The government has announced an education policy and the world hasn’t ended. Civil war hasn’t broken out. No pitched battles are taking place on Twitter or Facebook. Few parent groups are up in arms. No astroturfing groups purporting to represent parents are jumping to the policy’s defence. In fact, an eerie silence reigns. The education world is busier arguing about bias in Ofsted’s curriculum consultation than a substantial change to…well…the curriculum.

How has this happened? Has the Department for Education discovered a bridge across the policy Rubicon?

On Tuesday, Damian Hinds toured television studios to tell the nation that health, sex and relationship education was set to become a compulsory element of the PSHE programme, and commentators focused more on the practicalities of schools’ capacity to deliver it than the rights or wrongs of the announcement.

These questions will surely form the basis of the policy’s success or failure, but in these divided times, how has the quiet man at the DfE’s helm managed to bring everyone together? The answer is as simple as it is revolutionary. PSHE is a curriculum without a syllabus. Perhaps more precisely, it is a syllabus without content. Ethical considerations around its key themes ensure that no one-size-fits-all set of learning objectives can be dictated from on high. Instead, each is left loose enough for interpretation, and the whole is supported by “what the law says”.

This flexibility may be daunting for some, but those schools already driven by a clear ethos will have no trouble adapting. Here, PSHE is usually already a strong part of the curriculum. Those driven by results alone, on the other hand, fall into two categories: those who buy in and centrally impose a wholly innocuous and broadly ineffective set of resources, and those who do the same, pitch it wrong, and end up on the receiving end of parental complaints.

In secondary schools, whether in a bitty sequence of form-time sessions or on a half-termly rotation of longer lessons at the expense of one or other subject, PSHE is likely to be delivered by form tutors to their form groups. Capitalising on the strong rapport tutors have with their charges is an age-old way to circumvent the shortcomings of a poorly planned sequence of learning. That is not to slight the hardworking army of PSHE coordinators. They know, too, that their planning for whole year groups can never achieve the quality that a teacher planning for a known group can. I did the job for a while, and I certainly knew it.

Some multi-academy trusts already centralise their curriculum in all other subjects in this way, not just across one school, but across the whole trust. Teachers receive planning and resources - scripts, even - handed down from on high. The jury is out as to the quality of curriculum this represents. Perhaps Ofsted will shed some light on that come September.

But PSHE is uniquely about relationships, about personalisation and socialisation. It is about more than acquisition of knowledge. It is about the development of behaviours, the creation of a culture. The only shortcut I know to doing that sustainably through relational teaching is to instil fear. For PSHE to be effective at all, let alone Mr Hinds’ expanded PSHE syllabus, and not to derail into trying and failing (or worse, succeeding) to scare children away from sex, drugs or social media, more needs to happen than what the punters have so far suggested.

Rewiring accountability

Developing capacity is not, in fact, the problem. On the whole, schools have become extremely adept at it; 30 years of curriculum meddling and unstable micromanagement have ensured that. What schools lack is the capacity to develop capacity, also as a consequence of centralisation. In our current state, unless accountability is rewired to make PSHE a priority, it just won’t be or will continue to be prioritised only patchily, unequally - no matter how necessary and important, how desired and welcome this new policy is.

Ofsted will have no choice but to follow suit on this renewed PSHE focus. The curriculum element of its new inspection framework will invariably be founded upon the twin pillars of the English Baccalaureate (as it has already stated) and PSHE. Schools will have to respond and PSHE will quickly become shorthand for a broad and balanced curriculum. Something will have to give, leaving the arts, technology and/or PE to bear the brunt.

The irony of teaching students about health at the expense of their opportunity to exercise, social skills at the expense of an ever-increasingly rare opportunity to work collaboratively, or personal development at the expense of their opportunity for creative expression will be lost on nobody.

Worse still (if that’s possible) is that an expanded PSHE curriculum could become another driver of workload. I know, I was its co-pilot. There’s nothing worse as a teacher than to deliver something that is of no value, that could be of value, but which consistently misses the spot. And, as a leader, to be responsible for inflicting that on others, despite all your best efforts, is soul-crushing. When there is no capacity to develop the capacity, everyone loses, no matter what Ofsted is persuaded of in a one-day visit. Creating and nurturing a culture takes time.

Workload isn’t about the amount of work we do (within limits), but about the sense of value we derive from it. That’s why teachers in so-called outstanding schools who work the same hours as those in schools in special measures report much less dissatisfaction with workload. That’s why I have no issue pointing the finger at accountability in general, and Ofsted in particular, for ballooning workload. And that’s why I can’t abide by Mr Hinds telling us there is no “golden lever” to reduce it.

Like almost everyone, I welcome the addition of health, sex and relationships education to PSHE’s compulsory content. Unlike education’s current paymasters, though, I take it seriously, as I take school curriculum seriously.

Ironically, the golden lever for tackling our entrenched problems of lack of capacity, of workload expansion and curriculum shrinkage, and of schools’ growing distance from real-world issues affecting our children, is right there for all to see in the PSHE announcement. The very reason the policy is so broadly welcome is that, at least in theory, it empowers schools and communities to cross the bridge that separates them, to develop curriculum together.

The greatest obstacle is the troll under that bridge with the voracious appetite, whose name is Ofsted.

JL Dutaut is co-editor of Flip the System UK: a teachers’ manifesto (Routledge). He is currently on a career break from teaching to research school accountability systems around the world. He hasn’t found one he likes yet, and he doesn’t think you would either