Minister says Labour government failed on education in Wales

Welsh Secretary Stephen Kinnock has admitted that Labour got it wrong with its education policies during its time in government in Wales when compared to results in England.

He told The Camilla Tominey Show on GB News: “Those PISA results are very disappointing, and I fully recognise the much better PISA results in England than in Wales. I see that as an opportunity.

“We’ve got to have a situation where all of the governments of the UK are able to learn from each other, and where it’s clearly been getting right in England, which the PISA results demonstrate.

“I hope that the Welsh government now will look at that and start to say, well, you know, what are we getting wrong in Wales? What could we fix? What did we get right?

“What I would also say is, of course, there is a tremendous amount of socio-economic deprivation in Wales. We’ve got the deep scarring of the closure of heavy industry, the way in which the coal mines were shut down in the 1980s, vast numbers of people put onto unemployment benefits. So there are structural challenges in Wales.”

On the Prime Minister’s line that Margaret Thatcher is to blame for the country’s current ills, he said: “I think for me it’s not so much about the closure of the coal mines. I think there was a large part of that which was inevitable because of the way that the market was working.

“The big difference is between, say, the UK and a country like Germany. They closed their heavy industry down in Germany. What did they do? They had an industrial strategy. They created a banking system to loan to small businesses.

“Those coal miners set up the so-called Mittelstand, which was all about SMEs producing widgets which they then sold to China.

“They had a transition, which meant that they protected their manufacturing base. Whereas Margaret Thatcher said, ‘Pull the plug, put them all onto unemployment benefits’, washed their hands of it, and walked away.”

He also said that the deal on transferring sovereignty of the Chagos could proceed without the approval of the US administration: “On Chagos, we’ve made it clear that we need to go ahead with the support of the United States.

“We had the support of the United States at first. President Trump changed his mind, and now we have to kind of adapt to that position.”