Sometimes it seems every politician considers themselves an expert on education. All of us, and I’m as guilty as anyone, use our own time in school either as a benchmark by which we judge teaching today or as a model that we should aspire to.

But the world, and the demands it will place on the next generation of school leavers, has changed massively since I left school in Aberdeen 22 years ago. We’re living in an age of scientific discovery and intellectual exploration as momentous as any revolution in history. The human brain is achieving marvellous things. And in the new world being created, brainpower will dictate our destiny.

That’s why it’s so important we improve the education the next generation receives. At the moment we’re failing – we still can’t get half of 16-year-olds to the basic level of five good GCSE passes including maths and English.

Globalisation will bring huge opportunities to those individuals and nations equipped to deal with change, but it will also present new challenges. Those young people without skills will find that even the limited opportunities available today will diminish.

Already we have more than a million young people who’re not in employment, education or training while countries such as Australia, New Zealand, America, Sweden, Norway, Finland and even Poland are sending many more people to university. If our country is to avoid decline, we’ve got to change. We’ve got to ensure that instead of so many being let down by a system that is falling behind, every young person can become the author of their own life story.

And we’ve got to have change not just for reasons of economic efficiency, but also because of social justice. We must urgently tackle the huge problem we have with children growing up in deprived circumstances, falling even further and further behind the rest. Fewer than 20% of children eligible for free school meals secure five good GCSE passes including maths and English. Schools should exist to reverse inequality, to advance social mobility, to give individuals of talent, whatever their background, the chance to shine. But that isn’t happening under the current system.

Children who are born with high abilities but who come from poor backgrounds are overtaken in recorded levels of achievement at primary school by children of weaker ability from wealthier socioeconomic backgrounds.

As these children pass through the education system the attainment gap widens. When compared with their peers, the performance of both boys and girls eligible for free school meals progressively worsens at every stage it is measured. By the time they’re 16 poorer pupils are performing at a level around 40% below their contemporaries.

We Conservatives will be unveiling plans later this week to target resources and innovation at those most in need, and crucial to those plans will be a drive to deal with the damage caused to our children by the complacent educational establishment and the teaching methods it has used.

Nowhere has the educational establishment’s influence been more damaging than in teaching reading. It is only once children have learnt to read that they can then go on to read to learn. But every year thousands of children leave primary school without the ability to read properly.

And these are the young people who go on to become disruptive and ill disciplined and, all too often, drop out of the system. If we are to tackle poor behaviour and ensure more young people stay on in education, there is no more crucial task than teaching them to read properly in the earliest years.

Tragically, however, the educational establishment overturned tried and tested methods of teaching reading in the past century because these methods, which we now call synthetic phonics, were thought too rigidly conservative, mere “rote learning” that entrenched an authoritarian worldview.

But the so-called progressive methods the establishment favoured haven’t conquered illiteracy. Far from it. The leading researchers of standards at Durham University have shown that millions spent on government reading schemes have had essentially no effect.

But there is strong evidence that it is precisely the embrace of teaching methods once derided as stuffily conservative that can conquer illiteracy and give children from poorer backgrounds a better start in life.

The West Dunbartonshire literacy initiative has underlined how the traditional methods of teaching embodied in synthetic phonics can transform the chances of children from areas of real deprivation. West Dunbartonshire, the second most deprived local authority in Scotland, had a functional illiteracy level of 28% in 1997. It was practically eliminated by 2006. What can happen in one corner of Scotland can be made to happen across the UK.

The Tory party wants to eradicate the plague of reading failure in our schools. At the age of six a child should have learnt to read. We therefore plan to overhaul the bureaucratic testing structure in primary schools and streamline it, replacing the existing key stage 1 test with a simple externally administered short standardised reading test at the end of year one (age six) to ensure that children have mastered the skill of decoding.

In order to push these changes through we may face a battle with the educational establishment. It’s a fight we’re happy to have, to ensure we don’t lose in the broader struggle to give the next generation the best possible start.

Michael Gove is shadow schools secretary

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