For high aspiration for all our children, vote Labour

This party conference season marks for many commentators and psephologists the starting line for the next General Election. We know from Lord Ashcroft’s polling that education is an issue of great salience in the marginal seats so crucial in shaping the outcome of the 2015 poll.

Labour is winning the battle of ideas in education.

Stealing the march at Labour Party conference last year, Ed Miliband launched Labour’s plan for the Forgotten 50% – for those young people who do not want to go to university but want to pursue a high aspiration route through vocational learning.

These reforms ‘will leave millions of state school pupils unemployable’ was the line the Tories briefed to the press when we announced that a future Labour Government will introduce a Technical Baccalaureate – a gold standard vocational route for all to aim for at 18. Only months later, realising that the agenda was now well and truly set, the Tories fully endorsed Labour’s Tech Bacc. In politics, it is often said that plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.

As I set out in my speech to Labour Party conference last week, since last October, we have taken this work forward announcing a doubling in the number of high quality, Level 3 apprenticeships for young people; measures to raise the quality of teaching in FE colleges (where the majority of young people study for A Levels); and guarantees on work experience and careers guidance in schools.

Our vision for the Forgotten 50% is one that resonates with voters. Voters who want to see an end to the low skill, low wage economy that holds young people and our country back.

Our offer on childcare – to introduce before and after school childcare for primary age children and to expand universal childcare for 3 and 4 year olds from 15 to 25 hours – will help hard pressed families with the cost of living crisis that David Cameron has created.

So when you hear Michael Gove saying that Labour has no education policy, read ‘the Tories are rattled’.

As we shape our offer on reforming 14- 19 education – with forthcoming reports due within months from Labour’s Skills Taskforce led by Professor Chris Husbands- we are focused on getting it right, not on rushing out policies to satisfy the appetite of the rolling news cycle.

Fine-tuned in the art of politics though he is, Michael Gove falls short when it comes to delivering lasting and effective education reforms that will raise standards across all of our schools.

He tells us that the most important thing is the type of school. That having unqualified teachers in classrooms on a permanent basis will raise standards. That a rigid, narrow and outdated curriculum is the key to educational success – despite the well-argued case made by the CBI  and others.

But we know what the evidence shows- and that in his actions, he chooses political posturing over the right policy every time.

We know that what makes the biggest difference to raising educational attainment is not the type of school but the quality of teaching and learning, underpinned by excellent leadership. That is why I said in my speech at the RSA in June that where a greater degree of autonomy raises education standards, then it should be afforded to all schools- not just academies and free schools.

We know that scrapping the requirement for qualified teacher status is out of sync with practice in the highest performing jurisdictions. That is why we have pledged a qualified teacher guarantee – a qualified teacher in every classroom under Labour.

And we know that to end the low skill, low wage economy, we need to equip young people with the knowledge, skills and character for the jobs of the future. A rigour of the future, not the past.

As we have seen, weighed down by dogma, driven by politics not policy, this Education Secretary’s legacy will be one of missed opportunities and reforms that will take our education system backward, not forward.

Sunday’s announcement to end the practice of GCSE re-sits counting towards school performance tables is a text book case of Michael Gove policy making on the hoof. A policy guided by a party conference agenda, not what is in the best interests of education standards. One that will cap aspiration- an all stakes test, grounded in the principles of the 11-plus. Yes, there is a need to reduce perverse incentives that encourage some schools to game the system, putting results ahead of learning outcomes. That is a given. Michael Gove was late to the party here, after Labour fired the starting pistol on the need to end the abuse of multiple entries following the recent concern expressed by the exam regulator Ofqual. However, in a bid to play catch up, Michael Gove has rushed out an ill thought-through policy.

If we look at one school that I have visited, Perry Beeches Academy in Birmingham. An Outstanding school (as rated by Ofsted), led by an exceptional Executive Principal, Liam Nolan.  This is the same school that Michael Gove has consistently praised. Indeed, so impressed is he that he took David Cameron to the first day of term at Perry Beeches Free School- a sister school under the leadership of Liam Nolan.

Perry Beeches has a high proportion of children on free school meals (the Government measure of social deprivation), with low prior attainment and with English as an additional language. For an ambitious head like Liam, none of this matters. It’s his goal to achieve the very best from every single child in his school. He refuses to accept that social background will determine life chances.  And he is absolutely right.

To do this, he builds confidence in his pupils, many of whom joined his school without the expected levels in speaking, reading, writing and arithmetic. So he makes a judgement that when his teachers think that pupils are ready, they are entered into exams. If that’s before Year 11, then so be it. But from next year, under Michael Gove’s plan, it will not matter if a pupil doesn’t reach their potential the first time around; that is the result on which that school will be judged.

So instead of a sensible reform to address the problem of abuse, we have a rushed announcement to make the headlines, one that undermines ambitious head teachers like Liam Nolan at Perry Beeches and the brilliant Vanessa Ogden at Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets, serving a similarly challenging community.

We saw it with his plans to bring back a two-tier exam system to replace GCSEs and in his failed attempt to introduce damaging changes to childcare ratios. Dogma and shooting from the hip favoured over evidence-informed policy that works. I have said that under Labour, evidence will always come first (£).

In my speech to Labour Conference in Brighton, I said that education is the great engine of social mobility. That there is no greater cause for Labour than education.

Labour is the party of high aspiration for all- for the Forgotten 50% and for those who want to go to university. It is a disgrace that our best universities have become more socially exclusive. Overcoming that too will be a priority for a future Labour Government.

Our vision in education is one where all young people at 18 go into higher education or a high quality apprenticeship, realising their true potential. If that’s not high aspiration, then I don’t know what is.

Stephen Twigg MP is Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary