‘We need a no-nonsense approach to education – Labour’s mindless identity politics threatens all the progress in schools’

The new Education Secretary and her Ministerial team have huge boots to fill.

The Conservative Party’s record on education between 2010 and 2024 is one we should all be proud of.

We inherited a situation where only 68 per cent of schools were rated Good or Outstanding by Ofsted in 2010 and raised standards to make this figure 90 per cent when we left office.

When Labour was last in power, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranked the UK 27th in the world for maths, 25th for reading and 16th for science.

But thanks to the pioneering Conservative Ministers Michael Gove and Nick Gibb, our results sky-rocketed.

As the Conservatives left office, we went up to 11th in the world for maths, 13th in the world for reading and 13th in the world for science.

The Conservatives ignored the Labour Party who sniped from the sidelines, calling our plans for free schools ‘dangerous’, proposed abolishing Ofsted and called our literacy programme ‘dull’, and improved school standards from Stoke-on-Trent to St Ives since 2010.

Labour is fundamentally and ideologically adverse to rigorous educational standards and now threatens all this progress with mindless identity politics.

The Labour Education Secretary is taking us back to square one as she is set to abandon reforms made by the previous Government and education pioneer Tom Bennett to deal with bad behaviour for a more ‘inclusive’ approach to coping with poor behaviour.

Our no-nonsense approach to education had a hugely positive impact on schools.

We just need to look at Katharine Birbalsingh’s fantastic Michaela Community School, which prides itself as one of the strictest schools in Britain, to see the positive impact of this.

They have some of the best GCSE and A Level results for state schools in the country and their children go on to do extraordinary things.

But no, Labour wants to strip funding from behaviour hubs, completely failing to recognise this will have a disproportionate impact on our most vulnerable children, as pointed out by leading education experts Katharine Birbalsingh and Mouhssin Ismail.

Evidence from the National Behaviour Survey shows just how much kids miss out.

Their 2021/2022 survey found that for every 30 minutes of lesson time, 6.3 minutes were lost due to misbehaviour.

As a former teacher, I took a tough approach to disruptive pupils because I knew that for every minute the teacher is having to deal with that one disruptive pupil, all the other children who are there and willing to learn are missing out.

However, I now fear that Labour is willing to put our most disadvantaged pupils at serious risk of doing well at school by making it harder for schools to punish disruptive children.

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Of course, it should come as no surprise that the Education Secretary is looking to force through policies which will damage our school standards.

Labour’s egregious tax raid on private schools has been called out by education experts who know it will have a big impact on class sizes. But she is putting her fundamental class-based politics ahead of good sense.

It is now apparent that Labour has no clear plan to carry on the Conservatives’ record on education. The Education Secretary is willing to disregard case studies of schools with tough standards doing extraordinary things and clear warnings about the dire impact raising VAT on private schools will have on class sizes to roll out her vision for schools.

My fear is that this will harm our children and reverse social mobility, undermining all the good progress we have seen in our schools since 2010.