Born and raised on a council estate, pregnant by 16 and a working mother who struggled to make ends meet, Angela Rayner is the Conservatives’ worst nightmare when it comes to their grammar schools policy.
Labour’s shadow education secretary is exactly the type of parent prime minister Theresa May identified when she spoke of helping families who were “just getting by”.
“I recognise the struggle they talk about,” Rayner says. “I was a home help before I came into Parliament. My salary at the time was just over £20,000 and I was on working tax credits. So I have been a working parent in receipt of tax credits who was not eligible for free school meals.
“But grammar schools are not the answer. We really are not going to get very far if we’re giving a life raft to a few kids and leaving the rest behind,” she says.
I was a ginger kid who grew up on a council estate
The Conservatives’ grammar-school policy is likely to be one of the few policy areas that will unite the Labour Party when it convenes in Liverpool for its annual conference next week, after a fractious and long-running leadership battle between Jeremy Corbyn and challenger Owen Smith.
Rayner describes Corbyn as being like a “geography teacher”, who may not have the dramatic performance skills of David Cameron or Tony Blair, but has “substance”.
“He isn’t going to ignite,” she says. “He’s not going to make you look and think ‘Oh wow, look at that performer’. But what he says, his integrity is what people tune into,” Rayner adds.
The MP for Ashton-under-Lyne spoke to TES just days after the government released its Green Paper outlining plans to expand selective education in England. And it is clear that her feelings toward the policy are still raw.
By seeking to lift the ban on creating more grammars, put in place by Labour in 1998, Rayner says that the government would be “pitching poor people against each other”.
But interestingly, she says that if Labour were to win a hypothetical general election tomorrow, she would not seek to abolish the existing 163 grammar schools, despite the issue being placed back into mainstream debate.
“I am not going to get bogged down in picking on the grammars that are already here; I will be going down a rabbit warren if I do that. Which is exactly what Theresa May is doing herself,” Rayner says. “The government has been attacking working class families and yet, to suggest that grammars are the answer to helping people to achieve is just completely false.”
She adds: “They are trying to pitch one group of ‘poor’ against the other. What they are saying is: ‘You are the working poor, so you are the deserving poor. And you are the non-working poor, so you’re not deserving’.”
‘I was Neet for a while’
Sitting in her office in Westminster, Rayner explains that she would have been one of the young people “cut adrift” by the Tories’ grammar-school policy.
“I ticked every key indicator for deprivation,” she says. “I was Neet for a while, I was on free school meals, I came from a family that was on benefits, I was a ginger kid who grew up on a council estate. I ticked every box. I didn’t go to school ‘school-ready’.”
All of these factors put her at a disadvantage, she says, but, in spite of them, she has worked her way up to become an MP. She puts her success down to Labour interventions, such as Sure Start centres, helping her as a parent, and decent investment in adult education.
The fundamental problem with grammar schools is that they create winners and losers
But she believes that a wider expansion of selection in the education sector would mean that more people like her would be denied a chance to “break the cycle” of disadvantage they find themselves in.
“My aptitude and ability were both there, otherwise I wouldn’t be sat in front of you today,” she says. “The fundamental problem with grammar schools is that they create winners and losers.
“I want to reach out to anybody who opposes them. We must defeat this, otherwise we let down a generation of children if we don’t.”
