In both the 2017 and 2019 general elections, the Labour Party, then led by Jeremy Corbyn, proposed the establishment of a National Education Service (NES) – a comprehensive system that would provide free educational opportunities for all stages of life, including adult, early-years, primary and secondary education, whether technical, vocational, academic or creative. “Fundamentally, it was about putting education on the same footing as the NHS: free, universal and from cradle to grave,” explains Andrew Fisher, the party’s director of policy from 2017 to 2019. The NES policy considered education as much as a matter of social health as a means for self-betterment, offering an approach to training and learning that – in the words of the 2019 manifesto – “lets people develop their talents, overcomes injustices and inequalities and helps us understand each other and form social bonds”. The NES would have been funded through various measures such as imposing VAT on private-school fees, gradually reversing cuts to corporation tax, and taxing capital gains at income-tax rates.
Since the Conservatives gained power in 2010, the number of adults participating in further education and skills training has dropped by 48%; students in England now graduate with on average over £40,000 of debt, on which they currently pay 6.5% interest; 22.5% of all school pupils in England are now eligible for free school meals, up from 15.8% in 2010; nearly a third of teachers in England who qualified in the last decade have since left the profession; and full-time nursery for children under two costs almost two-thirds of a parent’s weekly take-home pay in England. Education functions as a key support strut for the social contract and – almost uniquely – impacts the lives of every person in society; in Corbyn’s words, “we don’t just benefit from our own education, we benefit from everybody else’s, too.”
Jeremy Corbyn spoke to Masoud Golsorkhi in the TANK office about his own education, both formal and political, and more widely about education in the UK, a historically stratified and contingent privilege that is yet to be reformed into a right.
Masoud Golsorkhi Welcome Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a real pleasure to have you here. Education as a topic comes up often at TANK, as our audience and workforce have often left education increasingly unsatisfied and increasingly more in debt. We have lost an essential idea of what education means. Let’s start with “education, education, education”, which was a flagship Labour Party policy in 1997 and shaped educational policy in the UK for the next decade and a half. To what extent was your education policy in the 2017 manifesto a response to that?
Jeremy Corbyn When we came up to the 2017 election, we were working on the assumption that the general election would be in 2019 or 2020, but we had already started developing ideas around education from my leadership campaign in 2015, where I had set out the general concept of a National Education Service. This was trying to take the competitiveness out of education and ensure free education from cradle to grave as a human right. It meant improving nursery and early years opportunities; removing much of the testing in primary schools, particularly Key Stage One and Key Stage Two; ensuring that university and college education were free of tuition fees; bringing back maintenance grants; and restoring adult education and relearning opportunities without age limits. The idea was that education is for a person’s whole life. It would have been expensive, sure, but it would have given us two things – one, a better-educated society with greater opportunities, and two, removal of the stigma of assumed failure in primary school. Our media is full of success stories – students who’ve come from a poor, disadvantaged background, got a super degree and gone on to make a huge personal success of their lives – but they don’t talk about the stress, the increasing need for mental-health provisions, the number of students in pupil-referral units, and the problems – particularly post- COVID – that many school students have been facing. We’re only in school from age 4 till 18. That’s 14 years of your life, and for many people, that’s the only education they ever get. So education ought to be about encouraging the ability to self-teach.
MG The education system in the UK is unique, with its emphasis on exams and early specialisation. Education is also a way of reproducing class, and class is facilitated and maintained through the process of education. How is it possible, as a matter of policy, to take class out of the educational process?
