Nick Seaton: For all our sakes, Gove must win the counter-revolution in our classrooms

Clever move! By pre-announcing this measure to avoid it getting lost in the fog of detail when the education White Paper appears, Mr Gove has placed a firm foundation stone for the rest of the coalition Government's reforms. What are schools for, if they don't teach everyone to read, write, spell and punctuate? And, of course, to compose clear, grammatically correct sentences. These basic skills open doors to everything else.

The announcement will also have created thousands of supporters for the reforms in business and industry. Recent complaints from business leaders, including the bosses of Marks & Spencer, Asda and Tesco, that young people are leaving school and university "not fit for work", cannot easily be ignored. Busy people may not have time to absorb the details of the reforms, but they now know what's intended, so their support is assured.

If the reforms do, as promised, ensure national tests and exams again become serious measures of knowledge and ability, much else will follow. But a massive cultural change will be needed.

A couple of days ago, we received an email from an A-level examiner. He rebuked us, albeit mildly, for backing the emphasis on spelling on the grounds that in the General Studies – Science papers he marked, 20 per cent of the marks were specifically reserved for spelling, punctuation and grammar.

That may be so – in a General Studies exam, which covers general knowledge, rather than the content of a specific subject. Yet this examiner unwittingly highlights the confusion within the educational establishment. Should an exam, in say chemistry, physics or history, carry additional marks for spelling and grammar, or should marks be deducted when these are poor? Unless the question is specifically examining punctuation, spelling or grammar, the answer, surely, is the latter? This, we must hope, is now being made clear.

How will other proposals in the White Paper fit in?

If, as planned, discipline improves and Ministers persuade all primary schools to teach reading by ensuring children first learn the phonic code (the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they represent), the educational prospects of thousands of children will be massively improved.

But even this will not be easy. Last week, Ofsted inspectors added to the confusion by publishing a report warning that too much emphasis on phonics could reduce "the motivation of children who want to explore books". Of course it could, but how can children profitably "explore" books if they can't make sense of the letters and hence the words?

The White Paper also proposes to raise the standard of entry for candidates for teacher training; and to weaken the influence of teacher training colleges by encouraging more "on the job" training in schools. Three cheers for that, especially when many private schools refuse to employ people who have completed university-based teacher training courses on the grounds that they are steeped in ideological nonsense that can't easily be erased.

Add all this to plans to reinforce the content of important subjects such as maths, chemistry, physics, geography and history; plus moves to make school league tables more meaningful by discouraging schools from promoting subjects such as Information and Communication Technology (worth up to four GCSEs), and a coherent package emerges.

Yet even at this stage, Michael Gove and his allies face difficulties. Many of the reforms will need Parliamentary approval in the forthcoming Education Act before they can be implemented. Will the "progressive" educational establishment and its allies among the Lib Dems ensure their favourite "subjects" such as citizenship and the newly- named "personal, social, health and enterprise education" remain, or become, compulsory, thereby crowding out important lessons?

Will state schools be encouraged to produce a value-free society by removing the legal requirement to hold a daily act of worship? Within the last few days, the British Humanist Association, the general secretaries of the Association of School and College Lecturers, and the National Union of Teachers have urged Mr Gove to do just that, arguing that worship in schools infringes pupils' human rights.

This is nonsense: at present, schools are legally required to offer worship, but attendance for youngsters of different faiths, or none, is entirely voluntary.

Have all the reforms been properly thought through? Despite their flaws, Labour's academies had a clear aim – raising standards in the poorest areas. Leaving aside the extra funding they receive directly from Whitehall, the educational purpose of Mr Gove's academies is less clear. Good schools seeking academy status must take responsibility for under-performing schools. Will this distract their staff and weaken their performance?

Despite these doubts, this is the beginning of a counter-revolution. For all our sakes, it must end well.

Nick seaton is the York-based chairman of the Campaign for Real Education