Historian Tristram Hunt pus skills at centre of education's future

Tristram Hunt, television historian, son of a Labour peer, expensively educated, alumnus of the Cambridge Footlights, says he is often asked: "Isn't Tristram a funny name to have in the Labour party?"

It is a question with a serious subtext for Labour's putative education secretary. Michael Gove, former Tory education secretary and adopted son of an Aberdeen fish processor, saw raising schools' standards as "a civil rights struggle"; can a politician called Tristram from a privileged educational background match his reforming zeal?

Mr Hunt notes that the Labour party's history is littered with politicians from comfortable backgrounds passionate about making a more equal society - from the Fabians onwards. "What about Dingle Foot?" he jokes, referring to the Labour minister who served in the Wilson government of the 1960s.

A protege of Peter Mandelson and "parachuted" into Stoke-on-Trent Central as a candidate at the last minute in 2010, Mr Hunt seems to exemplify the tendency of Labour to choose professionals over local working-class candidates. But he says this is a wider societal issue.

"Of course there's an issue, just as there is in journalism, law, medicine and other professions about access and a tightening of the circle," he says. "We have to guard against the development of a narrow political class but this isn't unique to England or Britain."

This drive to broaden access is mirrored in his front bench brief, and Mr Hunt - who comes from the New Labour wing of the party and went to University College School, a highly selective private school in Hampstead - talks passionately about education as the means of "liberating" communities such as Stoke, a working-class city founded on potteries and steel.

But whereas Mr Gove focused on raising attainment by drilling core areas such as literacy and numeracy, Labour's shadow education secretary says he has a wider vision based on improving careers advice and vocational education.

"It's about dealing with the challenge of globalisation . . . and how you ensure that communities who are feeling left behind, often white working-class communities in former coalfields and coastal towns and shire counties . . . how you use education to get them to buy into and succeed in the challenges of the 21st century," he explains.

"The only way Stoke-on-Trent is going to succeed in the future is education skills and that's the same in Lowestoft, or the Isle of Wight, or Hartlepool."

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"I share that ambition but I also want to have those pathways into brilliant apprenticeships at BAE or Rolls-Royce or JCB or in retail or in business."

He visits the Goodwin Steel Foundry with an extensive apprenticeship scheme to make the point. Stoke's unemployment rate is broadly in line with the national average but Mr Hunt sees better skills as the route to better lives.

Despite this particular difference in emphasis, Labour's key problem in education has been in outlining a position that is distinctive from the Tories. The difficulty intensified after Mr Gove - whose provocative criticisms of teachers and unions caused outrage in the profession - was replaced as education secretary by Nicky Morgan, who has sought to rebuild bridges. As a result, divisions sometimes appear exaggerated. Mr Hunt warned repeatedly that his opponents supported profitmaking free schools; this was explicitly ruled out by Ms Morgan, and again this week in the Tory manifesto.

<>When the Financial Times recalls Mr Gove's infamous broadsides against teachers and unions, the shadow education secretary agrees that historically there was an "willingness to accept . . . mediocrity" in the school system. He endorses the Tories' shake-up of vocational exams, and describes most of their curriculum changes as broadly "fine".

He would not undo any of the more controversial reforms, for instance by closing free schools. "Absolutely not - and this will create some problems for me within the Labour movement - I'm not coming in and reversing everything Michael did because you cannot have an education system . . . in which every time there's a change of government you have a new curriculum," he says firmly.

However, Labour has consistently criticised the Conservatives for allowing unqualified teachers into the classroom - this would stop. No further free schools would open. All pupils would be offered face-to-face careers advice. Class sizes for infants would be capped at 30.

A network of directors of schools standards would oversee schools around the country, ending the central control exerted from Whitehall. "We've got to move away from the education secretary rewriting the curriculum over a long weekend, deciding this academy will go there and that one there," Mr Hunt says.

Canvassing on Stoke's Abbey Hulton estate, the Labour candidate is greeted by a mixture of voters who have returned to Labour, who are bemoaning the closure of the 81 bus route, or who have no interest in speaking to him whatsoever. Striding around in a navy corduroy jacket and brown lace-up shoes, he is unmistakably the television historian rather than traditional working-class hero.

But Terry Sherwin, a 69-year-old former lorry driver, says Mr Hunt has done a good job fighting to preserve facilities for local residents and adds: "I don't care where he comes from so long as he looks after the people who vote for him."

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