There's no one right way to teach poetry in schools. One thing you can be sure of though is that what the government has been doing with the English curriculum in schools over the last few years has been disastrous for the enjoyment of the stuff. They created a Literacy Strategy - note, it's called "literacy" and under this umbrella they bunged in "literature". Someone should have told them that there's a difference between the two things and if you make literature serve literacy, you deny literature its prime purpose: to give us a pleasure, surprise, solace and challenges through the shape and meaning of language. Instead, you reduce literature to little formulae that you ask children to trainspot in order to prove that this or that passage is "effective". This way you prevent children and school students from talking about what they feel about a book or poem, you prevent them from talking about poems from the base of what they already know about life and indeed the other books and poems they know. The juice and emotion of how we feel when we read is what it's for. But government-determined programmes of learning prevent this juice from flowing. Poems (and all literature, actually) become servants to the testing and exam system.

What happens on the ground is that schools have been required to follow a literacy matrix - yes, some schools junked it - but most schools follow it. This matrix determined what children have to study and when. Poetry has a place on the matrix so that this or that form (eg haiku, or ballad) is introduced in a particular form. Why? Why should a particular form go with a specific point in the school year? For poetry to work, you need to let it fill up the spaces between the bricks. So, for example, you could write a poem out on a great big piece of paper and put it up on the wall and see what happens. Then a week later, replace it with another one. No questions asked, no grilling, no testing. You could take a poetry book and ask the children to turn it into a play or what is in effect a revue. They could write their own poems and monologues to go alongside the poems in the book. When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it's about, how it works, how it's constructed and so on. If you write a poem alongside it, to complement it, you start to feel poetry's method, poetry's way of looking at things.

Where the government has got it seriously wrong is to imagine that poetry is about right and wrong answers, that poetry has testable outcomes. It doesn't. Very nearly all poetry is full of ambiguity and suggestiveness. It's perfectly OK to end a poem with a question. In a way, most poems do. It's a question that takes you back into the poem and out into you and the world you inhabit. So one of the best things you can do with a poem is invite children to ask questions of a poem. In other words, instead of teachers quizzing children about poems in order to answer questions that the teachers already know the answers to (where are the metaphors? - that sort of thing), you can say, are there any questions you'd like to ask the poet, any questions you'd like to ask anyone or anything in the poem? You can collect these questions up and then see if there are people in the room who would like to have a go at answering them. If it seems to difficult to find answers then you can say, where can we go and find answers to these questions? Perhaps you find out that there aren't any definitive answers to some of the questions and that's OK too.

When it comes to writing poetry, I see also that the government-inspired training videos and the like are obsessed with children following forms as if children can't invent their own, or, feel that they're inventing their own. This is a mistaken idea. First, if you've got a classroom full of poems, full of the performance of poems, if you've got poets coming into your school, CDs and DVDs of poets then the shapes of poems are in the air. What you can do is set up situations that invite poems to be written. The most obvious are the equivalent of the operatic aria or musical solo - that's to say the moment in a drama, scene, book, or indeed life, which you stop and then from within that moment you speak about what you feel, think, see and want to say.

In essence, an enormous amount of poetry is like that. It stops life for a moment and wonders about it. So, you can stop a story - let's say, it's Hansel and Gretel and you ask the children to be Hansel or Gretel at the moment they're abandoned in the wood. If that seems too obvious, you ask the children instead to be one of the trees watching Hansel and Gretel as they're abandoned and write from within that moment. If there are poems in the room the children will find the form that fits the emotion of that moment.

The Ofsted report worries about the range of poetry in schools. I don't think you can blame schools for this. Most schools are running like crazy just trying to keep up with the hundreds of targets right across the school curriculum. Don't forget that the government is leaning on them now to introduce synthetic phonics an hour a day every day and this is absorbing a huge amount of time, energy and money. Anyway, this country has never been very hot on variety when it comes to poetry. We fib to ourselves that someone like Chaucer is "English poetry" when in fact it is shot through with Frenchness and Italianess! The form of some of the tales derives directly from France and the plots of many of them from Italy, and in one case probably from Arab literature. But we call it English.

There is not much of a tradition in this country of studying comparative literature, which is what the Ofsted report is calling for. I agree with the call but it's tough on schools to expect them to be able to simply leap into the comparative approach when it's not in our culture as a whole to look at poetry like this. Open anyone of the popular anthologies you can buy in the shops - "Britain's best...this", or "Great Love Poems" and the like, and you won't find many written outside of Britain and Ireland. There is often more variety in anthologies produced for children than there is in those aimed at adults.

So, I welcome what this Ofsted report has to say about the need for more variety, I welcome what it says about testing inhibiting good poetry practice. The question is how you change it. You do it in the way that Phil Jarrett, the author of the report, is doing already - run open conferences with teachers, poets, inspectors and advisers sharing ways of reading, writing and performing poems. Instead of top-down instructions, we need open talk, debate and practice. I'm delighted that Phil is doing this, instead of the previous governmental methods of delivering matrices and commands. Poetry in schools thrives on freedom.