Thanks for the vote of confidence. It's one with which I suspect a great many would disagree: unfortunately there's a tendency in the UK for people to want to be told what to do and to hand over individual autonomy and responsibility to The Government to make those decisions for them and everyone else at the same time.
I'm a believer in individual freedom and autonomy, within limits and provided the law is kept. I suspect if certain other countries were to have Gove's draconian fining system imposed on them from above there would be an outcry, and probably rightly so. (Gove, incidentally, has been amongst the worst Education Secretaries seen in several generations; I know of no other educators who have a good word to say about him).
Other issues: bullying, the terrible system of teaching literacy via phonics which are appalling for kids with SEN (and studies are unsubstantiated as to whether the system is even beneficial), the atrocious grammar so often displayed by new university undergraduates, the unacceptable levels of numerical illiteracy, are all issues which should form urgent priorities within any Department of Education. Our standards have badly sunk, not only in comparison with our own previous, pre-National Curriculum educational standards, but with current ones in, say, Scandinavia, and some in the US.
And we are expending our energies in policing the colour of stitching on kids' shoes or fining parents when they have the odd bit of in-term time off (without which some poorer kids might never get a holiday at all).
Successive governments have ruined the compulsory education sector, teaching has a severe recruitment crisis, and now our universities are in free-fall and are haemorrhaging staff to VS schemes. At some point, they need to start asking themselves where, why and how they have gone so badly wrong.