Labour was accused last night of “destroying school standards” through yet another overhaul of the curriculum.
Education Secretary Lucy Powell was warned that “children will be the losers” after announcing that speaking skills will receive the same status as reading and writing in GCSE assessments.
Ms Powell also indicated that fewer pupils could be sent home for poor behaviour, saying she wanted the education system to reward “inclusion, not exclusion”. Setting out her vision, she vowed to “widen the narrow view of what good is” and said she was leading the “Department of Hope”.
Downing Street said her speech to school leaders in Birmingham was intended to outline a vision to “reimagine childhood in a new era”.
The proposals appear to move in the opposite direction to efforts by previous Conservative governments to strengthen and toughen school standards.
Laura Trott, the Conservatives’ education spokesman, said: “Blowing open the curriculum and assessment review once again creates more confusion for schools and risks reopening the hard-won debate over the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum.”
She described Ms Powell’s decision to rebrand her department as the “Department of Hope” as “Orwellian”.
Labour has been accused of “destroying school standards” after Education Secretary Lucy Powell, pictured in August, announced a fresh overhaul of the curriculum
Ms Powell was warned that “children will be the losers” after she announced that speaking skills would become as important as reading and writing in GCSE assessments (Pictured: Ms Powell with students collecting GCSE results in Bolton)
Invoking George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ms Trott said: “The Ministry of Peace made war, the Ministry of Love tortured people, and now Lucy Powell has the Department of Hope while school standards are being destroyed.”
Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, called the proposals “woolly” and said: “Hope won’t get pupils through exams.”
Speaking at the Confederation of School Trusts, Ms Powell said that “speaking, listening and communicating” would become a “core part” of teaching and assessment from primary school through GCSE and beyond. Speaking and listening exams were removed from the marks counting towards English GCSE final grades in 2013 after concerns that teachers were inflating results.
Baroness Spielman, a former head of Ofsted who is now a Conservative life peer and shadow work and pensions minister, said the announcement appeared to signal that Ms Powell could reopen methods once used by schools to boost GCSE grades and make their performance appear stronger than it was.
She added: “It is children who will be the losers.”
Other Conservative sources said they feared the push to introduce speaking skills could displace more rigorous academic content in state schools, while private schools continued to demand more from their pupils.
Ms Powell argued that “oracy” was increasingly important in the age of artificial intelligence and said pupils in state schools were often denied the opportunity to develop those skills.
“The ability to articulate yourself confidently is central to success in work and in life, but for too long it’s been a marker of privilege,” she said. “Now it will become the right of every child – nobody left out because they can’t speak up. That’s why we’re hardwiring oracy into the revised national curriculum.”
She added: “I can announce today that I will give oracy equal status to reading and writing, as a new strand of the English curriculum.” Labour will work with schools and exams regulator Ofqual to ensure that “oracy will light up every classroom”, she said.
Ms Powell also indicated that she wanted to reduce exclusions, calling for a system that “rewards inclusion, not exclusion”. She said: “Poor behaviour must have strong consequences, but once someone falls out of the system, it’s all that much harder to get them back.”
She also wants to reduce the amount of academic writing required in subjects including music, PE and drama, with more practical forms of assessment introduced instead. Summing up her approach, she said: “We need to widen the narrow view of what good is. And we need to give our young people something to believe in again. Hope for the future. That is my mission – I’ve dubbed it as me leading the Department of Hope.”
But when the Daily Mail asked for details as to how all of this would be implemented, no answers were forthcoming.
Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, said: ‘Oracy is vital but should be a side product of all good teaching.
‘Separating it out will be a green light for lazy teaching.’