Ministers vs the curriculum

David Cameron has not sought to seek personal or political capital from the Olympics, for which he deserves much credit. It doesn’t take much to imagine how Gordon Brown would  have behaved had he been in power. But this is politics, Cameron is under pressure to establish an “Olympic Legacy” so he will today announce two hours of competitive sport every week in schools. In so doing, he highlights the contradiction in his education policy.

On one hand, he wants to devolve power to schools and get politicians out of the education process. But like his predecessors, he also can’t resist pulling the levers of power and telling head teachers what to do. Not so long ago, the idea of a politician telling teachers what to teach would have seemed bizarre: what does an MP know about how children should be taught? Even the 1945 Labour government considered this an intrusion: George Tomlinson, the Education Secretary, famously declared that ‘the minister knows nowt about curriculum’.