Change at the chalkface

I've written this feature on the Gove legacy for the October edition of Public Finance.

David Cameron's replacement of Michael Gove with Nicky Morgan as education secretary caused consternation among reformers whilst exciting enthusiasm in many staffrooms. Reformers fear his changes will be watered down by his successor; many teachers hope the relentless pressure of change will ease.

But Gove’s legacy may lie less in academies and free schools than in the changes to the curriculum, teaching and accountability. And a focus on classroom teaching by Morgan, with her more conciliatory tone to teachers, could reap real dividends.

Academies are funded directly by the government rather than local authorities, and have had greater freedoms over the curriculum, teachers’ pay and admissions, subject to regulation and funding agreements. By May 2010, the growing programme was targeted on underachieving secondary schools, with 203 such ‘sponsored academies’ already open and 60 more due that autumn.

Gove allowed successful schools to become academies and brought primaries into the programme. Many signed up for extra cash – typically £250,000 per secondary school – as they gained control of their local authority budgets. At a time of austerity, it was a no-brainer. In return, these ‘converter academies’ would work with weaker schools. Most say they do, though the extent to which they do so varies, and academy take-up has been much slower in primary schools.

Meanwhile, Gove also introduced ‘free schools’, essentially new academies set up in response to parental demand or innovative ideas from teachers, educational and faith-based charities. The government barred local authorities from establishing any traditional community schools.

Since 2010, the number of academies has grown rapidly. There are now over 4,000 academies, including nearly two-thirds of secondary and about one in eight primary schools, as well as dozens of technical academies – 30 university technical colleges and 37 studio schools with practical curriculums and close industry links for 14- to 19-year-olds.

Sponsored academies – of which there are now 1,100 – were intended to improve standards, particularly for the poorest students, which is why Gove required many failing primaries to change status, sometimes in the teeth of strong local opposition. Downhills primary school in Tottenham, north London – now the Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane – was a particular flashpoint and the scene of strong protests. The proportion of its pupils getting the expected level 4 in reading, writing and maths rose from 69% to 77% this summer – twice the national average improvement.

And, sponsored academies generally have improved faster than other schools, albeit from a lower base. Many belong to chains – groups led by an educational charity, a university or a successful school. Sutton Trust analysis in July found that disadvantaged pupils in nine of 31 chains studied had better results than the average for all schools, while improvements in 18 chains were faster than average. Some well-known chains, like Harris and Ark, each with 27 academies, do particularly well. But the study confirmed Department for Education concerns that other chains that had grown very rapidly since 2010 were underperforming.

The DfE capped 14 academy chains in March, including the 77-school Academies Enterprise Trust. They must focus on improving their existing schools before being allowed further expansion. Ministers also forced another academy chain, E-Act, to transfer 10 of its 34 schools to other sponsors. Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has inspected weaker academies in co-ordinated swoops across chains, including AET, where half the 12 academies inspected were deemed inadequate. He has yet to be given the power by ministers to inspect chains as separate entities.

This mixed picture also extends to the 250 free schools now open, though few have been open long enough for a full judgment. Seventy-nine free schools opened this term and 76 more have been approved, but the programme still feels incoherent. It may be the default mechanism for new schools with rising demand for new places, but relatively few free schools result from parental action.

Instead, there is an eclectic mix of genuine teacher innovation and rebranding of existing options, including faith schools, former independent schools or new academies established by chains.
One celebrated success has been the London Academy of Excellence, a free school for sixth formers in Stratford, east London, supported by Eton and the independent Brighton College, which sent four of its 160 students to Oxbridge and 68 to Russell Group universities this year. However, the local college says it does well too: of the 75 students it admitted with the 5A* or A grades at GCSE required by LAE, 60 went to Russell Group universities and two to Oxbridge.

Other free schools have faced real difficulties. The Montessori Discovery free school in Crawley, Sussex, had to close in January after a damning Ofsted report. Anal ysis by independent factchecking organisation Full Fact of Ofsted data suggests a similar proportion of free schools were rated outstanding as other schools, but a higher proportion rated inadequate or failing, based on 40 free school inspections.

For all the arguments about academies and free schools, their impact may be more prosaic than their supporters or critics allow. Good chains have an effective model absent in weaker chains. But their success still reflects quality of leadership and teaching, and their consistent application, which may not simply be an academy effect when many schools are forming collective trusts and federations.

