The events of the past week or so give you a tremendous opportunity to storm into public view with a clear statement about British values in education and society, don’t you think?

First, we’ve had the Andrew Sabisky affair. Here is a young man, not long out of full-time education, who has been happy to put into the public arena his ideas about race, intelligence, sex and arms expenditure. You must be acutely aware how the explosion of social media has raised the question of what role education should play in responding to the knowledge that school students can access outside school.

The proposal that schools teach “British values” came in part, I think, from an anxiety that some young people were finding ideas online sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism. We know that Sabisky hasn’t been shy in the past to put into the public space views that your colleague, Kwasi Kwarteng, described as “racist and reprehensible”.

Perhaps you’ve been overly preoccupied with the floods, but might it not have been an opportunity for you, in your role as the figurehead of the English education system, to have made clear to young people and teachers that there is no room for eugenicist ideas in schools?

I probably don’t need to remind you that the British, American and European past is haunted by the effects of such thought: it was used to justify colonisation, mass exploitation, sterilisation and genocide.

Mind you, I can understand why you might have some difficulty being forthright about such matters. Your leader hasn’t been reluctant to flirt with racist ideas himself and his most favoured adviser, Dominic Cummings, who spent four years in your department, suggested in a 2014 blogpost that the NHS might pay for designer babies.

Even so, if Mr Kwarteng could break ranks, then perhaps you could. I look forward to your update on the “British values” programme, making clear that schools are places of hope for all, and not the means of reinforcing spurious stratifications made at birth, or earlier. After all, you could explain that there are many people in this country, me included, who would not be alive today if the eugenicists of the 1930s had won the second world war.

Then, straight off the back of Sabiskygate, came an announcement by the home secretary, Priti Patel, that migrants to this country will have to be able to speak English. Isn’t this matter on your patch, too? I’ve met thousands of children and parents who have learned their English here in schools, community centres, further education colleges and universities. Isn’t this a wonderful thing worth boasting about?

Like Mr Kwarteng on Sabisky, you could make a stand. You could speak up for the fantastic work the education system does in teaching English to so many people who go on to benefit us all in countless different ways.

You could also point out the absurdity of the UK government outsourcing education in English to countries of origin, explaining to Ms Patel that it is not really appropriate to demand that people sit in class for years, far away from the UK, in the hope that they might get enough points to be allowed to come and pick fruit or wheel a hospital bed, when we have such fantastic facilities, governed by your own department, for teaching English.

Yours, Michael Rosen