment gap and helping to create a more equal society.

So when people say that Latin is an elitist subject that shouldn’t be taught in the state sector they are contributing to the widening of that gap and to the very elitism they rail against.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, on 1 July 2011.

Thank you very much, Ben, and thank you everyone at Stonewall for your kind invitation. It is always a pleasure to work with Stonewall, and I am delighted to be here today.

I’m also very happy to be here with Gok, who is doing excellent work on body image in schools. Although, talking of body image, I have to admit that sharing the stage with a style expert has made me feel slightly self-conscious – I’ve never spent longer picking out a shirt and tie…and yet I still chose this one.

Today’s conference is addressing a hugely important topic. Tackling poor behaviour and bullying are top priorities for this Government, and we are supporting schools to take action against all forms of bullying, particularly prejudice-based bullying and homophobic bullying.

Pupils have the right to come to school and focus on their studies, free from disruption and the fear of bullying. Schools should be happy and safe places for children to learn, and parents expect nothing less from our state education system.

But the 2009/10 Tellus survey found that 28% of children had been bullied in the preceding school year, 21% had been bullied outside school, and 17% had been victims of cyber-bullying.

Overall, just under half (46%) of pupils have experienced bullying at school at some point in their lives – and Stonewall’s research has found that two thirds of lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils have been victims of bullying, one of the highest figures for any particular group of children.

We need to send the message that homophobic bullying, of any kind and of any child, is unacceptable. No child should have to suffer disruption, victimisation or fear as a result of bullying, whether on or off school premises.

But I believe bullying can be tackled. Successful schools have clear policies, developed with pupils and parents, so that pupils understand what is expected of them.

The best schools have gone beyond that to create an ethos of good behaviour where bullying is less likely to occur in the first place…

…Where pupils treat each other, and staff, with respect; where teachers proactively talk to pupils about social and cultural differences, and what behaviour is acceptable; where pupils understand the impact that their actions can have on others.

That culture extends beyond the classroom into the corridors, the canteen, the playground, and beyond the school gates.

The schools and local authorities taking part in Stonewall’s Education Equality Index are making real strides towards this kind of culture, and Stonewall is, I believe, playing an important part in encouraging and promoting best practice.

One issue which I find particularly concerning is the casual use of homophobic language – for example, using the word “gay” in a pejorative sense.

We shouldn’t underestimate the impact of language in our society, and already, Stonewall has found that 98% of young gay pupils hear the word “gay” used as a form of abuse at school.

Even when this language is used pejoratively without thinking and without intended homophobic prejudice, it is still offensive and still unacceptable. We have to show that this use of language is as unacceptable as racist slurs in our schools and in our society.

Teachers have a huge role to play in changing how language is used within a school. There’s a school in the East of England, where behaviour was generally good and homophobia and transphobia weren’t a problem, which identified that the unthinking and derogatory use of words like “gay” was widespread.

They sought specialist support from an outside organisation, Gendered Intelligence, to work with groups of secondary boys on issues of identity and gender. As a result of this work, the school removed the stigma from gender-related terms so that pupils could use language without embarrassment or negative association.

I know that there may be some here may be thinking, “this is all very well, but how is the Government going to make a difference and what is it actually going to do?”.

Well, we know that we can’t just set a target, order an inspection or pass a law and expect all homophobic bullying to disappear. There are some things that can’t be prescribed from the centre. If we could, we or the previous Government would already have done it. Unfortunately, there are no short cuts or silver bullets.

But we will use all the tools at our disposal to send a clear and unequivocal message that homophobic bullying is unacceptable. That means hammering home our message at every opportunity.

Whether in speeches like this to specialist organisations and people working in the front line, in detailed discussions with Parliamentary committees, in wide-ranging speeches to teaching unions or political Party conference set pieces; week in, week out, year in, year out, education ministers in this administration will keep saying that homophobic bullying is not acceptable in our schools.

We are working with schools in a new way, by putting more trust in teaching professionals to find the best solutions for their schools, rather than dictating from the centre what they should do.

That also means a change to the way in which schools work with organisations like Stonewall, EACH and the Anti-Bullying Alliance. This is a real opportunity for specialists in this area to work with schools and give teachers the benefit of their experience.

When it comes to homophobic bullying, for example, the Government is not the expert. Stonewall is, and so are other LGBT organisations working directly with school staff and young people every day.

Our role in Government is to help schools to find and use these expert organisations – not just Stonewall, but also groups like Schools Out, EACH and Gendered Intelligence.

