Laura Trott: 'Labour are kowtowing to the unions'

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0:37Tim Shipman: Hello and welcome to this special Saturday edition of Coffeehouse Shots. I'm James Heal and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman, who's the political editor of The Spectator, and Laura Trott, who is the Shadow Education Secretary. Now, Tim, this week on Tuesday we had the results come out, which suggested that England was very much bucking the international trend on PISA results. Tell us about the results and a bit of a political fruity around them.

0:57James Heale: Yeah, no, that's right. These are the sort of international metrics by which you measure success in schools. And effectively, Britain as a whole is top 10 for English, maths and science. But that is only because England is doing quite well. Scotland and Wales are not doing well and their results are declining. There's a general downward trend internationally, which I suspect we will come to see as a result of everybody staring at smartphones and screens and being distracted from learning things across the globe. But the interesting thing is, you know, the debate has blown up, of course, because the Conservatives will say, well, look, when we were in government, we sorted this stuff out, we changed things, we made things about rigorous learning, about learning times tables, about, you know, repetitive stuff that actually works, rather than a lot of the fashionable educational theories that had had English schools in their grip for a couple of decades.

1:49James Heale: That did not change in Scotland and Wales and they have not defied the international trend and their numbers are dropping at a time when England's are not. And this is particularly politically loaded now because we've had successive education secretaries, Bridget Phillips and Lucy Powell, who seem to be wanting to unpick all of the stuff that happened under the coalition and under the Conservative government, doing away with a sort of focus on standards and rigour and returning to a kind of one size fits all, as they would see it, equity and education. But it's one that I think people are arguing has done away with expertise and excellence.

2:27James Heale: And we have to tread carefully on this podcast as employees of The Spectator, because lots of people will say this is broadly Michael Gove's doing. So I think it's duty-bound to say that the key figure who remained throughout the Conservative government was Nick Gibb, the schools minister, who was very big on phonics. And I think that's one of the things that people attribute our improvements in reading and writing to. Anyway, that's what's going on. And, you know, it's interesting when you get a sort of international thing that appears to play into domestic political debates. I think it's also interesting for those of us that cover politics, that the effects of things that are done in government can sometimes take a heck of a long time to come through.

3:07James Heale: So, you know, Gove and Gibb and others did this stuff back in 2010. And here we are seeing the benefits of it 16 years later. So it's useful for politicians, I think, to see, you know, what a long lead time some of these changes can have. And also that, you know, a lot of our political debate is focused on what happens this week, next week, at most over a five year span. And actually, a lot of what people do has an impact much later.

3:32Tim Shipman: I mean, Laura, Lucy Powell seemed a little bit reluctant to congratulate the sort of schools and the education system on the success on Tuesday. It took until about 12.30 for her to actually send out the obligatory tweet. Yes, I did a chase on Twitter. I did see that on X, yeah. But I mean, what do you think she's actually doing to change this? Obviously, you wrote in your mail column talking about how she was wanting to change the system from having academic excellence. But what are actually Labour doing which would potentially harm some of these results? Well, there's two bits, James. because we've got the education secretary who came before, Bridget Philipson, who unpicked a lot of the education reforms.

4:06So the school freedoms that have helped drive us up the league tables, those were undone by the schools bill, which they took through the House of Commons, basically making us more like Wales, which is nuts, seeing what was actually happening to the Welsh education system very sadly. And then now we have a new education secretary who said there's been an over-focus on academic outcomes. I mean, let's just pause on that for a second. It's actually quite frightening. And has also said over the summer that she wants to change GCSEs to introduce a vocational pathway at 14. Now, this is something that has been tried before.

4:40It was a disaster. It meant that more young people, particularly from deprived backgrounds, were kind of funneled down a vocational GCSE route. It wasn't very rigorous. These are all the things that we had to overturn in 2010. So I just slightly said despair because it's the bit of the state that is working well. It is where other countries are asking what they can do to be more like us. And yet we have a government which is dismantling it. It makes no sense.

5:05Tim Shipman: I just wonder, because obviously you've got a new government, your education secretary, Bridget Phillips, and lost that role. If there are any sign yet of what they're planning to do, and it just seems that the Conservative position maybe is it to sort of, I know even Oberyn Wall bemoving the fact that the Conservative Party never turn the clock back one minute. Is the Conservative position simply to go back to 4th of July, 2024, in terms of schooling? It's to be evidence-led, right? Because the thing is, people don't vote on education. I wish they voted on education. They don't vote on education.

