If Labour win the next general election, it would likely mean that the current shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson would become the education secretary.
Who is the shadow education secretary?
Bridget Phillipson was born in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear in 1983 and grew up in Washington, Sunderland. Speaking to Tes in 2022, she said there were high levels of youth unemployment, rising crime and “children growing up in avoidable poverty” in the area - something she said was impossible to ignore in education: “What was happening in school couldn’t be separated from real problems we faced.”
The secondary school she attended was St Robert of Newminster Catholic School in Washington and she has spoken about being a recipient of free school meals and then the education maintenance allowance, which was key in helping her to stay on and complete her A levels.
“For a lot of the people I went to school with, it was the difference between staying on or going at 16,” she told the Mirror in 2021.
While she was aware of the tough circumstances many children faced, she told Tes there were many “amazing teachers” at the school and there was an “ambition and determination to see us succeed [that] ran right through the school”.
Part of the ambition teachers had for pupils included helping promising pupils apply to Oxbridge: “I remember as a sixth-former getting a note in class to go and see [Mr Hurst] as soon as possible. I was worried. It turned out there was a visit being arranged from school to an open day for Oxford University, and I hadn’t put my name down for it, and he wanted me to go and to think of applying.”
Ms Phillipson went on to secure a place at Hertford College, Oxford, to study modern history.
She had already joined the Labour Party aged 15 and became co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club.
Progression to Parliament
After graduating, Ms Phillipson moved back to the North East and took a job working for her mother’s charity, Women in Need, acting as manager for a refuge run by the charity that supported women and children fleeing domestic violence.
In the 2010 general election, Ms Phillipson stood as Labour MP for Houghton and Sunderland South, aged just 26, and won the seat with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast.
Once in Parliament, she spent the first 10 years of her career on the backbenches and brought her knowledge from her stint at Women in Need to her role on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic and Sexual Violence.
In the general elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019 she won each time, although in the last election in 2019, she did see a reduction in her majority from more than 12,000 in 2017 to just over 3,000.
On the front bench
In 2020, she became shadow chief secretary to the Treasury.
Then in 2021, she was promoted to her current role of shadow secretary of state for education.
Since then, she has unveiled several key Labour education policy pledges that are seen as central to the party’s educational plans if they win the election.
One clear area of focus that Ms Phillipson has brought to the role is around early years provision - writing in Tes in July 2023 that she sees it as key to providing children with the right foundations for their education.
“It’s crucial, in particular, to make sure that every child can access the early years foundation stage and benefit from high-quality and effective early years education.”
To this end, she also announced plans for a major review of early years provision at the Labour Party conference in October 2023, which will be led by the former chief inspector of schools Sir David Bell.
She has also said that Labour would introduce free breakfast clubs in all primary schools, arguing that it would help to boost early academic progress for pupils and give parents more flexibility around returning to work.
The funding for this training for teachers is set to come from Labour’s proposed move to end tax breaks for private schools, which it claims will raise an additional £1.7 billion, although some have disputed this figure.
Ms Phillipson has stated that Labour will use some of this planned tax windfall to help bring in 6,500 more teachers to the profession, although details on how this will be achieved remain to be fleshed out.
“We are working on planning around how we bring it to life, looking at what we did last time around and how we make teaching a more attractive place to be,” she said at the Labour party conference last year.