The role of schools is to concentrate on their core business – educating children to become knowledgeable, responsible adults who make a positive contribution to society.

The role of organisations like Stonewall is to help schools, and help us, to create one of the most inclusive education systems in the world.

Schools have a specific legal duty to tackle bullying and we know that schools need clear anti-bullying policies and procedures. Teachers need to feel confident about using the powers available to them to tackle bullying both on and off school premises.

But I think Government does need to be careful in prescribing to schools and local authorities exactly what to include in their anti-bullying policies. Different schools across the country will need different approaches, and teachers should feel empowered to find the right solution for their pupils and their school.

We believe that anti-bullying strategies need to be led and initiated by staff, rather than relying on the courage of individual children to make the terrifying admission that they’re being picked on. By its very nature, bullying often happens in secret, so teachers need to gather intelligence about what is going on in their schools, how and where.

It’s also vital that pupils feel they can report bullying, and the most successful schools are developing creative ways for children to do this.

Bradley Stoke Community School in South Gloucestershire is what we call a lead behaviour school – rated outstanding by Ofsted. Realising that children can be reluctant to report bullying in person (and even a “bullying box” for pupils to drop notes into is too conspicuous), they have developed a new online reporting system. Anonymous messages like “there’s going to be a fight at the shops after school tonight”, or “I’ve seen someone being bullied on the playing fields”, will mean that bullying can be addressed without identifying which child is being victimised and which child has made the report.

While individual schools are developing their own strategies to tackle bullying, there are important changes that we need to make in Government. The last thing we want is for teachers, for example, to waste their valuable time wading through pages of overlapping and repetitive government guidance.

We have already issued new and clearer guidance to help teachers to tackle poor pupil behaviour, cutting more than 600 pages of guidance down to 50. Anti-bullying guidance has been reduced from 481 pages to less than 20, including shorter, sharper advice on schools’ legal obligations and powers to tackle bullying, the principles underpinning the most effective anti-bullying strategies, and further resources for school staff to access specialist information on different types of bullying. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Stonewall for their valuable input and advice during the development of this document.

Our Education Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, will give heads and teachers a range of powers to put them back in control in tackling bad behaviour and bullying.

These powers are not mandatory, and we do not want to create a punitive culture in schools – but we want teachers to be able to use their judgement, and to have wider powers available when they need them.

To measure the impact of all these changes, we are creating a sharper focus in Ofsted inspections on behaviour and bullying. Ofsted will now look at behaviour as one of only four important core areas, rather than as one of 27 different and equal headings in the inspection framework at the moment.

So we are working more closely with experts, empowering teachers and school staff to take the lead in anti-bullying strategies, and stripping back the cumbersome bureaucracy.

But Ben, if there is any message that leaves this conference today, I hope that it is this.

That while Michael Gove and I are Education Ministers at the Department for Education, the education world should be clear that it is our express intent that the use of the word “gay” as a pejorative adjective is as unacceptable in our schools as any racial slur. And we expect teachers and head teachers to react to it as they would to the use of any of the worst racial slurs.

Thank you very much.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, on 12 November 2014.

The government’s education reforms over the past 4-and-a-half years have been the most far-reaching for a generation. Our reforms to the curriculum, making it more knowledge-based and academically rigorous – and our focus on raising standards of pupil behaviour in the classroom, enabling teachers to spend more time teaching – are both key elements of this reform.

But today I want to talk about our structural reforms that have delivered professional autonomy. At the centre of these is academisation, making schools free from local authority control. Accompanying this were numerous smaller reforms, designed to pass powers back to teachers and heads – the aim, to let a thousand flowers bloom.

We are now in the enviable position of being able to see which of these flowers have bloomed the brightest. I first became Shadow Schools Minister in 2005, and after 9 years of witnessing some of the most gifted educators in England, I am repeatedly struck by a new vibrancy and excitement in the English education system.

Schools are, with no shadow of a doubt, improving.

As of this summer, the proportion of schools judged ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted at their most recent inspection reached 80%, compared with 70% in 2012.

Our reforms to GCSEs are helping reverse the decline in the number of pupils taking rigorous academic qualifications. The number of pupils taking challenging EBacc subjects has risen dramatically under this government. In 2010, only 22% of pupils in state-funded schools entered all EBacc subjects. In the most recent academic year, this rose to almost 39%. Over the same period, entries to history or geography have risen from 48% to 65%, and entries to languages from 40% to 50%.

