What education policies should the parties put in their election manifestos?

Posted on 26 April 2017

Dr Paul Wakeling, amongst others in the education sector, are asked what they would like politicians to promise in their manifestos.

Published in The Guardian, Paul writes, 'For schools: abandonment of plans for new grammar schools and no further changes to institutional form; fair and proportional per capita funding, with a carefully planned transition for schools facing reductions; a return to planned, university-led teacher training; a reduction in targets and testing in favour of an approach that values teachers as partners rather than seeing them as the enemy.

For further education, this would be my priority: a substantial increase in funding and an end to tinkering with the form of qualifications and bland repetition of the “parity of esteem” trope.

For higher education: restore maintenance grants and overturn the recent changes to funding for student nurses; no further increases in undergraduate tuition fees beyond inflation; scrap selling off the student loan book; ditch the Teaching Excellence Framework; remove international students from migration targets.'

Read what other people in education had to say.