5:32And actually, we don't. I'm so pleased we're doing this today because we don't actually get the focus on public policy, I don't think, as much as we should in this country. And it's a route of things going fundamentally wrong. And you can see that across public services. We kind of gave up a little bit on public service reform post-2016. We were kind of engaged in other things. And as a result, things have gone wrong. and what we've seen with the education system was where public service reform has worked and has been effective and so if they were coming forward and saying right, this is the evidence for what I want to do this is why, this is the effect we think it's going to have I would obviously listen to that but just stating that children don't like it and that we need to make them feel better and copying areas that have done really badly does not feel to me like the right approach and it's not about being anti-technical education.

6:23We've proposed a plan like post-16 to actually increase the number of apprenticeships, reduce the number of dead-end degrees but it's about putting a sorting hat on children age 14 and either saying you're vocational or academic and I just don't agree with that. It hasn't worked before and it will really harm disadvantaged children.

6:39Tim Shipman: I suppose, Tim, the point is that Labour is focused on sometimes rerunning the last war, talking about what went on in the coalition government rather than actually developing any kind of sign of thinking in this area and on wider public service reform.

6:50James Heale: I think what's curious about it, as Laura says, is that the explanations given are wholly inadequate. If the government came forward and said, look, we think this is fairer for this reason than this reason than this reason, then you could have a more intelligent public debate about what actually works best and why maybe there are some winners and losers here. And they might say, well, we prefer to have these people as winners rather than these people as winners. But they're not doing that. It was virtually impossible to pin down Bridget Phillipson about why she was doing what she was doing. And I still don't think we've seen much kind of working from Lucy Powell about where she's coming from.

7:26James Heale: The simplistic and I hope not unfair conclusion is that it's ideological, that there's a belief that everyone should be in a sort of what was once referred to as a bog standard comprehensive. And that is some spurious form of equality. but you know anyone who's looked at the results would conclude that the best performing schools are the ones that take impoverished underprivileged working class kids and give them a proper education and give them a better start in life that ought to be something that the Labour Party is cheerleading for and championing but as Michael Gove wrote in his cover story in The Spectator a couple of weeks ago it's easy to measure the schools that are doing that there's a kind of value-added metric that shows, that takes away all the sort of selection, the view that, you know, the best performing schools are just grabbing the best pupils.

8:15James Heale: It's nonsense. Some of the best schools, including some of those in the North East, a lot of the ones in London, which have improved the educational environment there, are basically taking kids who didn't have much of a chance, giving them discipline, giving them a school uniform, telling them to behave, telling them to put their phones away, telling them to learn their times tables. And instead of patting them on the head and asking them whether they feel good is actually teaching them stuff. And that is far more use to a working class kid who didn't, you know, perhaps has a turbulent family life and doesn't have parents who went on to university and made lots of money.

8:52James Heale: that gives them you know perspective an outlook and an opportunity and it is perverse that the Labour Party seems to want to unpick all of that you know oh we mustn't have unqualified teachers they say well hang on a minute you know a lot of those schools employed you know like a sports person who once was was a leading person in that particular Olympians Olympians for example not qualified teachers bring them into a school inspire people to take up athletics or football or whatever it is. And, you know, I'm a grammar school kid. So I've always seen from my days growing up in Lincolnshire where that system worked well.

9:26James Heale: Michael tells me that that is not generally a very good system. And I'm prepared to believe him on the whole. But what that grammar school did for me was give me an outlook and a perspective that I would not have had from elsewhere. And I think the best schools in a lot of the less sort of wealthy parts of the country are doing that and it seems that the Labour Party just wants to destroy all that out of some spurious notion of equality. You know, equality of outcome is levelling down and we need to get away from that and I would have far more respect for either of those education sectors if they come out and made a coherent or even an honest argument about what they're trying to do.

10:04James Heale: If they came out and say we just hate this and we're not going to do it and we want to do it for these reasons, I'd at least give them the time of day. But they haven't even done that. It's sort of, they couch it in And there's notions of, you know, equality and, you know, oh, we'd rather spend the money on this than give money to, you know, to some of these more what appear to be successful, they would say privileged schools. It's completely ludicrous. And it's one of the areas, because we're basically focused on the cost of living and migration in this country, that has fallen by the wayside.

10:34James Heale: And frankly, it's a scandal.