My mother was a primary school teacher, so early years education has always been a key concern for me. I am delighted that the number of 6-year-olds able to decode simple words and pass the phonics screening check at the end of year 1 has increased from 58% in 2012 to 74% in 2014. That’s 102,000 more 6-year-olds on track to be reading more effectively as a direct result of this policy.

The number of persistent truants has fallen from 433,130 in 2009 to 2010, to 300,895 during the last academic year.

Autonomy is not about government directives, committees of experts, quango worthies or national strategies costing hundreds of millions of pounds. It is about associations of like-minded people, bound by a common purpose – academy trusts, teaching school alliances, independent training organisations, charities, social enterprises and online communities. Call it civil society – call it the third sector. It is with these little platoons of idealistic people that the future of our school system lies.

This was why this government launched the free schools programme in 2010. We wanted to provide outlets for idealism – opportunities for dedicated groups of individuals who believed they could improve school provision.

Such groups of individuals have exceeded our expectations. The best academy chains, such as Ark Schools and the Harris Federation, have expanded and replicated their proven success. Ark Schools have opened 3 free schools, with 8 more in development. Likewise, the Harris Federation has opened 8 free schools, with 5 more in development.

And we have seen, much older institutions play a new role in educating our young people. The London Academy of Excellence sixth-form college was established 2-and-a-half years ago by a collection of independent schools including Brighton College, Eton College and Highgate School.

Situated in Newham, the LAE’s ambition was to channel the brightest pupils from London’s most deprived borough into top universities. 2 years later, its A level results beat those of several well-known public schools. 68 pupils from its first cohort gained places at Russell Group Universities, including 5 at Oxford and Cambridge. This year, more London Academy of Excellence pupils were offered places at Oxbridge than has ever been achieved by the entire borough of Newham in any previous year.

Since 2010, this government has also pioneered university technical colleges, a new type of school geared towards providing technical education for 14- to 18-year-olds. Known as UTCs, they bridge the gap that too often exists between educational provision and the local job market by linking with a nearby university or employer. We now have the Silverstone UTC, Liverpool Life Sciences UTC and UTC Sheffield.

Leading this innovation in vocational education has been Kenneth Baker, a truly inspiring public servant. Now in his ninth decade, Kenneth works tirelessly as chairman of the Baker Dearing Trust and has helped establish 30 UTCs already, with 26 already approved to open.

In the same period, our academies programme has ensured that over 1,200 of the worst-performing schools have been taken over by successful sponsors or headteachers – the majority of which are already leading other schools with a proven track record of academic achievement. We have given the very best heads control over many more schools, with the freedom they need to ensure that the children in their care receive the education they deserve and need.

And they have succeeded. Underperforming schools taken into the academies programme and placed under the leadership of great heads are improving more rapidly than those schools which remain in the hands of local authorities.

This element of the academies programme is a deliberate continuation of an approach begun under the previous government, which we have championed and expanded.

But the government firmly believes that the autonomy previously available to sponsored academies should be available to all schools.

I am delighted that since 2010 more than 3,000 schools – including many of our highest-performing schools – have chosen to become academies. These schools have seized the opportunity to raise standards by using the freedoms we have given them. They can now vary their curriculum, extend the length of their school day and employ the best teachers – regardless of whether they have received formal qualified teacher status.

In each of these cases, parts of civil society – be they teachers, school leaders, employers, philanthropists, universities or parent groups – are empowered to decide how future generations should be educated.

There are now 646 sponsors, 550 chains of 2 schools or more, and 40 chains of at least 10 schools – of these, 9 are responsible for 30 schools or more. All of these rightly compete to raise academic standards for their pupils. And within and between chains, this spirit of competition is accompanied by a culture of collaboration – professionals working together to improve children’s education.

Surveying today’s educational landscape, I derive enormous optimism from other organisations that are being established to support schools. Since Teach First was founded in 2003, 38 social enterprises have been set up by former participants in the programme – all examples of what can be achieved when real autonomy is delivered.

Take one of these – the National Orchestra for All. Founded by Marianna Hay in 2011, the NOFA takes 150 musicians each year from schools in London and the west Midlands and forms a full orchestra, rehearsing throughout the year and giving pupils from these schools the opportunity to play in such venues as the Royal Albert Hall, the Southbank Centre and the Royal Academy of Music.

Similarly, the Brilliant Club was formed in 2011 to bring fruits normally preserved for the more privileged within the reach of the less advantaged. It places postgraduate students in challenging schools to run university-style tutorials for groups of promising pupils. So far, the Brilliant Club has worked with 150 schools around Britain, connecting over 250 doctoral and postdoctoral researchers with 5,000 pupils.