This is why other reforms may matter more. There is growing interest in using research evidence to inform school improvement. Since 2011, the Education Endowment Foundation, a sister charity of the Sutton Trust established with £135m of government money to help improve results for disadvantaged pupils, has used 75 randomised trials to test approaches to school improvement. Nearly half of school leaders now consult its research evidence.

Tougher accountability is making its mark too. Ofsted has put many coasting schools into special measures and placed more emphasis on good teaching, downgrading some previously top-rated schools. Gove toughened Labour’s floor targets, requiring weaker schools to achieve ever-rising minimum standards. Failure often prompts a requirement to become an academy.

However, the biggest upheaval has been to the curriculum and exams. This term, primary pupils face tougher spelling, grammar, punctuation and mental arithmetic lessons, in addition to phonics checks introduced in 2012, while secondary schools are introducing computer science, harder maths and more historical chronology. GCSE coursework, modularity and resits have been dropped, leading to a dip in English performance this year. Many vocational qualifications have been devalued or removed from the league tables.

From 2016, secondary schools will be judged on their best eight GCSE subjects, using average points, rather than the five best graded C or above as now. This builds on the English Baccalaureate, a league table measure of English, maths, science, languages and humanities results. The combined impact is intended to make exams harder and ensure that schools don’t game the league tables to conceal underlying weaknesses. However, they also make it much harder to make a fair judgment on the success of Gove’s reforms, and could force down results at once struggling schools and academies that were starting to improve.

Yet behind the flurry of change, there remains an underlying truth. The two things that make the most difference to a school’s success, particularly for poorer pupils, are the quality of its teaching and the calibre of its leaders.

Gove has introduced teaching schools, with a remit to improve teaching quality among groups of local schools, and expanded school-based teacher training. But for all the emphasis on new teachers – 35,000 are recruited each year, and their quality has been improving alongside that of school leaders – there is far too little done to improve the skills of the 450,000 serving teachers in England’s classrooms. In fact, there is much more variation in the quality of teaching within schools than there is between schools.

Improved professional development and teacher appraisal may not set reformers’ pulses racing, but they could make most difference at the chalkface. Sutton Trust research has shown that raising the quality of the weakest tenth of teachers to the average would lift England from a middling position in the OECD international league tables to the top five, and the trust is now working with the Gates Foundation to capture international best practice. That could deliver the revolution in standards that politicians want to see – in academies and community schools alike.

Cultural capital in the core curriculum

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I argue that there are important social mobility implications surrounding what children study in the core curriculum, in the wake of the Of Mice and Men Twitter storm.

Of Mice and Men may not be quite flavour of the month, but To Kill A Mockingbird certainly has the imprimatur of the Education Secretary. Michael Gove hit back on Monday after a Bank Holiday weekend Twitter storm denounced the supposed banning of Arthur Miller in favour of a British and Irish literary canon.

The facts of the case are murky: the Secretary of State has upped the compulsion on the study of British and Irish authors, so exam boards are apparently interpreting this as meaning that the greats of American literature that have been a staple of English classrooms are no longer an essential part of their GCSE syllabus.

This isn’t the first time such debates have occurred. But they still have important implications for the cause of social mobility and educational equality. Having a breadth of cultural knowledge and awareness is an important part of success in later life and engaging with the networks where power resides.

When I worked with David Blunkett during an earlier National Curriculum review there were voices arguing in favour of dropping compulsory Shakespeare and ending a requirement that all students should read at least one significant pre-1900 work of fiction. We resisted their siren call.

The rationale for doing so is clear. Despite the supposed homogeneity of our tech-obsessed lives, there remains a significant access gap when it comes to works of great literature, drama and poetry. For many young people, their primary access to their literary heritage – and a global canon of great writing - will be at school, and often before the age of 14. So it is right that there should be a clear entitlement to such access, just as there are fundamentals of history, geography, science and art where school is the gatekeeper to such knowledge.

This is not to say we need wholesale to adopt the philosophy of E.D. Hirsch or still more his Amero-centric fact lists, but it is to say that it does matter that we have a core curriculum and an expectation  that every young person will have a basic entitlement to cultural knowledge as well English, Maths and Science.

There is, of course, a counter argument. Some say that the accumulation of knowledge and facts is rather less important than the acquisition of skills – learning to research, knowing how to study, the ability to communicate well, working in teams. The Sutton Trust/EEF toolkit rates meta-cognition, sometimes called ‘learning to learn’ – in plain terms, study skills – among the highest scoring interventions for raising attainment.

