This blog is part of a series looking at education policy in the run up to the British general election on the 7th May.

This blog aims to tell you the manifesto pledges of the 5 main parties in England (sorry Wales, Scotland and Ireland). I am trying to do it without bias and for ease I have divided the pledges into themes and policy areas for easy comparison so you can flick through and find what you are interested in.

I have now read each manifesto three times just for you. You’re welcome.

My general impression of each

So each party’s education section felt very different as you may (or may not) have expected.

The conservative party emphasised their commitment to academic rigour from a very early age. This makes it seem like there might be an increase in formal assessment under a Conservative government. “We will expect every 11-year-old to know their times tables off by heart and be able to perform long division and complex multiplication.” On top of that, “If children do not reach the required standards in their exams at the end of primary school, they will resit them at the start of secondary school, to make sure no pupil is left behind.”

Labour on the other hand emphasise the other learning that children do at school, “Children develop and learn best when they are secure and happy. We need to help our children develop the creativity, self-awareness and emotional skills they need to get on in life.”

The Lib Dems are stressing education to close the inequality gap. With their “cradle to College” slogan, the liberals emphasise the pupil premium and better early years provision to try to close the classed gap in attainment.

The Green Party have policies which are much more ‘child-centred’ and focus a lot less on accountability and assessment. They want to “make schools fit for children, not the other way around.” Its also very noticeable that they have tried to include the costs of their expensive policies such as extending free school meals, smaller class sizes and higher budgets.

The UKIP manifesto seems to be geared towards bringing back grammar schools and so they emphasise different children’s learning needs and the importance of correct skills training in further education.

They all have the upmost respect for teachers

Conservatives: “We believe that teaching is a highly skilled profession.”

Labour: “We believe fundamentally that a world-class education system is made by excellent teachers.”

Lib Dems: “Great teachers are at the heart of the heart a successful education system. We will continue our work to attract the best into the profession and support teachers throughout their careers.”

Green: “Teachers feel undervalued and their professionalism is undermined by a strict curriculum.”

UKIP: The quality of education is almost entirely dependent on the quality of teaching… (they need to) have a high status in society and feel valued.”

Early Years provision

Green: Promise a lot more funding and want to make sure that only qualified Early Years teachers are leaders of early years teaching (I am slightly confused by what that entails).

Lib Dems: Also offer a lot more funding and a qualified early years teacher in every early years provider by 2020. I get the impression that this is subsidised so that it will not cost parents extra.

Academies

Conservatives: Will continue to roll out the academy programme, encouraging schools to become academies. They will also ensure that schools cannot be run for profit.

Labour and UKIP: both support academies.

Lib Dems: Also support academies, but will allow Ofsted to inspect academy chains. (Currently Ofsted can inspect individual academy schools, but cannot investigate a chain for effectiveness.)

Green: Will bring academies under Local Authority control.

Additional organisations

Manifestoes this year are full of extra quangos and organisations to be established to improve education. This makes it seem likely that reviewable and retractable teaching licenses might become a thing in the next few years.

Conservative: Want to establish a Royal College of Teachers to “promote high standards of teaching and leadership.”

Labour: support a College of teaching so that teachers can continue to “update their knowledge and skills as a condition of remaining in the profession” and to set up a School Leadership Institute to “identify and support the leadership of the future”.

Lib Dems: Win the prize for the most organisations to be set up. They support the Royal College of Teachers to further develop and raise the profile of the profession. They also want to create a National Leadership Institute to ensure highly qualified leadership and provide support to leaders in challenging schools. Additionally they support a Education Standards Authority (Or Anti-Gove Authority) to have control curriculum content and examination standards control which would ensure that ministers could not change them.

So where does that leave Ofsted?

Labour: seem to want to make some of Ofsted’s powers locally democratic, establishing a Director of School Standards (separate from Ofsted) “to monitor performance, intervene in underperforming schools and support them to improve.” If a majority of parents complain to the DSS they can ‘hold the school to account’.

