Scrap the curriculum! is the glorious headline this morning on the Beeb in response to David Laws’ speech this morning.

I didn’t catch the speech, but I like the coverage. The curriculum in its current dessicated form is, IMHO, nowt more than an outmoded article of faith among statists, and not something which should detain a liberal:

Ed Balls runs our education system as if it was still one of the great nationalized industries of the last century. But from the poshest Public Schools to the toughest Maintained Schools, there is a new consensus that standardization and centralisation just don’t work. That what is needed is more independence, more real freedom for schools.

An Education Freedom Act. An Act to give power back to Schools. Back to Local Government. And back to Parents. The huge Whitehall department should be cut back – dramatically. No school should be directly accountable to Ministers. And no school should ever again have to write a grovelling letter to the Secretary of State, seeking his permission to be creative! Academies presently have these freedoms to innovate. In the future, ALL schools should have them.

The 635 pages of the nationalized curriculum should go in the shredder. Let’s replace it with something closer to the 21 pages that seem to do the job in places like Sweden.

And on more familiar ground:

The Pupil Premium would make a real difference in tackling disadvantage. Just think what it could mean. Private school funding levels would allow the most disadvantaged schools to deliver for their pupils what private schools take for granted: longer teaching hours, Saturday opening, small class sizes, and resources to attract the best staff.

And we are already looking at whether we can identify further savings within the department’s spending, which would allow us, in time, to increase the Pupil Premium up to £5bn, so other disadvantaged pupils can benefit too.

By the way, conference I would like to congratulate you because since last year, you have won a new convert to this policy.

The Conservative Party

Read the full speech here.