Labour is very pleased with the amount of attention it garnered for its new private schools policy when Tristram Hunt unveiled it last week. So it was natural that the Shadow Education Secretary used this as his main line of attack at today’s Education Questions. He set the scene first using one of his shadow ministerial team Alison McGovern, who contrasted bankers’ pay rising by 7 per cent on average with a 1 per cent rise for nursery staff. It was clear that Labour was keen for a game of Us vs Them.
Hunt then piggybacked onto a question from party colleague Ian Lucas about the public benefit of private schools and these comments on the matter by Sir Michael Wilshaw. Nicky Morgan had already responded by arguing that independent schools were having a tougher time at the moment because state schools were improving.
When he got to his feet, Hunt listed examples of token efforts from private schools who receive a good amount of money in tax breaks, then said:
‘Enough is enough. Will the Secretary of State now join with Anthony Seldon of Wellington College, headteachers of United Learning Trust and the majority of the British people in supporting Labour’s plans to break down the barriers in English education and require private schools to work alongside state schools to share best practice and raise attainment across the country?’
Morgan had already been on her best disapproving behaviour, telling a Labour MP off for asking ‘an extremely disappointing question’ earlier (though if a minister did that every time someone asked a disappointing question in the Commons, we’d be stuck there for a lot longer and they’d find themselves telling their colleagues off a lot too). Now she turned her full teacherly disapproval on Hunt, helped by her junior minister Edward Timpson, who fixed a death stare on Hunt throughout the exchange.
‘Well, the honourable gentleman appears to have answered his own question, in fact his own policy by pointing out already the successful collaborative partnerships between private schools and state schools going on right the way across the country. I think it fair to say that the honourable gentleman has clearly decided…er, his previous school has clearly decided they won’t be building any buildings or unveiling any statues to the honourable gentleman any time soon and I think he ought to have more cause to think about the Labour Uncut website, which says it’s not so much that Tristram Hunt has the wrong policies for education, it is that he appears to have none. Last week’s announcement hasn’t changed that.’
Hunt then accused her of the ‘politics of the status quo’, then went for the jugular, asking whether Morgan would change her mind on this policy too, as she did on gay marriage. She grew even more disapproving, and actually deployed the phrase ‘letting the children of this country down’ in her answer, though she is clearly saving that accusation that Hunt would be letting himself down too for another exchange in the Commons. Morgan then repeated her accusation that Labour had made very little progress on education policy.
Morgan is developing a nice little line in looking stern. But she isn’t quite accurate when she says that Labour has no policies. Today Hunt’s main line of attack centred on him pressing the government to adopt a Labour policy. The problem is that these policies do not join into an overarching and distinctive framework. Prod a private school here, constrict a free school there (though the main mention of free schools at this session came from Keith Vaz, who was both very happy about the free school in his constituency and very happy that Nicky Morgan ate some vegetable samosas when she visited), but there is still little clarity on what Labour’s vision for education is, other than ideas it thinks populist.
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