What happened to education, education, education, Bridget Phillipson?

Kemi Badenoch is trying to block the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which receives its second reading today, as part of her opportunist demand for another national inquiry into rape gangs.

The Conservative leader has tabled an amendment to demand an inquiry, which will be voted on this evening. Keir Starmer will then use his huge majority to defeat the amendment, which the Tories will exploit to try to embarrass Labour MPs by accusing them of voting against the victims of child sexual exploitation.

This is a grubby political tactic, by a party which was in government when a national inquiry into the subject reported two years ago, and which did nothing. It distracts from the substance of the schools bill, which is a step in the wrong direction in education policy, and a step away from the academies revolution that has helped raise school standards since the later years of Tony Blair’s government.

Indeed, most of the text of the Tory amendment is an accurate critique of the wrong direction taken by Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary. It says that the bill “undermines the long-standing combination of school freedom and accountability that has led to educational standards rising in England”.

This is, unfortunately, true. Phillipson, who used to be lauded as a Blairite, was never a convincing one in opposition and has turned into a traditional Labour defender of the teachers’ vested interest in government. Her bill removes freedom for academies to set teacher pay and conditions, takes away some of their discretion over the curriculum, “leading to less innovation”, as the Tories say, and repeals the requirement for failing schools to become academies.

Combined with Phillipson’s watering-down of Ofsted inspections, making its judgements less clear and therefore privileging parents who have the time and the knowledge to find out which schools in their area really are good and bad, she is taking education policy back to the assumptions that failed pupils and parents before the Blair era.

We know that Blairism worked because England went up the international league tables for reading, maths and science, while Scotland and Wales, which pursued “trad Labour” policies, went down. So embarrassing was Scotland’s failure under the SNP that its government decided that the answer to falling down the league tables was not to take part in them – a decision that has only recently been reversed.

So why is Phillipson so keen to turn the clock back on one of the last Labour government’s greatest successes? Why, instead of learning from what works and trying to promote it – most of which does not need legislation – has she suddenly decided to legislate to reverse the gains?

She could reinforce the best things about the New Labour reforms, some of which were diluted by the Conservatives, and restore the Blairite focus on underperforming schools in deprived areas. She could concentrate on the new challenges that have arisen from the growth of multi-academy trusts, which are an important way of spreading good practice and scaling up the impact of outstanding education entrepreneurs, but which raise some questions about empire building and executive pay.

But no, she has sprung new legislation on parliament, which wasn’t advertised in the manifesto and for which the case has not been made. She was originally going to have a children’s wellbeing bill, according to Neil O’Brien, the shadow education minister who is an unreconstructed Blairite on schools, but late in the day added “and schools” to the bill’s title.

What is going on? One theory, which cannot possibly be true, is that Phillipson has her eye on the Labour leadership after Keir Starmer.

She can see that Rachel Reeves’s stock has fallen. Wes Streeting’s Blairite promotion of the private sector as part of the solution to the NHS’s problems might make him unpopular with party members – especially if it works. Plus, his Ilford seat is under threat from a pro-Palestinian independent. Angela Rayner is hungry for the top job and would run for it on a “trad Labour” platform with Blairite trimmings – she received Tony Blair’s personal blessing at his institute’s pre-Christmas reception.

If Phillipson wants to be a contender, she might calculate, she needs to pitch to the Labour Party’s core constituency, heavily dominated by teachers whose unions are not even affiliated to the party but who tend to take positions to the so-called left.

One of Jeremy Corbyn’s aides from his time as Labour leader told me: “You can tell Phillipson is running for the leadership because she used the word ‘socialism’ in her conference speech last year.”

So she did. “My belief is simple,” she said. “That socialism is about using the power of government to extend to all of us the freedoms that in the past a great education only gave to a lucky few.”

What a wonderful, and dare I say Blairite, sentiment. I simply cannot understand why she thinks that today’s bill promotes those freedoms rather than curtailing them.