Shadow schools minister Mike Kane has shed more light on Labour’s plans to reform England’s education system after the party’s announcement on Sunday that it would scrap Ofsted if it came to power.
Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour Party Conference, Mr Kane said teachers would be asked to devise a new national curriculum and also that there would be new testing to go with it.
“We’re going to trust the profession over a five- or 10-year period to come up with a national curriculum,” he said.
“A subsidiarity put into that will be that there’ll be a local curriculum as well. And, as a nation, we decide about how that is tested and monitored.”
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Mr Kane, a former primary school teacher, was speaking at the Tes fringe meeting on accountability, and said the nation’s children were “the most tested in the world”.
Labour has said it will abolish Sats. The shadow minister said that the high-stakes assessment regime was the reason why the curriculum was narrowing and that subjects like design and technology, music, drama and art were in decline.
He added that, in primary schools, there were currently 13 statutory tests that teachers had to implement and it was just “a burden on teachers, pupils and parents alike”.
Referring to his own experience as a Year 1 teacher, Mr Kane said: “What happened with the Sats was that, instead of providing curriculum for the high-flyers and those with special educational needs, we started to focus on the moveable group - those that we could get over level 4 and above at the end of key stage 2.
“That’s where all the resource went because we knew we would be punished if we didn’t get a good enough result at the end of key stage 2.”
He continued: “A Labour government will launch a commission on curriculum and assessment. And a new assessment system will be based on a set of core principles in order to ensure it meets the needs of pupils.
“Developed alongside teachers using professional expertise, [and] expertise from unions as well, we will introduce lower-stakes testing with a reduced burden on children across a broader and more balanced curriculum. This new system would trust teachers as professionals and give agency back to our teachers.”
