Like all good education policy announcements, Stephen Twigg’s chose the trusted ‘three priorities’ method when delivering his keynote speech yesterday. Freedom, devolution and collaboration will provide the backbone to Labour’s education offer in 2015. But more importantly, they allow Labour to finally feel comfortable with our achievements in government.

The first of these priorities is the most pressing for Labour’s message on education. Read between the lines and the underlying message is an important truth. Freedom for schools never was a Conservative idea. The argument that Labour is buying into the ‘Tory narrative’ by advocating the idea of freedom doesn’t fit Labour’s recent history. In 1992, was the Labour party buying into the Tory narrative by calling for schools to ‘be freed from central government control’?

In the 13 years following 1997, we went further and did more for academic freedom than any Conservative education secretary has. But since leaving office, the party has felt uncomfortable with our time in government, particularly on education where some have been unsure of claiming credit for our academy programme. The Conservatives have taken free rein over it, painting anyone with legitimate concerns as ‘enemies of promise’.

Finally we are now wresting back control of the notion of freedom in education. This doesn’t, as Mark Ferguson has written, conflict with the original purpose of the academy programme.

Of course, it is true that academies were envisaged as a way to target failing schools. But academies grew into something bigger: a new and better way of teaching. We shouldn’t be ashamed of that, but the challenge now is one of levelling the playing field of state education. That’s something every Labour education secretary should do, and it is something Twigg has started to shape with this speech.

As part of this, allowing teachers flexibility over the curriculum they teach puts trust back into the profession. It is an idea that, along with vast support amongst teachers, has won over the general secretary of the NAHT who praised the ‘potential to excite and re-invigorate the profession’. What sane Labour government would limit that potential to just those teachers working in free schools or academies?

Michael Gove’s approach to reform – slapping the word ‘free’ in a school’s name and hoping for the best – has led to, as Jacqui Smith wrote, the ‘most centralised system in the history of education policy’. Labour’s position is not ideologically driven by the belief that competition is more important than good standards for all.

Parent-led academies, the kind which Labour would set up, is a policy as interesting for its potential impact on devolution as well as for its delivery. Stephen Twigg’s decision to bring David Blunkett back into Labour’s education policy is inspired – last year Blunkett’s pamphlet, In Defence of Politics Revisited, highlighted that in education policy ‘the main challenge will be to engage parents, governors and trustees in a bottom up-approach’.

The Tory response – that parent-led academies are free schools by another name – is indicative of the confusion at the Department for Education over Gove’s flagship policy. Their policy is to let the education secretary decide, from Whitehall, where a school is needed best. Politicians are no substitute for local parents; it is a policy that has clearly failed to tackle the serious shortage of primary school places, wasting money in the process.

Under Labour, parents and communities would be able to call for a school of any type – academies, maintained or trust schools – to be set up where they are needed, not where Whitehall thinks best.  It is an important distinction to be made, which should be driven repeatedly over the next two years.

In his book on education reform, Lord Adonis notes a memo he sent towards the end of Tony Blair’s premiership. It asked ‘does New Labour, including serious education reform, end with Tony Blair?’

Since 2007 the party has been unsure of the answer. Stephen Twigg took a big step this week in answering it, and he is rightly reclaiming the idea that school freedom is an inherently progressive, inherently Labour, one.

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Alex White is a member of Progress, writes for the Young Progressives column, and tweets @AlexWhiteUK

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Photo: Conservatives