10:35Tim Shipman: I mean, you mentioned about grammar schools, of course. One of the interesting things, Laura, is that we actually had, of course, the four home nations, if you will. And in Northern Ireland, of course, they have those grammar schools. And so these results show that England are doing better than Northern Ireland. Exactly. Exactly that. And that is because there is a focus on every child being able to achieve a good academic outcome. And that shouldn't be a controversial statement. And that is what is so extraordinary about this is that we, the Conservatives, are saying we believe that every child has an opportunity and ability.

11:03And Labour Party is saying, no, no, we should write them off. Like some children can't do that. And I just don't believe that's true. and Tim was saying about some of these excellent kind of free schools that are out there look at what they've done with an absolutely comprehensive intake look at what they have achieved and it is extraordinary to me that the Labour government they can't bring themselves to like praise Michaela right like it's like they can't even say the word Michaela it's it just speaks to the fact that they just want everything to be uniform everything to be the same the input is much more important than the output.

11:38We cannot have excellence. We cannot have any differentiation. And I just can't bear that because that is the thing that has made our school system great.

11:45Tim Shipman: I mean, not to get you as a sort of cod psychologist, but why do you think that is in the Labour Party psyche? Why do they seem unable to do that when they've had some enlightened people like Lord Donis in the past? I do think there's a union thing here. I was having this torturous process with Bridget Philipson during the passage of the schools bill where I would, much as Tim was saying, would say, you know, these are the five reasons why this bill is going to lower standards. And then she would just say, but it will raise standards. And I say, but what is the point of this? You know, why are we having this conversation if you can't justify what you're doing on its own merits?

12:16And the only thing that I can see is that this is a kowtowing to unions, because unions never like the reforms, they reduce their powers, it reduces their influence, it focuses much more on school standards than anything else. And, and they, you know, they've always been opposed to that. They don't like Ofsted, they don't like school inspection. and so that's the only thing that I can divine.

12:37James Heale: There also seems, I think there's a civil service element to this as well. I think... Control. Well, it's partly about control and they want to maintain central control of everything rather than devolve it to good heads but I think there's also an element that if you are looking for the blobby bits of the blob they are to be found in the Department for Education. They are the most ideological and resistant to this kind of public service reform, even more so than civil servants in the Department of Health, where there's another problem. I mean, there are hospitals that are wildly successful at keeping ambulance queues low and there are others that are complete failure at it.

13:16James Heale: Is there any attempt to seek best practice and make everybody else look at what works? It's almost impossible to get people to do that. They all say, oh, it's very difficult, different circumstances where we are. And you get a lot of the same thing in education. I mean, you know, we've seen now what works. There's proof of what works and they're still not interested. And I think, you know, that ought to be something that parents are furious about. But too many of the parents, I'm afraid, in areas where their children might benefit from this are not following this. you know, bluntly, this will sound appallingly antediluvian, but they're probably watching the football or gambling on the National Lottery or doing other highly cliched things that will get me into trouble.

13:59James Heale: But parents do care about their kids, but not a lot of them know how always to sort of lobby for them. And that's why they need politicians to do it for them. And in this case, I think Labour politicians are failing those parents and they're supposed to be people that the Labour Party cares about.

14:13Tim Shipman: I mean, Laura, that is a point from Tim, which is, how do we get parents more animated by this? I mean, my entire tour of yesterday was just conservatives all in unison all shouting good news for once which was of course these piece of results talking very much about the success there but we've seen in the past you know things like the grammar school closures the 1970s really animated communities how do we get parents to care about what's going on at a Westminster level in terms of the education reforms I think the thing is is that people have very busy lives right they've got a lot going on and they kind of want the politicians to deal with this because and I think they would assume that there is an evidence that debate which is going on at the top of politics trying to sort this out and unfortunately there's just not right there's us trying to make the point and the government frankly just not listening to reason or trying to make an argument and that's what's been so frustrated frustrating um but i think the thing that we did see when michael was pushing his stuff through that actually there were a lot of very irritated parents about the standard of schooling in their area right like a lot of them set up free schools those free schools are amazing they are outperforming schools in their other local areas up and down the country uh they are doing so much and just epitomise the benefits of school freedoms that are now being taken away.

15:23So there are some parents that really care about this, but I think they just want politicians to get on with it. As for so much, right? And it's interesting what you say to him. Wes was making some noises about actually copying the school reforms when he was health secretary. I mean, at the same time as they were dismantling the school reforms, just to be clear, but that's obviously just all gone now. And it's just such a shame because there is so much that can be done with public service reform, it would make things better because things can be better. And we just need more of a focus on it in our politics and in our policies.

15:56And I think that's what we're trying to do from the Tory side as well, like, you know, actually joining it all up. But it is trying to get the government to care is an uphill struggle.

