Section:GDN BE PaGe:1 Edition Date:130207 Edition:03 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2013 0:58 cYanmaGentaYellowblack

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Perfect storm Britain battered by gales

Gove abandons plan to scrap GCSEs after coalition pressureLiberal Democrats and exam groups force out English Baccalaureate certifi cate

Continued on page 9 ≥

Denis CampbellHealth correspondent

David Cameron wants nurses’ pay to be tied to how well they look after patients as part of changes to banish poor care in the NHS in response to the devastating fi nd-ings of a report published yesterday into the Mid Staff ordshire hospital scandal.

The prime minister told MPs the change should reward nurses who pro-vide excellent care as the government began considering the 290 far-reaching recommendations set out by inquiry chairman, Robert Francis QC, to improve patient safety and overhaul what he called a fl awed, self-serving “NHS system”.

Cameron pledged to respond to Fran-cis’s proposals within a month but also backed a shakeup of nurses’ salaries as one of a number of moves that need to be made without delay, alongside appointing a fi rst chief inspector of hospitals to investigate where concerns have been raised.

“There are some simple but profound things that need to happen. Nurses should be hired and promoted on the basis of hav-ing compassion as a vocation and not just academic qualifi cations,” Cameron said.

“We need a style of leadership from nurses which means poor practice is not tolerated and is driven off the wards. ”

The sweeping changes that Francis recommended also included:• Regulation of the NHS’s 800,000 health-care assistants, who carry out much of the basic hands-on patient care.• A ban on hospitals forcing staff who leave to sign “gagging clauses”.• NHS managers and bosses to have to join a registration scheme and face disqualifi -cation if they fail to deliver good care, as well as a new fi t and proper persons test.• A legal “duty of candour” compelling NHS staff to admit to mistakes.• The closure of hospital units where concerns about safety are raised.

Francis’s report found that an array of local and national NHS organisations, including the system’s regulators, failed to detect or stop neglectful and danger-ous care provided to patients from 2005 to 2009 at Staff ord . Between 400 and 1,200 patients are estimated to have died in that time as a result of neglect, misdiagnosis, poor hygiene and callous treatment .

Francis lambasted the “appalling and unnecessary suff ering” infl icted by hos-

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A wave hits Seaham harbour in County Durham, yesterday. The Met Offi ce issued weather warnings for Scotland, the north and east Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

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Cameron’s remedy for NHS: target nurses’ pay

Peter Walker

Michael Gove will announce today that he has abandoned his plans to replace GCSEs with a new English Baccalaureate certifi -cate (EBC) after mounting concern within the coalition and from education groups .

In what will be seen as a humiliating reverse for the education secretary, for whom the shake up of exams for 16-year –olds was a major chunk of his agenda, Gove will make a statement to the Com-mons today announcing the decision.

Gove’s breakneck and highly ideological programme for the Department for Educa-tion has won him many fans within the Conservative party and the media, albeit arguably less so in the country at large. But such an unexpected and public U-turn on a major policy will be seen as defi nite blow to the Gove brand.

He had faced concern from not just teaching unions but also the exams watch-dog, Ofqual, and the infl uential all-party education committee, which warned last month that the plan amounted to “too much, too quickly”.

It is understood the change of plan was primarily forced by a combination of

opposition from Liberal Democrats and reservations from Ofqual.

In November, Ofqual’s chief regulator, Glenys Stacey, wrote to Gove to warn him that his ambitions for the English Bacca-laureate certifi cate “may exceed what is realistically achievable through a single assessment”. Though politely worded, the meaning was clear: the regulator viewed the change as unworkable as planned.

The Liberal Democrat input is the sec-

ond time they have helped thwart Gove’s policies. Last year, Nick Clegg lobbied hard for the Department for Education to drop plans leaked to newspapers about a two-tier replacement for the GCSE, billed by some as a return to O-levels and CSEs.

Another motivation is understood to be civil service warnings that the decision to give single exam boards responsibility for setting exams in a particular core subject

could counter EU rules on public service contracts.

The U-turn was seized on by Labour, who described it as “a humiliating climbdown” for Gove. Stephen Twigg, the shadow edu-cation secretary, said: “It shows why he should have listened to business leaders, headteachers and experts in the fi rst place and not come up with a plan on the back of an envelope.”

The education secretary unveiled the new qualifi cations in September last year. The GCSE would be replaced by an English Baccalaureate Certifi cate, with the fi rst students beginning syllabuses in English, maths and sciences from 2015, with exams in 2017, to be followed by history, geogra-phy and languages.

Critics, however, as well as condemn-ing the rush, said the change would make pupils’ focus too restricted. Tech compa-nies lobbied for computer science to be added to the set of core subjects and many from the arts world complained the new qualifi cation would squeeze out creative subjects, with interjections from sources as varied as Jude Law and Tracey Emin.

However, the most signifi cant political blows came fi rst with Stacey’s letter to Gove, copied to Sir Michael Wilshaw, the

chief inspector at Ofsted. Stacey warned against the single-exam-board-per-sub-ject idea and said the qualifi cation’s role in assessing schools and could lead to “more limited” teaching as pupils crammed.

The report from the education select committee was more damning still, with Graham Stuart, the Conservative MP who heads it, saying he could not even see a case for dispensing with GCSEs.

The committee warned particularly about the impact on less able pupils of the plan for those who did not complete an E BC to be given a so-called statement of achievement rather than an actual qualifi cation. These could easily become a “badge of failure”, Stuart warned.

Gove will nonetheless press ahead with his wider plans to bring in what he sees as a much -needed return to a more fact-based, exam-tested approach to learning.

This philosophy was set out in a speech on Tuesday night. Notable in retrospect was that Gove made no mention of the planned new qualifi cation, although he did talk up an existing system for grading schools based on the percentage of pupils who pass GCSEs in a series of core sub-jects, confusingly also called the English baccalaureate, but known as Ebacc.

MPs warned last month that Michael Gove’s EBC plan amounted to‘too much, too quickly’

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