Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you, Graeme, for that introduction, and thank you to everyone at Ruskin College for hosting us today.
We’re here to mark 50 years since Jim Callaghan gave his famous speech as Prime Minister, right here.
There’s a chance he wrote a first draft on an Apple 1 Computer.
But it’s unlikely, I think.
Apple’s very first personal computer had come to market six months before Callaghan stood up to speak, but it only had space for about 400 words before you maxed out the memory.
Even for a speaker of Callaghan’s concision, you would need a few more than 400 words to put education to rights.
He had access to more powerful computers of course, but they filled whole rooms.
Yet 50 years later your average teenager has in their pocket a supercomputer almost infinitely more powerful than anything available to the prime ministers and presidents of the 1970s.
The world in which our children are growing up is changing dramatically – perhaps even more than Callaghan could have imagined.
And in so many ways, that is deeply exciting.
The full span of human knowledge and creativity at our fingertips.
The chance to scale ideas, to share what works, to support and spread learning as never before.
But what does it mean for children if their childhoods continue to drift, from offline to online, outdoors to indoors, from face-to-face to screen-to-screen?
And it’s not just childhood that’s changing.
The shape of the family is shifting too.
The world in which one parent goes off to work, and the other has dinner ready on the table at the end of the day, that world is over.
There are other big changes – spanning culture, the economy, and our society.
And as a country we succeed not when we run from change, but when we embrace it, and when we prepare our young people especially to embrace it.
Our approach should be enthusiastic, but it must be thoughtful too, because there are risks as well as rewards, and they aren’t split evenly across classes or communities.
In some ways technology can enhance childhood and learning, but in others it can harm development.
And when it comes to broader changes like global labour markets, artificial intelligence, the green transition… for people equipped with the right knowledge and skills, these are huge opportunities.
But for some communities, they look more like risks.
We need to think carefully about how we prepare our children both to seize and to shape the opportunities of this changing world… and to manage the rising uncertainty that I know we all feel.
The more things change, the more we need to hold clear in our minds what education should be for.
And that’s what I want to cover today.
I want to talk about how the revolution I am leading in education – and in early years especially – can set people up for lives of opportunity, to have control and choice in a changing world, and to once again feel part of something bigger.
Above all, I want to talk about education as freedom.
For all this talk of change, some things are eternal.
‘The abiding problem of British education is easily stated we provide excellence for a few instead of the majority’.
Those aren’t my words.
They’re Tony Blair’s, spoken in 1996, to mark two decades since the Ruskin speech, where Callaghan had said something very similar himself.
I fear there’s still some truth to those words today.
In the wake of both speeches, new waves of progress lifted our schools.
Raising the school leaving age. The way we use evidence.
Teaching as a graduate profession.
Academies. The literacy Hour. The numeracy Hour. And much more besides.
School standards have risen – thanks in huge part to the heroic efforts of our teachers and support staff.
Yet gaps persist.
The pernicious gaps between the achievement of the richest and poorest children.
Between white working-class children and virtually every other group.
Between children with SEND and those without.
Hundreds of schools and thousands of pupils were left to underachieve, month after month, and year after year, often in towns scarred by deindustrialisation and unemployment, where the inspiration to achieve has been worn down and that aspiration to get on has gradually drained away.
The gaps widened because we have a school system that caters only for the median child, and not for every child.
And they mean that still for far too many children, background means destiny, too often shunted into adult lives bare of opportunity.
They are forced to go through life forever on the back foot.
Global trends and new technology for them mean closing doors not doors opening.
I hear from young people who apply for hundreds of jobs and get nothing but silence in return. They have to take whatever job comes their way.
This is what so many people misunderstand about freedom.
They see it simply as the absence of constraint.
But it requires the presence of choice too.
Freedom means nothing if you only have one option to choose from.
That’s how a great education can bestow freedom.
It grants the power to meet change from a position of strength.
Turning down a great job offer for an even better one.
The special kind of joy and fulfilment that comes from the chance to fully explore all of your talents.
The knowledge and skills to choose not just the career you want, but the life you want.
A great education gives that bright freedom to so many young people, but we withhold it from others, from the same families and communities, generation after generation.
In education we can break that cycle of despair, we can build a brighter future.
Callaghan knew just how important that is.
He told Lord Donoughue, the head of his policy unit at the time, that the Ruskin speech was the most important he ever gave.
