Michael Gove: my revolution for culture in classroom

Why we must raise education standards so children can compete with rest of the world

It's become fashionable over the Christmas holidays to refer to the Coalition as a Maoist enterprise. Not so much because the Government is inhabiting the wilder shores of the Left but because of the relentless pace of modernisation being pursued across government.

While the Opposition has nothing to say on any policy, the Government has been responding to the economic and social crises we face with big and comprehensive programmes.

And nowhere has that been more needed than in education, where I am happy to confess I’d like us to implement a cultural revolution just like the one they’ve had in China.

I was in the Far East last month, to see what I could learn. In one Beijing school I was handed a thick book with screeds of Chinese characters and the odd paragraph in English. “Is this a textbook,” I asked? No, I was told, it was a compendium of research papers published in academic journals by people at the school. “Gosh,” I replied. “Your teachers must be well qualified if they are regularly publishing new work in university journals.”

The papers were not, I was told, the professional work of the teachers. They were the homework of the pupils. And lest you think the example was a one-off, I had exactly the same experience in a Singapore school just two days later.

Schools in the Far East are turning out students who are working at an altogether higher level than our own.

The latest international education league tables showed us slipping further and further behind, thanks to Labour’s neglect of standards. And, at the same time, the gap between rich and poor grows wider, while places like Shanghai and Singapore put us to shame.

That’s why The Daily Telegraph is so right to sound the warning bell on what’s happening with university entry. The problems we face exemplify the flaws in our education system.

Colleges can no longer rely on the existing A-level to identify the best candidates, so they have to set their own tests. And academics report that even the brightest of our students don’t have the level of knowledge that undergraduates from abroad can boast. So when they arrive at college they need remedial work, especially on subjects like maths, to compete.

We can’t afford to waste time while our students fall further behind in the race for the best university places and jobs.

Which is why we’re accelerating the pace of reform. We’re giving new teeth to the exams watchdog, Ofqual, to fix higher standards. In the past there’s been a temptation for exam boards to offer easier courses to scoop up more students, especially from schools worried about league table rankings and anxious to get the easiest As going.

We’re overhauling Ofqual so exam boards have to peg their tests to the world’s most rigorous and those who offer devalued qualifications will be penalised. We’re asking universities to play a bigger part in designing A-levels so they don’t have to offer their own tests on top. And we’re also reforming league tables so they focus on the exams universities and employers value, such as science, history and modern languages. Soft subjects will no longer have the same value.

Like Chairman Mao, we’ve embarked on a Long March to reform our education system. Sometimes we will have to manoeuvre less than elegantly to get around obstacles. But the alternative, simply accepting the inevitability of our decline, is not an option.