𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The Education Secretary has faced major backlash over her plans to reform the curriculum. Lucy Powell announced that “peaking skills” will become just as important as reading and writing in GSCE assessments, and that she’s shifting behavioural regulations to in hopes that fewers students will face fewer exclusions. Ms Powell said she is leading a “Department of Hope” but was told “hope won’t get pupils through exams” and “children will be the losers”.

Tory education spokesman Laura Trott 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.’ Labour’s plans strikes a constrast to those of the Tory government, aiming to toughen out school standards. Ms Trott slammed the reform as “Orwellian”, adding: “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, said the proposals looked “woolly”, and further critised that “Hope won’t get pupils through exams”. In her speech to the Confederation of School Trusts, Ms Powell said ‘speaking, listening and communicating’ would become a ‘core part’ of content and assessment, ‘from primary to GCSE and beyond’. This is despite speaking and listening exams already having been dropped as counting towards English GCSE final marks in 2013, due to teachers inflating grades.

Former Ofsted head, Baronness Spielman, now a Tory life peer and shadow minister for work and pensions, claims the changes will “reopen the routes by which schools used to push up pupil grades in GCSEs to make it look as though they were doing better than they really were”.

She added: “It is children who will be the losers.” However, Ms Powell said “oracy” was becoming more important in the age of artifical intelligence, and state school pupils were often denied these skills.

“That 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.

“And I can announce today that I will give oracy equal status to reading and writing, as a new strand of the English curriculum.’ She said Labour would work with schools and exams regulator Ofqual to ensure ‘oracy will light up every classroom”.

The Education Secertary also suggested reducing exclusions by implementing a “system that rewards inclusion, not exlucison”. She explained that while “poor behaviour must have strong consquences”, it is “much harder” to someone back in the system once they fall out.

She also wants to reduce the amount of academic writing in subjects such as music, PE and drama, instead adopting more ‘practical’ modes of assessment. Summarising 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.”

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.”