Lib Dems: Will ensure that Ofsted inspections will be of high quality and fair to all schools (as well as increasing their powers to inspect academy chains). Inspections will focus on outcomes not processes giving teacher’s and school’s more autonomy over their teaching methods.

UKIP: will inform Ofsted and take away their power “to investigate itself”. Inspection will also focus more on the classroom and less on the paperwork and “tick-box targets”. They want Ofsted to combat extremism and radicalisation in schools and not “criticise widely-held Judeo-Christian beliefs.” If a quarter of parents make a complaint about a school, Ofsted will be able to inspect that school in response.

Green: Don’t mention Ofsted in their manifesto but have talked about closing it down and replacing it with a National Council of Educational Excellence that “would create a supportive, cooperative system working in conjunction with our wider policy to devolve power and accountability to a more local level.”

Investment

Conservatives: Promise a real terms raise in funding (they aren’t explicit). Additionally they promise £7billion for new school places and £18billion for school buildings.

Labour: Will protect the current budgets from the early years to further education in line with inflation.

Lib Dems: Will protect the current budgets at all levels from the EYFS to Further education. They also propose to increase the Pupil Premium in the early years to £1000 per child per year.

Green: will return education funding to 2010 levels (an extra £7billion per year). Additionally they estimate that the cost of their low class sizes will be an extra £1.5billion over the parliament. Free school meals for all children will be an extra £2billion a year.

Teacher working conditions

They all agree that this is an issue. Their proposals to deal with it are…

Conservatives: teachers will spend less time on paperwork and will reduce the burden of Ofsted.

Labour: Will set up “master teacher status” (no details provided).

Lib Dems: will ensure less bureaucracy by avoiding policy changes while children are in a Key Stage – i.e. policy changes will not apply to the child until they move to the next Key Stage. They will also reform accountability and Ofsted.

UKIP: set out in a huge amount of detail exactly how they will lessen teachers’ workloads. By decreasing paperwork including overly detailed lesson plans, data collection, excessive internal assessments and dialogue based marking schemes.” They will streamline targets limit normal lesson observations to once per term. They will also end performance related pay.

Green: will change the entire structure of schools to have less assessment, more trust in teachers and less over-regulation of all.

Qualified teachers

Labour and Lib Dems: will ensure that all teachers are qualified (with the exception of teaching students).

Conservatives: will ensure that all teachers have adequate additional training in behaviour management. This comes from Ofsted’s comments about teachers losing teaching time to low level behaviour issues – the manifesto basically directly quotes Ofsted.

Free School Meals

Conservative, Labour, UKIP: Do not mention – I assume they will continue with the policy as it is.

Lib Dems and Green: Will extend Free School meals across Primary School.

PSHE keeps cropping up this year (but not citizenship – its not mentioned specifically)

Labour: will ensure independent careers advice, age appropriate sex ed and emphasised the importance of character education and combatting homophobic abuse in schools.

Lib Dems: A core part of their slimmed down national curriculum will be the ‘curriculum for life’ which will include “financial literacy, first aid and emergency lifesaving skills, citizenship, and age-appropriate sexand relationship education.”

UKIP: are adamant that they want to end all sex ed in Primary School beyond online safety and anti-molestation information. They would also have a compulsory First Aid qualification taken alongside the GCSE.

Green: would make PSHE and first aid compulsory.

Pupil Premium

Conservative: Will continue at the current amount.

Lib Dems: Will continue at the surrent rate with an increase in the early years to £1000 per child per year.

Class Sizes

Labour: will cap Key Stage 1 classes at 30 pupils.

UKIP: will keep class sizes to 30 per class with a view to reducing it to 25.

Green: will reduce class sizes to 20 (costed at £1.5 billion over 4 years).

Congratulations if you managed to make it to the end of all that. I hope it helped in some way in helping you to feel a little bit more informed. Look out for further blogs in the next few days before the election.