Keir Starmer praises i's Save Britain's Rivers campaign, but stops short of full supportComing into the election in 2010, no policy area outside the economy was given as much prominence as the Tories’ plans for the education system.
But how do those who were on the frontline implementing the reforms look back on the changes 14 years on? But there was, he said, a bigger consequence from the reforms brought in, first by the Coalition and continued under the Cameron administration – cuts to children’s services. “Kids know more – the kind of knowledge-rich curriculum has led to kids understanding a knowing more. If you speak to school leaders who have been around a while, they will broadly say that teaching quality has gone up.”
As with the education reforms, the proposed changes to the health system preached the Tory mantra of utilising the power of market forces and bringing “competition” into the sector and handing far greater control over to GPs. The job of unpicking the changes fell to Jeremy Hunt, who ran the Department for Health for more than six years, overseeing what he would argue was a sustained period of improved productivity in the health system.