Brace yourselves, a perfect storm is brewing. Next year’s European elections will draw out and intensify the debate on the right over Europe. A year before the general election, UKIP have a chance to make sure their single issue is on the agenda going into a Westminster election more firmly than any other single-issue party …

It conjures up a curious mix of feelings to see a list of Labour’s key targets for the 2015 election – excitement for the campaigns, despair for how close we came to winning some in 2010. Here is our path back to power laid out in 106 battleground seats, most of which would take a …

Which Labour policy would, according to Michael Gove’s Hyperbole Machine, leave ‘millions of state school pupils unemployable’? That would be the Technical Baccalaureate policy which Gove has this week picked up, having realised that he should probably contribute to ending youth unemployment. The Tech Bacc, which provides practical courses for young people for whom university …

Ten years ago this month, The Business Academy Bexley opened its doors. The first academy in England, it replaced Thamesmead Community College, an institution which reflected the inherent failures of an education system held back by tired dogma. In Thamesmead’s final year, just 10 per cent of its students achieved five or more A*-C grades …

My primary school, halfway through my time there, seemed to adopt a rather pithy motto. I think it was in Latin, but having been brought up before the great liberator Michael Gove launched his attack on the oppressive, anti-Latin language programmes in schools, I can’t give you the full translation, but it was essentially ‘always …

When Tyrell Burgess, academic and innovative educational thinker, was asked to write a Labour party pamphlet on education he found himself ‘depressed about the lack of real planning … I could only bring myself to say no more than we would “make a start”’. That was his own admission from an essay published in 1968 …

The Labour party loves challenges: 211 seats where we sit in third place, on average 19,000 votes behind the incumbent; just 10 MPs across the south out of a possible 197. The speakers and delegates attending the inaugural Third Place First conference in Reading at the end of last month showed their determination to prove …

The Labour party of 1997 – at least, the driving force behind it – grew up in irrelevance. Muted by the dogma of the 1980s, walking into campaigns with electoral suicide notes; it is little wonder that Tony Blair considered leaving politics completely. 1997 ‘happened’ partly because the country was tired of the Conservative party. …

I’ve not made much secret of the fact that I greatly admire the work Stephen Twigg has done during our time in opposition. I’ve had plenty of arguments with those who think he endorses Tory policy (he doesn’t), that he will open up the schools system to a market free-for-all (he won’t) or that he …

The Labour party must look to education as a way of winning arguments and changing lives. It shows our commitment to communities; education is where the future is built. It is also vital to our fiscal credibility that we find the middle ground between overspending and starving our schools of funds. The party should make …