But I have always thought this to be an artificial divide. Without some basic knowledge, Google is an unholy mix of the irrelevant, the interesting and the positively ill-informed. Knowing what is likely to be correct is an important part of assessing the relevant over the ridiculous. A false dichotomy between knowledge and skills has emerged.

Yet it must equally be the case that learning such important skills through the curriculum is important. It is no good getting to university and finding oneself with hours of time intended for independent learning when you don’t know how to use that time as effectively as possible. This is not to excuse the dearth of contact time increasingly complained about but to note that the absence of such skills makes it far harder to make the most of university life.

As the former Chief Inspector of Schools, Christine Gilbert, made clear in her seminal review of personalised learning nearly a decade ago, personalised learning, which is particularly important for disadvantaged pupils, “should involve a broad and rich curriculum that takes account of prior learning and experiences and helps pupils to develop the full range of knowledge, skills, understanding and attitudes.”

That seems the right balance in a debate too often needlessly polarised. That’s why this weekend’s controversy highlights an issue about the curriculum – and the syllabuses of our competing exam boards – that is more important than the literary merits of John Steinbeck or Harper Lee. The National Curriculum should not simply be the preserve of whoever happens to be in power at the time of its revision. But nor should it be left to ‘independent experts’ whose instincts may be to strip the masters for modernity.

We need to have a proper mix of politicians of all parties, headteachers and subject specialists whose role is to decide on the subject matter of the curriculum and to reach consensus in doing so. It should not really be for David Blunkett or Michael Gove to decide the preferred authors in the curriculum, based on their personal prejudices or preferences.

Yet, whoever takes on responsibility for the curriculum should remember the fundamental responsibility they have to ensure that the next generation has access to a breadth of knowledge and skills that gives them the cultural capital that is as important to social mobility as good exam results

Can we get a secondary consensus?

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at the implications of last week’s announcements on secondary school exams and the curriculum by Michael Gove. This is written in a personal capacity.

Last Thursday’s unexpected U-turn by Education Secretary Michael Gove over his plans to replace GCSEs was presented by some as a sign that the most sure-footed cabinet minister in the coalition had come unstuck.

Yet a closer look at what actually happened suggests that though his plans may not have had the full rebranding he envisaged, they remain rather more intact than commentators have suggested.

While reformed GCSEs will no longer be known as EBCs, other changes announced last week could still have a profound effect on schools, what they teach and how they are assessed.

Alongside the confessional appearance in the Commons, Gove also unveiled his plans for the national curriculum, a radical change in the key league table measure for GCSEs and confirmed his plans for those exams to remain linear and become more demanding.

The draft national curriculum makes little change to range of subjects that students take – computing replaces ICT, but PSHE, citizenship and PE remain statutory requirements, even if their programmes of study are sharper and less prescriptive.

The level of prescription in subjects like history – which is now wholly chronological – and English which has a level of detail on grammar unseen since the literacy hour – stands in sharp contrast to the notion that schools would be increasingly free to decide for themselves what they would do. Teachers are freer to decide how to teach, but are much more circumscribed in what they must teach, at least until the age of 14 (and, at least for core subjects, to 16).

In that context, it was particularly surprising that Gove dropped plans to move towards a single exam board for each GCSE syllabus. He may have done so on the advice of Ofqual and worries about European competition law, but it was a reform that had wide support outside the exam boards and should be revisited.

The context for the new Gove curriculum was set out in a speech to the Social Market Foundation last Tuesday, where his belief that a core body of knowledge should lie at the heart of schools was set out more sharply than ever before, with the Conservative Secretary of State choosing the Italian Marxist father of Euro-Communism, Antonio Gramsci as his chief witness, alongside more familiar contemporary advocates such as the American academic E.D. Hirsch.

At the same time, Gove is proposing a number of changes to the league tables, which could have even more wide-ranging impacts on what schools teach.

Instead of measuring schools primarily on five good GCSEs – at C grade or above – including English and Maths, they will be measured on English and Maths grade Cs and on an average point score based on a student’s best eight subjects.

What might all this mean for social mobility and for disadvantaged students? On the one hand, there is a lot to be said for bringing greater clarity to the body of knowledge that children should learn. The curriculum had, arguably, lost the clarity it had in 2000 and earlier versions, and many will welcome this. It is also right to encourage greater breadth – and that would be welcome at A-level as well as GCSE, as Peter Lampl has argued recently.

