With its edgy and wind-battered seafront, Brighton is a city made for drama.

And so it proved this week as party infighting and Keir Starmer’s battle to wrest control took centre stage at the Labour Party conference.

It wasn’t only out in the murky English Channel that waters were choppy.

Central to the vision Starmer set out in his leader’s speech was the role of education.

And the drama was apparent here too, as he referenced Tony Blair’s famous pledge at the 1996 Labour conference that the party’s top three priorities were “education, education and education”.

“Education,” said Sir Keir, “is so important I am tempted to say it three times.”

It’s a good line. But what of the substance behind the rhetorical flourish?

The big ideas 

Party conferences are seldom big on detail, tending instead to deliver broad-brush stuff. But they at least give a direction of travel, a tonal sense of what a party stands for or against.

Of the 2021 version of Labour, we learned the following:

• If elected, Labour will launch “the most ambitious school improvement plan in a generation”.

• It will focus on practical life skills, reinstating two weeks of compulsory work experience and guaranteeing that every young person gets to see a careers adviser.

• It will “write a curriculum for tomorrow” and will add, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic, a fourth pillar of digital skills.

• Labour’s “National Excellence Programme” will include recruiting thousands of new teachers; reform of Ofsted to support struggling schools; and providing teachers and headteachers with continuing professional development and training.

• It would reform the “citizenship” statutory programme to include practical life skills; guarantee that every child has access to a digital device at home; and ensure access to weekly extracurricular activities and after-school clubs.

• It will pay for its plans by ending “the charitable status of England’s private schools, ending the VAT and business rate exemptions that they currently benefit from, raising £1.7 billion”.

Some bold ideas, to be sure. What was just as notable, though, was what was not said.

Gone was the anti-academy rhetoric of its 2019 manifesto (and of previous shadow education secretary Angela Rayner), while “scrapping” Ofsted has become “reforming” Ofsted.

There’s no mention either of that big policy centrepiece of the 2019 manifesto, the National Education Service.

On the first of these - the previous tendency towards academy bashing - the party’s change of tone was apparent at an ASCL fringe event where shadow schools minister Peter Kyle and shadow children’s minister Tulip Siddiq made it clear there was no appetite for huge structural reform - much to the chagrin of some activists in the audience.

Ms Siddiq cautioned against “pendulum politics” and expressed a wish to “create on the existing system”.

A welcome shift

This change in tone is significant and welcome.

In political terms, given the large numbers of teachers, leaders, families and communities who are rightly proud of their academy schools, this is a smart move - and the right move.

After all, more than 50 per cent of England’s young people are now educated in standalone academies or trusts.

Whatever your view on the rights and wrongs of the academisation programme, the reality is that unpicking that system would involve massive disruption, legal battles and expense.

Instead of fighting ideological battles of the past, energies and resources are best focused on the future, on the things that will close the attainment gap between rich and poor and take our education system from being good to being world class.

These are ideas around shaping a curriculum fit for the future, a greater emphasis on professional development and pedagogical excellence, and better support for struggling schools.

And we can see the seeds of such thinking in Labour’s announcements this week.

Private school debate persists

However, there is one ideological battle that Labour is less willing to relinquish: its desire to end the charitable status held by many independent schools and their associated tax exemptions.

Lots of people may find this an attractive policy, reasoning that institutions that charge fees of many thousands of pounds a year should not be classed as charities and should not benefit from tax breaks.

If ending this exemption raises money that would be spent on state education, then so much the better.

It’s a powerful argument, but one that might not survive first contact with reality. Research commissioned by the Independent Schools Council in 2018 found that making independent schools liable to VAT would result in fees being unaffordable for many parents and some schools closing entirely.

It estimated that between 17.1 and 25.4 per cent of pupils would have to move from the independent to the state sector, either immediately or over the next four years. 

This would compromise Labour’s modelling in a number of ways:

• It would reduce the amount of revenue it estimates this policy will raise (because fewer parents will be paying fees).
• It will increase the cost of state education (because up to 135,000 more pupils would be in state schools).
• It will increase capital expenditure on schools (because the school estate will need to be expanded to accommodate these extra pupils). 

It would also, as the ISC report pointed out, “cause significant upheaval and disruption to the lives and education of many tens of thousands of children, often at key stages of their lives”.

There is, then, at the very least, a risk of unintended consequences from this policy. And, whatever your view, it is unlikely - in reality - to fund Labour’s National Excellence Programme.

Focus on the many

So I’d counsel that Labour should beware of throwing a red-meat policy to its delegates which may end up not providing the solution that was promised.

Rather than fixate on the education of 7 per cent of young people in independent schools, surely the real moral high ground for Labour lies in making state education for all the others universally and compellingly world class, something that (as historian RH Tawney put it) would demonstrate a long-standing precept: “What the good parent would want for their child, the state should want for all children.”

That’s the bigger prize at stake today.

And against a backdrop of a party in power that appears to have run out of ideas when it comes to education improvement, Labour in opposition has a window of opportunity to develop the key policies finally to deliver equity and excellence for every child from every background.

This week’s conference, despite its stormy backdrop, hinted at a Labour Party recognising that if they are to win power again then a bold education programme - one based on evidence of what actually works rather than policy crowd-pleasers - will need to be central to its ambition.

And “ambition” is the key word.

Because we already have a good education system. Now it’s time to make it world class.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders