Education Secretary is told children will be the losers after she said 'speaking skills' will be as important as reading and writing in new plans for GCSEs

Labour was last night accused of 'destroying school standards' with yet another overhaul of the curriculum.

Education Secretary Lucy Powell was told 'children will be the losers' after she announced 'speaking skills' will become just as important as reading and writing in GCSE assessments.

Ms Powell also signalled fewer children will be sent home for poor behaviour, because she wants to reward 'inclusion not exclusion'. Outlining her vision, she vowed to 'widen the narrow view of what good is' and insisted she was leading the 'Department of Hope'. 

Downing Street said her speech to school leaders in Birmingham was designed to 'set out her vision to reimagine childhood in a new era'.

The plans appear to be in direct contrast to reforms to toughen up standards under previous Tory governments.

Tory education spokesman Laura Trott said: 'Blowing open the curriculum and assessment review once again creates more confusion for schools and risks reopening the hard-won debate over the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum.'

She said Ms Powell's rebranding of her brief as the 'Department of Hope' was 'Orwellian'.

Referencing George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, she said: 'The Ministry of Peace made war, the Ministry of Love tortured people, and now Lucy Powell has the Department of Hope while school standards are being destroyed.'

Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said the proposals looked 'woolly' and added: 'Hope won't get pupils through exams.'

In her speech to the Confederation of School Trusts, Ms Powell said 'speaking, listening and communicating' would become a 'core part' of content and assessment, 'from primary to GCSE and beyond'. This is despite speaking and listening exams already having been dropped as counting towards English GCSE final marks in 2013, due to teachers inflating grades.

A former head of schools watchdog Ofsted, Baroness Spielman, now a Tory life peer and shadow minister for work and pensions, said it looked like a 'signal that [Ms Powell] will reopen the routes by which schools used to push up pupil grades in GCSEs to make it look as though they were doing better than they really were'.

She added: 'It is children who will be the losers.'

Other Tory sources said they feared the rush to include speaking skills could lead to a squeezing out of more rigorous content in state schools, while private education continues to push pupils harder.

Ms Powell said 'oracy' was becoming more important in the age of artificial intelligence, and state school pupils were often denied these skills.

'That ability to articulate yourself confidently is central to success in work and in life, but for too long it's been a marker of privilege,' she said. 'Now it will become the right of every child – nobody left out because they can't speak up. That's why we're hardwiring oracy into the revised national curriculum.

'And I can announce today that I will give oracy equal status to reading and writing, as a new strand of the English curriculum.' She said Labour would work with schools and exams regulator Ofqual to ensure 'oracy will light up every classroom'.

Ms Powell also suggested she wanted to reduce exclusions, by saying she wanted a 'system that rewards inclusion, not exclusion'. 'Poor behaviour must have strong consequences, but once someone falls out of the system, it's all that much harder to get them back.'

She also wants to decrease the amount of academic writing in subjects such as music, PE and drama, instead adopting more 'practical' modes of assessment. Summarising her approach, she said: 'We need to widen the narrow view of what good is. And we need to give our young people something to believe in again. Hope for the future. That is my mission, I've dubbed it as me leading the Department of Hope.'

But when the Daily Mail asked for details as to how all of this would be implemented, no answers were forthcoming.

Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, said: 'Oracy is vital but should be a side product of all good teaching.

'Separating it out will be a green light for lazy teaching.'

• QUENTIN LETTS: Lucy Powell's speech was 20 minutes of patronising banality. You could have set it in an A-level English paper, asking: 'What, if anything, is this person trying to say?
• DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Lucy Powell's disgraceful plan to dumb down schools will deprive Britain's young of the education she was lucky enough to enjoy 
• READ MORE: Lucy Powell famously dropped out of Oxford 'because it was too elitist'