There'll be no winners after Labour has wrecked the education system

Bridget Phillipson is destroying one of our greatest success stories

- Toby Young

In 2010 I debated Ed Balls on Newsnight about the Conservatives’ education plans. “The danger is that there will be winners in this policy,” he warned, a line later quoted by David Cameron to ridicule Labour’s attitude to his education

reforms. Fifteen years later, those reforms have proved to be the Tories’ proudest legacy. The performance of English schoolchildren in the international PISA league tables between 2009 and 2022 improved dramatically, rising from 21st to seventh in maths, 19th to ninth in reading and 11th to ninth in science.

Compare this with the performance of children in SNP-run Scotland and Labour-run Wales, which stubbornly resisted every reform. In the same period, Scotland slumped from 15th to 25th in maths, while Wales fell from 19th to 29th in science. Their results in the other subjects weren’t much better.

As Michael Gove — the politician responsible for these reforms — says, it is like one of those famous studies involving twins separated at birth. Over the past couple of decades we have carried out a twin study on an epic scale, educating children in England according to one philosophy and children in Scotland and Wales according to another. The results are in and there’s a clear winner. Which begs the question: Why does Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s current education secretary, want to dismantle the reforms that have turned English state education into the envy of the world? I’m not exaggerating. New Zealand, which was once lauded for its high-performing education system, is currently planning to replicate all the innovations that have led to England’s success, including free schools.

Rise of the academies