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Rose Report

I certainly agree that that is an important issue, and I shall go on to discuss it, because it is one of the matters to which we should give priority. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the Rose review has a fairly limited perspective on primary education and that the Cambridge review has a much broader view of primary education. Although the Cambridge review started before the Rose review, we expect the results to be delivered after Rose's. The Cambridge review will look at all aspects of the development of youngsters in that age range, and it will deal with the important issue of testing, where concerns that what is being taught and tested is not always the most appropriate part of the English and mathematics curricula have been underscored by bodies such as Ofsted. Testing can also pressure some schools into narrowing what is actually taught. I shall come back to that later. Will the Minister say to what extent the Rose review consultation process should be taken seriously? It is disappointing that the Alexander review, the Cambridge review and the Rose review have got slightly out of kilter. There is a feeling that the Government are not drawing as much on the Cambridge review as they could and that they will have made many of their decisions before it is published. I understand that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has already started work on a lot of the detailed programmes of study that come out of the Rose review, particularly in relation to the six areas of learning. That work appears to have started even before the end of the consultation process on the Rose report, which I believe will be at the end of this month. I wonder whether we ought to take seriously the consultation in which the Government are involved, or whether this Government-commissioned report has been fairly closely prescribed and consideration of some issues that could usefully have been considered has specifically been ruled out, with the result that the report can lead only to modest changes. Before I outline my concerns about the report, I want to highlight some of its useful and important aspects. As the hon. Member for Norwich, North indicated, the report emphasises the importance of getting the basics of literacy and numeracy right. In fairness, it also highlights extremely important issues, such as speech and language, where there is a need for more support and better joining up with other services that can help to deliver better speech and language education. The Government took effective action in commissioning a report on that, the Bercow report, which makes many useful proposals that I hope will be picked up. I question, however, what precisely the Rose report says about the amount of time to be spent on literacy, numeracy and communications. The report's remit made it clear that the Government wanted that area to continue to take priority, and that is a clear conclusion of the review. The hon. Member for Norwich, North, in response to my intervention, expressed the hope that those aspects of the curriculum would contract to make way for the subjects that people perceive to have been squeezed out, such as history, some of the sciences, geography and some of the non-academic parts of the curriculum. We are therefore being told two contradictory things about the impact of the Rose report. If the report is accepted, does the Minister expect us to end up with more time for those subjects—perhaps with a different emphasis on different parts of the teaching of literacy, numeracy and communication—less time for them, or the same amount of time? Some of the proposals for teaching modern languages seem fairly sensible. We have a crisis in the number of pupils engaged in modern language education. Ever since the Government ended the compulsory teaching of modern languages beyond the age of 14, without doing anything to encourage youngsters to persist with them, we have had a topsy-turvy approach, whereby we have tried to salvage modern language education by including much more of it in primary education. Its quality is inconsistent, however, and, because of a lack of qualified teachers, some schools teach modern languages that may not be followed up in secondary education, simply giving children a taster of five or 10 different languages. Rose says that what is taught in modern languages during key stages 2 and 3 ought to be joined up, and that is quite sensible. In what could be seen as a criticism of the present Government and their predecessors, Rose says that he wants a more thoughtful and stable process for reviewing primary education. He says that past reviews have been largely reactive and driven by the need to reduce curriculum overload and over-prescription, and that now he wants a proactive strategy and schools to be afforded a period of stability in which to achieve the agreed curriculum goals. That is very important: if head teachers, governing bodies and teachers generally make one request when we visit schools, it is that we provide greater stability and consistency, rather than a series of initiatives that are introduced and often phased out before they have had a chance to benefit anyone. Those are the report's aspects that I welcome, but I have some concerns about other elements. There is a lack of clarity about the proposed emphasis on the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and communication. We know that they are crucial not only to people's basic skills and to getting a job, but to their ability to engage properly in other subjects. We can teach those English and mathematics skills through the high-quality teaching of other subjects, and they do not have to be taught in a dry way that is all about the two times table, but we must get the basics right. Youngsters cannot succeed in secondary education unless they are taught those important basic skills, but there is a lack of clarity about whether there will be more or less of such teaching. I also found in the report a great deal of jargon and a good many things that seem to be motherhood and apple pie. Before the hon. Gentleman finished his speech, I flicked at random through the report to any old page just to read a paragraph again. Paragraph 1.51 is typical of the report's educational mumbo-jumbo, listing rather obvious points with which nobody could disagree. That is a feature of the report which makes it so difficult to engage with the document and to understand what it means. It is almost impossible to disagree with the provisional recommendations; if one were to propose their opposite, one would be considered bizarre or educationally illiterate. The report contains much that is uncontroversial and much with which it is difficult to engage.