Top marks for Michael Gove As the example of EU bureaucracy shows, many politicians and officials find it hard to believe that there is any aspect of human life that cannot be improved by centralised regulation. So we are delighted to report today that there is at least one Government department poised to scrap a piece of centralised regulation. The Department for Education, under the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, is to abandon the requirement that teachers set a prescribed amount of homework for each pupil. The rules, introduced in 1998 by Labour, required an hour a week for children aged five to seven; half an hour a night for seven to 11-year-olds; between 45 and 90 minutes a night for pupils aged 11 to 14; and one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours a night for those between 15 and 16. The scrapping of that requirement may not seem very significant in itself. But its symbolism is extremely important. It shows that the Department for Education is prepared to trust teachers to choose the right amount of homework for their pupils, rather than mandating a minimum with which they must all comply. That approach underlies Mr Gove's whole philosophy: trust teachers to do their job properly, and do not force them into forms of education that they do not think work effectively. There are, of course, risks. One is that lazy and incompetent teachers will take the opportunity not to set any homework, to save themselves the labour of marking. But bad workers have never been transformed by centralised diktats. Inspirational teachers, however, have been discouraged by the rigidities of centralised rules. Mr Gove is right to risk this change. May it be the first of many that give control of the business of education to teachers in classrooms, rather than to bureaucrats in Whitehall.