JC The British education system has always been a product of the class nature of our society. From the 15th or 16th century onwards, the children of the landed gentry were educated at what we now call public schools – Harrow, Winchester, Rugby – all of which are very old schools. The children of the meritocratic classes, those who’d had business opportunities, got their education through selective fee-paying grammar schools. The rest of the population got some church education if they were lucky. The Industrial Revolution came in the late 18th or early 19th century and employers needed people who could read the instructions on a machine. Church schools grew quite a lot at that point. Compulsory education didn’t come until 1870, which was very late. It was a pretty basic, rudimentary education. You would go to the same school from the age of five until you left school; theoretically, the school-leaving age then would have been 10 or 12. Some of the great figures of 20th-century politics, Keir Hardie in Scotland and James Connolly in Ireland, both left school very early. Hardie left school at the age of eight and worked down the pit as a child labourer; he was self-educated and went on to become the first leader of the Labour Party. The contemporary education system didn’t really develop until after the First World War, but even when I was growing up, in the 1950s [in Shropshire], students would go from age 5 to 15 to the village school, and then they would leave, and – it was assumed – get a job on the farm. The 1944 Education Act was important, but it failed to address the classed nature of education in Britain. Every Education Act since then has largely failed to address the class-based nature of education. So we preserved the public schools, and in some areas, we’ve preserved selective grammar schools. In some areas, we did develop comprehensive education, particularly in London, because of the progressive nature of the Inner London Education Authority and the LCC before it. What I want is education for all, because it’s also how we teach children to understand where our history comes from, where their places are in the world. The opportunity for education should be massive. We miss it by making it over-competitive and over-selective.
1885 election advert
Jennie Lee Building at Open University Campus, Milton Keynes
MG If we go back to the comparison between these two competing philosophies and the idea of the National Education Service as something that citizens are entitled to, we see that you’re defining things by outcome rather than process. Applying the health-service ethos would make education free at the point of use, however you arrived there. This is a way of rejecting the existing framework between selection and stratification.
JC That was the whole point behind it. We’ve talked about school, college and university, in our chat so far. In reality, the real problem begins at birth, where you’ve got a system that only provides social-security benefits for the first two children. Therefore, big families get less money. In central city areas of the country, we have a housing crisis. Children are growing up in an overcrowded environment, where opportunities to learn are limited. Preschool childcare facilities are a very important thing that the Labour government did in 1979. The children’s centres and Sure Start [introduced during Blair’s first government] – that was absolutely right. In my constituency, we have eight children’s centres, which are absolutely brilliant. They’re holistic and supportive of the parents: if they need support in some way, it is there for them without a stigma attached. If you look at children aged two playing together in a nursery, they don’t notice linguistic differences, they don’t notice ethnic differences. As they grow older, things change. But while I do think that the opportunity for nursery education is important, we start children in formal education too young. I was a councillor in the 1970s in London; we were very proud of getting all the “rising fives” into schools. Children who would be five during the academic year would go to school at age four. Now, it’s the rising fours who are going into full-time primary-school education. We formalise education from the beginning; I think it’s too stressful. I’m much more interested in the Finnish model; they start formal education at the age of seven and their reading, maths and functional skills are better because they give children the opportunity to grow and expand. I didn’t go to school of any sort until I was five. There was no nursery in the village we grew up in, nothing. So I was at home with my mum most of the time, and we lived in the country; life was walking around fields and gardens. I was quite happy with the way I was. Then I was packed off to school; I didn’t want to go there at all.
MG Education can mean taking a perfectly happy child and making him miserable.
JC Indeed. Getting rid of the testing process is important because we’re now getting into a really bad situation, where parents are keen on their children getting good Key Stage One and Key Stage Two tests. We don’t need tutors for primary-school kids in order to get them into a good secondary school or to get them a scholarship to go to private school. Let’s value children.
MG Exactly. When did streaming become so prevalent?
JC Streaming went on in grammar schools and the secondary modern schools. It’s very hard for people now to understand the brutality of the 11+. I remember the small town I grew up in, where the kids all grew up together. At the age of 11, they take the 11+ and the sheep go here, and the goats go there. It became a rivalry that had quite a bitter edge to it. I couldn’t wait for it to end. One of my first speeches in grammar school was about turning our school into a comprehensive one; it wasn’t terribly popular. Later on, my dad was appointed as a school governor by the Labour council; they thought he’d be the one to get the school to become comprehensive. So he duly moved the appropriate motion at the governors’ meeting. He said, “I’ve had four sons in the school; I want my sons to grow up understanding the value of education for all.” He lost, but he did his best.
