The state of education need not be this way in the UK - Bridget Phillipson

Because standards were the story of my time at school. And today, looking ahead to the next election, standards are my story.

Ambition and aspiration, for each of us and all of us.

Those values are at the heart of why I joined Labour as a teenager. They are at the heart of my politics today.

The belief that as the last Labour government rightly stressed, every child matters. That excellence is for everyone. That there must be no place for low expectations, for any of our children, in any of our schools.

Today, like so many beliefs that were once common currency in our politics, that belief is distinctively Labour because whilst for 14 years governments have paid lip service to that rhetoric, we have seen how the reality has slipped slowly away.

School rebuilding, cancelled. Buildings left silently to rot.

Standards first rising, as the impact of Labour’s reforms was felt right through the system, then stagnating, now falling.

A curriculum that narrows, not broadens our children’s experiences and opportunities, where the pursuit of high standards has become too often synonymous with joylessness, when nothing of the sort needs to be true.

Worsening shortages of staff at every stage, from initial teacher training and support staff recruitment through to retaining great teachers and fewer and fewer keen to step up to headships.

A culture where in the midst of a cost of living crisis, too often uniform requirements go beyond making children smart and instead make families poor.

A workforce fed up with the contempt Conservative Ministers show them. Industrial action ballots, in unions that have never issued them before.

A recruitment and a retention crisis that speaks to sadness far beyond this year’s pay deal.

Classrooms literally crumbling around the next generation.

A sense that if the Conservatives did ever care about state education, those days are distant now.

It is hard sometimes to remember that it need not be like this. That it has not always been like this.

It would be easy – for too many, it is easy – to say it’s all down to the pandemic. To say that was where things went wrong. That the downhill slide of the last few years is short-lived, inevitable: just bad luck.

I am having absolutely none of it. There were choices then, and there are choices now.

Two truths you’ll hear me tell you often in the months and years to come. First, that the good governments do in education, can take a while to be seen. Second, simpler still, that schools can’t solve society’s problems alone.

An abridged version of a speech delivered by Bridget Phillipson MP, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, at the Centre for Social Justice.