Baroness Chakrabarti to Give Hopper Lecture

Baroness Shami Chakrabarti will deliver the third annual Dave Hopper Memorial Lecture at Durham’s Miners’ Hall on Friday 12 July as part of Education4Action’s ‘Politics, Pits and Protest’ 10-day fringe programme leading up to the 2019 Durham Miners’ Gala....

A Centenary Commission on Adult Education

November 2019 will mark the centenary of the Ministry of Reconstruction’s final report on adult education which set the groundwork for liberal adult education in Britain for the rest of the 20th century. NIGEL TODD explains why the time is ripe to revive and re-evaluate adult education for the 21st century....

Striking for a Higher Purpose

The lecturers’ strike, affecting more than 60 Universities and more than one million students, has thrown up new challenges to an increasingly dysfunctional university system. HAZEL HEAD reports. As the lecturers’ strike by the University and College Union enters its third week, pressure is mounting on the well-heeled leaders of higher education to give ground....

Jack Lawson: A Man’s Life

Harry Barnes’s review of Jack Lawson’s autobiography, A Man’s Life, has been re-published on the North East Labour History website. Like many of his era, Lawson first became politically active through the ILP which he joined in 1904....

Re-balancing Education: Dear Labour Councillor…

BEN SELLERS wrote an angry and articulate open letter to Durham County councillors on his blog last month, following their decision to suspend plans to cut the pay of local teaching assistants. As part of our series on education, we are re-publishing his letter below, prefaced with an explanatory note from ILP chair DAVID...

Unbalanced Britain: Education and Inequality

MELISSA BENN examines the continuing inequalities in our education system, and the failures of recent governments to close the gaps. What could Labour do to promote an alternative vision? Despite endless policy initiatives, exhaustive reforms and official obeisance to the questionable aim of ‘social mobility’, our education system still has yawning gaps in outcomes between...

Re-balancing Education: The Democratic Deficit

VICKY SEDDON attended the ILP’s Unbalanced Britain conference on education last month. Here, she argues that any future progressive reforms must include changes to our structures of democracy and control. The ILP hosted a very interesting discussion on 4 March in Sheffield. Melissa Benn was informative, strategic and focussed; Julie Thorpe was interesting and thought-provoking...

Back to the Future: Re-balancing Education

Every government since New Labour has made education its top priority yet inequality still runs through the system from top to bottom. So why have they failed and how can Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party win support for a return to the principles and values of the comprehensive system? That was the question raised by...