North-South divide in how culturally significant exhibitions are viewed - David Behrens

I think we all know why. Exhibitions in London are chic; those in the North are provincial. And in the arts as in politics, provincial means second best.

You will look in vain for logic. The British Library is co-curating the Brontë exhibition. So its provenance is unquestioned. But it’s off the radar of London commentators whose frame of reference is roughly the length of the Metropolitan Line.

This dismissive attitude to what should be a national event is not unusual. On the contrary, it pollutes the entire landscape of education, politics and the arts. Regional differences that should be celebrated are subsumed in a cultural blender of one-size-fits-all policies that are never really the right size for anyone. If the Brontë sisters were at school today they’d be made to study design technology and citizenship and told to find jobs in a call centre. So much for inspiring creative youngsters.

This question of what subjects should be taught and to whom is at the heart of the levelling-up debate but it’s something the main parties can’t even agree among themselves. The present administration has hitched its cart to the academically-skewed English Baccalaureate while at the same time seeking to steer students away from “low value” degrees in some of the same subjects – though they haven’t said which subjects specifically.

Labour, meanwhile, is promising “regional improvement teams” to try to end the stigma of children from the worst areas going to the worst schools. But it’s an empty gesture; you can’t improve a school unless you first improve the quality of the community around it. Labour knows this but it’s not a message that plays well with voters.

In any case, the party realises – but won’t acknowledge – that one of its number outside the Westminster bubble has a much better idea.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester who was Culture Secretary under Gordon Brown, wants to establish what he calls a Manchester Baccalaureate to help young people gain a qualification in a practical subject, rather than go to university.

He means it, too. Which in itself sets him apart from most politicians. “We’re not going to take no for an answer,” he told an education conference in Sheffield, adding that a place the size of Greater Manchester shouldn’t have to ask permission to do what it knows is right for its young people.

The same could also be said for much of Yorkshire. But the Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, isn’t having it. “We don’t want to be having the schools in Manchester having one thing, schools in Liverpool having another,” she said at the same conference.

Well, why not? If each city is served better by a different curriculum, then it’s exactly what it should have. Job opportunities differ even within the same district – the Brontës’ home turf being a case in point – and schools should be able to adapt to the market.

But that kind of self-government sits uneasily among Whitehall officials whose power would be diluted; and with Labour itself whose leadership feels threatened by Mr Burnham. The current leader’s response has been to sit uncomfortably on the fence. Britain needed to shatter the “class ceiling” that was preventing children from getting ahead, Sir Keir Starmer argued in a speech that read like a Citizenship GCSE essay. But children needed both vocational and academic courses, he said; it shouldn’t be a choice.

Had he asked them? Because if he did I think they would say they wanted only what the Brontë sisters did 200 years ago: to be free to thrive at doing what they loved, not moulded into a homogenised, levelled-down Britain and written off as provincial if they didn’t fit the mould.

The day that happens will be the day cultural commentators from London start turning up at events because they’re in the North, not in spite of it.