In September this year I had the privilege of attending a ResearchEd conference. These events have brought fresh thinking and new energy to debates about teaching practices in English schools. ResearchEd was founded in 2013 by teachers – not by the government or university education faculties. These teachers, led by Tom Bennett, are determined that what happens in their classrooms should be informed by evidence, not fad.

And Teach First alumni such as Robert Peal, Kris Boulton, Katie Ashford and Joe Kirby are challenging current education orthodoxies. Their passionate iconoclasm, which refuses to accept mistaken and damaging conventional wisdom, is inspirational.

Similarly, the Institute of Ideas – run by Claire Fox – has long been arguing that children deserve a curriculum which is more knowledge-based and rigorous. Its debating competition – Debating Matters – has reinvigorated formal debating in state schools. It was founded in 2002 by a physics teacher from south London called David Perks, today the principal of a free school in east London. Likewise, the debating competition Debate Mate brings 350 undergraduates from top universities to train young debaters in 220 challenging, inner-city schools around England. We are seeing the beginnings of an academic renaissance in our education system.

Autonomy is at the heart of that renaissance. The great liberal politician Lord Beveridge is often invoked as the father of the British welfare state. Less often cited than the 1942 Beveridge report is a report he wrote in 1948 entitled ‘Voluntary Action’. In it, Beveridge specifically warned against monopolistic state provision, in which new ideas and new institutions are quashed instead of nurtured.

Beveridge contrasted a totalitarian state, or a state monopoly, with a free society. He wrote that in a free society, ‘discontented individuals with new ideas can make a new institution to meet their needs. The field is open to experiment and success or failure; secession is the midwife of invention.’

In that passage, Beveridge offered the best-possible articulation of what this government’s school reform agenda has aimed to achieve.

Beveridge was a liberal in the truest sense of the word. He believed that whilst services such as education can be paid for by the state, they should be provided by civil society. Our reforms have unleashed a previously untapped educational idealism within English civil society engaging thousands of groups and individuals, from millionaire carpet salesmen to Premiership football clubs, from high-tech companies to medieval guilds.

As Minister for School Reform, I delight in seeing the fruits of this autonomy in all their vivid abundance. It reaffirms my belief that good government does not improve public services. It enables public services to improve themselves.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, at the Publishers Association and the British Educational Suppliers Association Conference held in London on 20 November 2014.

Thank you – it’s a great pleasure to be here today and I’d like to thank the Educational Publishers Council and the British Educational Suppliers Association for inviting me.

Last May at the Kettner’s Educational Publishers’ lunch I said that the government’s new approach to education policy, designed to foster the autonomy of the teaching profession and sweep away the prescriptive and ideological National Strategies, meant that there is now an important leadership role for educational publishers. And that role is not to pander to the lowest common denominator in the scramble for market share, but to develop in young people the academic knowledge and the scholarship skills that the old curriculum has driven out of too many schools.

This time last year my predecessor Liz Truss issued a call to arms to publishers to introduce high-quality textbooks to support the new national curriculum.

Curriculum

Today’s conference is called ‘Delivering quality in changing times’. There is a lot of change in our schools. This term has seen the introduction of the new curriculum, modelled on those in the very best education systems around the world:

– in maths, this means a greater focus on getting the fundamentals right, with children becoming fluent in times tables at an earlier age and studying formal, efficient written methods of arithmetic – we’ve removed calculators from primary tests to ensure this focus is maintained throughout primary school.

– in English, we have increased the level of demand from an early age, with greater emphasis on grammar and vocabulary throughout the curriculum – we have embedded the use of systematic synthetic phonics in the curriculum because evidence shows that it is the most effective approach to the teaching of reading the new knowledge-rich science curriculum focuses on the big ideas.

– in science the new computing curriculum emphasises the hard elements of computer science, including how computers work and programming.

– it equips pupils to design their own computer programs
and all primary school children in maintained schools aged 7 to 11 years are now required to study a foreign language to help prepare them for life in our globalised economy.

Our reforms to qualifications will also help to drive up standards:

English GCSEs will require the study of a range of intellectually challenging and substantial texts – whole books, not just extracts – the new qualifications will encourage students to read widely and reward those that can demonstrate the breadth of their reading
maths GCSEs will be larger qualifications – they’re more challenging and provide assurances of a firm grasp of the fundamentals while stretching the most able redesigned A levels will provide a stronger basis for transition to higher education any young person who doesn’t reach a good level in English and maths by age 16 will need to study those subjects in post-16 education and we have taken the important step of introducing ‘core maths’ qualifications for post-16 students who achieve at least a C at GCSE maths but don’t go on to take AS or A level maths.

