It should have felt like a celebration. When I first booked my pass back in early summer, I fully expected this year’s Labour conference to feature little more than thousands of delegates dancing around high-fiving one another.
But instead the mood was serious and sombre. It was super busy, yes, but the conversations in the never-ending queues to buy an overpriced vegan roll were a very long way from euphoric.
The ongoing row over political donations cast a long shadow. (“When will No 10 get a grip?” was a remarkably common refrain.) So too did the Iron Chancellor’s grip on public finances.
For the many teachers, heads and policy wonks in Liverpool, the absence of free-flowing investment into our schools did somewhat undermine what I had hoped might be an ideas fest.
And among the more radical progressives and union leaders, concern was never far from the surface that Becky Francis’s curriculum and assessment review was a little too conservative in its proposed scope.
As a result, there was a slight ‘Christmas is cancelled’ vibe. But I’m not so sure “bah humbug” was the correct response.
In fact, a completely new set of values was clearly identifiable. Of course, these values had been present in previous conferences, but these were now the values of the governing party.
Government ministers talked endlessly about inclusion of the poorest in our society, of the need to radically fix the SEND system and, overarchingly, of the need to do something urgent about the chilling impact of child poverty on attainment in schools.
This was a conference with social justice, not just social mobility, at the core of its educational debate.
The importance of a creative education and the co-curriculum was at the centre of the debate too. Most remarkably, of course, it was there in Keir Starmer’s speech, which featured a lengthy and poetic passage about the impact learning the flute had had on his early life.
I’m not sure ‘bah humbug’ was the correct response
There was a teeny bit of concrete policy too. Squint and you could see the very early foundations of a new government attitude to schools beginning – just beginning – to become real.
It was there in Reeves freeing up a few million to begin rolling out a universal breakfast club offer. And it was present in Bridget Phillipson’s plans to start a pilot for turning spare primary capacity into new state nurseries.
All of this does not, of course, amount to the full-scale rollout of a multi-billion pound national Sure Start 2.0 programme. But this is not 1997, the economy is not booming (far from it), and the tax receipts are not overflowing.
But it does at least show the direction of travel: that what happens immediately beyond the school gates, around the fringes of the core curriculum and the core business of schools, especially for the poorest in society (not just the poor-but-clever) is central to how Bridget Philipson and her colleagues think about their mission.
And so, while the announcements remain small-scale, we do now have a very strong sense of the terms of reference for the education policy debate over the next few years. We know where they want to go – and that does include having an idea of what potentially large-scale stuff like a new version of Sure Start might try to achieve.
So no, it isn’t Christmas for the education sector. But pay has risen, reform of Ofsted is underway, and the consultation for the curriculum and assessment review is open.
All things considered, there is a nascent sense that brighter days are ahead for teachers and, most importantly, their pupils. Christmas might be looking austere, but there were enough Easter eggs here to suggest we could yet have a lot of fun in spring.
In the meantime, while the government’s focus is diverted by getting the national finances in order, perhaps the sector ought to get busy thinking about how it would like to make these new governing philosophies tangible.
The moment for big bold education ideas is now.
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