Literacy news
Queen’s speech announces two new education bills
25 May 2010
The new Government used their first Queen’s speech to announce a raft of new legislation while upholding their main priority of reducing the public sector deficit.
Announcing 22 new bills in the House of Lords, including two education bills, the Queen said: "My government's legislative programme will be based upon the principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility”.
The two new education bills, the Academies Bill and the Education and Children's Bill, will be pushed through Parliament in the next legislative session, introducing a number of new measures. These include reading tests for six-year-olds, a slimmer curriculum giving more power and freedom to teachers, and thousands of new academies.
Prime Minister David Cameron hailed the Queen’s speech as a "radical programme for a radical government".
The main elements of the Education and Children’s Bill are:
- To provide schools with the freedoms to deliver an excellent education in the way they see fit.
- To reform Ofsted and other accountability frameworks to ensure that head teachers are held properly accountable for the core educational goals of attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor.
- To introduce a slimmer curriculum giving more space for teachers to decide how to teach.
- To introduce a reading test for six year olds to make sure that young children are learning and to identify problems early.
- To give teachers and head teachers the powers to improve behaviour and tackle bullying.
- We expect standards across the education sector to rise through the creation of more academies and giving more freedom to head teachers and teachers. We will also ensure that money follows pupils, and introduce a “pupil premium” so that more money follows the poorest pupils.
The main elements of the Academies Bill are:
- To provide schools with the freedoms to deliver an excellent education in the way they see fit, within a broad framework where they are clearly accountable for the outcomes they deliver.
- To enable all maintained schools to apply to become an academy with schools judged “outstanding” by Ofsted being pre-approved.
- Primary and special schools would be able to apply to become an academy in their own right for the first time and will benefit from the increased freedoms and flexibilities that this will offer.
- To make the process of applying to become an academy as simple as possible without a requirement for local authorities to be consulted.
- We expect standards across the education sector to rise through the creation of more academies. We would expect a significant number to open in September and for the number to continue to grow each year.
- Academies would be funded at a comparable level to maintained schools.
- There would be no expansion of selection but grammar schools and other schools which select or partially select pupils will be able to continue to do so.
- The Bill would automatically make all new academies charities.
Read the full story on the Queen’s speech on the BBC website
Read the full details of the Education and Children’s Bill at the Number 10 website
Read the full details of the Academies Bill at the Number 10 website
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