Show caption Robert Halfon is said to have stopped Toby Young’s appointment to the Office for Students. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian The profile Robert Halfon: ‘The Tory party should change its name to the Workers’ party’ Interview: The chair of the education select committee, dubbed ‘a white-van Tory’, on why he now has more power than a minister Peter Wilby Tue 17 Apr 2018 07.15 BST Share on Facebook

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After last year’s general election, one of Theresa May’s first moves was to sack not only Justine Greening, the education secretary, but also Robert Halfon, the skills minister, whom she had appointed to the job less than 11 months earlier. Why, I ask Halfon in his House of Commons office, was he caught up in this purge? “I have no idea. She just said to me: ‘Go back to the backbenches. You’re good at campaigning.’”

He took the prime minister at her word. His first campaign was to get himself elected by his fellow MPs as chair of the education select committee. “I stood for days on end in Commons corridors and in the members’ lobby handing out my ladder of opportunity.” Pardon? He hands me a sheet of paper depicting a ladder with five rungs. It lays out the statistics of educational inequality – “when getting similar GCSE results and living in the same neighbourhoods, pupils on free school meals are 47% less likely to attend Russell Group institutions” – and policies needed for a more socially just system. If the policies are implemented, those who reach the top of the ladder will have “secure and prosperous lives” and the country “a thriving economy fit for purpose in the 21st century”.

Many will dismiss this as typical Tory flannel intended to make a deeply unequal society a touch more acceptable. But Halfon is not an orthodox Conservative. He has been called the champion of “blue-collar Conservatism” and “a white-van Tory” even though he went to Highgate, a fee-charging school in London, and the middle-class University of Exeter, before becoming chief of staff to Oliver Letwin, an old Etonian. He has near-zero experience of business.

Last August, he wrote that “charitable status for most private schools should come to an end”. He has since accepted that abolishing the schools’ tax breaks would entail a dauntingly complex overhaul of charitable law. Instead, he now proposes a compulsory levy on private schools to finance bursaries for the disadvantaged. It would operate similarly to the apprentice levy; schools would get the money back if they provided their own bursaries in line with government criteria. “I have nothing against private schools,” Halfon says. “I have no problem if people want to pay £30-40,000 a year for private education. I just want to make sure pupils from poor backgrounds also have a chance to go. Bursaries are offered now but they often go to the middle classes.”

Halfon’s biggest passion is for apprenticeships and skills training, on which the select committee has been taking evidence. He thinks FE colleges should be funded much more generously. “In this country, it’s been universities, universities, universities when it should have been skills, skills, skills. There’s huge amounts of snobbery. Things will really change only when technical education passes the dinner-party test so that when you say you did an apprenticeship, people say ‘wow! what’s your trade?’ FE was cut under our government. I’m not denying that. It was stabilised for just one year when Sajid Javid was business secretary. He went to an FE college. I think that says it all.”

Halfon wants half of university students to be taking degree apprenticeships. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

He believes half the students in universities should be on degree apprenticeships. “It’s much better than abolishing student fees which would just help the middle classes. Degree apprentices earn while they learn so they won’t end up in debt.” There should also be discounts for those taking courses in, for example, healthcare, coding, construction or engineering, where nearly all graduates get jobs. In one interview this year, he picked out medieval history as a subject for which students should pay full whack.

The risk of focusing exclusively on skills, I suggest, is that students are trained for obsolescence. Don’t subjects such as medieval history produce trained minds flexible enough to cope with anything? “I think with every degree you get a trained mind, not just arts degrees.”

Show Halfon a sacred cow and he wants to slaughter it. GCSEs should go, he says. At 16, only tests to monitor progress are necessary. A-levels should be replaced by a baccalaureate covering a far wider range of subjects. Everybody should have to do some maths, even at university. Grammar schools, so loved by the prime minister, “aren’t a priority”. And more money should be going to universities that focus on skills and employability. “They should be seen as elite.” He cites Nottingham Trent, which recruits a quarter of its students from households with annual incomes of less than £15,000, and the Open University, , though it was set up by a Labour government, describing it as “one of Britain’s greatest achievements”.

Would he call himself an educational traditionalist? No. An anti-traditionalist? No. “I’m a Bakerite.” He’s talking about Kenneth Baker, education secretary under Margaret Thatcher and the father of the national curriculum. “I think he’s a great man. The more I hear from him, the more I think he’s got it.”

Bakerites, according to Halfon, favour a broader curriculum focusing on creativity and technical skills. Baker is largely responsible for England’s 49 university technical colleges (UTCs), all founded in the past eight years. With university and industry sponsorship and government funding on the same basis as academies, they offer courses for students aged 14 to 19. “I want one in every town,” says Halfon. I point out that nine UTCs have closed, mainly because of lack of recruits. “That’s because other schools don’t want their pupils to go to them. They see them as rivals. And there’s been no leadership at all from the government. They’re traditionalists, not Bakerites.”

Halfon, brought up in Hampstead, north London, wanted to be an MP from the age of 10 which sounds a nerdy ambition until you learn that he couldn’t aspire to be a footballer because he was born with a moderate spastic diplegia that restricts his mobility. By 14, he was knocking on doors for the Tories. He took a politics degree and became chair of his university’s Conservative Association. He first contested Harlow, in Essex, in 2001, losing then and in 2005, before victory in 2010.

His father, an Italian Jew by origin who ran a successful wholesale fruit and vegetable business, was a dedicated Tory who briefly served as a councillor and took his teenage son to meet Thatcher. “I’m a tribal Conservative,” Halfon says. “It’s like a way of life. But I think we need fundamental, radical change.”

He thinks the Tories should change their name to the Workers’ party – “I’m 100% serious” – and adopt his ladder as their symbol “instead of that silly cauliflower”.

In his new role, Halfon has already persuaded the government to give foster carers 30 hours a week of free childcare – a working parents’ entitlement from which they were previously excluded – and (it is said) he stopped Toby Young’s appointment to the Office for Students board. He doesn’t mince his words: in the Sunday Times, he described Young’s appointment as reinforcing “an image of my party as heartless and cruel”.