Labour backs away from school closure policy it advocated during lockdown

Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson today said that schools should have been the last public services to close and the first to open during the pandemic, despite Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour party advocating for stricter lockdowns at the time. 

Speaking in central London at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Phillipson set out her vision for schools should the Labour party win the next general election and responded to media questions. She argued that Labour would tackle the doubling of absent pupils since the Covid lockdowns but tactfully avoided admitting that her party advocated for harsher lockdowns during the pandemic.

Ahead of the second school closure (third official lockdown) in January 2021 lasting until March 2021, Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues campaigned vociferously for schools to shut, parroting the line taken by teaching unions that schools were unsafe.

Now, with the terrible damage of that policy clear, Labour is promising to crack down on persistent absence. Some 140,000 pupils missed 50 per cent or more of their school time in the Spring term last year. Phillipson announced new measures Labour would take in government. These included the rule that homeschooled children would have to be registered by law, annual Ofsted checks would have the power to track attendance, AI would be used to track and collate important data and mental health support would be available in all secondary schools. She said the plans would be funded by “ending the tax breaks that private schools enjoy”.

Phillipson’s major speech comes a day after her opposite number, education secretary Gillian Keegan, announced more attendance hubs to support 1,000 more schools and a £15 million investment to expand the attendance mentor pilot programme.

A new report from the CSJ found that one in four parents don’t think it is necessary for their child to go to school every day. Citing this worrying find, Phillipson said she aimed to restore the “broken relationship” between families, schools and government which had been allowed to rot under almost fourteen years of Tory governments.

Sir Kevan Collins, who resigned from his job as catch-up tsar after the government pledged £5bn rather than his recommended £15bn to education recovery post-pandemic, backed Phillipson’s proposed reforms. Introducing the shadow secretary, Collins said: “I’m a Labour party sympathiser but I was happy and honoured to go and support a Conservative prime minister (Collins was appointed by Boris Johnson). We all had to stand up and do our part.”

“The phrase that was used was that we were ‘maxed out on recovery’ – and I don’t think we ever maxed out on recovery. We left schools too often on their own to resolve this. For too many children in our most vulnerable communities, we failed them and let them down.”

Phillipson was eager to say that she thought schools in England and Wales had been in decline long before Covid, but was more quiet on how lockdowns exacerbated the issue. Surprisingly, she had praise for Michael Gove who she said in his role as education secretary from 2010-2014, brought “a sense of energy and drive and determination” to the role. But she then attacked the recent “merry-go-round of the last five secretaries” who have deprioritised the nation’s schools. 

In an audacious show of political manoeuvring on a platform usually associated with the Tories (the CSJ was co-founded by Iain Duncan Smith), Phillipson never proposed anything radical. In contrast to Rishi Sunak’s proposal for a baccalaureate-style ‘Advanced British Standard’, Labour’s rising star said it was instead crucial to get the basics right. And she might just get the chance to do so.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life