Our education plan will underpin a transformation of the education system by setting out and increasing the essential knowledge and skills the next generation will need to compete successfully for jobs in the global jobs market.

But these changes are only part of the story. They will not deliver quality in themselves.

They are necessary but not sufficient to raise academic standards. That’s because behind every document setting out content to be taught – every sample assessment question – there is inevitably scope for interpretation. The real transformation always depends not on rules, but on people – and this transformation is in the hands of schools and teachers, in what happens in the classroom.

That is where the skills of teachers and the resources they use are so important. That is where a great textbook can help teachers to transform their classes – critical indeed for raising academic standards.

Why textbooks count

In 2010 Tim Oates, who chaired the national curriculum expert review panel, examined the international research and evidence around curriculum design and published his findings in his seminal paper ‘Could do better’. It said that only by learning from the very best around the world could we hope to design a world-class curriculum, and this philosophy underpinned all the work that followed and has led to the rigorous curriculum we have today.

Today Cambridge Assessment has published ‘Why textbooks count’, which analyses the use of high-quality textbooks around the world. Its message is clear – once again England has fallen behind. ‘Why textbooks count’ should rightly send shockwaves through the education system and the publishing industry.

In the controversial search for the reasons why a range of key nations have improved their systems so dramatically and so quickly, the role of high-quality textbooks has been seriously neglected. Well-focused, forensic study of these nations highlights the extent to which good teaching and high academic standards are strongly associated with adequate provision and widespread use of high-quality textbooks.

In Finland, 95% of maths teachers use a textbook as a basis for instruction, and in Singapore it’s 70%. Compare that to England, where only 10% of maths teachers use a textbook for their core teaching. And in science the story is even worse – only 4%.

What is important about this research is the quite astounding gap between this country and high-performing jurisdictions. However one measures textbook usage, it is this huge gap that matters – and it is this huge gap we need to overcome.

The paper shows us that textbooks work:

– excellent textbooks are central to education in Singapore, where they are closely linked to pedagogy

– in Shanghai, as we also know from the recent China-England maths teacher exchange, textbooks are used extensively to provide structure to lessons and progression – helping to ensure that all pupils keep up and achieve

– and at the time that Finland’s education system improved so strongly, use of textbooks was central – what were the key elements in that transformation? To quote the paper: ‘high-quality teachers and high-quality materials’

But despite these examples we know that there is, in some quarters, a distinct ‘anti-textbook’ ethos.

Where does this ethos come from? The research found that it originates not from teachers but from teacher training providers and educational research communities. Teachers themselves understand the benefits of a good textbook:

– firstly, it saves time – producing worksheets is immensely time consuming, as is endlessly trawling the internet for suitable resources – this is time that could be better spent by teachers in planning the perfect lesson or supporting their pupils to master particularly tricky elements

– it can provide a far better experience for pupils – a well-designed textbook provides a coherent, structured programme which supports a teacher’s own expertise and knowledge as well as a pupil’s

– and it helps parents support their children – good textbooks have workbooks which support homework in a positive way by providing well-structured practice exercises linked to clear explanations, which parents can understand and use to help their children

Criticisms

I doubt that anyone here will disagree with any of these points. But some people argue that textbooks hark back to the past, as though textbooks are from a bygone era. This view is based upon a misconception, an out-of-date idea of what textbooks are. The books used in Singapore, Shanghai, Finland are state of the art, tried and tested – firmly based on solid evidence of what works.

Others say that textbooks are too expensive, that schools can’t afford them. But if you think about the amount a school will spend on photocopying worksheets, and factor in the time teachers waste and how they could be using that time to support pupils, then a set of good textbooks can only be seen as the right investment.

Digital resources

Other critics said: ‘the future is digital – why bother with textbooks when online resources are clearly superior?’

I put this point to Lee Fei Chen and Joy Tan, representatives of Marshall Cavendish, one of the largest publishers in Singapore – not a country noted for shying away from technological advances. They told me that yes, Singapore is introducing digital resources, but with thought and care when there is clear evidence that those resources are as effective as their outstanding paper-based textbooks.

The very best digital resources can be powerful, providing teachers with resources and extra tools to do their job better, but they are no replacement for a good textbook – instead they should complement it.

