The Importance of Teaching sets out the government’s proposals for schools reform with the stated aim of freeing schools from centralised bureaucracy and allowing teachers and school leaders to drive improvement.
But teaching unions have criticised the paper for creating contradictions including promoting a national curriculum but allowing academies to be exempt from it.
Voice general secretary Philip Parkin warned: "The Department for Education seems to be driven by competing and conflicting ideologies: centralise with inflexible targets yet undermine national pay and conditions for school staff; raise teaching standards but propose the employment of unqualified teachers in free schools; promote a traditional national curriculum but exempt its favourite type of school (academies) from following it; allow teachers freedom to teach but tell them how to do it – not so much a mass of contradictions but a mess of contradictions."
Chris Keates, general secretary of the teaching union NASUWT, added that the paper undermines the work of teachers by introducing more monitoring.
"Teachers will be doing today what they do everyday, working hard to ensure that all children and young people succeed," she said.
"But all they will hear from the Secretary of State is that their qualifications are not good enough; they shouldn’t have been in the classroom in the first place; they need to be subject to more monitoring because they can’t be trusted and they must be told how to teach because they have been short-changing pupils.
Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, claimed Gove's education policy is confusing, incoherent and full of blatant contradictions.
"Bit by bit Michael Gove is dismantling state education in England. His plans risk leaving every school an island divorced from the help and support of their local authorities," she explained.
"We totally support the Education Secretary’s drive to encourage schools to improve, but his plans dismally fail to provide the means to help them do so. His one-size-fits-all approach fails to recognise the diversity of issues facing schools where fewer than 35 per cent of pupils get five A* to C grade GCSEs and the range of measures they will need to help them improve.
Following Gove’s statement to the House of Commons, shadow education secretary Andy Burnham said moves to reform teacher training and create a network of Teaching Schools were unwise given the publication of Ofsted’s annual report this week, which found that school-centred teacher training programmes did not fair as well as others.
Burnham accused Gove of "sounding confused" and said the reforms could be damaging. He said: "His talk of standards is undermined by his ideological obsession with structures."
But Roy Blatchford, director of the National Education Trust, said plans to streamline the Ofsted inspection framework and focusing teacher training within classrooms should be welcomed.
"Teachers need to have their training rooted in classrooms and learn as all the best interns do in other professions," he said.
"The trust's work over many years, nationally and internationally, has focused on improving what children and young people experience day by day in their classrooms. We fully support an inspection framework that focuses where it matters."