So I am continuing that revolution in school standards. And our white paper shows the way forward.
High standards in every classroom.
Academic excellence for every child.
Inclusive mainstream a reality.
The school day enriched.
A curriculum that secures knowledge and develops skills.
But that’s not enough.
Education must be about more than what happens in classrooms between teachers and children.
That’s what we’ve learned in the time since those speeches.
What we’ve learned about children and what we’ve learned about education.
We’ve learned that what happens outside of our schools matters for what happens inside our schools.
So we need to look beyond, and – crucially – focus on the years that come before.
From the first joyous morning when they come home from the hospital, some children get all of the support they could ever need.
They are played with every day. Read to every night.
They get the very best early education from highly trained professionals, bonding with children their own age.
Their parents or carers have quality advice and guidance, and support from grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbours.
But other children, they get very little of that.
Maybe there’s no quality childcare at the end of the road.
Or maybe their parents are juggling two or three jobs and just can’t make it back for a bedtime story.
Nowhere to go for parenting advice.
No network of experienced mams and dads to lean on when times get tough.
No clubs or classes where they can bring their babies and watch them grow with others their own age.
All parents want the best for their children. Socio-economic status does not hold back the hopes we have for our children.
Love is not limited by class.
When I was growing up, we didn’t have much, but we had that.
It’s freedom that makes the difference, freedom so often denied to children because they are poor, because their families lack not just material goods but power, opportunity, and choice.
And we’re learning more all the time about how those differences in early childhood trickle down into school and then later life.
As Alan Milburn’s Review shows, the roots of our NEET crisis dig deep.
From not included in quality early years, to not engaged in school, to not in education, employment or training.
A million young people and counting.
We’ve got to stop this at the source.
Blair’s Ruskin speech might have focused on schools, but his government pioneered joined-up family support in Sure Start centres.
And research has shown that they changed so many lives, especially for those children who needed it the most.
I’ve wasted no time in building an education system that gives every child the best start in life, recognising early years as a core part of education, in the same way as schools, colleges and universities.
Not a luxury. Not something to keep the little ones quiet.
Rather, early years as a serious and sophisticated stage of education, that’s what the latest neuroscience shows us.
Neuroplasticity in our little ones is a marvellous thing.
Parachute a two-year-old into any village in the world and they’ll soon be talking like a local.
But no matter how hard you study a new language as an adult – whether it’s French or Farsi – you’ll always sound a bit like an outsider.
Every young brain has that wonderous but fleeting power to absorb and adapt, not just language, but curiosity, confidence, self-regulation, social development, emotion, and love.
The nurture we receive in our first few years truly can enrich the rest of our lives.
And the simple truth is that issues are easier to resolve or manage when we spot them sooner.
That’s what the science tells us about special educational needs and disabilities.
Early intervention can be truly life changing for children with SEND.
But if needs are left unchecked, they can spiral in school.
The way we approach early years education has to reflect its importance, with staff as highly trained educational professionals.
Just last month we introduced bonuses to recruit and retain qualified early years teachers where they are needed most.
But all of you here today know that the state can’t and shouldn’t do this alone.
It’s here to partner with communities and families, not replace them, to lift them up, not crowd them out.
We need an early years system that supports parents as well as children.
The parent-baby connection – it’s not just precious, it’s primal.
As Blair said 30 years ago, parents are their child’s first and most important teachers.
As parents we can make learning a core part of home life.
We can support them to fail, give them a hug and encourage them to go again.
But parenting is hard. And the changes in our world are making it harder, with so much uncertainty, with working parents juggling endless commitments, and with the constant temptation to reach for a screen.
At one point or another, every parent has lain awake at night, worrying about whether they’re doing the wrong thing and damaging their child for ever.
But our attitude to risk as parents can shape the way our children approach and manage risk for the rest of their lives.
In the past it was far more common for children to walk to school by themselves, to bike around the neighbourhood, to go out with their mates on a Saturday morning, with no means of keeping in touch beyond having to be back by the time the streetlights came on.
With the right boundaries and support, children build trust and independence, and that’s an important rite of passage.
If we allow that to change, then anxious parenting can be part of the mix that leads to a generation of anxious children, stuck in a Peter Pan period of extended childhood, in which they are left unequipped to cope with the demands of adult life in our ever-changing world.
Take the death of the Saturday job.
