Pupils return to UK schools as they reopen for Autumn term

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Schools and colleges around the country are coming off the back end of dishing out teacher-based assessments for the second year in a row. The confusion, U-turns and resignations which marred last summer’s results were this year avoided. Yet, Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, still found himself at the forefront of attacks from Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.

The Opposition leader went further than before, calling on Boris Johnson to sack Mr Williamson for failing children during the pandemic and presiding over a “yawning gap” in attainment between private and state school pupils.

The grade inflation this year was higher in private schools, which saw a rise of nine percent in A and A* grades, compared to a six percent increase elsewhere.

It is now widely believed that Mr Williamson could be replaced by either the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, or the vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, at the next reshuffle after two years of chaotic exam policies.

Sir Keir outright rejected plans from some in the Government to scrap letter grades for A-levels in favour of a numerical 1-9 grading system similar to that seen with GSCEs, touted as a way to help get over the disparities of in-house assessment grades because of the pandemic.

Others, like deputy leader Angela Rayner, have gone as far as to suggest that Labour would transform Britain’s education landscape by scrapping the “tax loophole” benefits private schools are privy to.

While some have claimed Labour is offering a legitimate upheaval of an archaic schooling system, others have warned that the party’s plans risk plunging schoolchildren into the midst of the wider culture wars.

Joanna Williams, director of Cieo, a think-tank, and head of education and culture at Policy Exchange, told Express.co.uk that a Labour government would “politicise education”, one of the final frontiers in what would likely be a vast campaign of “wokeism”.

She said: “I think they would be absolutely disastrous for education because they would politicise it to such a degree that it would be very hard to distinguish what would be genuine knowledge and good academic standards from the political values that the curriculum would be expected to impart.”

Ms Williams believes that Labour, if successful in any future General Election, would act in the way that Joe Biden’s Democratic Party has since assuming office in January.

She said that, while Mr Biden portrayed himself as someone who would “calm down the culture wars,” he has himself become a “culture warrior”.

She continued: “And I think the Labour Party would be exactly the same.

“They don’t differentiate culture war issues from ‘real politics’.

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“So then these kinds of culture war politics are, and would be, their politics: wanting everything to take the knee and so on.”

Similar school policies might be transferred from the US into the UK, she said.

Earlier this year, on his first day in office, Mr Biden delivered what many publications deemed a “victory for transgender athletes”, allowing those people to participate as their identified gender in high school and college sports.

He called on all federal agencies to enforce a US supreme court decision from last year that expanded the definition of sex discrimination to include discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as gender identity – with language that explicitly referenced the arena of high school and college sports.

Many states have since pushed back against the decision, arguing that those who were born as female now compete at a disadvantage.

Sir Keir has been relatively quiet over the issue of transgender sports, even keeping hush over those in his own party embroiled in alleged transphobia. 

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He has, however, quipped that the Conservative Party must match Labour’s “ambition for our children’s learning and their futures”.

His comments came after GCSE and A-level results day, where he told the BBC that there is “baked-in unfairness” in education, claiming that the results proved this.

A record 44.8 percent of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland received A* or A grades through the teacher-assessed system this week.

In England, 6.9 percent of students were awarded three A*s, compared with 4.3 percent in 2020 and 1.6 percent in 2019.

But the increase in A grades was 50 percent higher among private schools than comprehensives, and more than double the increase seen among students at sixth form colleges.

Ofqual analysis found that the attainment gap for an A grade or higher between pupils on free school meals, black students or those with a “very high level of deprivation” and their peers has widened since 2019.

Offering insight into how Labour might address the issue, he said: “The attainment gap was too big before we went into the pandemic and it’s even bigger now.

“The gap now is getting bigger and bigger and there’s baked-in unfairness.

“And, yet again, it’s those who most need the support of the Government who aren’t getting that support and, frankly, the way the Government has run education in the last few years is utterly chaotic.”

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