As somebody who grew up in Liverpool, I have had many a fabulous holiday in north Wales. In terms of the education department, unfortunately Wales suffers from a poor Administration.
Let us move on to schools. Nowhere is the difference between Labour and the Conservatives clearer to see than in our school system. When we came into office, Labour had overseen a decade of decline in our schools. Fortunately, thanks to the tireless work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) and, notably, that of the Minister for Schools, we have reversed that trajectory. Today, 88% of our schools are “good” or “outstanding”—up from just 68% under Labour.
By the end of the Labour era, we had plummeted down the international league tables: our children were ranked 25th for reading and 27th for maths. Now, we are up 10 places in both. Better still, the progress in international reading literacy study shows that when it comes to reading, English primary school children are the best in the west, coming fourth in the world—an amazing, phenomenal achievement, for which I thank our teachers, parents and children.
How have we done this? We have reformed the school system, putting teachers and experts—not politicians—in charge of schools. Through our free schools and academies programmes, we have empowered heads and focused on academic excellence, improving discipline and ensuring that schools are calmer, happier places to learn. We have built on the evidence, not the ideology, over the past decade.
The Education Endowment Foundation has carried out over 200 evaluations to understand which approaches are the most effective in closing the attainment gap. It has engaged 23,000 nurseries, schools and colleges and, as a result, teachers are better trained in the things that make a difference, and children are taught in ways that we can prove work, such as phonics and maths mastery. We have made our exams more rigorous and reliable; and we have changed how we teach for the better. And at every turn we were met with a barrage of opposition from the opportunists on the Labour Benches.