We take the work of the pay review body extremely seriously, but the previous Government did not act responsibly in that regard. They sat on the report, and then they called an election. I understand the frustrations that school leaders and teachers are experiencing, but as my hon. Friend knows, we are moving as quickly as we can on this important issue, and the Chancellor will set out our position before the end of the month. We understand the importance of getting this right. Let me reiterate, once more, our thanks to our brilliant teachers and support staff for their work during this academic year.
We are putting education back where it belongs, at the heart of change. After years at the margins under the Conservatives, after years of ministerial merry-go-rounds, after years of opportunity for our children being treated as an afterthought, education is back at the forefront of national life. I know the power of education to transform lives, because I lived it. Standards were my story, and now I want standards to be the story for every child in the country, not just in some of our schools but in all our schools. I want high and rising standards for each and every child, but for 14 long years that has not been the story in our education system.
I think often of children born in the months after the Labour party last won an election, some 19 years ago. They entered school in September 2010, in the first autumn in which Conservative Members served as Ministers. By then the damage had already begun. Labour’s ambitious Building Schools for the Future programme had already been cancelled, and that was storing up problems for the decades ahead. As the years went by, those children saw opportunity stripped away. They saw not just resources drained from their childhood, but also hope. They saw the children’s centres they had attended being closed by the hundred. They saw falling investment in the school buildings in which they learned, and in the staff who taught and supported them. They saw a change in the support for children with special educational needs—a situation that, in a moment of unusual candour, my predecessor, the former MP for Chichester, described as “lose-lose-lose”, though she did almost nothing about it. A generation of children in social care were falling further and further out of sight.