IN keeping with the double standards of “Two Tier Keir’s” erratic premiership, the Labour Party this week has presented two very different faces to the public.
On one hand, there was the showcase of practical moderation, embodied in the sensible plan for welfare reform set out by the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, probably the most centrist minister in the Cabinet.
Critics complained with some justification that her measures did not go far enough, given the scale of Britain’s dependency culture, but at least she is moving in the right direction.
But the same cannot be said of Labour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who showed the other, far more sinister face of the party in all its addiction to left-wing ideology and expanded bureaucracy.
Kendall wants to build a benefits system that will help to get the country working again.
Phillipson wants to take a wrecking ball to an education system that is actually working.
The entire thrust of Phillipson’s programme is to overturn the progress made in schools over recent decades and bring back the failed model of centralised control.
Consumed with class envy, contemptuous of excellence, she is like a miserable, Marxist relic of the Seventies in her eagerness to appease the unions and put socialist dogma before the needs of pupils.
Her approach is causing despair and outrage among many in the education field.
Only this week, Amanda Spielman, the former head of the schools inspectorate Ofsted, delivered a withering attack on Phillipson’s proposals for change, which she warned will mean that schools will lose their freedoms, exams will lose their integrity and inspectors with lose their rigour.
In place of the push to raise standards, she concluded, there will be a process of “levelling down”.
The tragic irony of this upheaval is that recent state education in Britain is a remarkable success story.
Other parts of the public realm, like the NHS, the railways and the prison service, are mired in crisis, but it is very different in schooling.
In core subjects, England is among the best performing nations in the world.
Global test outcomes for 2022 revealed that Year 5 pupils here — essentially primary school pupils aged nine and ten — were ranked in fifth place for science and in ninth for maths.
Part of the explanation for that advance lies in the structural changes begun by Tony Blair’s government and continued with enthusiasm by the Tories, particularly during the Coalition, when Michael Gove was Education Secretary, with Dominic Cummings as his adviser.
The maverick pair swept through the establishment like a tornado, challenging vested interests and exposing the emptiness of conventional progressive views.
Crucially, the stranglehold of the Blob — as Gove and Cummings called the nexus of bureaucrats, experts, trade unions, and campaigners who ran the ineffectual system — was broken by the creation of academies and free schools that were allowed to take responsibility for lesson content, staff recruitment, admissions and discipline.
A virtuous cycle began to develop in our schools, where real accountability for results and standards obliterated the climate of low expectations.
But there is now a real danger that all this good work could be undone.
This week saw a return to the Commons of Phillipson’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which will massively curb the autonomy of academies and revive the domination of Whitehall and municipal domination.
Because they have been so successful in the recent past, these academies account for 82 per cent of all secondaries.
Sadly, under Phillipson’s influence, they will become nothing more than traditional, mediocre, local authority schools.
Other steps are likely to be just as destructive.
The extension of VAT to private school fees has done nothing except polish Labour’s credentials for waging the class war and increase the burdens on the state by generating a sudden exodus from the independent sector.
In the same disturbing vein the feminist academic Becky Francis yesterday published the interim findings of her review into the National Curriculum and Assessment regime which she was commissioned by Phillipson to lead.
In the past, Francis has criticised the Blair government for its “obsession with academic achievement”, so it is no surprise that her report was filled with the kind of hand-wringing concerns that are typical of the Left.
So she proposed cutting GCSEs to reduce the stress on pupils, with greater emphasis to be put on coursework, while she also blathered about the need “to increase diversity” in the curriculum.
The trade unions, especially the National Education Union led by Daniel Kebede, are keen advocates of this kind of identity politics, demanding “embedded anti-racist and decolonised approaches” and reading material that “subverts racial biases”.
Language like that finds fertile ground in Phillipson’s fiefdom.
Like many left-wingers, she sees the education system as a vehicle for social engineering.
Her values are reflected in the fact that she has met trade union officials 33 times but has had just one meeting with the Independent Schools Council.
Her lack of balance and her mission to centralise led Katharine Birbalsingh, the head of Britain’s most successful free school, to write an open letter to her that asked, “Which is better for our children: School leaders who make the decisions for our schools or you in central government?”
The answer is obvious but Phillipson is too blinkered to act on this truth.
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