Changing the narrative, but perhaps not yet the policy….

Posted on 26/08/2026

Melissa Benn reflects on what we might expect from Andy Burnham’s government on education

At the very least, it’s an amusing parlour game, to divide political leaders into tweakers and dreamers. The tweakers adapt to prevailing economic and political realities and adopt small-scale changes, while the dreamers give voice to visions of more fundamental change but often struggle to implement them. What’s interesting about Andy Burnham, who rose up through the New Labour years, is that he learned his trade through a period of incremental pragmatism but has returned in 2026 to speak the more generalist language of the visionary. In practice, this means that, while we applaud his moral mission to create a workable plan for social care, to end rough sleeping, to exert greater public control of the utilities and so on, we have, as yet, no detailed sense of how he will push through these reforms.

What implications does this have for Burnham’s approach on education? Again, we know what our new prime minister believes. He has a long record of being a clear and outspoken supporter of comprehensive education and opponent of the 11-plus (his father failed the test during a difficult period in his childhood). At the 2023 launch of Time’s Up for the Test (TUFTT), a grassroots group against selection, Burnham spoke passionately of the need for an ‘an education system where all children have an equal start in life’ and urged politicians to ‘call time on the test’. And in Head North, the 2024 book he co-authored with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham, he criticised what he saw as the ‘snobbery’ surrounding attitudes to comprehensive education, and called for a system in which ‘everyone [is] educated together, seeing life from all sides and a broad curriculum catering for all talents’. Burnham was also outspoken in his criticism of the structural reforms to schools, particularly free schools, introduced by the coalition government of 2010-15.

Such outspoken advocacy is unusual for a prominent Labour figure, and rare indeed for a modern Labour prime minister. Couple this with the fact that Burnham is a relaxed and talented communicator, already known as the TikTok PM, and it is highly possible that he could do more via his engaging and self-deprecating social media presence to shift attitudes to comprehensive education – singing its praises, showcasing its successes, emphasising its roots in justice and equality – than a generation of worthy books and conference resolutions. I say that as the author of a few worthy books myself, but with admiration and relief; it is extraordinary and enraging how such a successful educational project as comprehensive education has been so consistently maligned (as Burnham himself has acknowledged), its aims and effects consistently distorted.

Stonewalled

For all that, I doubt that we will, at least in the short term, be hearing plans for phasing out the remains of the 11-plus and a change in status of the 163 grammar schools that remain within England. Anyone who has canvassed Labour MPs – the first and most important constituency that Burnham will have to persuade – will know the complex set of educational experiences and aspirations at work, be that in an MP’s own background or in their decisions regarding their own children. A few years ago, I did a lot of that kind of lobbying as chair of Comprehensive Future and, while there was not a single Labour MP or minister who supported the class discrimination baked into the 11-plus, I became used to being courteously but consistently stonewalled when it came to discussing policies that might phase out the test. With more MPs and more leaders, such as Burnham himself, coming successfully through a comprehensive system, that picture may have shifted a little.

For now, the prime minister is more concerned about the dire position of the forgotten third, that 33 per cent of children who do not make the academic grade at GCSE, and who feed directly into the million or so young people not in employment, education or training, as highlighted by the recent Milburn report.[1] Burnham is deploying his precious store of early political capital to bring in a national version of the Manchester baccalaureate (MBacc), the scheme set up in Greater Manchester under his leadership to bring together schools, colleges, local authorities and employers to offer genuine technical and vocational options. However, in the words of one expert, the Department for Education (DfE) will have to be ‘seriously rewired’ – and the Treasury unexpectedly generous – to deliver such a scheme nationwide.

One other consequence of the MBacc-style plans will be the greater role allotted to local authorities, in both their established and new mayoral forms. While this will represent a shift away from the tendency of the last few decades to move so many aspects of education into semi-private hands, it also opens up the possibility of individual councils going their own way and, in the case of Reform, possibly deciding to reintroduce the 11-plus in areas currently free of it. (Reform already run Kent and Lincolnshire County Councils, both which have retained the 11-plus since 1944.)

