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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I agree with my hon. Friend, and that is a very important point. What seems to have worked in the primary schools that I am referring to is a combination of rigorous focus on the curriculum—including literacy and numeracy—better support for teachers, better materials and better overall support. However, it is important to recognise that, although good management of a school is important in itself, we must ensure that it feeds through into improvements in teaching in the classroom. Ofsted’s report on academies found that although leadership is a strength for most academies, that has as yet led to minimal improvements in teaching in the classroom. If we are going to tackle this problem, our education spending must in future focus on the curriculum, teaching and improving teacher training. Alongside that is the question of how we get our best and brightest teachers into our most challenging schools. The biggest single indicator of low educational achievement in this country is not ethnicity or gender, but poverty: the simple question of whether a child is born poor. Of course, that does not mean that all poor children are destined to fail—some schools prove triumphantly that that is not so—but it is more likely to happen. So in making our spending decisions, the first question that we need to ask is, what do we do about the curriculum? What do our children need to flourish in the 21st century? The problems that they will face are quite different from the ones that we have had to face. They are growing up in a world of vast movements of people. They will indeed be global citizens, and many of them will work abroad at some time in their lives. Families are scattered and communities often fragmented; schools have a role to play in dealing with that. Most of all, our children are growing up in an age of mountains of information: in a multi-media age in which, at the touch of a button, the internet can provide information—some good, some bad—on every subject under the sun. Unless we teach them to deal with that information overload, we will not be preparing them adequately for the world in which they will grow up. I accept that we in this country are not good at talking about the schools curriculum. We tend to assume that we know what everyone should learn, and usually, it is what we ourselves learned. As a result, our curriculum is still based on a 19th-century curriculum. It has been tweaked here and there and bits have been added and subtracted, but it is recognisable as the same curriculum. That is not good enough for the 21st century. We need to ask much closer questions about what our children learn. If we all accept, as I assume we do, that the building blocks of the curriculum are literacy and numeracy, because they are the foundation of all other learning, we have to ask, ““What next?”” I wish to make a few suggestions. They are not prescriptive or even a full list, but they are suggestions that we should debate—