MG I know people of my age whose parents did the same thing, where the younger sibling was actually taken away from selective education because the parents could see the pressures, pains and anxieties. As a foreigner looking at it, it’s a very strange period at which to fix a child’s destiny. We’re so volatile at that age.
JC In a way, the American system is more democratic. There are private schools in America, but the idea that you have a sort of universal primary, universal secondary school in the USA is quite normal, and that’s a good thing.
MG Selection crushes ambition and opportunity, and creates a kind of class anxiety.
JC This is where Jim Callaghan came in. He didn’t go to university; he was a secondary modern student. Obviously, he was a very intelligent man who eventually became prime minister, but he got it into his head that there were a lot of, I suppose, what he would deem as dangerous left-wing teachers, filling kids’ heads up with all kinds of ideas and freelancing on what they taught children, which was more than a bit of an exaggeration. So he then pushed the national curriculum, which has become more and more restrictive. What I was trying to do in the National Education Service was to ensure that every student would be able to read, able to understand maths, and have some understanding of science, all of which is basic for anything in society. There are other things children need to develop as well, which is why I was very keen on protecting art, music and theatre. Creative education gives one an understanding of wider skills in life; it’s also an equaliser in school. Now, I’m involved with a number of local theatrical groups in my area. One of them is called Angel Shed Theatre, a voluntary theatre group with no charges at all. Any child who wants to act can come and write and perform their own plays, and we raise money to make sure they can do that. What I see are young people, some of whom are probably doing quite well in formal education, some that are not doing very well at all, but who love the principle of being able to act, to be somebody else. Every school should have money they cannot raid for anything else restricted to the creative arts, so every child could learn a musical instrument. Every child learning a musical instrument will be better at maths, better at engineering, better at science, and they’ll understand an awful lot more about themselves.
MG I remember having a conversation with one of my children’s teachers who was saying my son was completely tone-deaf, that there was no point continuing with his violin lessons, and I said, “Well, you know, he might be terrible at playing the violin, but he might learn to listen.”
JC I turned up to a music lesson on my first day in my grammar school. The teacher was a bit crazy, really, but he loved classical music. So we stand, all 32 of us kids around the wall. He goes round and says, “Each of you call out your name.” We’re all standing in alphabetical order and he got to me and I said my name. “Do you have any brothers?” “Yes, sir, I’ve got three.” “And do they all come here?” “Yes.” “Get out. They were utterly useless. They were totally tone-deaf. Just get out. I don’t want you in my class.” Great stuff. First day, first lesson. I was allowed back in later, but we never learned musical instruments. He made us listen to classical music every week.
MG I think this is a good point to switch over and talk about your biography a little – your political education and the development of your political awareness. How did it happen?
JC My parents were both socialists, both people of peace. They met campaigning in solidarity with the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, at Conway Hall, here in Central London. My mum was a teacher; my dad was an engineer who worked in the private sector. They didn’t push political ideas on us as far as I remember, but they were probably in the subtleties of conversation, in the places we went and saw. My mum’s family were very keen readers and collectors. We had a lot of books around, many of which she gave to me, and I’ve still got a lot of them. Where did the political awakening come from? Partly peace issues like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; I remember that very well. I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shortly after that. Also environmental issues, because I grew up in the countryside. It was a time when the government was funding farms to dig up hedges to make space for bigger machines – more fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. You could see the wildlife declining around you. This is at the time that Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. So I grew up with that environmental approach as well. As a child, it was magic. I could just go off in these woods on my own. That was a time of feeling enormous safety. This kind of consciousness existed, then was shaped by things like the opposition to the Vietnam War, so I became more and more political. In school, I was always in the minority on everything.