Given the history of English technical and vocational education, successful reform will not be easy. The technical schools – originally proposed in the 1944 Education Act as the third element of the tripartite system, along with grammars and secondary moderns – languished from the start; and the more recent landscape is scattered with the acronyms of previous failed schemes, from the 1983 TVEI (Technical and Vocational Initiative) to the 1993 GNVQ (General National Vocational Qualifications) through to the low take-up of T-levels (technical qualifications considered on a par with A levels). Even if successful, there are bigger questions about whether Burnham’s scheme will bring the ‘parity of esteem’ between the ‘hard hat’ and the ‘graduation cap’ that he so clearly wants to see. Many sympathetic to the prime minister fear that a nationally adopted version of the MBacc will lead to a 14-plus, analogous to the iniquitous 11-plus with clear tramlines within secondary education set too early along existing class lines.

Fundamental reform

For this reason among many, some influential figures within Labour are now urging him to consider more fundamental reform of secondary education and, in particular, an updated version of the Tomlinson Review of 2004.[2] Commissioned by Tony Blair in the early part of his premiership,  the review’s findings were abandoned virtually a day or two after publication as Blair, weakened by the Iraq war, feared attack from the right on ‘standards’. If implemented, an updated version of Tomlinson would amount to a fundamental shake-up of the schooling system (comparable in radicalism to some of the 2010-14 reforms of the Gove era), leading to the eventual phasing out of GCSEs and A levels. In its place, a single four-level diploma would allow students to proceed at their own pace (leading sometimes to mixed-age classes) and to switch between, or blend, vocational and academic subjects. Tomlinson has made the case (as have many others in the years since, including the influential Rethinking Assessment group) for fewer exams, more emphasis on oracy (significantly cut back by the Tories), and more opportunity for all students, whatever their subject choices, to deepen practical and intellectual interests.

Being (brutally) realistic, I suspect that Burnham will need his own electoral mandate and more years in government to bring in reform of such a fundamental kind. It has always been the frustrating paradox of Labour administrations: instinctively closer to the teaching profession, Labour ministers hesitate to rip things up from the foundations, particularly after a Tory government has left the place a building site. Move too early and Burnham and Powell could face the exhaustion of a profession – both battered by, yet longing for, change. They would also have to manage the combined ire and media-backed might of what I have called elsewhere the New Education Establishment (NEE), a generation of politicians, policymakers, school leaders and influential commentators who have cheered on, benefited from or eventually adapted to the massive structural changes (and resulting opaque complexity) of the coalition/Tory years. Many believe that the NEE has continued since 2024 to exercise too much influence within the DfE and in the broader public culture. It was striking, for instance, how, during the 2024 election, there appeared to be a cross-party consensus that English education was in good shape and, at most, in need of some tweaking, despite the continuing and widely acknowledged failure of so many parts of the system.

Even so, I hope that, in time, Burnham, Powell et al. will begin to rethink the deeper purposes of our primary and secondary system, to stand up to the traditionalists and privatisers, and to create a secondary school system that can, in Burnham’s words, genuinely cater to all talents. There is so much good work out there to draw on – from the decades of writing and activism of the eminent Diane Ravitch in the United States to the fresh thinking of Sunderland head Sammy Wright – on what a more effective local school might look like; so much rethinking to be done on everything from admissions to the curriculum, teacher autonomy to forms of assessment. On these and many other themes, there are many experienced educationalists, left out in the cold by Labour for too long, who have much to offer this new administration. Of course, for any politician seriously interested to learn about what really goes on in the classroom or how to overturn 40-plus years of damaging neoliberal reform in education, reading the back numbers of FORUM, our august journal, would be an excellent start.

Melissa Benn is a writer and campaigner and a member of the FORUM editorial board.

Watch her lecture on the rise of the New Educational Establishment here: https://newvisionsforeducation.org.uk/fred-jarvis-memorial-lecture-2023

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report

[2] https://education-uk.org/documents/pdfs/2004-tomlinson-report.pdf