Whether paper round or shelf stacking, in the past our teenagers were supported into the world of work, with more responsibility earned and given gradually.
Now too many are left to stumble straight from childhood to adulthood – but end up in NEET-hood instead.
There’s no freedom to be found there.
How we respond says a lot about our society.
Do we leave parents alone in their struggle?
Or do we build communities of support, from which those parents eventually graduate, and lend a helping hand to the next generation of mams and dads?
I choose the latter.
I am redefining early years as not only part of our education system, but part of our communities too, sitting at the centre of our towns and cities, our Best Start Family Hubs leading the way, updating Sure Start as we head towards the 2030s.
More than 200 new hubs have already opened in areas previously denied this support.
Families are now getting the right help on everything from feeding and parenting support to financial and housing advice, all in one place.
And we will secure our Best Start Family Hubs for the future, leaving nothing to chance, instead cementing their legacy in law, building the long-term social infrastructure of our age, with local authorities accountable to local families.
Education as a source and convener of community connection, a place to meet, that’s how it becomes a mutual responsibility that we take on together.
Because here’s another misunderstanding about freedom.
It’s not the absence of constraint, and neither is it the absence of obligation.
True freedom comes from strong networks of support, a community upon which we can rely when times are tough, but to which we can contribute as well, respecting our obligations to one another.
These are the ties that bind us as a country.
Nowhere is that more true or more powerful than in education.
Callaghan was right that education is for all of us to shape, not the realm of experts alone.
Only together can we nurture the next generation of parents and partners, of artists and accountants, scientists and social workers, colleagues, neighbours, friends.
A future of opportunity for all our children – and their mothers too.
Because you can draw a direct line from affordable childcare to the economic empowerment of women.
The choice for mothers to pursue their careers, to hold their economic hopes in their own hands.
But there’s one further point I want to make.
It matters not only what we do in early years, but who has access.
Because it’s disadvantaged communities who benefit the most.
That’s not a platitude, it’s proven.
Children who spend more time in formal early education do better in their exams later on, and the data tells us that the relationship is stronger for disadvantaged children.
Not just a bit stronger.
Twice as strong.
Yet we know that around half of all children from low-income families are missing out on formal childcare and early years education.
So the rollout of government-funded childcare is a huge step forward.
A giant leap towards establishing the social infrastructure our country needs, which empowers families and women and children most of all.
But we also know there are families this does not and will not reach, families who cannot afford quality childcare, because they aren’t working, or aren’t working enough to qualify.
But many are struggling to work precisely because they cannot afford quality childcare, stuck in a loop that serves nobody, and the children least of all.
So by extending government-funded childcare into these communities, not only would we be supporting parents into work, not only would we be supporting disadvantaged children with quality early years, but we would no longer be cutting off those families from society, no longer fostering disengagement, with parents in work and children in childcare.
It’s my view – backed up by the best evidence – that we’ve reached the limit of what we can achieve with the current system.
The time has come to build towards a bolder future, a future of universal early years education.
We’ve had comprehensive schooling since before Callaghan stood up to speak, but truly comprehensive education?
The wait goes on, because we won’t have achieved comprehensive education from birthplace to workplace in this country until every family has equal access to childcare.
Finishing what we’ve started.
Not just promising the social infrastructure of our age, but delivering it for every child, setting them up to achieve and thrive.
Delivering it for every family, setting them up with the choice and the freedom to start working, and to work more.
Our failure to take that next step is costing this country in so many ways.
Early years is a time bursting with hope. You can feel it in our best nurseries.
Those little boys and girls, their lives so full of colour, their futures so full of possibility.
Every child deserves that bright hope and opportunity.
No child deserves to start school behind because their parents are poor.
If we want to avoid million more children ending up NEET, if we want to ward off the grey hopelessness that darkens too many communities, if we want a society in which every young person can grow up and contribute to our economy, then it must start in the early years.
I can’t tell you how important that is.
Because today there are communities disengaging wholesale from education.
And they are at risk of disengaging from the entire social contract, withdrawing their democratic consent, retreating into the easy answers of division and hate, of anger and despair.
A whole generation who feel as though they are in the back seats of their own lives.
No inspiration. No aspiration.
It’s something I saw when I grew up on my street, I was lucky. I had wonderful teachers who stretched me, and a family who prized education above all else.
