Schools in England have been “fragmented” and “fractured” by a “slow rot of focusing on structures over standards” and these have failed “a fresh generation of children”, Bridget Phillipson has said today.
Speaking at a think tank this morning, the shadow education secretary said that “the state of England’s school system since 2010 is a monument to what happens when politicians simply copy policy off a Scandinavian postcard”.
She added it was “a system not merely fragmented but fractured, where the slow rot of focusing on structures over standards fails a fresh generation of children, when ambition is untethered from the hard realities of fiscal policy and workforce availability”.
Ms Phillipson used her speech at Onward today to set out Labour’s focus on strengthening support for families.
Labour’s ambitions for early years
Ms Phillipson used today’s speech to outline a vision focused on early years education. Referring to the government’s Family Hubs scheme, she said support for parents of young children “must stretch beyond how” children are “fed”.
“We have said childcare needs to be more available, more affordable and better quality. But it also needs to be better linked to educational priorities, better geared to closing attainment gaps and better at enabling all our children to succeed at school, at college at university, and all through their lives,” she said.
She said a next Labour government “will build a modern childcare system…that supports families from the end of parental leave, right through to the end of primary school”.
And she added that schools and the childcare system, as well as the NHS, “should be vehicles for enabling the aspirations of families” across the country.
“But too many children are let down by stuck schools which fail them year after year,” she said.
She added that a “challenge” for Labour “is to define afresh the role for government, the role for parents, the role for families, and how those roles work together”.
“When schools aren’t supported, when standards slip or safeguarding isn’t there, we know it’s rarely individual heads or teachers, who are failing our children.”
She said “it is a wider failure” and “it is a failure by the government.”
Ms Phillipson also admitted that the previous Labour government’s SureStart programme “was many great things”, but that the educational and healthcare component “too often…fell down the priority list”.
She said that the flagship Labour government policy announced in 1998, and which has since been dismantled, was an “amazing achievement”, but that there were “issues” with the programme and a “better future our children need will not come simply from winding back the clock”.
Problems with government’s ‘five priorities’
Ms Phillipson also used her speech to criticise prime minister Rishi Sunak’s five priorities for 2023 because they ”[did] not mention children, and they [did] not mention childcare”.
“So the first test is whether this features in government thinking at all, whether they recognise there is a problem and a need for change.
“The second test is whether they have listened to parents,” she added.
Last September, Labour announced that under its plans, every primary school in England would offer fully funded breakfast clubs, paid for by reinstating the top level of income tax.
