Drill has a place. Most certainly. But they are not the good lessons.

The good lessons are the ones that make kids struggle, where they have to dredge up long forgotten knowledge and create new ways of working, new ways of seeing a situation.

Blended learning is settling in to a definition that requires co-location and distance work. But what if, just as we are agreeing on a definition, the definition itself is about to become redundant?

I recently had supper with a chap as a sort of job interview. Nick is 6'5", handsome, witty, intelligent, thoughtful and kind. He makes for really easy company. He is equally a good listener as he is able to entertain with urbane bon mot. On the surface, Nick has everything going for him. He walks with a confidence and air of friendliness that make him attractive – people want to spend time with Nick. Having graduated from Oxford with a first class degree, the world is his oyster.

Or at least it should be.

For many years, mathematics education specialists have joined forces with software and hardware developers to create new tools for learning. But still, decades on, the mathematics classroom remains one largely about teacher exposition and bookwork practice. Technology has made little impact.

Yet, technology in mathematics can help to de-abstract-ise the subject. All those apparently meaningless processes that we have all been taught at some point in our lives can suddenly be made to come to life. Just watch a Gapminder animation or use a virtual manipulative and you will see what I mean. No longer does the mathematics teacher have to explain some new concept while drawing inadequate diagrams that contradict their words. Technology can solve this. So why hasn't it?

Teachermon was a straight forward rip off of one aspect of the incredibly popular (at the time at least) game Pokemon – in which cards containing information about little creatures are used to play a battle. Sort of Top Trumps on speed. It exploded out of Japan in 1996 and suddenly the kids of the world went Pokemon crazy.

So when a boy in Year 10 approached me and asked if it would be ok to create a version of the cards based on the teachers at the school, I thought it simply genius.

Many people have asked me this week what I thought to the Secretary of State's speech at the Conservative Party Conference, and maybe at some point I will get round to writing up a response.

In the meantime, I thought that some of you might find it helpful to catch up with what was said if you were unable to attend the conference, so here is a transcript of Michael's speech.

(if there are spelling errors or such like, well tough, I was typing pretty damn fast!)

I guess if you think back to school, or watch TV, or think about stereotypes, a lesson is when 30 children sit in a room, at desks, on chairs, in a school. A teacher imparts some information, which the children take notes of, then the children undertake some task from a book, writing their responses in another book, which they carry to and from school.

But that is not a lesson.

Before addressing that question it is important to establish some knowns.

The quality of teaching in State schools is diverse. There are amazing teachers, there are crap ones.

The quality of teaching in Public schools is diverse. There are amazing teachers, there are crap ones.

Sam was beautiful. Her hair was a firey red and her eyes shone.

There is a collection of huge granite spires that stand thousands of feet above the Kern River at the southern edge of the Sierra Nevada in California. As eager fresh faced graduates, we took the easy drive down from Los Angeles with a trunk full of beer and the most basic of climbing essentials. The four of us had been climbing together for years, and had long since abandoned ropes in search of a purer form of excitement. When people would quiz us about the purpose of such apparent foolishness, telling us that we were risking death, our stock reply was "well that's kind of the point." It was exactly that knowledge, that gut-wrenching feeling, that your life is literally in your hands we were trying to capture. There is something about facing your own mortality nakedly that makes the pettiness of much of life disappear and allows you to taste and feel those things that truly matter.

I believe that there are many hidden geniuses out there (in fact, I believe everyone is a genius – just that we all have different fields of expertise). They are hidden because the education system that they are a part of does not provide opportunities for unlocking the genius.

Here are a few examples of moments that have warmed my heart over the years:

David Cameron has just spoken about the violence that has sprung up across England over the last few nights, and in a strong and passionate speech he made some excellent points. Unfortunately, the spin doctors have insisted on the use of the broken Britain rhetoric. And in questioning, he alluded to better discipline in schools as being a part of the solution.

When I was a teenager, each and every Tuesday for years at secondary school, I would have to attend a lunchtime detention. Religiously set by my Religious Studies teacher each and every Thursday afternoon for reasons I failed then and fail now to comprehend. I was no angel at school, far from it, but I was also no bad apple either. For whatever the reason, RS was always chaos and I seemed to have a face that asked for a detention. So there I would sit for 35 minutes during Tuesday lunch, copying out page after page from the Bible.

What strikes me this morning, listening to Nick Gibb, Schools Minister, is yet again schools are being used as the punch bag. So when ill informed, trying to get a soundbite, journalists state that 33% of children are "failing", Nick's immediate response is to talk about schools and standards of teaching and learning, blah-de-blah-de-blah.

At not one point does he mention that, actually, if your kids can't read, write and do simple arithmetic at age 11, then blaming the school is a red herring, take a long honest look at your own parenting.