Schools won’t open unless Sir Keir reins in teaching unions
LABOUR leader Sir Keir Starmer, writing in today’s Mail on Sunday, is very free with his criticism of the Government. That is right and proper. He is in charge of the official Opposition. In some cases, he has justice on his side. Much of what he says about the clumsy and unfair regrading of A-levels is correct and cannot be denied.
The failure of Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, and of Ofqual, to foresee a crisis that could be – and was – accurately predicted by Huy Duong, the father of a teenage A-level candidate, is shocking. The anguish, disappointment and upset caused by the inept and unjust regrading of results has been deeply distressing for many families, and will take months to sort out.
Let us hope Mr Williamson manages to avoid a similar mess when GCSE results are released next week.
Even if he does, it is increasingly hard to see why he continues to survive in his post. But perhaps his greatest test lies in the reopening of schools next month, now days away and vital to the economic recovery on which so much depends.
And on this issue, Sir Keir is on much weaker ground. Boris Johnson, writing here a week ago, made his determination to achieve this reopening clear beyond doubt. By contrast, the Labour leader says only that he wants and expects children to be back at school. He offers vaguely to help, but he places all the responsibility for the reopening of schools on the Prime Minister, saying it lies ‘squarely at the door of Downing Street’.
Yet in a free society this cannot be true. We do not have a dictatorship in which teachers can be ordered to go back to work, but a free country in which they must be persuaded to do so. How will this happen if the main Opposition party, historically and morally linked to the union movement, and owing many of its votes to teachers, sends out mixed signals? Yet Sir Keir, in the midst of his attacks on the Government, manages somehow to omit any mention at all of the teachers’ unions.
No good Labour leader has ever got anywhere without at some point taking on the power of the TUC, and of the unions in general, as Sir Keir is going to find out sooner or later, whatever he does. In this case, the problem is absolutely clear. The education unions have seen a Tory Government in trouble and have failed to help it thanks to political prejudice, even though the main victims of this failure are in fact the schoolchildren of this country and their parents.
It is striking that Sir Keir does not find room in his article to refer to this problem.
He should also be frank about his own personal position. Because his wife is a key worker in the NHS, his children have been able to attend school throughout the crisis, a circumstance which must surely have made the problem seem less urgent in the Starmer household than elsewhere.
The Opposition Leader deserves some marks for at least trying, but if he really wishes to succeed, he must do better in future. The real effort is still being made by Boris Johnson, and the public must be strongly behind him – as it was at the last Election – as he takes this, the most important single step in getting the country back to work.