Two cheers so far for Labour’s missionary position

It’s easy to be sceptical about Labour’s embrace of a ‘mission-led government’, as outlined in Kier Starmer’s recent speech. Mariana Mazzucato’s original concept, whilst powerful in reclaiming the idea of state-led innovation that refuses to outsource thinking and action to the private sector, is light on what mission-led innovation has actually achieved. 

The idea was sprinkled throughout last year’s Levelling Up White paper, but then rapidly diluted into traditional top-down targets and what Mayor Andy Street described ‘bidding and begging bowl culture’. 

Former chancellor Ed Balls is already telling Kier Starmer that the five missions are ’not retail enough’ to sell to voters. The Institute for Government is arguing that ‘without any more detail it’s entirely anodyne’.

However, it may be the very lack of detail that can help these missions become both appealing and transformative. Behind the five missions lies what Labour describe as a ‘new approach to governing’ that is ‘more agile, empowering, and catalytic’. 

Within six underpinning principles in the paper, Labour is committing itself to a radical reset of the relationship between the national and the local – not just governments, but civil society, businesses and communities. 

This includes creating deliberate space for local ‘flexibility and innovation’ in how to achieve missions; ‘handing powers to local leaders to deliver the improvements they want to see, and letting local people make the big calls about what affects them’; and ‘long-term, integrated funding settlements to local leaders’.

These principles could be vital not only for achieving better outcomes for all citizens, but in restoring more harmonious relationships between citizens across different parts of the UK.  As Andrew Marr recently suggested: ‘until we get away from the greedy stockpiling of power in London, tensions across Britain will never be resolved.’

What might this mean for one area of policy – children and young people – and one specific mission linked to this – ‘Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage, for every child’? 

Labour will come under increasing, rapid pressure to announce the detail. It has already promised a ‘route map’ with ‘measurable goals’ in the next few months. However, the trick that Labour will have to pull is to do this whilst staying true to the principles of local empowerment.

Every politician and party is a localist in opposition, but that commitment always seems to wane as they come closer to power. Share on X

Witness this recent comment from a ‘Labour source’: ‘be in no doubt: under a Labour government the only person responsible for setting education policy will be the secretary of state for education.’

Labour should resist the ‘retail and detail’ pressures and avoid turning this mission into simplistic targets (for instance, what does a 90% primary school success target mean for the other 10%?) or crude, centralising input measures, such as any commitment to reduce class sizes or make free school meals universal.

It will also need to make some tough choices about existing policy and departmental levers, for example

• How would a genuinely localised mission require reform of our current, highly centralised and punitive accountability and inspection systems?
• Regardless of whether academisation grows or plateaus, should a labour government devolve its current responsibilities for the commissioning of all MATs to local authorities or the regional level  (as I have proposed here). 
• What about its centralised delivery programmes – from education investment areas to the national tutoring programme to what our recent report on area-based partnerships describes as the national ‘contractualisation’ of teacher development? 
• What can Labour learn from its previous (and probably over-centralised) attempts at more joined-up, connected services and outcomes for children and young people that can usefully inform the vital next iteration of this approach?

As I explain in this EDSK podcast,  CfEY is exploring through our current programme that will map locally-driven education partnerships in detail, and enacting through our project on primary assessment:

A space creator that sets and enforces minimum standards (for instance, a national curriculum, or an early career framework for teachers), but ensures with just as much vigour that these standards remain minimal and don’t become the blobs that disable schools or localities from designing and delivering their own visions and priorities. 

When, in opposition,  Tony Blair announced his ‘education, education, education’ priorities, then prime minister John Major could claim that his priorities were the same ‘just in a different order’. Labour’s education mission, as stands, could apply to every government at any time, including our current administration. What could make this mission the unique and valuable foundation for the improvements in outcomes that have been so slow in a centralising last three decades is holding true to, and holding nerve on, a genuinely ‘localist turn’.