Come on, Tristram Hunt, if you think you’re hard enough

For a brief moment earlier this week, I thought education might become an issue in the general election campaign. The Commons Education Select Committee’s lukewarm report on the government’s academy and free school programmes was leaked to the Guardian on Monday and the accompanying story claimed that Labour hoped to open a ‘second front’ following the ‘success’ of its attacks over the NHS.

‘It is undeniable that the last Labour government dramatically improved school standards in secondary education,’ said Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary. ‘But the progress that we made… is being undone by a government that is obsessed with market ideology in education.’

Now, I would welcome this, obviously, and not just because it would mean Michael Gove playing a more prominent role in the Conservative campaign. The main reason is because I think the government should be proud of its record in education.

Hunt’s claims are laughable. The public education system that Gove and his team inherited from Labour was a basket case. Under the last government, spending per pupil doubled but English children slipped further down the international league tables. Between 2000 and 2009, we went from eighth to 27th in maths, seventh to 25th in reading and fourth to 16th in science. At least a fifth of children were leaving school unable to read, write or add up, and more children from a single school — Westminster — got into Oxford and Cambridge in 2010 than from all the kids on free school meals.

Under this government, by contrast, huge strides have been made. The number of English children being educated in failing schools has fallen by 250,000, the national curriculum has been rewritten with more emphasis on knowledge, rigour will shortly be restored to GCSEs and A-levels, and headteachers have the powers they need to enforce discipline.