Lucy Powell was reportedly Andy Burnham’s third choice for Education Secretary after Rachel Reeves and David Miliband turned it down – and judging from her recent intervention in the education debate, it’s not hard to see why. Her claim that a million young people are not in education, employment or training (Neets) as a result of Michael Gove’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ education reforms is almost comically misinformed.
To begin with, the reforms she’s referring to – turning the majority of English state schools into academies, increasing their autonomy and, at the same time, making them more accountable – began with the Education Reform Act 1988, which ushered in City Technology Colleges, a forerunner to academies. Tony Blair continued in the same direction with the Education Act 2000 and Michael Gove put turboboosters under the programme with the Academies Act 2010. To ascribe those reforms to just one education secretary, in office between 2010 and 2014, is astonishingly ignorant. It’s a programme that has commanded cross-party support for almost 40 years.
Contrasting vocational with academic qualifications is fundamentally wrongheaded
Far from being the miserable failure Powell suggests, those reforms have been astonishingly successful. When I co-founded the first free school to sign a funding agreement with Michael Gove in 2010 – named the Sunday Times Comprehensive of the Year in December – Finland’s education system was held up as the gold standard. Today, that status belongs to England thanks in part to Gove’s acceleration of the structural changes begun by his predecessors.