Singapore has no plans to stop producing textbooks, of course not – they have been crafted, tested and refined with great care, and are proven to build deep understanding and support solid progress in the subject.

Whether electronic textbooks can play a similar role is an open question. Features of the physical form should not be underestimated – for example being able to easily flick backwards and forwards, quickly reminding yourself of past lessons and easily skimming what’s coming next.

In my view, clearly a future which includes digital should not exclude the textbook.

The quality of textbooks in England

But the bigger failure is a one of quality.

In this country textbooks simply do not match up to the best in the world, resulting in poorly designed resources, damaging and undermining good teaching.

Today’s paper sets out an analysis of a typical GCSE textbook – and what did it show? Incoherent presentations, little signposting of key concepts and an approach focused more on preparing for GCSE-type questions than understanding the subject.

In comparison, a secondary maths textbook from Singapore has a clear structure, strong explanations of key ideas, helpful worked examples and plenty of opportunity for essential practice to increase fluency and understanding.

And this isn’t just a problem at GCSE – most new primary curriculum textbooks fall far short of the high standards we find in Singapore, Shanghai and other countries. The best-quality text books in the world are based on rigorous research and drive high attainment, pupil enjoyment of the subject matter and higher outcomes for children from all backgrounds. These textbooks have left this country behind.

In Tim’s view there is a fundamental market failure in this country which has led to the narrow focus we find in too many GCSE textbooks.

And whilst it can be argued that accountability systems for too long encouraged a focus in schools on getting young people to a C, our changes now place much greater emphasis on progress for every child – not just those at the C/D borderline. From 2016 school performance measures (Progress 8) will, crucially, reflect GCSE point scores, not just the number of C grades.

Schools will look to publishers for solutions – for higher-quality resources which truly support every young person to reach a higher standard than ever before.

Eighteen months on from my last encounter with the textbook industry, and 1 year on from Elizabeth Truss’s call to arms, I wish I could say that the challenge has been met.

Sadly, we’re not there yet.

This government would be happy to promote textbooks, to rebut the arguments that have driven them from classrooms for too long, to challenge the anti-textbook ethos.

But we can only do that when it’s clear that the textbooks on offer in England match the best in the world.

This is my challenge to you.

Good examples

There has already been some progress.

To support high-quality phonics teaching – which is key to success in early reading – we provided over £23 million of match funding for schools to help them purchase high-quality phonics training and resources. Over 14,000 schools benefited from this funding, buying thousands of top-quality textbooks and resources and putting much greater focus on phonics, and we have seen the percentage of pupils reaching the expected standard in the phonics screening check rise from 58% in 2012 to 74% in 2014.

Since last year’s conference 2 UK publishers – OUP and Maths No Problem – have joined forces with leading Singapore publishers to develop versions of their world-class primary maths textbooks for England.

It is excellent news that pupils in England will now be able to benefit from this carefully constructed, rigorous approach in line with the new curriculum.

Textbook project

Which is why it’s equally good news that our new network of 34 maths hubs around the country intend to trial the use of these new Singapore-based textbooks, supported by the NCETM, through this academic year and beyond. That’s a great development, and a chance to learn how textbooks can be used to drive up the quality of primary maths teaching.

Conclusion

All the evidence shows that high-quality textbooks are good for teachers, students and parents. For teachers, well-structured textbooks reduce workload and the perpetual ritual of producing worksheets; for students, knowledge-rich textbooks mean they can read beyond the confines of the exam syllabus, and using textbooks helps to develop those all-important scholarship skills; and for parents, textbooks are a guide to what their children are being taught in school. I would like to see all schools, both primary and secondary, using high-quality textbooks in most academic subjects, bringing us closer to the norm in high-performing countries.

I strongly believe that textbooks need to play an important role in pushing up academic standards. Ministers need to make the case for more textbooks in schools, particularly primary schools. But the industry needs to provide the type of textbook that policy makers can be proud to promote. I am sure that’s what every individual in this room is intent on providing and I hope that together we can deliver on that intent.

Thank you.

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

Introduction

Thank you for that introduction [Richard Yelland].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our plan

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

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

– increased autonomy for schools, coupled with

– strong accountability

– all underpinned by a rigorous academic curriculum

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

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

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

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

English complacency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autonomy

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

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

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

We have taken lessons from 2 countries in particular.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic curriculum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress in the UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic decline

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

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

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

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

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

Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A broad curriculum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Success in the modern economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-intellectualism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next steps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jem continues:

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

Scout goes on to reflect that:

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

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

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

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

He continued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.