As he stands down as an MP, it’s price reflecting on one of Michael Gove’s greatest achievements: his training reforms. College requirements have soared, England has risen up the worldwide league tables in topics comparable to maths, and the grip of “progressive” educationalists and the unions on the training system has been dramatically loosened, all to the advantage of the nation’s youngsters and their mother and father.
Now, the Labour Celebration might put a lot of this in danger. Not content material with taking a wrecking ball to non-public colleges by means of its vindictive plan to place VAT on faculty charges – which, by the way, is more likely to increase pressure on the state sector, if the variety of mother and father capable of afford an unbiased training declines – the get together is believed to be plotting a reversal of Mr Gove’s reforms.
As this newspaper has reported, the shadow training secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is assumed to need native authorities to be given the facility to shut down undersubscribed academies, threatening to roll again parental alternative and competitors. Labour thinks that the college system has change into too fragmented. The get together needs all colleges to “co-operate” rather more intently with native councils.
However liberating colleges from native authority management was one of many key mechanisms for enhancing requirements, alongside competitors between establishments. The worry should be that Labour’s training coverage might be motivated not by an impulse to make sure that youngsters obtain a superb training, however by Left-wing ideology and the calls for of the general public sector unions.
It has additionally been weak in resisting the incursion of gender ideology into the classroom. Labour did not immediately commit to conserving the Authorities’s new intercourse training steering for colleges, and its wider coverage on gender stays unclear. It might hardly be stunning if stress from the Left inspired a Labour authorities to “decolonise” the college curriculum.
Sir Keir Starmer’s battle towards non-public colleges is pure class envy, a disgraceful assault on excellence, aspiration and parental rights. However his get together’s plans for the state sector additionally deserve larger scrutiny. Labour is likely to be about to unwind the progress that has been made since 2010 to make sure that each youngster in England will get a very good training. There could be nothing “progressive” or “truthful” about that.
