Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis

So that's the picture of English school reform and a huge part of why England has gone up in those rankings.

Michael Gove, Nick Gibb, Andrew Adonis, if you're watching, I salute you.

So why has everywhere else gone down? What about that side of the question? Okay, so we've already said that COVID and money don't quite stack up.

They can't fully explain the downward shift globally, and obviously it won't be the same for every country.

A general election in the UK soon seems inevitable.

That's the startling conclusion reached by the respected political commentator, Lord Adonis, immediately after Andy Burnham's speech to Labour Party annual conference.

His analysis appeared in Prospect, which I've always found one of the UK's more balanced political journals.

He begins by acknowledging that the company insists, that the government insists, that there will not be an early election.

And also, I suppose, secondly, that from an HS2 point of view, that's where the... rot if you like of the project began to set in

yeah i agree with you about that i mean effectively the focus from the time andrew adonis was transport secretary on hs2 essentially threw eddington out of the window but you'll never find a report from the department for transport which says we're changing our strategy eddington's no longer right and no longer relevant and And everything I've seen over recent years would suggest to me that Eddington is exactly right.

Because if you look at the overall markets, long distance travel isn't increasing.

There's been a bit of switching between modes, you know, a bit of air travel's gone onto the railways, perhaps a bit of road travel's gone onto the railways.

Yeah, I think we have, first and foremost, to look at the political leadership because it's very clear that there were a number of politicians, as you said earlier, in the three major parties at the time, Labour, Lib Dem, Tories, they were all in favour of HS2.

It wasn't just one politician.

It was obviously Andrew Adonis in the Labour Party and he was the initial driving force behind it.

But it was also for example Theresa Villiers in the Conservative Party.

You know, but again, we go back to education and so on.

You know, the academy programme, Freeing schools from local authority control, introduced by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis as education minister 20 years ago in England, has contributed to the success of English schools, which are now demonstrably better performing than Scottish schools.

Are there lessons to be learned there? Does the Labour Party have the courage to say no to some of its base, if you like, in terms of the public sector workforce? And again, this is a problem I think that Andy Burnham has to grapple with.

Politics is often, political leadership is often about saying no.

The example that's been used with me a couple of times is Heathrow Third Runway.

Yes, some people might not think it's going to happen, but the fact is successive governments since, I think the last time, the first time I worked on Heathrow expansion for the third runway was when Andrew Adonis was transport secretary.

So that's under Gordon Brown.

That's nearly 20 years ago.

We cannot have any differentiation, and I just can't bear that because that is the thing that has made our school system great.

I mean, not to get you as a sort of cod psychologist, but why do you think that is in the Labour Party psyche? Why do they seem unable to do that when they've had some enlightened people like Lord Adonis in the past?

I do think there's a union thing here.

I was having this torturous process with Bridget Phillipson during the passage of the schools bill-

Very.

And then the whole, you know, academy movement, you know, arguably had its origins in John Major's city technology colleges, and then obviously with Andrew Adonis and Tony Blair, um, the academies particularly in East London, and then big academy program under Michael Gove and David Cameron's government.

So there's been quite a lot of continuity, and I would say one of the interesting things in politics at the moment- Is how ed-- I mean, I'm not saying it's a good thing, is how education has just sort of completely dropped off the radar as a political topic.

If you think of Andy Burnham's priorities, we talk about this in the main podcast, uh, you know, we talk about social housing, and we were talking about social care and skills.