Is Education the next Coalition row waiting to happen?

David Laws has returned to Government, replacing Sarah Teather at Education. Leaving aside whether or not Laws should have returned to government afte rbeing found guilty of wrongdoing in the past, he’s made some very strident statements on education – and Michael Gove – in the past. Here are some extracts from his 2010 ATL conference speech, which sought to set out the “Liberal Democrat vision for England’s education system”:

“Too often even the Conservatives seem only to want to replace one set of central diktats with another.”

“Michael Gove…. has proposed that school improvement can be delivered by creating an educational market-place and by allowing new providers to open up schools…..But there is a risk that what is being claimed by the Tories for their model is being vastly over-sold, and will fail to deliver higher standards.”

“In Michael Gove’s model, that is the education market. But we are not talking about petrol stations or sweet-shops, we are talking about schools, and more importantly – children.”

“We do not, however, support Michael Gove’s proposal to drop vocational subjects from all league tables. That, in our view, would merely replace one undesirable incentive with another, and set back even more the prospect of offering students serious vocational options.”

“The Conservatives have a naïve view that the market alone will deliver.”

There may be trouble ahead…

Update: It seems David Laws was also a fan of Labour’s work on education, saying back in 2010 that the improvement under Labour had been:

“astonishing, dramatic, unbelievable”