Michael Gove said parents favoured a “common sense” approach to education such as proper uniforms, decent standards of behaviour and academic subjects.
He also said there should be more of a recognition that working-class parents were just as ambitious for their children as those from middle-class backgrounds.
Speaking today, Mr Gove called for an expansion in the number of academies and free schools established in deprived inner-city communities to give children from poor families a greater chance of a decent education.
It came as a BBC documentary being aired on Monday evening suggested that the gap in performance between private and state schools was larger in Britain than most other developed nations.
Mr Gove said the “scandal of unequal opportunity in this country has to be addressed head-on".
“We need to increase opportunities for the very poorest by making sure that we get the basics right and that means that the sort of educational opportunities that are currently available for the middle-classes should be spread more widely,” he said.
“I am inclined to trust the common sense of the majority of mums and dads who recognise that their children want proper uniforms, strict discipline, academic subjects rigorously taught and not some of the wild and wacky theorems that have distracted some of our schools from delivering on the basics over the last 20 years.”
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Gove said too many children had been “written off” at the end of primary school.
“One of the problems we have had as a country is the assumption that some children can’t take to the age of 16 subjects like history or foreign languages or physics, chemistry and biology as separate sciences,” he said.
“As a result, we have written off, often at the age of 11 or even before that, the capacity of children from poorer backgrounds to do really well. I think that’s wrong and that’s one of the things we are challenging.”
The Coalition has already announced plans to introduce an “English Baccalaureate” in which pupils would be required to complete academic GCSEs in English, maths, science, humanities and a foreign language.
--By Graeme Paton, 20 Sep 2010