MG Did you ever have any of those radical left-wing teachers?
JC Most of them were Tories, actually. There was one who was extremely assertive in his conservatism; he was quite keen to push his right-wing models on us all. We had one left-wing English teacher. He stood out a mile in his suede shoes and CND badge. I imagine the head teacher told him to take the badge off. I got on very well with him; he gave me a lot of American and Russian literature to read. He didn’t push his views on me. He would say, “Read this and see what you think.” I was not a particularly good student. I left school with Es in my A-levels. I was told by the head teacher that I’d never achieve anything in life. I enjoyed studying history because we were a very small A-level group. You could choose either European history or the Russian Revolution, so I chose the latter. I then wrote to the Soviet Union embassy, saying we were studying Russian history and asking them to help me, and then this massive parcel of books arrived. I still have some of them. I did very badly in the exam because they couldn’t read my writing. It was a fascinating time, though. It taught me a great deal.
MG You got into national politics in 1981?
JC Well, no. After I left school, I went to the Caribbean and travelled around Latin America as a volunteer teacher. MG Tell me about the political impact of that. JC Oh, massive. I couldn’t have gotten into university even if I’d wanted to, I had such bad grades, though my mum was probably more upset than I was. So I applied for a thing called VSO [Voluntary Service Overseas], that was a bit neocolonial, which I didn’t appreciate at the time. I had this rather bizarre interview, saying, “You don’t like cruelty to animals, do you?” I said no. “What would you do if somebody cut the head off a chicken in front of you?” I said, “What is this madness? I’ve worked on farms and I’ve seen this stuff happening. I just don’t like it.” Anyway, they obviously ended up quite liking my answers as I was asked to go to Jamaica, which was a fantastic experience. I was told, “You’re going to go to the school and you’re going to teach the geography of the Caribbean.” I was told this the night before the term started. We go to the school on Tuesday, the one I’m going to work in, and the teaching starts on Wednesday. So I said, “What’s the curriculum we teach this year?” They said, “You’re doing the first phase of Caribbean geography, and then we move on to world climate and stuff like that.” So I went to the room, I had to stay in that night and read the whole textbook, so I was always a page ahead of the students. But I discovered the best way of teaching to cover up for my ignorance was for the kids to learn themselves. They didn’t understand temperature, because they were in a place that was permanently 20 to 25 degrees. Why would they? They didn’t understand the scale of maps, so I made them go out and measure the school and then measure the streets all around. I was in central Kingston, but quite a few of the kids had come from other Caribbean islands, so we would ask, “What’s it like in St Kitts?” Basically, giving them an opportunity to teach themselves. We had one week’s training for all this at a teacher-training college in Tottenham. It was an amazing but stressful experience because I had 40 children in my classes. MG So you got the education alongside them. JC In a colonial way, yes. It was me, this young white guy going to the Caribbean to do my best to teach people. I learned far more than I taught; I learned a lot about history. I got involved with a lot of stuff on the periphery of the University of the West Indies, Jamaican history and American culture. Jamaica was four years independent. So I got a lot from that, and met Walter Rodney, who wrote the amazing book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa [1972]. He was then deported from Jamaica because the prime minister decided he was a Marxist. I’m not sure the prime minister knew what a Marxist was; he got a tip-off from London or someplace. So I learned a lot. It gave me a fascination for both Latin American and African history, which has never left me.
MG Did you travel after?
JC I stayed for almost two years, then I went to South America by ship to Guyana and Brazil. I got arrested in every country. They all had military dictatorships, no surprise; I joined in these demonstrations, which probably wasn’t a very good idea. But when you’re 19 or 20…
MG And you’ve been in Parliament for…?
JC I was elected to Haringey Council in 1974, and was a councillor until 1983. I was involved with planning and community-development work. I was first elected to Parliament for Islington North in 1983.
