Tristram Hunt’s speech to the Labour conference was short and sweet. It was laden with sweeteners for party delegates, which is as things should be at these events, but perhaps his Blairite predecessors are feeling a little sour after the Shadow Education Secretary spent a fair bit of his time on the stage denouncing the principles they once espoused.
Clearly the aim was to keep the party faithful happy – and they’d spent the session beforehand making quite clear that they wanted a screeching reversal over many of the Coalition’s education reform – because Hunt also attempted to galvanise them by talking about Michael Gove. And when he got bored of talking about Gove, he talked about Nicky Morgan, who he described as ‘a “Continuity Gove”, auto-pilot Education Secretary’.
He emphasised that the core of Labour’s education reform was collaboration, not the Conservative principle of competition, saying:
‘But schools, like teachers, work best as a team.
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