What difference has Kemi Badenoch’s victory made to the way the party talks about education? Badenoch doesn’t want to make policy straight away, having stood on a platform promising a fundamental rethink of what the Conservatives stand for. Today’s Education Questions in the Commons suggested that in the meantime, she wants her frontbenchers to put their efforts into defending the party’s legacy.
Laura Trott had been appointed to the shadow education secretary brief just hours before the question session, along with Neil O’Brien in the shadow minister of state role. Her first contribution was to ask about early years funding and whether it would increase in line with the hike in employers’ National Insurance – with no answer forthcoming other than ‘we will set out more detail on funding rates in due course’. Trott then used her slot to argue that the Conservatives had overseen huge improvements in school standards in England:
There has been a lot of discussion about our record in government. Under the Conservatives, England climbed international educational league tables, but what happened to Labour-run Wales? It fell. Under the Conservatives, youth unemployment went down and school standards improved—that is the record of the Conservative Government, which we are proud to defend. Does the Secretary of State agree that academisation was one of the driving forces behind that very good school improvement?
Bridget Phillipson replied that she was ‘sorry to disappoint the right honourable lady, but we will be talking about the Conservatives’ 14 years of failure for a very long time indeed’. At this point, the Speaker had to rebuke Neil O’Brien for heckling from the front bench, before Phillipson continued that the Conservative party ‘made sure that our children went to school in buildings that were literally propped up’.
Trott’s second question continued to defend the Tory record. She asked:
The problem that we have is that while we are learning the lessons of our defeat, the Government are failing to learn from our brilliant record on school standards. Results improved, more schools were “good” or “outstanding”, but now the party in government is trying to undermine one part of the basis for that success. Why is the Secretary of State scrapping the academy conversion support grant when it was such a push behind improving school standards?
There were other Conservatives trying to push Labour to accept that it had inherited rising standards in English schools. Nick Timothy also criticised what he felt was an answer which had ‘very little focus on academic attainment’, which led to Phillipson claiming ‘the honourable gentleman and his party have learned nothing from the massive defeat inflicted upon them by voters in July’.
This will be the tenor of the exchanges between shadow ministers and those in government for a good while to come. On education, the Conservatives forgot to trumpet their achievements in their later years in government, almost acting with surprise when England started to climb up international league tables for literacy. So the party has a lot of catching up to do as it counters the Labour narrative about Tory neglect of schools, even before it gets onto what it would want to do if it got back in government.
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