Teacher’s letter to Mr Gove sparks curriculum backlash

Debra Kidd, who is studying for a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University, started the petition on her blog but it soon grew as word spread on social media.

The support from the grass-roots comes in response to what teachers consider to be too short a consultation period over the new national curriculum, as well as the education secretary’s quick dismissal of critics to his reforms.

Ms Kidd was one of the 100 academics who signed a letter to Mr Gove last month, published in The Independent, which raised concerns about the methods that teachers were expected to use in the classroom and the “endless list of spellings, facts and rules” children would have learn under the new curriculum. He responded by calling them “The Blob” and “bad academia” and said too many teachers had been pushed towards “ideologically driven theory”.