Boggart Blog Central

Education secretary hails first 16 free schools, and promises teachers more freedom and 'sharper focus on underperforming primary schools'

Pupils with five GCSEs would gain the proposed certificate as 'special recognition', says education secretary

The education secretary, Michael Gove, today announced plans to combat the decline in exam standards by proposing an English baccalaureate qualification to recognise the achievements of GCSE students who complete a broad course of studies.

The "English bac" would not replace GCSEs, but would be a certificate to reward pupils who pass at least five of the exams, at grade C or above, including English, maths, one science, one foreign language and one humanity. "If you get five GCSEs in those areas, I think you should be entitled to special recognition," Gove said.

The details will be set out in a white paper in the autumn, but Gove will flesh out some aspects in a speech tomorrow, seen by Labour as an attempt to divert attention from the fact that he is only able to announce 17 new free schools, state-funded institutions outside local authority control.

Ed Balls, the shadow education secretary, said it was laughable that Gove claimed he was on course to succeed with plans for new schools set up by parents and teachers.

Gove also revealed plans to "declutter" A-levels, slimming down the number of modules and exams faced by students in order to allow them more time for extra-curricular pursuits such as art, music and sport, as well as "deep study" in their chosen subjects.

Speaking on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show, Gove said he wanted to "transform the accountability systems, the league tables, the whole qualification system in this country".

GCSE league tables obscured the exams pupils were taking and hid the flight from languages and tougher subjects such as science, his aides said. The education secretary was not seeking to tell pupils what exams to take, but the baccalaureate would be a way of rewarding those who took a wider range of subjects.

Gove said the narrowing of the range of exams being taken was "depriving young people of the things they should get from education, which is a rounded sense of how to understand this world in all its complexity and richness.

"If you don't understand science and you don't understand other cultures, you are deliberately cutting yourself off from the best that is going on in our world."Gove said he was "very attracted" by the baccalaureate systems operated by many European and Asian countries that deliver a broader educational curriculum than in England.

"One of the concerns about the English education system is that people's options are narrowed too early," he said.

"I am deeply concerned that fewer and fewer students are studying languages: it not only breeds insularity, it means an integral part of the brain's learning capacity rusts unused.

"I am determined that we step up the number of students studying proper science subjects. Asian countries massively outstrip us in the growth of scientific learning and they are already reaping the cultural and economic benefits."

The percentage of pupils gaining a baccalaureate would be included in school league tables, allowing parents to assess which schools were likely to give their children a broad academic education.

Gove's aides said the policy of "equivalence" introduced in 2004, under which vocational qualifications were given parity with academic exams when compiling league tables, had led to perverse incentives for schools to put children through easier courses. Gove made clear that he intended to retain A-levels, but said it was important to ensure they "remain a proper preparation for university", and he has asked universities to contribute to reform of the system.

"There are parents who worry that what used to be a clear two-year run during the sixth form – when you had the chance to do sport and art and music as well as getting into deep study – has become cluttered up by too many modules, too many exams, which have led to too much time being spent weighing what you know and not enough time actually getting to grips with the subject," he said.

Balls said: "If Michael Gove was serious about making sure young people get a broad and balanced education, he would not be scrapping diplomas or saying vocational qualifications should count for less in school-to-school comparison."

A behind-the-scaffolding tour as MOSI in Manchester undergoes an £8m redevelopment

Please, no more articles about middle-class "panic" and secondary schools (Can't do God, can't pay fees … so what next?, Family, 4 September). The panic and fear doesn't help. Like the writer of the piece, Andrew Penman, I faced finding a secondary school in Merton for my son. I considered church schools but, for me, that would have been lying. I tutored my son for the grammar schools but the odds of 10/1 aren't great, even for bright boys. Private schools are too expensive. However, I held firm and my son is attending Rutlish school, the same school that sent Mr Penman running. Guess what? My son has been at Rutlish for a year, is very happy and learning well. Good behaviour and good results are expected (this summer's GCSE results are now 10% above the national average at A*-C). Positive stories about schools with pupils of mixed ability, social and racial diversity will do more for state education, our children and our society as a whole than more pages of cynical parents, running scared.

Christina Strupinska Brown

London

• While one sympathises with Andrew Penman and his struggle to find a secondary school for his son, surely the answer is not to up sticks but to get involved at his local senior school from day one – to join the PTA, to participate, to speak to teachers, to be as supportive as possible. Schools value concerned parents like Mr Penman (although his faking of religious belief for a primary school place is despicable). No school can do it all themselves. The best schools are a partnership between the school and the local community.

Roger Tagholm

London

• Andrew Penman could have saved himself and his family "three years of confusion and distress", not to mention vast sums of money, if he had been a little more open-minded. Andrew acknowledges that "there was a very good school in Tooting, but Tooting has had a couple too many murders for my tastes". Well, I've lived a few minutes' walk from the school in question for 30 years and my children, both now through university and out the other side, were educated there. None of us has been murdered. Nor have we murdered anyone.

Jean Ettridge

London

• In your informative article about the Heygate estate's use as a film set (Blowing more than the doors off – end of film-makers' favourite estate, 4 September) you incorrectly say that the estate had a "reputation for violence". My family lived there for 30 years and it wasn't a violent place to grow up – its a reputation that's largely been acquired by its use as a film set. The article might also have spared a line to ask why the estate is now empty, if it was formerly home to a "thriving community", and where that community has gone to? The answer is to other council houses not much better, or worse, than the ones on the Heygate – Southwark council reneged on its promise to build new ones.

