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Rose Report

If the hon. Gentleman is saying that he wants the Government to provide for more flexibility and freedom in what is taught in every curricular area, I entirely agree. We, as a party, do not believe in a curriculum that is so prescriptive that it seeks to prioritise certain parts of history. If, however, he is saying that history teaching should be almost fact-free—perhaps I parody his argument—that poses a serious risk. If youngsters are not given a framework to understand the past, it is difficult for them to use the skills that he rightly wants to develop so that they can improve their education. I am not sure what implications the Rose report has for the teaching of those core subjects, however. When the Government and Rose came under attack because of the perception that the proposals meant dumbing down education, there was a considerable retreat from them. That feature of the report makes it so frustrating when one tries to understand its proposals—whether some might be damaging or whether they are just tweaks to the system. Some speeches take much longer than one expected when one started, and I have left precious little time left to discuss some important points that should have higher Government priority. I shall touch on them briefly. Any primary education review that leaves out the testing regime leaves out something of great importance and relevance to the curriculum debate, because one cannot debate the curriculum without debating the pressures on schools through the testing regime, which is so crucial. I certainly do not want us to get rid of key stage 2 testing in its entirety; it is important to know in primary schools the proportion of youngsters who achieve basic skills in maths and English. I do not want the testing regime to become more onerous through the introduction of single-level tests, either. The debacle of last year's SATs results gives us an opportunity to consider whether there is a greater role for teacher assessment with external moderation, because credible tests are still essential for testing the right things in the basic subjects and for giving us an idea of how schools and youngsters are doing in a particular age range. We also need a much better system of assessing youngsters as they enter primary education, and of ensuring that the interventions that they need, particularly in speech, language and other special educational areas, are delivered. The testing regime should not just be about assessing the performance of schools. More significantly, it should be about the actions that we need to take to improve opportunities for young children. That is why some of our proposals on school funding and the pupil premium, which would put additional money into schools to help the most disadvantaged youngsters, are crucial, and will become even more important in an environment where education funding is being squeezed, as it will be after 2011.