British voters go to the polls in less than a month. All signs point to a crushing defeat for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party after 14 chaotic years in power. The Labour Party, ably led by Keir Starmer, is leading the Tories in polls by more than 20 points and appears poised for a strong victory.
Like here at home, U.K. voters say the economy is their most important issue. Unlike here, however, K-12 education — known as “schools policy” in Britain — is expected to be a key flashpoint. Labour is leaning into the issue, knowing that it’s important to working-class families fed up with crumbling schools and a government that seems to care little about their children’s academic or mental well-being.
This is not the first time that Labour has had to rescue an education system in crisis. The last Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, rode into office in 1997 partly on the back of an oft-repeated three-word phrase: “Education, education, education.” Like his American counterpart, President Bill Clinton, Blair wasted little time pushing through education reforms.
Blair’s “national strategies” aimed at reforming the literacy and numeracy curriculums in primary schools. Just three years later, England’s lowest performing school districts in reading were outperforming the average district when the reforms began.
In 1999, the Labour government launched the Excellence in Cities Programme, which focused on improving education in six major urban areas, with the idea of rolling it out nationally after identifying the most effective reforms. Because the low-performing schools in London were so bad, with the city’s school system widely recognized as a dangerous “jungle,” Blair in 2002 launched the “London Challenge.” It identified the worst-performing schools, then placed a dedicated, senior education practitioner in each school to drive reforms. It was a data-driven program that identified precise information demonstrating the effectiveness of a practice in a particular school, then used that data to sell the method to other schools.
A decade later, London’s school system went from the worst in the nation to surpassing the rest of the U.K. For example, more than half of all low-income schoolchildren in “Inner London” met a high academic benchmark, compared to 40% achieving the same benchmark in the West Midlands, the next highest-achieving region.
Another Labour-initiated reform, in 2002, granted some schools autonomy from the “local authority control.” According to a 2007 National Audit Office report, in 2006 Prime Minister Blair announced plans for 400 independent academies to open by 2010, including 60 in London. Today, what we would call a “nonprofit public charter school network” is known in the U.K. as a “multi-academy trust.” There are now 1,460 multi-academy trust schools serving British students in every region.
After a recent Progressive Britain conference, I had the opportunity to visit one in an industrial neighborhood in East London. School 360 (as in 360 degrees, or “the whole child”) offers parents who value well-being, relationships, and creativity along with academic rigor a choice that would have been unheard of in prior years. It was refreshing to see young students learning clearly defined literacy and numeracy lessons in a play-based setting, thoroughly engaged and having a good time in the process.
But all is not rosy in the U.K.’s education sector. Many parents reportedly feel alienated from the schools. Absenteeism is shocking. There are some schools where as many as 57% of students are chronically absent. Shadow Education Secretary — and likely soon-to-be Education Secretary — Bridget Phillipson calls it “a crisis” and “a disaster.” Phillipson said, “Insofar as they do anything, the Conservative government’s policies only tackle the symptoms, not the causes.
As education standard bearer for the Labour Party, she is campaigning hard on promises to ensure free breakfast for every child, provide universal early learning, address mental health crisis by offering counselors, especially in secondary schools, recruiting and training 6,500 badly-needed teachers, while ending the use of teachers teaching subjects in which they are not trained. Accountability measures would include bringing in “annual checks for attendance, safeguarding, and offrolling” (illegally disenrolling poorly behaved or low achieving students).
Further, she vows to create a national registry for students. Similar to a social security number, it will ensure needed services and other relevant information follows children from school to school as they matriculate, to ensure that fewer students fall through the cracks. The registry would also keep track of homeschooled students to ensure that they are really learning up to standards, and that their mental health needs are being met.
She’s been quite clear in saying that she will not make any promises the government is unable to fund, and has pointed to ending tax exempt status for private schools as a source of revenue to fund Labour’s vision for getting Britain’s middle class and low-income students back on track, with expectations of excellence for all.
By marginalizing education as an issue, Philipson says the Tories have “left parents and their children to struggle too long in a failing system that the current Education Secretary herself rightly described as lose-lose-lose.”
But perhaps what is most powerful about Labour’s vision is that it includes real work to repair fractured ties with parents. This sends a message to working-class voters that Labour recognizes now — as it did in 1997 and throughout Prime Minister Blair’s decade of leadership — that earning parents’ trust is important. Labour knows it has work to do to gain parents’ enthusiastic participation in their children’s education, but they see that as vital to strengthening the ties that hold communities together.
On this side of the pond, all we get from Republicans are voucher schemes that further fractionalize school communities, fights over gender policies, and book-banning campaigns. From Democrats, we aren’t hearing much of anything on education policy.
Labour has less than a month to make its case to voters — we’ve got five. Let’s learn from Labour’s education vision and embrace the relevant policy issues as our own. Given that our students and parents face similar issues, Democrats seeking to make their case to middle-class families would do well to follow Labour’s lead on bringing education policy to “the heart of the national conversation,” as Phillipson puts it.
Tressa Pankovits is the Co-Director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project at Progressive Policy Institute
