Together with a handful of educationalists and teachers, Baker has written a new book – 14-18: A New Vision for Secondary Education – which proposes a radical transformation of secondary-school education. He would like primary school to end at nine, followed by middle school to the age of 14, at which point the national curriculum would end and every pupil would choose one of four "pathways". This is not a sentence I would have imagined myself writing back at the height of Thatcherism, when Baker was most lefty teenagers' idea of the devil, but I think he has probably come up with an excellent plan...Perhaps even more importantly, his proposals attempt to remedy the impending anomaly of our preoccupation with exams at 16, which will make very little sense once the school-leaving age goes up to 18 in 2015...Given the new leaving age of 18, Baker's ideas make a great deal of sense.

Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian

Kenneth Baker makes a valuable contribution to the debate about the value of vocational education in his new book...The case is made for practical, technical and vocational options to be available to young people of all abilities. Read it and engage in the debate.

Helen Hill, The Teacher

This book may represent a significant milestone in the realignment of English debates about 14–18 or 14–19 education, and possibly a new consensus in the middle ground.

David Raffe, University of Edinburgh, British Journal of Education Studies

This brings the much welcome blast of rationality into the education debate and undercuts almost everything being said by politicians. It is full of serious, sensible proposals for ways of making education better for everyone.

Michael Rosen, author and broadcaster, UK

14-18 is highly persuasive, both in its analysis of how we got here and in its route map for where we go next. After half a century of obsessive tinkering with our schools, I'm convinced that it's time for the last, best reform… Kenneth Baker and his allies show how it could work brilliantly for everyone.

Ferdinand Mount, author of The New Few and former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, UK

Apart from minor changes, such as the merging of CSE and O-level in 1988, the system of public examinations in England is essentially unchanged since the abolition of the School Certificate in 1951. As participation in education beyond compulsory schooling has increased, our existing system of assessments has become unfit for purpose, with examinations at 16 in particular being an increasingly irrelevant punctuation mark in young people's education. In this thought-provoking book, a number of people who have thought about these issues deeply-and for a considerable amount of time-provide insightful analyses into the problems of the current system, and well-conceived solutions about how we could do better. Anyone interested in what's wrong with our 14-18 curriculum, and what we can do about it, should read this book.

Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University of London, UK