Welsh Secretary launches attack on Labour education record

Stephen Crabb is becoming a disingenuous, smiling assassin of the reputation of our Welsh schools and hospitals. Only a few weeks ago he called on his Cabinet colleagues to mind their language about Wales, lest they create a false and damaging impression of our country with their politically motivated attacks on the Welsh NHS. Yet today he himself declared Welsh schools as ‘worse than Eastern Europe’, in ignorance of the facts and in a naked attempt to score political points ahead of the election – no matter the damage done to Wales’ reputation abroad, nor the morale of our pupils and teachers at home.

In his speech, Mr Crabb recalls his own education – like mine and the First Minister’s - in a Welsh Comprehensive, but the prescription he hints at - for the failings he falsely describes - is for Wales to go down the route of scrapping comprehensive education and creating instead autonomous academies, as in England. He fails to point out, of course, that a higher proportion of these academies are failing than of their local authority run equivalents, but that will surprise no one here in Wales: we are used to Tory Ministers smiling sweetly as they smear.

In England, there has been 20 years of heated debate about how to deliver the best education. In Wales, we haven’t even had that discussion. When Welsh Labour Ministers try to shut down the debate it’s the pupils, parents and teachers who lose out.

It is not just the best performing students that are missing out, the most disadvantaged children in Wales are less likely to get good GCSEs than similar pupils in England. That is just not good enough.

We need an honesty check here in Wales and start facing the facts. The inconvenient truth is that at the moment our education standards our not where they should be if we are to have any hope of getting off the bottom of the league table.,

If we are going to be ambitious for the Welsh economy we need to be far more ambitions for Welsh education.

Simply saying, 'we took our eye off the ball' doesn’t come close to the level of responsibility Welsh Labour Ministers should be accepting.

The Tories' plans to slash funding for schools, nurseries and colleges in England in the next parliament would have dire consequences for Wales. The Tories want to run schools for profit and bring back grammar schools: that is their priority. It’s all very well David Cameron talking a good game on education, but we all know that without the Liberal Democrats holding him back in coalition, he would have cut school spending.

"This is simply the latest salvo in the war on Wales. Not content with denigrating our NHS, now the Tories are putting Welsh teachers and pupils in the firing line.

"All the latest evidence says that education reforms in England are stalling, whilst standards in Wales are improving."