The challenge – and test – for the new curriculum will be the extent to which it is adopted by academies, the 50 per cent of secondary schools that are free to choose most of their own curriculum, and the extent to which today’s parents expect them to adopt it.

There is a perfectly good argument – as Gove made in his SMF speech – that children need a body of knowledge if they are to benefit fully from acquiring the research and study skills that most teachers – and the evidence from the Sutton Trust/EEF toolkit – suggest can play a big role in boosting attainment. A false dichotomy has been created between knowledge and skills, and both need to be seen as an important part of children’s educational development.

Of course, for students who go to university, it is right that they should be encouraged to take a strong suite of academic subjects, and it is to be hoped that the new GCSEs have the rigour to bring an end to the soul-destroying annual ritual of criticising the achievements of young people at the moment when they learn how well they have done in their exams.

Yet a big gap in the Government’s thinking lies in what happens after the age of 14 to those for whom a more vocational or technical education would be more motivating. EBCs may be gone but the EBacc remains, and will lie at the heart of the 8-GCSE measure in the new league tables. For students taking 8 GCSEs, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to take five EBacc subjects, and they now have a chance to have achievements in other subjects like art, technology and religious education recognised. This has pleased those lobbying for such recognition.

Kenneth Baker’s University Technical Colleges start students on technical and vocational pathways from age 14. Further education colleges will be able to recruit from that age. Yet because of the undoubted abuses of vocational equivalences in the past, all technical and vocational qualifications, regardless of depth and intensity, have equal weight in the league tables.

The Government still has to find a satisfactory way of recognising the achievements of those who take a more technical curriculum, and it should use the reformed league tables to do so. To argue this point is to be neither Luddite nor defeatist, but it is to recognise that for some students – a minority maybe but at all ability levels – an academic curriculum post-14 will not enable them to fulfil their potential.

There is a real chance to develop a lasting consensus on education, one that outlives changes in Government, and one that caters for the needs of every child at different phases of their education. Last week’s suite of announcements could herald a different approach. For that to happen, the consultations on the curriculum and league tables need to be as open to reasonable change as that on GCSE reform turned out to have been.

Will this secondary shake-up boost standards for all?

Today's Daily Mail splash on the future of GCSEs, the national curriculum, league tables and exam boards has the air of a brainstorm session at Sanctuary Buildings that has been released before being fully thought through. Nothing wrong with that, if Michael Gove spends some time thinking through all the implications of what he is proposing. But he needs to be careful that his proposals don't end up undermining a wider drive to raise standards for all.

There are some perfectly good ideas in what appears to be being considered. It makes perfect sense to have a single exam board for each exam. The effect, of course, will be to have a single syllabus in these subjects. Which makes the supposed removal of the national curriculum from secondary schools rather less radical than is being suggested: indeed it would ensure that academies and free schools work to a single syllabus. Lord Baker is right to argue that it is as important that technical subjects are examined at a high standard as well as Gove's favoured subjects like history and geography.

The second question concerns the proposal of splitting the GCSE into a CSE and O-level exam. There is a seductive sense to this idea if you believe that the only impact of GCSEs has been a 'dumbing down'. But this is a tabloid caricature. It is perfectly fair to feel that there needs to be more rigour involved in getting an A grade, but that doesn't mean writing off thousands of youngsters who could today strive for a C. There is a terrible canard in the notion that the use of the 5 A-C benchmark itself denies ambition: in fact, a C is worth far more to a child than a D when talking to employers, and the existence of the benchmark has led many schools to push such pupils towards a grade they can achieve in a way that the average point score would not necessarily do.

But there is a good argument for saying that achieving an A grade should be really demanding. With a single syllabus there is no reason why this cannot be achieved in a single exam, particularly since Gove wants to move back to linear testing at the end of two years. That is not to say there is no place for more practical exams in English, Maths and Science. Such tests should be available, however, at GCSE standard of level 2 as well as the less demanding level 1, and less 'academically -minded' students should not merely be expected to achieve level 1. It would be a serious and terribly retrograde step to move in this direction, and Gove will find that it could have as serious an impact as Labour's scrapping of an expectation that all schools study languages through to 16.

