The Children’s Plan is an ambitious attempt to shift government attention from education to children.

As children spend less than a fifth of their time at school, so the thinking goes, intervention should go beyond the school gates, reaching other areas of family life.

Yesterday Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, focused on education. His planned testing regime is modelled on the system for music examinations. Students prepare to be examined at a particular level of achievement and do not move to the next level until they have passed the last. The idea is that this enables teachers to track the progress of individual children, level by level, to ensure the very bright are stretched and the stragglers are not left behind.

This approach depends heavily on subjective teacher assessments about when each child is ready for a test. It will require that teachers have extra training and that parents are confident that their children are being assigned to the correct level.

As Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, notes, a logical extension is to let slower children repeat years of primary school and brighter children skip a year, an approach for which the Government has shown no enthusiasm.

Decluttering the curriculum, which may mean history and geography are combined into a single humanities lesson or art and music combined into a creative arts class, is also a tricky area. Many primary schools already use this topic-led approach, but concerns remain that the move may squeeze breadth out of the curriculum.

Primary pupils often spend more than 11 hours a week on English and maths combined, according to research from the University of Manchester. By comparison, many spend just under an hour a week being taught history or geography, and even less time on music.

Less contentious is the insistence on encouraging parental involvement in education. There is much evidence that it is more important in determining a child’s educational achievement than social class, family size or the parent’s own academic attainment.

Although measures to tackle child poverty will be implicit, they are not to be the plan’s core. This will disappoint those campaigners who have argued that if ministers concentrate on eradicating child poverty, solutions to many other problems will follow more easily.

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