The single most important thing in a child's performance is the quality of the teacher. Making sure a child spends the maximum amount of time with inspirational teachers is the most important thing.

As long as there are people in education making excuses for failure, cursing future generations with a culture of low expectations, denying children access to the best that has been thought and written, because Nemo and the Mister Men are more relevant, the battle needs to be joined.

One of the problems we've had is that the ICT curriculum in the past has been written for a subject that is changing all the time. I think that what we should have is computer science in the future - and how it fits in to the curriculum is something we need to be talking to scientists, to experts in coding and to young people about.

The accumulation of cultural capital - the acquisition of knowledge - is the key to social mobility.

The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

What I think is wrong is spending £9m of taxpayers' money on one particular piece of one-sided propaganda.

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.

The Government wants to give young people from every community the chance to learn about the heroism and sacrifice of our great-grandparents, which is why we are organising visits to the battlefields of the Western Front.