Earlier this week I broke out my rusty alto voice to sing with the office choir. In a cold church round the corner, it struck me what a precious gift two teachers gave me all those years ago – the ability to read a score and (more or less) hit the notes.

So thank you, Miss Leney and Mr Carter, for your skill and passion. For there is nothing so exhilarating as sharing this common language, harmonising with other people, trying to create a moment of beauty. It is liberating. And levelling. Unlike some of my colleagues I am more lucky than talented. I am convinced that most people can learn to make music if they start early enough. And it is a chance I feel that no one should be denied.

So when the Culture Secretary announced that all children should have five hours of culture a week, it chimed perfectly with my mood. Yes! I thought. Expose children to the beauty of music, of art. Give them the tools to create their own scores and scripts and sounds. The instant attacks from teaching unions only made me more sympathetic. Unions that have spent years bemoaning the narrowness of the curriculum are now wailing that they cannot make time to broaden it.

But on further study, I found my enthusiasm waning. The Government’s “cultural offer”, a depressing phrase, will be a smorgasbord of experiences from going to the library, to going to the opera, to “making a piece of visual art”. Pressed by the BBC to explain, Andy Burnham acknowledged that most schools are already doing many of these things. But going to the Globe Theatre, he said, can help the teaching of history in the curriculum. Fair enough. So I call the DCMS to clarify the aims of the project. The nice woman on the phone sounds nonplussed. Well, is it to develop artistic talent? Ye-es. To give deprived children access to productions their parents could never afford? Yes. But the budget is £15 per pupil per year? “Um, I think it’s about opportunity,” she says. “To sort of inspire creativity.”

Here is where it unravels. “Creative” has become a catch-all term to jazz things up: “creative writing”, “creative thinking”. What other kind is there? It sounds fun, a possible lifeline for pupils bored by the rest of school. I have met too many underwhelmed media studies graduates, who have been “analysing” movies but not learning much, to believe that “creativity” so broadly defined can do much to tackle the poverty of aspiration.

Mr Burnham makes big claims about creativity boosting confidence and attainment. The Education Select Committee of MPs has been much more tentative than he is about the £100 million Creative Partnerships programme, which brings professional artists into schools, and which will receive more under this five-hour proposal. The committee found no clear evidence of improved attainment, though it believes that some good work is being done and that creative activities have value for their own sake.

What really brings confidence, and fulfils potential, is learning. Creative skills aren’t easier to come by than any others. They require hours of patience and dedication and passion, as Mozart and Billy Elliot knew. In my own paltry case, it took me years to learn to sight-read, to play an instrument, to listen. I wasn’t keen on practice. But I was lucky to be taught by people who had a relentless and sometimes unsympathetic focus on excellence. And what a boost it was for me to see the results, to learn the lesson that hard work pays off, and to get my head around the concepts of melody and harmony that were so far removed from anything else I was doing.

Excellence is not a new Labour word. The Government is torn by the desire to avoid what Gordon Brown has called the old version of equality of opportunity, where “only some can succeed and others are condemned to fail”. But you cannot protect people from failure if you mislead them about how much hard work is needed to succeed.

If the Government really wants to “unlock creative talent”, it must aim higher. In Venezuela, half a million children have been given musical instruments and have played in classical orchestras in a programme created to help what its founder calls “the fight of a poor and abandoned child against everything that opposes his full realisation as a human being”. This programme has turned street kids away from crime and drugs, and created some of the world’s finest musicians, such as Edicson Ruiz, who became the youngest double bass player in the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 17. It has been uncompromising in its emphasis on quality. Conservatoires round the world have marvelled at the standards of children who practise three hours a day, and more at weekends. Venezuela now has 200 youth orchestras.

The Venezuelan programme costs a lot more than £15 a head. But we might be able to afford it if government could find the courage to focus on only one thing. The proposal for five hours of culture is only one of 20 in the forthcoming DCMS Green Paper, which looks as though it were written by Stalin on an acid trip with Samuel Beckett. We need, apparently, a High Fashion Production Hub to coordinate the fashion industry, which I had foolishly believed was doing fine. We need a Creative Innovators Growth Programme to encourage risk-taking. We need diversity, because “creativity is diversity”.

Creativity cannot be centralised. What the arts can do, what great teachers can do, is offer our children a chance to excel. All else, to quote Shakespeare’s most famous protagonist, is “words, words, words”. Signifying nothing.

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