But so many of my friends weren’t so lucky, just like so many white working class children growing up today.
Society still tells them that to succeed they need to be either exceptional, or exceptionally lucky.
So this government is taking a new approach.
Not running away from the hard problems but running towards them.
Generational reform and the expansion of early years is just the start.
Seeing through our plan for SEND is another case in point.
Mine is a vision for education that runs from birthplace to workplace.
And I’ll say it again, that includes doing all we can to raise standards in our schools.
From there it’s about giving people genuine choice to pursue the route that’s right for them.
Callaghan chose to give his speech here because Ruskin College gave adults a ‘second chance’ at the university route, for people who found their path blocked the first time around.
In the fifty years since that speech, the share of young people going to university has shot up.
That’s something we should celebrate an opportunity once the preserve of the privileged few is now in reach for so many.
But today there are young people who fill out their UCAS forms, I fear not because university is their preferred choice among many great options, but because they see it as the only choice, the only ambitious choice, the only choice that their friends and family will approve of.
The other choices are tarred as low on quality and short on aspiration.
That’s no choice at all really.
It’s a situation that strips young people of the power to choose.
That’s why achieving parity of esteem across post-16 education means so much to me because for our young people it will mean genuine choice.
The freedom to decide that the academic route might be right for you but it’s wrong for me.
But we can only give our young people that precious freedom if they have a great apprenticeship waiting for them in town or fantastic vocational and technical routes and if we end the absurdity that says success outside of the academic route doesn’t really count.
That’s my dream A system in which technical training is every bit as excellent, every bit as exciting, and every bit as celebrated as the academic alternatives.
A great apprenticeship as easy to find as a place at university.
So I will continue the change that we’ve begun in our colleges, backed by a record £18 billion investment in the skills system, and brand-new V-levels, giving our young people the choices they need to succeed.
But we will look outside as well as inside our schools and colleges for solutions.
And that means eradicating the stain of child poverty. It’s not a separate challenge.
For success, having enough to eat matters as much as having the right curriculum, parents with the space to spend quality time with their children matters as much as great teachers.
So I am deeply proud that this government is delivering the largest ever reduction in child poverty in a single parliament on record, through our free breakfast clubs that’ll reach every primary in the country, through our expansion of free school meals, by lifting the two child limit, we’re freeing more than half a million children from the weight of poverty, and restoring the lightness of childhood.
Putting money back in parents’ pockets and supporting them through the cost-of-living crisis, that’s about more than the immediacy of food on the table, more than the energy to concentrate in the classroom.
It’s freedom, family freedom.
The freedom to say yes to an ice cream in the park together on a Sunday afternoon, yes to a trip to the seaside, yes to a summer holiday. yes to expanding the family home, to expanding the family itself, yes to hope for the future.
And so if you ask me, what does the education system of the future look like?
Technology playing a central role, yes, of course, making life easier for our teachers, giving a helping hand to our children.
But what about the fabric of that system?
Universal childcare – truly equal access to the single thing we know makes the biggest difference.
Comprehensive education – not just from four to 16 but nought to 16.
And then a longer school day.
More space for the sport, the arts, the breadth and the richness that makes school not a process to endure, but a time to cherish.
Apprenticeships in every postcode.
A clear line of sight to the future for every young person, whatever their dreams.
Education as freedom, for all children and for all families.
That’s what it means to me.
That’s what I’ve been building towards over these last two years, an agenda of positivity and promise that will last long after I’ve left government.
Colleagues, I started today with two big figures of the Labour movement.
And now I want to close with a third.
Back in the 1980s, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party Roy Hattersley wrote a book urging us to ‘Choose Freedom’.
It was his version of the moral and intellectual case for Labour governments, in a dark time for our Party.
Today, as Education Secretary, I always keep a copy close.
And I returned to it once more when Hattersley passed away last month, at the age of 93.
Freedom is at the heart of the future I want us to build together.
A country in which every young person feels in control of their own destiny, whatever their needs, no matter their background, authors of their own stories.
But what Hattersley got so right is that reaching such a future is about not just removing limits, but adding choices, the state doing what only the state can do, setting up our citizens to live the lives they choose, to build the country we want.
A new type of education can lead us to that better future, a partnership between families and the state, pride of place in every community, the wind at every child’s back from their first days of life.
That’s how we can shed our national malaise, and choose freedom.
Thank you.
