Poet Simon Armitage has expressed his deep reservations about the plan by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to ensure five-year-old pupils learn to recite poems by heart. In an article on the Guardian’s website Armitage said he was “nervous about the noises currently being made by the Department for Education about returning to ‘traditional values’ in schools – values which would see children as young as five being expected to learn and recite poetry ‘by heart’.”

He added: “My concerns are mainly about labelling poetry as something solid, traditional and worthy, something belonging to the establishment, a yardstick against which most people won't measure up. I'm also worried that by poetry, what the government might really mean is ‘poetry’, or POETRY – that is, grist for the spoken English competition, in which students at my school were expected to stand on a stage and chew their way through The Lady of Shalott in a feigned and foreign RP accent. If those are the values being pursued, and if in Michael Gove's master plan English literature is actually a byword for Englishness, or learning ‘by heart’ might actually mean learning by rote, then I'd prefer poetry to have no part in it.”

Armitage went on: “If, on the other hand, children are allowed to find the poems that fit their voices or appeal to their imaginations and their cultural inclinations, then I'm on board. It's a well-established fact that poems learned at an early stage in the form of nursery rhymes stay with us for life, and that people suffering with Alzheimer's and other forms of memory loss, who struggle in later life to remember their address or the names of their children, can often recite nursery rhymes without any difficulty. The brain is always keen to seize on pattern and structure, and the growing brain seems to instil poetry at its core.”

Gove is said to be determined to make the teaching of English at primary school "far more rigorous" than it is at present, with the study of poetry becoming an important part of the subject at primary school level. According to reports, from Year 1, at the age of five, children will be read poems by their teacher as well as starting to learn simple poems by heart and practise recitals. The programme of study for Year 2 will state that pupils should continue "to build up a repertoire of poems learnt by heart and recite some of these, with appropriate intonation to make the meaning clear".

But one primary headteacher queried whether there was anything new in the proposals regarding poetry. She told Write out Loud: “Teachers have never stopped reading children poems. Pupils already learn and recite them, for example at assemblies. The first time I heard the term ‘performance poetry’ was via the national curriculum. Poetry has been part of the national curriculum ever since it was introduced.”