John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.

Lucy Powell’s predecessor as Secretary of State for Education, Brigid Phillipson, practised government by making continuous announcements, with only some free breakfasts to show for it. Powell, by contrast, is a ball of energy, bouncing off the walls.  One minute she wonders whether children need to use a pen, as if one might build a house by putting on the roof rather than laying foundations. The next she makes policy announcements in interviews with two Sunday newspapers behind paywalls. Fortunately, someone posted one of them on Facebook, and I have a cut-price subscription to the other. As comic relief, she has herself pictured wearing a t-shirt proclaiming that she has never kissed a Tory. Can she be sure?
But one of her suggestions not only makes sense, but corrects previous errors by all governing parties. GCSEs in work-related subjects, such as plumbing, engineering, cookery and computer operation, are essential both to give all school pupils a sense of purpose that they can understand, and to begin to restore the skills that have been neglected since the raising of the school leaving age and the decline of apprenticeship. Calling such courses  “vocational” is a misnomer – nobody seriously thinks that being a plumber or an electrician is a vocation rather than a job – but they are essential to the operation of society and offer a much better income than some degree-entry occupations.

Labour and Conservatives have both tried to improve work-related learning. Labour’s last effort, setting up one BTEC as the equivalent of four GCSEs,   was so obviously dishonest that it was shunned even by its supporters among headteachers. Lord Baker’s attempt, via City Technology Colleges and Technology and Learning Centres, had limited success. The CTS, like grant-maintained schools, were successful in themselves, but met fierce and effective opposition from local authorities, most of whom took the money and used it for their own purposes. In the longer term, though, the grant-maintained schools set a precedent for the sea-change in educational administration brought about by academies, which is now accepted as Labour policy.

During her damaging stint as a minister under the coalition,  Lib Dem Sarah Teather spiked the idea of separate qualifications, arguing, like the progressive Left, that they would create a two-tier system, and so make inequality permanent. Neither she nor her leftist allies understood that they were leaving lower-attaining school leavers with nothing. Powell’s efforts to reverse this thinking deserve full support.

A pleasant change from this continuous strife came at a conference at East London University’s Institute for the Science of Early Years and Youth. Academics and teachers from across the world came together to share discoveries and innovation that can be of direct benefit to children, with two senior DfE officials presenting and taking notes. The theme was the ways in which design, colour and lighting can help young children learn to focus their attention, and so learn. The key point was that attractive displays and bright colours grab children’s attention, but that the overload created by too many competing items may prevent them from developing the sustained focus they need in order to learn.

Opening the conference, centre director Professor Sam Wass argued that the environment needed to be seen in relation to the children’s development, especially in the earliest years. Professor Anna Fisher, of Philadelphia’s Carnegie Mellon University, took up the theme through illustrations in children’s books. These were important – children were not engaged by uninterrupted text – but were too often overloaded with irrelevant detail. Under experimental conditions, she showed that editing this out, leaving only material directly related to the text, removed the distraction, and improved children’s enjoyment and understanding of the story.

Fisher was interested in a doctorate by Morag MacMartin that showed how an illustration could lead children to misread a text in order to match it to the picture. Earlier work by Dorothy Butler – Cushla and Her Books – had shown how clear illustrations, such as Dick Bruna’s, could catch a child’s attention and become the basis of communication – and there were several references to Montessori’s work in the early 20th century. There could not be a better demonstration of the purpose of a university in advancing learning.

Professor Arnold Wilkins has been investigating the effects of lighting for half a century, first at the Medical Research Institute’s Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, and later at Essex University. He has homed in on the issue of flicker produced by fluorescent lighting, which produces much more light per unit of electricity than a traditional bulb, by producing continuous flashes within the tube– roughly 100 Hz (per second). Most of us don’t notice, but for some they cause stress and disturbance, at worst triggering severe migraine and even epileptic fits. The latest LED technology can speed up the flicker to the extent that it is imperceptible, and at no extra cost. Crompton were one possible supplier. However, the issue is not considered important enough to be clearly labelled, and Wilkins found, on visits to schools, that decisions on choosing lighting were left to the caretaker. Lighting with 100Hz flicker, he said, should be got rid of. Having worked with him on the issue since 1986, and seen the damage that this causes to staff as well as children, I agree. The DfE officials, revising design guidelines for new nurseries, were interested.