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Rose Report

Mr. Olner, it is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) on securing the debate. He is right; this is the first opportunity that we have had to debate an important area of education reform. I thank him for his warm welcome for the interim report of the Rose review. I should like to stress, first, that the report is an interim one and, secondly, that it is on the primary curriculum, not on primary education—some Members may have misinterpreted that point, as a couple of them referred to the review as a report on primary education. That may be what they wished it was, but it is a report on the primary curriculum. My hon. Friend has brought great insight to the debate, as a teacher and from his experience as a constituency Member of Parliament. Unlike the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws), the primary schools that I have visited welcome the review of the curriculum, so perhaps we are going into different primary schools. I want to correct one point that was made. Although the QCA provided evidence, Sir Jim Rose actually wrote and authored the report. The 21st century job market is rapidly changing, as are the skills that young people will need when they leave school. Our young people, as we all know, are more techno-savvy and adept at communications. Importantly, new jobs are opening up that did not even exist a decade or so ago. The technological and communications revolution has opened up a whole realm of possibilities for more interactive, engaging learning than we could even have dreamed of 20 years ago, when the national curriculum was first introduced. We need to adapt our education system to that rate of change so that it is flexible enough to accommodate and seize on those opportunities and to prepare our young people for the future. In our children's plan, we outlined our ambition for a world-class education system and high-quality children's services and for this country to be the best place in the world for children to grow up in.