Jerry Flynn

London

• The research from the Institute of Education and Bristol University regarding Brighton and Hove's much lauded system of secondary admissions is an important case study (Middle-class pupils still winners despite admissions lottery, 3 September). It provides clear evidence that lotteries are no panacea for social injustice in school admissions.

My own research has also shown a significant concentration of children eligible for free school meals within schools catering for the city's most deprived areas. As further cohorts move to secondary school, it appears likely that the gap between schools serving poorer areas and those in more affluent parts of the city will widen further. As the latest report suggests, children eligible for free school meals "were 'slightly' more likely to be at school with other pupils on free school meals under Brighton's lottery system than under the previous system". With the fixed catchments taking their toll year on year, even "slight" increases in social segregation have the potential to become increasingly significant.

As this new research highlights, random allocation may yet offer some potential for addressing increasing segregation. However, this can only be achieved if it is combined with other methods such as fair banding or more socially inclusive catchments, thereby facilitating more balanced intakes. Otherwise lotteries may be little more than a figleaf of social justice for local authorities, while social segregation increases as a result of other system features.

Keith Turvey

Senior lecturer, University of Brighton

•  Your article concludes, rightly, with a reference to the decline in foreign language study (Social class affects white pupils' exam results, 3 September). The current threat to language-learning risks widening the social divide still further: there is a danger that the social confidence and career advantages which bilingualism bring will be restricted to children whose parents actively support or finance their languages education. This discrimination would represent a return to the years when languages were studied exclusively in independent and grammar schools.

Recent progress in introducing language diversity in primary schools is now at risk. Poorer white monolingual pupils and bilingual pupils from minority ethnic groups are all set to lose out if language-learning is not made part of the compulsory curriculum. Enthusiastic teachers have worked hard to develop young children's language skills and research has identified gains in overall literacy development where pupils have access to more than one language. Should this initiative fail through lack of support, the poor will get poorer – and the social advantages of linguistic competence will remain with the rich.

Anne Feltham

Brighton

It's the start of another school year and I'm dreaming of new pencil cases, satchels and the books I read in class. But what are the books you remember from your own school days?

Fourteen years after I finished school, there's still something about September which feels like the start of the year, and I'm nostalgic this morning for new pencils and felt tips, satchels and packed lunches. As the hope of the nation barrels back into classrooms, I'm also thinking back to the books I read in school.

I was away last weekend and talking about how we all read William Golding's Lord of the Flies (and no, the weekend wasn't that bad, it's just that one of my friends is currently making her way through his complete works, to settle a bet). I was 14, and I think there couldn't have been a more perfect book to pick for kids of that age – if you're not going to be hooked by Ralph and Piggy and Simon and Jack, and "kill the pig, cut his throat, spill his blood", then you're not going to be hooked by anything. This was the edition we had – just looking at it casts me back to yellow highlighters and doodling and the horrors of reading aloud.

Anyway, the shocking gloriousness of Lord of the Flies made me hungry for more Golding. Our school library was pretty small, but it did, impressively, have a copy of Pincher Martin. I am quite sure I failed to get any allegorical, existential meaning from the book, but it successfully terrified me, burning an image of Martin clinging to his lonely rock into my brain. In typically disorganised fashion, I promptly lost the book for about a month and was subsequently banned from the school library for giving it back so late – obviously as a sop to all those Golding fans clamouring for more of his work.

Golding and my thieving tendencies aside, Jane Eyre bored me, King Lear enthralled me, and I described Romeo and Juliet in my mock GSCE as a novel – so something clearly went wrong there (thankfully I'd got the right end of the stick by the time the real thing came around). But the other book which really stands out in my memory from schooldays is Wuthering Heights. I was on to A-levels by then, but for some reason we were still going through the purgatory of reading (droning) aloud in class – possibly one of the best ways to make a group of teenagers lose interest in a novel. I was lazy, more interested in messing around than working, but I was so caught up in the melodramas of Cathy and Heathcliff ("Do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you! Oh God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!") that I'd be pages ahead when it came to my turn to read and would get in trouble for not concentrating. And I distinctly remember spending a break time racing to the end.

The rest of it, though, the years of English classes and essays, revising and exams, has largely faded into oblivion, which is rather worrying. But how about you? Indulge my nostalgia and tell me what you remember of your own literary school days.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet met to agree plans to extend the life of Germany's atomic power plants yesterday amid angry protests from anti-nuclear activists and the country's two main opposition parties.

Three hooded figures flanked by flags, filmed for a grainy video released to the BBC, announced yesterday that the Basque separatist group Eta was calling off the armed campaign it has waged for more than half a century.

Russia's next presidential election is not until 2012, but speculation is already rife about whether Dmitry Medvedev will try for a second term or whether his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, will want to reclaim his old job. The one thing almost everyone can agree on is that they will not stand against each other. But there might just be a third way, and that third way could give Russia its very own Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel.

Athletes who believe they have consumed caffeine perform better even when they have in fact had none, research shows.

It's a sunny afternoon in Rome and high above the Via Guido Reni in warm, marshmallow-soft air, swallows dot and dash under a sky that might have been painted by Tintoretto, or the young Turner. The birds' trajectories possess a perfect metaphorical quality: four or five hundred feet beneath their febrile wingtips lies the MAXXI museum of contemporary art and architecture, whose form is a lavish, supersized riddle of sinuously overlapping voids and projections.