This raises the issue of league tables and floor targets. And it is here that Gove could be making his biggest mistake. The big improvements in London and by academies over the last decade have been spurred in part by ever-more ambitious floor targets based on the 5 GCSE standard. It is a realistic but relatively demanding ambition for schools to expect a majority of their pupils to reach this level, and Gove has sharply increased the demand of the floor targets. Of course, one could set a target based on the average point score, but this could have the perverse effect of lowering expectations in terms of breadth. And since there is no longer a strong incentive to use high GCSE vocational alternatives, the main concern here has been addressed. By all means publish a 5A target alongside this, though in truth the EBacc is becoming the more rigorous target here.

Gove has time to get this right. More rigorous GCSEs, particularly for top achievers, do not have to place a cap on ambition for many other students. More practical business-focused English and Maths tests should not themselves be set unambitiously. And Gove should not throw away one of the most effective drivers of improve standards for many schools in the process.

Freedom, what freedom?

I recognise quite a lot of what was in the English and Maths curriculum materials issued by the Department for Education last week. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the documents that accompanied David Blunkett's national literacy and numeracy strategies in the late 90s. The expectations on spelling, grammar and punctuation were all there, as was a focus on mental arithmetic and times tables. So, the nonsense in the Tory press about this being the first time since the 1950s that schools had such expectations suggested that they were being even lazier than usual in accepting the line being spun by Michael Gove's spinners.

So far as I can see, all that is really new is that children, bizarrely in a decimal age, will have to learn their 12 times tables in case Britain abandons decimal currency in sympathy with a Greek return to the Drachma.

Equally, today's focus on synthetic phonics is not new either. Phonics were a part of the literacy strategy too, but the specific focus on synthetic phonics gained traction with Sir Jim Rose's report in 2005. This, too, was for a Labour government, for the benefit of confused Tory columnists. However, we didn't, it is true have the phonics screening check which seems to having some bizarre requirements.

So, I welcome quite a lot of this renewed rigour in the primary curriculum. I also think that most primary schools have been doing quite a lot of this, at least since the late 90s.

But I can't for the life of me see how it fits in with the philosophy of a government that insists it will set schools free. Is it any wonder that several members of the curriculum review have quit in the confusion?

Reforming the curriculum

The Government has started to realise how much harder it is to deliver change than it is to advance rhetoric. Any changes to the National Curriculum have been postponed until 2014 as ministers try to work out how their plans relate to each other. There has, it is true, been some good early work by the curriculum review team, albeit in the parameters set for them. However, there is still a real danger that in the Government's zeal to widen the academic requirements for the majority, the needs of the minority will be neglected.

The curriculum review are recommending that history, geography, the 'arts' and modern languages should all be compulsory until the age of 16, and that GCSEs should be taken over three rather than two years to allow time for the further study. The latter idea reflects existing practice, and is a good one, even if it belies the rhetoric criticising those who entered students for early GCSEs that seemed to come from government a few months ago. At the same time as requiring study in these additional subjects, schools will be expected to teach citizenship, technology and ICT, though it will be for them to decide how to do so. In line with the Wolf Review, but counter to the direction of travel of Lord Baker's University Technical Colleges, there is no room for serious vocational learning before 16.

All of this is certainly in line with the direction of travel signalled by the English Baccalaureate, and its weighting for particular GCSE subjects. And while the majority - perhaps four in five students - should certainly be able to take this range of academic subjects through to GCSE standard, there is a serious question mark over its appropriateness for the minority who will undoubtedly be turned off this mix. There needs to be a serious option of college-based vocational and pre-apprenticeship courses, with English and Maths, for the remainder. This means that it should not be compulsory for all to take the extended national curriculum through to 16.

This group may be 1 in 5 nationally, but they will number as many as half the cohort in some schools and academies. The latter, in theory, should be able to ignore these strictures. But the Department has its levers - including the EBac - to cajole them in a different direction. Meanwhile, what of the compulsory subjects without programmes of study? This is fine, so long as there are some clear expectations of what young people should know about civics and citizenship, as the research for the review team shows to be the norm in most countries, and which concepts are crucial in ICT. But the real problem is the exclusion of technology as a subject on a par with history and geography on the GCSE curriculum: the call for computer science, for example, is being sidelined. And citizenship is to be sidelined competely as an add-on to PSHE, as was the case before it became a compulsory subject. Democracy is to be an afterthought.

Today sees Ofqual reporting on the growing errors and ineptitude of some exam boards. There will be those who might ask whether it would make more sense to have a single board for England (with separate boards in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) to deal with the GCSE and A-level syllabuses. That way, there could be some clear expectations and no room for gaming. When I suggested this before, I was accused of undermining the innovation delivered by competition. I do wonder whether we have not seen rather too much such innovation from examiners in recent weeks.

