Labour have abandoned their main manifesto promise on education

In their General Election manifesto Labour promised they would employ an extra 6,500 more teachers.

It was not just their main education pledge, but one of the main pledges in the whole manifesto.

But the first statistics covering the Labour period, out yesterday, show that teacher numbers were down since last year - there are 400 fewer teachers overall.

Though numbers were up in secondary, this was more than offset by a 2,900 reduction in primary school teachers.

When you have said that teacher numbers will go up, and they are in fact going down, that’s a bit of a problem.

The government has responded with an absurd attempt to move the goalposts and define their promise out of existence.

Asked by the TES whether they intend to exclude primary school teachers from their target they confirmed that they will.

This is outrageous.

Let’s be clear: Ministers have never before said they would exclude primary.

In October last year Catherine McKinnell said:

“this government will work with the sector to deliver its pledge to recruit 6,500 additional teachers across schools and colleges over the course of this parliament”

“Schools and colleges” - no mention of excluding primary there.

What’s happening here is that the government are trying to wriggle out of one of their main manifesto pledges.

Sure, you can argue that they are right to wriggle out. That they should never have made such a pledge in the first place.

But that is the pledge they fought the election on - and is absolutely clear what is happening here: the numbers are going wrong, they don’t have confidence they will deliver, so they are moving the goalposts.

There are other things the government are doing that are not good for teacher numbers. They pledged to fully fund the National Insurance increase on schools - but they broke that promise, and some schools were short-changed by up to 35%.

They also underfunded the teachers’ pay award.

According to the IFS, the net effect is to leave schools £400 million short.

As a result schools are already making redundancies for next year. A survey by the NAHT suggests half of heads expect to cut teachers next year.

Those redundancies aren’t yet included in the data out yesterday.

How the numbers are changing

None of my pieces on here are complete without an interactive map.

So I've made a map of the reduction in the number of primary and nursery school teachers in each parliamentary constituency (the figures are published by DFE for the two groups taken together).

47 constituencies have lost more than 5% of their teachers.

In absolute terms the biggest decreases are in:

• Middlesbrough & Thornaby East (-51 teachers)

• Erith and Thamesmead (-45)

• Leicester East (-42)

• Dulwich & West Norwood (-40)

• Buckingham & Bletchley (-40)

In relative terms the biggest are in:

• Bath (-12% - nearly one in eight teachers)

• Dulwich and West Norwood (-11%)

• Scarborough and Whitby (-10%)

• Richmond and Northallerton (-9%)

• Hexham (-9%)

Conclusion

The Secretary of State for Education is building up a bit of reputation for tricksy behaviour. This is yet another example.

Overall the last government added an extra 27,000 teachers, and Labour were constantly critical throughout, saying this wasn’t enough. Yet teacher numbers are now falling under Labour.

What they are doing here is so crude it is really taking people for fools.

There was nothing unclear about Labour’s manifesto promise. What is clear is that they are trying to redefine one of their main election promises out of existence, because the numbers are going in the wrong direction.