an "anti-knowledge culture" for reducing achievement and said children benefited when expectations were set higher. In June 2011, his own "ignorance of science" was criticised after he called for students to have "a rooting in the basic scientific principles" and by way of example assigned Lord Kelvin's laws of thermodynamics to Sir Isaac Newton. In June 2012, the Daily Mail published leaked plans to scrap GCSE examinations, return to O-level exams and allow less academic students to take alternative qualifications. The Liberal Democrats claimed that the plans had not been discussed with the deputy prime minister and were subsequently heavily criticised by some teachers, trade unions and Labour Party MPs; they had been discussed with the prime minister at Cabinet level, and a subsequent YouGov/Sunday Times poll suggested that the public supported this policy by a margin of 50% to 32%. They received praise from the then-mayor of London Boris Johnson, who said that he "could be... singing a hymn of praises for my old chum Gove and his brilliant new Gove-levels." The leaked documents also suggested that Gove was intending to create a single exam board to organise all exams, and to scrap the National Curriculum in its current form. However, there were "rebukes" from both the Welsh and Northern Ireland education ministers who said it was important to communicate before making announcements on proposed changes to jointly owned qualifications. In February 2013, shortly after the draft Programmes of Study for History in the national curriculum was released by the DfE, the representatives of the principal organisations for historians in the UK wrote to The Observer to register "significant reservations" about its contents and the way in which it had been devised. They described it as "too narrowly and exclusively focused on British history" and argued that structuring history teaching in a strictly chronological sequence meant that students would learn about pre-modern history only in the early stages of their studies. In March 2013, 100 academics wrote an open letter arguing that Gove's curriculum placed too much emphasis upon memorisation of facts and rules over understanding, and would lead to more rote learning. Gove retorted that "there is good academia and bad academia." In response, one signatory to the letter opined that Gove suffered from a "blinkered, almost messianic, self-belief, which appears to have continually ignored the expertise and wisdom of teachers, head-teachers, advisers and academics, whom he often