MG From an observer’s point of view, it seems like British politics in the years since then has gone through a process of being less about ideas and more about preformed narratives. Do the positions ever permeate into one another? How do you think this happened, and what the hell can you do about it?
JC It’s about the limits of representational politics and the increasing simplicity of a media narrative. It wasn’t all perfect in the 1950s and 1960s, but there was a genuine ideological debate about the role of the state, the role of the community in public ownership, and the achievement of the individual. The left-Labour position on comprehensive education was fundamental to a lot of that. In Parliament from the early 1980s, there was this huge Tory majority. But even the miners' strike was, in a sense, all about ideas. Do you have a publicly owned mining industry? Do you have respect for the skills of miners or do you use them as commercial fodder? Thatcher brought in monetarism in the same way that Chile had brought in monetarism in the 1970s. That was a pretty fundamental time. The Tories were very fundamentalist. There were the one-nation Tories, and compared to Thatcher, Ted Heath was seen as one. The sadness was that Labour was not offering an ideological opposition to this. They offered an opposition that understood why the miners’ strike happened, but did not really support it. Tony Benn and myself were on picket lines all the time. We’d spend a whole day at miners’ activities and picket lines, then come back to Parliament in the evening. The cynicism of Labour MPs saying the NUM [National Union of Mineworkers] didn’t know what it was doing. There was a great deal to be done. They didn’t realise quite how fundamentalist the Thatcher government was; they just didn’t appreciate that. MG Michael Foot had the scope; he had the intellect. He was an orator. JC He wasn’t the leader for very long, only from 1980 to 1983. He resigned after the 1983 elections and [Neil] Kinnock took over. Foot did have that understanding and he did make that case, but the miners’ strike came after the 1983 election, which was Thatcher’s high watermark. She then went on an ideological binge against the miners. MG Was there an ideological challenge to her in 1983? JC In the Tory party? Yes, to some extent, although that election was completely framed around the Falklands War, and nuclear disarmament. Michael Foot had always been opposed to nuclear weapons. Everybody knew that; the whole thing spun around that. Foot had actually supported the Falklands War, although many in the Labour Party didn’t. We felt that there could have been a negotiated settlement via Peru at that time. Foot damaged himself by that decision.
MG He was trying not to be outflanked.
JC Exactly. But in reality, he ended up being sidelined. I was first elected in the 1983 elections. The manifesto was actually a redistributive manifesto. In a lot of ways, there was a lot of very good stuff in it, because this was a high point of the left in the Labour Party in the early 1980s.
Front façade of Conway Hall Ethical Society, London
MG I remember that period because I was here in the UK. I actually went to – do you remember Peter Tatchell standing…
JC In Bermondsey, yes.
MG I went to canvass for him.
JC We might have met each other.
MG I was only following a girl, to be honest; I had no idea what the hell was going on.
JC Was she canvassing as well?
MG She was a Labour Party member. But returning to ideology – recently, a good friend told me about the concept of the “two-inch gap”, the idea that there are two inches of policy between Labour and the Conservatives, but that’s the two inches in which we live. Your period as leader of the Labour Party was the only time in my life where there was an attempt to extend that, even by an extra few millimetres. When was the key point at which politics lost its ambition to have more than two inches to work with?
JC Thatcher and the move to the right of Tories in the mid-1970s, 1977 onwards. That was the same time as Reagan was winning in California. You had [monetarist economist Milton] Friedman in Chile. You had the growth of the idea of monetarism as opposed to economic management. Thatcher went out, offering everybody £10 notes for a fiver. Privatise all this stuff. You give shares to the public and have a sort of shareowning democracy. It was a load of nonsense; it was all about greed. What Thatcher did was stuff up government coffers with the sale of underpriced industries and used the North Sea revenue to pay for unemployment benefits while destroying the manufacturing industry at the same time. It was an incredibly nasty, short-sighted and brutal period. That is where politics became more consumerist, and very different from the debates of the 1940s and 1950s where Labour were saying the equivalent of [US president Lyndon] Johnson’s Great Society – we will have a national health service, education, housing. The Tories in the 1950s essentially copied a lot of 1940s Labour policies. It’s hard to believe now, but in the four general elections of the 1950s, there was a competition between Labour and Tories about who would build the most council houses.
