Curriculum and Exam Reform

Nicholas Dakin Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend who, both as a school governor and as someone with experience in further education, speaks with authority. He is absolutely right. The changes that we will make, I hope, to the accountability system will ensure that schools are incentivised to help students of all abilities. The English baccalaureate is a valuable measure that has already driven up participation in sciences, languages and history, and it will remain as a key element and measurement of how schools are responding to the needs of their pupils.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

I welcome the retention of the GCSE brand, but when will the Secretary of State learn from his mistakes, like a good learner, and stop meddling and tinkering, to echo the words of the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), and trying to micro-manage the school system in a way that will, I am afraid, inevitably and sadly disadvantage young people?

[Michael Gove]

I certainly shall not stop challenging the entire school system to do better for all our children, because my first priority is always to ensure that the generation of children who are in school—who, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), has pointed out, only have one chance—get schools that are pressurised to do even better for them.

As for micro-management, almost all the changes that we have made during my time as Secretary of State have been to allow teachers and heads greater control and to free them from micro-management in order to ensure that they can concentrate on teaching and learning. The success of the academies programme, which more than half of secondary schools have now adopted, shows that head teachers are enthusiastic about this Government’s desire to empower them with greater control over the curriculum and how teachers are rewarded.