The chance to get the curriculum right

Michael Gove has finally launched his curriculum review today. It is a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, the education secretary is keen to promote greater freedoms for schools, with more academies and free schools. For many schools converting to academy status, the freedoms in the curriculum are an important incentive. On the other, he clearly believes that there is a body of knowledge that every young person should experience during their school days.

I find myself similarly conflicted in this debate, as a supporter of academies and someone who has seen the benefits of a more imaginative skills-led curriculum, provided it is anchored in a strong core of knowledge. Which is why Gove is right to present his proposals as benchmarks rather than a prescriptive core. The truth is that the national curriculum has always been a difficult balancing act. I worked with David Blunkett in the 2000 curriculum review when he battled to keep locational geography, key historical figures and leading Victorian authors on the secondary curriculum. The reduction in prescription that followed the more recent curriculum review arguably went too far in diminishing the entitlement to such knowledge.

For many young people, school is the only time they will experience Shakespeare or Dickens, and learn about the extraordinary history of Britain and the wider world. It is a chance to acquire a basic understanding of how the world works, and where places are located. It should be an introduction, too, to our democracy and to an understanding of scientific concepts that are a part of our everyday discourse and debate. Between the ages of 7 and 14 there should be some basic knowledge that any educated youngster should have. That knowledge will be different today from what might have been taught 25 years ago, and Gove should say so. At the same time, it is no good saying that as adults, they can look things up on the Internet: without that core, it is impossible to separate the online wheat from the chaff.

Equally, I think the last curriculum review went too far in spelling out non-academic subjects, but there are important skills and attributes that schools can and should teach. I personally worked to get cooking on the curriculum, as what was taught in design and technology would leave children none the wiser in a real kitchen. Equally, there are attributes like communication, research skills and teamwork that should be expected in schools without prescription.

The real difficulty arises after 14. Kenneth Baker's University Technical Colleges will want to teach a different curriculum from a traditional academically inclined comprehensive or grammar school. Academies serving our most disadvantaged areas succeed because they have the flexibility to mix the academic and the vocational. It was not because she despised languages that Estelle Morris removed post-14 prescription, it was because she believed learning should start sooner and that schools needed that flexibility beyond 14. The English Bac will reward schools that teach languages and history or geography as standard through to 16. But many of our best heads can tell Gove that there are also many bright technically-minded students for whom a Tech Bac - with English, Maths and Science + two technology/technical GCSEs - would be more appropriate.

If this curriculum review simply reinforces the EBacc straightjacket, it will be a retrograde step. But if it focuses on getting a consensus on the body of knowledge that a well educated young person should know by 14, and allowing a sensible and rigorous flexibility beyond that, it could prove an important educational step forward.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

We need more curriculum clarity

Ed Balls has inevitably had to give ground on his sex and relationships education plans in the Children, Schools and Families Bill, despite his protestations to the contrary today. But there is a far bigger problem with the ludicrous attempt to impose a lengthy personal, social and health education curriculum on every school and academy up to age 16, at a time when languages, design technology, history and other subjects are at the discretion of schools at Key Stage 4. The decision to abandon Key Stage 3 tests has meant the abandonment of Shakespeare at Key Stage 3. Today's predictable climbdown in the face of church lobbying obscures the confusion at the heart of the Government's approach to the curriculum. Instead of a piecemeal approach to different subjects, we need a much clearer sense of the essential knowledge and skills that young people should acquire between the ages of 11 and 16, with schools and academies able to develop their own programmes to provide them and other subjects they choose to offer in ways that work with their students.

Blue school thinking

I have written the cover feature in this week's Public Finance, looking in detail at the Conservative plans for schools, drawing on an interview with the shadow schools secretary Michael Gove. My argument is that there is rather more in common between Labour and the Tories on structural reforms such as academies and school chains than either Ed Balls or Michael Gove would care to admit. But there is a bigger difference over the curriculum and the wider purpose of schools. You can read the article here.

Government must be clearer about its curriculum priorities

Today's news that Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) is to become a compulsory part of the curriculum in both primary and secondary schools shouldn't trouble the majority of schools which provide such lessons in any case. And the fuss over sex education is overdone: the government has been at pains to point out that lessons should be age appropriate, placed in their proper moral context and developed in consultation with parents. Indeed, schools minister Jim Knight has framed the arguments in an exemplary manner.