16:04Tim Shipman: Absolutely. And you talk about the public service reform agenda. You would undo what Labour have done since July 2024. What else would you pursue, Laura, if you were given the power to be Education Secretary tomorrow? I think there's, you think about the brief that I've been given. it's an incredible brief and it's an incredibly wide brief and I think when you are looking at policy you need to work out what's broken and what's not right and the school system is performing incredibly well of course there's issues within it SEND being the most prominent but actually I think the university system is where I need to be putting my energy and attention in terms of reform there are too many young people that are going to university paying thousands and thousands of pounds for a degree and they're coming out and not getting a job and they they have frankly been misled they've been going there they expect there to have tutorials in person it's all online it's they're not getting any marked essays it's just not okay and then the other part which gets far less attention but is really important is children's social services and if you look at for example the casey review the the failures that we saw over and over again with grooming gangs we've seen it up and down the country in individual cases and and look at where all the really problematic people in our country come from a vast majority of them are have been in care and go through care look at where people in young offenders institutions the our prison population they are very overrepresented we have to get children's social care right and I think that's where public service reform can come into play again it's something that's not talked about enough because most people don't deal with it right they see their schools they see their hospitals Most people don't come into contact with this.

17:36But it's something I really want to do and focus on.

17:39James Heale: Can I just ask, take you back to universities, because there is a sort of growing consensus in this country that 50%, you know, of pupils going to university thing that the Blair government pushed was probably overkill. That hasn't, you know, for the reasons that you say, a lot of these degrees are not worth the paper they're written on. how do you square the circle between that as a conservative party acknowledging that perhaps university isn't the right route for everybody but whilst avoiding what you seem to be opposing by effectively channeling people into technical path at 14 where's the where's the happy medium between those two things so what we propose is we're saying that actually we're going to cut a number of actually it is um funnily enough the same as suella announced uh you know a couple of months after we did, about cutting 20 % of university degrees and using that money to fund apprenticeships, right, to double the number of apprenticeships.

18:29Because actually, really good apprenticeships are more oversubscribed than Oxford or Cambridge now, right? This is what young people want to do. It's just giving them the opportunity to do it. And that will mean paying businesses in order to do that. It's also going to mean making sure that we are funding universities, the kind of courses that are more expensive, that are frankly being cross-subsidised at the moment by these cheap courses that aren't getting young people jobs so there's going to be a bit of moving around there but it does mean a kind of we call it a new deal for young people that's actually what it is it's going to be something different so you can leave you know when you do your degree it's a good degree you are going to get some actual teaching time and then also you're going to be able to get an apprenticeship if that's what you want to do

19:10James Heale: and speaking of Cambridge University I mean those of us that went there have spent years amused by the opprobrium that all the PPE people at Oxford have had for screwing up our politics but Cambridge now seem to be saying hold my beer Oxford they seem to be you know completely ideologically deranged and all the rest of it what what are you going to what would you do about you know frankly what appear to be grotesquely lax standards at one of our top universities and an approach to teaching pupils which is sort of sub-woke nonsense essentially. I think Cambridge particularly with the recent Jason Arde situation, which was a total tragedy.

19:46And so much of the blame for that lies with Cambridge University. They did not do the due diligence. They promoted DEI before thinking about the individual at the centre of all this. And then they took completely the wrong approach when it was scrutinised. And we cannot have universities behaving like this when they are publicly funded. There has to be some standards. There has to be accountability. They have to make sure that if they're spending public money they're doing it in such a way which is providing a good education for young people and I think it has not been regulated in the right way for too long I think some of the outcomes are awful and we would sort it out just a final question Laura

20:24Tim Shipman: we've got a party conference coming up you sort of have a great smorgasbord of different opportunities to take aim at this government I mean what do you have any plans that you can tease for us on this podcast for that it's we've got lots of plans it's going to be very exciting I'm really looking forward to it and also if you think about where we are as a party versus this time last year we're in you know a really different place and that is positive we want to make even further progress with this I'm going to be talking a little bit about what we can do to bring politics out of the classroom because actually you would have seen my work on social media before about keeping children's childhood intact and you know stopping the pollution that they're seeing every single day on their screens and the distraction which is causing you know reduction of learning which has actually came out in the PISA report but what we're also seeing too much in schools is actually time spent on things that aren't kind of key academic subjects and I want that to change.

21:18Tim Shipman: Thank you Laura, thank you Tim and thank you for listening to Coffeehouse Shots.

21:46James Heale: This is the story of the one.

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