MG So the ground was lost, in moving the “common sense” notions about what was the right thing to do.
JC There was also a global aspect. Western European manufacturing became less globally significant in the 1960s as Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union expanded their manufacturing base. China wasn’t on the manufacturing scene so much at that time, but Japan certainly was. There was a global shift, which was not necessarily recognised. With the huge economic growth of the 1940s and 1950s, the British manufacturing industry was based entirely on protected colonial markets. When independence came in the 1950s and 1960s, those colonial markets disappeared. I remember working in a diesel-engine factory in Staffordshire in the 1960s and early 1970s. We were making these diesel engines for Dorman Diesel; they were huge, great things, expensive, heavy, polluting and inefficient. They didn’t really change the design at all, so as soon as any competition appeared from Germany or Japan, they just disappeared, because they weren’t investing. There was a time of high profit-taking and low investment. That were protected markets for them, so they churned this stuff out. That is what Tony Benn particularly tried to reverse both in the 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1979 Labour governments.
MG And then the promises of [Harold Wilson’s] “white heat of technology”.
JC What a great speech. Technology for a new revolution.
Jeremy Corbyn and the late Councillor Len Silverstone, Haringey, 1973
MG Where do young people have the opportunity to learn their politics? Where is their political education going to come from?
JC In their home, on the street, in schools, in cafes, in music venues, at festivals, and on the picket lines.
MG Let’s talk about the picket line.
JC The greatest education possible is a day on a picket line. I always say to anyone who says, “Oh, I’m not sure about politics” – go and spend a day on a picket line; it’ll be better than a whole term of formal education. You’ll understand people making sacrifices in order to gain better wages or defend their jobs, but also to defend their service. We’re doing this interview today while there are strikes going on. This morning, I’ve been with a group of nurses at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The first strike for 100 years by the Royal College of Nursing. They were telling me they were striking because they cannot cope with the stress of being a nurse. With 30 patients on a ward, they haven’t got time to talk to them; they haven’t got time to listen to them. They’ve only got time to quickly hand out pharmaceutical medicines and move on to the next patient. They said that that’s not what nursing is about; that’s not what healthcare is about. They’re on strike for a better health service and they feel very angry that they’re being condemned by the newspapers for breaking the oath of being a nurse.
MG We were clapping for them two years ago.
JC Claps don’t pay the bills. There is a whole wave of action going on.
MG I feel that these actions are very different from previous ones. What do you think?
JC Absolutely. I used to be a full-time union organiser for the National Union of Public Employees. When we took industrial action at hospitals or schools or whatever it was, we would get a lot of public hostility. You’d have a lot of arguments with the public, which wasn’t great. You have to have those discussions, though. I call them discussions; they’d call them arguments. It’s different this time. I was just outside Euston station with the RMT. There are no trains running; they’ve closed the station. If that strike had been about five years ago, people would have come up and said, “You lot have stopped me getting home.” Now they are saying, “Good for you, you’ve got to stand up for your jobs; you’ve got to stand up for decent pay.” These strikes are the combination of more than ten years of falling living standards and wages. It has just hit me how different it is. I went to the Liverpool dockers picket line last year. They were on strike over their wages. I spoke to them and I said, “I’m here to support you, but I want you to understand this is also a strike for every hungry child, for every young person going through a mental-health crisis. It’s a strike to treat asylum seekers and refugees as human beings, not enemies of ours.” They cheered. Liverpool dockers have always been very progressive, so maybe it would have always been the case. But when you see private-renter campaigns and many others coming to these demonstrations, you realise things are different.
MG Thank you so much for your time.
JC It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. ◉