However, there are two issues where ministers must be clearer.

The first relates to the relative importance being given to different subjects. There is a danger that primary schools that already offer sufficient lessons will feel obliged to offer more, and that literacy and numeracy will suffer in the process. The government must set priorities, or it will repeat the mistakes made when the Primary Strategy was first introduced, which led many schools to downgrade the 3Rs. When Jim Rose produces his review, he should be explicit about this; otherwise his own excellent phonics report could be downgraded. With the recent abolition of Key Stage 3 tests, there is also a danger that some secondary schools could do the same.

And the second relates to parental choice. Will parents still have a right to withdraw their children from sex education lessons they consider inappropriate because of their own religious beliefs? Those lobbying for compulsion have always argued that they shouldn't have this right: but if they don't, won't this just mean more are home schooled in a totally insular environment or sent to mediocre independent religious schools?

Why schools can deliver the cultural commitment

One of the great myths about Labour's education policy is that it has been anti-culture and downplayed the arts. The decision to focus on the 3Rs in primary school has produced its share of tirades from authors who claim that to teach children to read, spell and write accurately can only be done at the expense of their enjoying their books (the illogicality of the argument is never questioned). But while this emphasis on the 3Rs was important, it was never at the expense of artistic and cultural activities. For example, Jacqui Smith, as junior schools minister one year after the introduction of the literacy hour, launched a special scheme to fund instrumental tuition, which continues as the Music Standards Fund. When targeted money was given to schools in 1998, their libraries were given injections of cash to fund new books. Museums and galleries have been expected to devote more effort to education, and in London, a forerunner of today's pledge by Andy Burnham that children should have the opportunity to enjoy five hours of culture a week, operated for several years through the London Challenge, with a clear list of activities that each child could expect to enjoy.

Given the growth of after-school clubs and other extended facilities, today's promise is far less ambitious than it sounds, and those teaching union leaders who use the announcement to whinge about SATs should stop talking rot. The real issue is not whether this can be delivered, but how it can be delivered in a meaningful way. It is right to allow local decisions, and the idea of an entitlement is a good one. The Times leader argues that the 'right' to five hours is too prescriptive, but then says it is too 'vague' about what should be involved. The writer has a better point with their concern about vagueness than in worries about prescription. A five hour entitlement in and out of school during term time is a reasonable expectation, including after-class activities. But the entitlement should be more precise: every child should expect to experience a live play or visit an art gallery during their secondary years, as well as the chance to take part in a live production and try their hand at a bit of painting or digital art. As the pilots develop, perhaps this could become clearer. However, none of this should detract from what is a good idea and a welcome announcement from the new culture secretary.

A liberal curriculum?

Apparently, David Laws, the new Liberal Democrat schools spokesman, is planning to free up the curriculum and leave it to teachers to decide exactly what they teach. They'll have the power to set their own curriculum (and perhaps also mark tests, inspect themselves and decide whether to bother telling parents how their school is doing). Just like in the old days. Before we had a national curriculum. When only 40% of kids could read and write to a reasonable standard at age 11. That's what it says in the Times. But is Laws really planning this? Further down the story, we're told he only wants to give schools "freedoms to innovate with the curriculum" just like Academies (and just like Estelle Morris did as Education Secretary, though few took up the offer). Does this mean the National Curriculum would be scrapped or doesn't it? Is this a neat way of ditching the producerist policies of the LibDems while pretending otherwise (there's lots of talk of choice in the article, though choice is meaningless unless it is informed). Not that Liberal policy matters much in the greater scheme of things, but I feel we should be told.

A balanced curriculum

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is today announcing its changes to the National Curriculum for 11-14 year-olds. The QCA has struck a good balance between prescription and flexibility. Flexibility in modern foreign languages fits with the times, given how many specialist language colleges have started teaching Mandarin in the last few years. It is great that cooking (rather than food technology) is back on the curriculum. And a greater emphasis on personal finance should help today's young people manage their household budgets more effectively. As Ken Boston, the QCA chief executive, said on Today this morning, it is also essential that teachers have the time to develop different approaches for able and struggling pupils. But at the heart of the National Curriculum - especially for 11-14 year-olds - there must continue to be a core entitlement in history and geography as well as English, Maths and Science. Alan Johnson ensured that he left that intact for Ed Balls, just as David Blunkett had done in 2000. Personalisation is nothing without purpose.