tangle that has too often distracted them from what really matters: improving teaching.

Similarly, another part of Mr Gove's legacy will be a splintering of the system. The sense of shared mission that the specialist schools movement brought us has too often been replaced by competition and atomisation. Free schools in their earliest days exemplified this; deliberately, it seemed, encouraging parents in some leafier environs to keep their children away from the plebs in the town down the road.

That sense of divisiveness struck me most when late last year – and slightly unexpectedly – I found myself invited to be the keynote speaker at the National Dance Teachers Association's annual conference at the magnificent Trinity Laban Conservatoire in Greenwich. They asked me, I suspect, because I believe that dancematters hugely in any school, as with the other arts.

Yet the pervading mood was a gloomy sense of being under attack, with dispiriting tales of schools chasing the English and Maths performance measure by abandoning arts-based GCSEs and, pretty disgracefully in my view, apparently telling students they can't attend extra-curricular music, dance, drama or art sessions if their target grade is a C and they're currently working at D. They have to submit to an extra maths or English "intervention" instead.

Thus our most urbane, well-read and seemingly civilised secretary of state presides over as philistine an age in education as many of us have known. And amid all the hype of international comparisons, the very attribute that many overseas educationalists look enviously to us for is our explicit