Education, education, education is ‘at heart of Labour’s plan’

REPAIRING truancy rates, children’s mental health and fractured ties with parents and teachers will form key aspects of Labour’s drive to return education to the heart of the national conversation, according to Bridget Phillipson.

Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow education secretary said she was “looking carefully” at Sadiq Khan’s extension of free school meals in London primary schools, when asked whether the policy could be rolled out nationwide.

But Ms Phillipson, who herself received free school meals during a poverty-stricken upbringing in Washington in the North-East before studying at Oxford, is clear about the fiscal boundaries facing Labour if it wins power this year.

“I’ve got to be clear that everything I set out has to be fully funded and fully costed. And I’m not going to make commitments that I can’t be confident I’ll deliver on,” she said in an interview at Fox Primary School in Holland Park.

Ahead of the 1997 election, Tony Blair famously listed Labour’s three priorities for government as “Education, education and education”. But state schooling has been reduced to a “peripheral” issue over 14 years of Conservative rule, said Ms Phillipson.

“That’s why, in the months ahead, Keir and I will be setting out further plans around Labour’s vision for education because we want to ensure that once more education is front and centre of national life,” she said.

The further plans include a crackdown on post-pandemic absenteeism, especially in inner London. Free breakfast clubs are a centrepiece of the plan to boost attendance.

Parents must also show greater responsibility, Phillipson said, while vowing to rebuild the “tense relationship between school staff and parents” after what Labour sees as needless confrontation under the Tories.

A Labour government would fund greater support for schools-based mental health, and give more funding for specialist teachers in art and drama to restore some of the “joy” to schooling, while working to end the use of non-specialist teachers in maths.