Rishi Sunak’s plan to teach maths up to 18 dismissed as ‘empty pledge’ and ‘admission of failure’ – UK politics live | Politics

In a tweet last night ahead of his speech this afternoon, Rishi Sunak said that people were feeling “a lot of apprehension” about 2023 and that he was working to change this.

Rosena Allin-Khan, the shadow mental health minister, was doing the morning media round for Labour today. With A&E waiting times still at crisis levels, and the issue still getting considerable media coverage (see below – the Guardian’s main overnight health story is here), this was an opportunity for a ‘free hit’ for Labour.

As a doctor who still does occasional shifts at her local hospital, Allin-Khan is particularly well qualified to hammer the government on this topic. And she duly delivered, criticising the current state of the NHS and highlighting Labour’s plan to recruite more healthcare staff. She told Sky News:

What I’m seeing is what my colleagues are echoing around the country, is that they feel, unfortunately, that this is the worst they have ever seen the NHS for patients and for staff …

We have had 12 years of political choices that have resulted in us already having an under-resourced NHS with no slack in the system.

Now we have a situation where people are having intimate examinations in cupboards, patients are waiting up to 99 hours in an ambulance in an A&E bay, unable to get a bed inside a hospital.

We’re having children sleeping on plastic chairs, patients lying on the floors, being examined on floors with sheets held up by nurses.

But when Allin-Khan was interviewed on the Today programme by Martha Kearney, she was asked if she agreed with Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary (and her boss), when he gave a speech to a Tory thinktank recently saying the NHS needed reform. Asked if she agreed with Streeting, Allin-Khan dodged the question and just delivered a spiel about the Labour plan announced at party conference. When Kearney tried again, and asked if she agreed with Streeting when he said he did not know why the BMA was so hostile to reform, Allin-Khan again avoided the question, and just said conditions in the NHS were the worst she had seen in her medical career.

Kearney tried a third time, saying she was finding it hard to understand why Allin-Khan would not say she agreed with her boss. Did Allin-Khan support Streeting’s call for reform? Allin-Khan said Labour had a plan to tackle the workforce issue (the one announced at party conference) and she said that was “what I stand by”.

Streeting has said he would like to see more use of the private sector to bring down waiting times. Kearney asked if Allin-Khan was in favour of that. And she implied that she wasn’t. After dodging the question completely the first time Kearney raised it, when she was pressed on this a second time, Allin-Khan replied:

I can tell you in my own brief, in mental health, we have use of the private sector which ultimately often lets patients down. This is about putting patient care first. Labour have a plan to grow the workforce.

A charitable interpretation of all this would be that Allin-Khan was just determined not to be sidetracked from delivering Labour’s key message. But it would not have been hard for her to say something supportive of Streeting, and it sounded like she was keen to distance herself from his Policy Exchange stance. She came second in Labour’s deputy leadership election in 2020 and still has her own ambitions and agenda.

Paul Nowak, the new general secretary of the TUC, has raised the prospect of stepping up industrial action this year, saying coordinated strikes “make absolute sense”. My colleague Aletha Adu has the story here.

Good morning. Parliament is not sitting this week but over the next 36 hours the prime minister, and the person most likely to be prime minister after the next election, will both be making major speeches about their vision for Britain in 2023. It should provide a great “compare and contrast” opportunity for the political commentariat – although what the public at large will make of it all is, of course, another matter.

Rishi Sunak is speaking today, and according to the overnight preview from Downing Street, he will set out his “priorities for the year ahead and ambition for a better future”. Keir Starmer is speaking tomorrow and, according to a note sent out by Labour yesterday, he will “outline how his Labour government will ‘create change, and fuel hope’, by moving away from the sticking plaster, short-term mindset of the current government, and tackling the long-term challenge our country faces”.

Sunak and Starmer are both criticised as managerial politicians who are short on passion and vision, and it seems that Sunak at least will seek to counter this charge when he speaks this afternoon. So far most of his time as PM has been focused on headline problems, like small boat Channel crossings, which don’t seem to engage him a great deal personally. But, as Pippa Crerar reports in her preview, today he will say that education is “the single most important reason why I came into politics” and outline plans to ensure all pupils study maths in some form up to the age of 18.

Responding to the extracts from the speech released overnight, Munira Wilson, the Liberal Democrats’ education spokesperson, said this was “an admission of failure”. She said:

This is an admission of failure from the prime minister on behalf of a Conservative government that has neglected our children’s education so badly. Too many children are being left behind when it comes to maths, and that happens well before they reach 16.

The prime minister’s words mean nothing without the extra funding and staff to make it happen. You don’t need a maths A-Level to know it takes more teachers to teach maths to age 18 than to 16. But schools are already struggling with a shortage of maths teachers, and the Conservatives have no plan to turn that around.

And Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, said this was just an “empty pledge” without the promise of more funding. She said:

The prime minister needs to show his working: he cannot deliver this reheated, empty pledge without more maths teachers, yet the government has missed their target for new maths teachers year after year, with existing teachers leaving in their droves.

Now, maths attainment gaps are widening yet Rishi Sunak as chancellor said the country had ‘maxed out’ on Covid recovery support for our children.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11am: Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK, holds a press conference on “the challenges faced by the nation after 12 years of Tory failure”.

Lunchtime: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, meets business groups to discuss his plans for how the energy support scheme for businesses will be scaled back from April.

2pm: Rishi Sunak delivers his speech setting out his priorities for the year.

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