There are few political potatoes as hot as those which Gordon Brown tossed to Ed Balls when he appointed him to head the newly created Department for Children, Schools and Families at the end of June. Trust schools, academies, faith schools, selection: issues which, aside from Iraq, have probably provoked more emotion, backbench revolts and hostile conference resolutions than any other since Labour came to power. No wonder that the new prime minister entrusted the task of defusing some of this anger to one of his longest-serving, closest and most trusted allies.

Through opposition and into government, Balls has been at Gordon Brown’s side for nearly fourteen years. Now he’s charged with running a department which not only has to tackle some of the most contentious issues Labour has faced in government, but which will also be on the frontline of the pre-election battle between Labour and the Conservatives. David Cameron has long believed that presenting himself as ‘family friendly’ will be critical to whether he makes it across the threshold of Number 10. Balls is determined to frustrate that ambition and appears to relish the coming fight.

In the three months he’s been in the job, Balls has been gently recalibrating Labour’s education policy. Are we witnessing a return to the mantra of ‘standards not structures’, the formula in the run-up to the 1997 election which skilfully finessed the party’s tensions? ‘I think the test of our education policy … is whether we are raising standards for all children, whether we have every young person coming out of school equipped to go to university, to get a job [or] an apprenticeship, to do well in life,’ says the children’s secretary. And, eluding to the battle over trust schools early last year, he concedes: ‘At the beginning of this parliament, there was sometimes the perception that we were talking about structures and structural change for its own sake. I’m absolutely not against structural change, but it’s not an end in itself. The end is raising standards for all.’

The children’s secretary also rebuts press reports that he’s planning an expansion of faith schools. ‘I have no departmental plan decided here in Whitehall that there should be more faith schools in Britain. I want those to be decisions which are made by local authorities and local communities, by parents and schools themselves.’ Instead, he wants faith schools to be ‘partners with me in my agenda to drive up standards, to make the admissions code work, and to make our community cohesion guidance work across the whole community of faith and non-faith schools alike.’

But schools policy is not the only tricky political issue Balls finds in his in-tray: the prime minister has handed him the ‘respect’ unit from the Home Office and shared responsibility for youth justice with the Ministry of Justice. So how does he respond to concerns that Asbos are being overused? Balls accepts that Asbos can be a ‘powerful way of tackling anti-social behaviour’ but he is keen to see both a change in the rhetoric ministers employ when describing them as well as a substantive shift in their use.

‘I don’t think that a society which over 10 to 15 years tripled or quadrupled the number of Asbos would be a society which you would think was necessarily going in the right direction,’ Balls argues. Instead, the children’s secretary wants to see a ‘much greater stress on early intervention and protection’. ‘Asbos should be the point you get to when all your other previous interventions have failed. Civilised societies prevent problems rather than dealing with them as they arise. Our ambition should be to see the number of Asbos falling over time.’

But Balls has a wider goal: to reverse the demonisation of children and young people which, some would argue, ministers’ own rhetoric has on occasion contributed to: ‘What we’ve got to do is break out of a world in which every time we see a young person on a street corner it’s potentially a young person about to cause trouble. What I want is to see young people for what they are, which is young adults with a contribution to make and needs and rights in the same way everybody else [has].’

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Balls gives short shrift to David Cameron’s late summer warnings that the spate of youth-related knife and gun crime was the result of Britain’s ‘broken society’. While recognising the need to take a ‘tough approach’ to gang crime where it has occurred in ‘a small number of our inner cities’, the children’s secretary warns against any attempt to ‘misrepresent the reality of life in our country’. The Tory leader, he believes, is simply playing politics with the issue: ‘David Cameron is trying…to appeal to a part of his own party which really can’t accept the way the world has changed and prefers things pre-the late 1960s when you a had a more simple set of family relations.’ However, that’s not the world which most Britons now inhabit, believes Balls, and ‘the fact that we have a more complex and diverse society doesn’t mean it’s broken down.’

Balls is equally dismissive of the idea that, in the heat of an election campaign, Cameron’s simple message of tax breaks for marriage will trump the more nuanced package of policies – Sure Start, tax credits, early intervention and prevention – which characterise Labour’s family agenda. The Tories, he argues, are offering the same formula of tax cuts financed by lower spending on public services that has cost them the last three elections. People are no more ready for such an approach than they were ‘five or 10 years ago’, he suggests.

And, befitting his Treasury background, Balls is eager to forensically dissect Cameron’s marriage tax break proposal. It not only excludes lone parents and those who have been widowed, he argues, it will also penalise those coming out of abusive relationships. ‘Under the Cameron proposal,’ he argues, ‘you not only deal with the reality of the abuse and then being left by the income-earning partner, but you also have your income cut because you no longer qualify for a family tax break.’

Balls believes that Cameron’s ‘anarchy in the UK’ rhetoric and his proposed marriage tax breaks are of a piece; reflections of the fact that, ‘like previous Tory leaders, he’s flunked the leadership test’. Cameron failed, says Balls, to go back to first principles, identify why Tory values and policies were out of touch and win that argument within his party before uniting it around ‘a modern Conservative position’ which he could then have attempted to sell to the country. Instead, like William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, Cameron has been forced to try and reunite the Tory party around policies which ‘just expose that the equilibrium, the centre of thinking, of the Conservative party is out of touch with the centre ground of British politics’.

Balls is also distinctly underwhelmed by his first skirmish with Cameron on education policy. He had long expected that the first week back to school in early September would turn into a tussle between the two main parties about education policy. But the Tory leader’s opening salvo – a Sunday newspaper article suggesting that children failing the basics at primary school should be kept back a year – was rapidly exposed as an ‘unworkable gimmick’, condemned by teaching unions and headteachers alike. ‘That’s the last proposal on education we saw [from the Tories] that week,’ says a bemused Balls. The Conservative leader, he evidently believes, must try harder.