Labour's schools review group

I am delighted and honoured to have accepted Andy Burnham's invitation to join Labour's schools policy review group. I will join a group of advisers, headteachers, teachers and parents who will work with the Shadow Education Team to help them explore what families want from good local schools, and specifically:

• What knowledge and skills do the next generation need to be successful in the modern world?
• How can we continue to improve standards in English, Maths and Science, but also provide a balanced curriculum which meets the needs of all children?
• What influence and control do parents want over local schools and their own child’s education?
• How can we create the most professional and highest quality teaching workforce in the world?

I am due to attend the first meeting in the next few weeks. What are your answers to the questions above? What do you want from your local school? What needs to be done to raise standards for all pupils even further? If you would like to contribute your ideas please either post a response or email me at mike-ion@hotmail.co.uk

Changing education paradigms

Sir Ken Robinson is someone I admire greatly, in this excellent RSA lecture he asks how do we make change happen in education and how do we make it last? I like his answers very much and, I would imagine you will too.

Tristram Hunt is wrong to argue for the reintroduction of charges for gallery and museum entry

According to Tristram Hunt, writing in today's Observer 'a truly equitable cultural policy might begin to think about the reintroducing charges for our national museums and galleries.' Really? Surely the most equitable policy is the one we have already; a policy that has delivered record numbers of visitors to our national museums and galleries and a policy that polls have shown to be the most popular public policy introduced by Labour's 1997-2001 government.

What Tristram fails to mention in his Observer piece is that back in the 1980s, national museums faced political pressure from the then Conservative government to charge for admission in order to make them less dependent on government funding. The result was that close to half of the major national museums introduced charges whilst the rest, including the British Museum, the Tate and the National Gallery, held out. What happened as a consequence is illuminating in terms of the likely impact of any return to a charging policy nationally. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s visitor numbers at the free national museums grew spectacularly, while many of the charging museums suffered marked declines. For example the Victoria and Albert Museum introduced a £5 admission charge in 1997 and saw its visitor numbers halved as a result.

In 1997, the new Labour government made a commitment to reinstate free entry at the national museums in the belief that doing so would significantly broaden the range of people visiting museums. The devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales also agreed to fund free entry at the national museums which they support, and free entry for all was introduced at all their sites in 2001. The national museums which dropped charges all saw substantial increases to their visitor numbers, an average of 70 per cent. In the first year after free admission was introduced visitor figures to the V&A rose by 111% from 1.1 million to 2.3 million. Figures have continued to rise: compared with 2001, 5.3 million extra people visited the free museums in 2002, 5.6 million extra in 2003 and 6 million extra in 2004.

It should also be remembered that many of these museums also completed hugely successful Heritage Lottery Fund projects in or around the same period and these have also had an enormous effect on visitors figures. Research undertaken by the Museums Association showed that the museums most 'successful' in terms of visitor figures were also those which had opened new or newly refurbished facilities and had also introduced free admission.

Tristram's argument appears to be predicated on the notion that if the excellent Potteries Museum is forced to charge for entry then so should the National Gallery and the British Museum. Surely a more principled, more far-sighted approach would see the likes of Tristram standing up for free entry to all publicly funded museum and galleries, especially in these hard times. Free access enables people to use museums and galleries in different ways; to meet friends or as a place to rest or think, in other words they are important civic and social spaces. Admission charges may not be the only barrier to the less well-off, they are nevertheless a significant. barrier. Museums are galleries are more like libraries than 'day out' venues, because they are about learning, as well as about enjoyment.

As a Labour member and supporter I am proud of Labour's record in this area and would seek to defend the current policy, indeed I think as a progressive movement we should be debating how any future cultural policy can further increase public access and participation in the arts. The reintroduction of charging for entry to our national museums and galleries would be a regressive act and I would imagine the vast majority of my fellow party members feel the same.

Why social mobility should not be abandoned

Writing for the Guardian's CiF Owen Jones argues that 'social mobility provides no answers for the vast majority of working-class people. It's time we abandoned it.' I enjoyed Owen's piece greatly and agreed with much of it but in many ways I think he misses a larger point.

Despite Owen's protestations it is not unreasonable that any parent should want their child to do as well at school and in life as they have done themselves; often they want them to do better. In a free society if some parents choose to secure advantage and privilege by sending their children to elite schools there is little the state can do about it. However there are clear consequences for future social mobility that many "left-leaning" (Guardian-reading) parents often choose to ignore. British public schools have always been a production line for the class system. They employ some of the best-qualified teachers, with as many as two-thirds educated in the top 20 British universities. They can – and do – raise their fees steadily, they select their pupils, have a growing endowment income from their benefactors and some of the most impressive sporting and extra-curricular activities. What's more they have (during the recent boom years) recruited from a middle-class obsessed by perceived educational and social advantage.

One issue on which Owen and I may well agree on is the old fashioned (possibly even an "old Labour") view that parents who espouse views about fairness, justice and redistribution but opt out of the state sector and send their children to private, fee-paying schools, choose to become part of the problem, rather than seeking to be part of the solution. Why do so many parents apparently talk left but act right, advocate change but seek to protect the status quo? One reason is that many middle-class parents perceive there to be little political mileage in calling for the reform of private schools and more equal access to universities. This is because those who already have influence, those who already have a "voice" in our society, have such a high stake in the current order they, almost subconsciously, mobilise and organise in order protect it. I am firmly of the view that when middle-class parents abandon the state sector in favour of the private, it is conservative and not progressive politics that triumphs.

Far from abandoning the idea of social mobility I think we need to set about creating a society that reduces the real barriers that prevent people from certain social backgrounds achieving their full potential. I agree that personal progress should never be measured by the extent to which individuals escape their social background, but we must also accept that in order to overcome entrenched privilege and vested interests we must actively seek to open up society and end the present 'closed shop' that has, for too long, stifled meritocracy by supporting an aristocracy of the elite.