Leave Twigg alone

The current whispering campaign against Stephen Twigg is not motivated by concerns about his performance, it is driven by ideology.

Twigg is, as I predicted some weeks ago, coming under significant pressure from those in the parliamentary party who have long been opposed to the ‘structural’ reforms undertaken by Blair. They want rid of Twigg and want Miliband to apply the handbrake, do a U-turn and find a way of bringing academies and Free Schools back under local authority control.

Twigg’s critics say he has failed to land any direct punches on Gove. The truth is the right-wing press love Gove and being his shadow in the current climate is a challenge for any politician. Move too far left and you will be crucified for lacking rigour and returning us to the bad old days of the 70s and 80s, move too far to the right and you will have ‘sold out’ and betrayed the ideals of comprehensive education. The course steered by Twigg has been to attempt to focus the debate on equity as well as excellence, on system reform that will benefit all pupils and not just those who may get a GCSE grade C or above.

He has also been talking in positive, rather than negative, terms about the professionals who make our schools work. Rather than being the enemies of promise, Twigg has cast them as the “enablers of promise”. He has also, rightly in my view, argued that it is unrealistic for the DfE to oversee thousands of schools from the centre so there needs to be clear local oversight of all schools.

Too many of Twigg’s critics seem to want him to dazzle by more flamboyant displays at the despatch box or eye-catching announcements about how Labour will return our school system to the supposed ‘glory days’ of the past – when, exactly, were they? His internal opponents either want greater emphasis on style over substance or the resurrection of tainted policies and programmes that all too often condemned generations to decades of endemic and systemic underachievement.

As a movement we must look to the future and this is particularly true in relation to the hopes and aspirations of our young people. Looking to the past has much to recommend, living in the past nothing at all.