Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families

ANDREW MARR: I'm joined now by the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families - Ed Balls. Welcome.

ED BALLS: Good morning.

ANDREW MARR: Thank you for coming in.

ED BALLS: It's great to be here.

ANDREW MARR: Looking at the international comparison tables where we have crashed on reading and writing and maths as a country what's gone wrong?

ED BALLS: I think parents most of all want to know what's happening to their child. And the evidence is that standards have been rising year on year over the last ten years. But we know that in our standards the pace of change has been slowing in recent years.

And during that same time there have been more countries coming into these comparisons but also doing better. And I've said consistently since I started this job that we are above average but we're not yet world class. I think these tables are showing that.

ANDREW MARR: We're slipping. We're slipping.

ED BALLS: We need to do more. I don't think the tables actually show that we are slipping. I think that show that ..

ANDREW MARR: Well we've gone down an awful long way.

ED BALLS: I think what they show is that our standards are rising. And you see that in science, you see that in reading. But we aren't rising fast enough. Other countries to be honest are going faster.

As I said while our standards have been going up ... slowed down ..

ANDREW MARR: We are clearly slipping down the tables though aren't we? I mean you are, I mean you know we've gone from seventh to seventeenth and you know all of those ... comparisons.

ED BALLS: We could have an arcane debate about the details of these things. The fact is that there are a number of countries who've come in who weren't there before. The fact is that we are doing well. We're doing better than we were. But it's not good enough. We aren't world class.

There have been new countries have come in. Some are doing better. And our children's plan is about getting to world class and most importantly to world class for every child.

ANDREW MARR: Okay.

ED BALLS: And we're not there yet.

ANDREW MARR: So another way of asking the same question in a way. If they're doing better and we're not doing so well at the moment, what have we, what have they been doing that we need to do?

ED BALLS: Well to give you a good example - and we're going to legislate to raise the education leaving age to eighteen. The reason we're going to do that is because I think in the twenty first century it's impossible for children to do well and young people without a skill and a qualification.

There are some countries who, who have already raised the education leaving age to eighteen. Other countries are doing it now. If we don't do it too we'll fall behind.

ANDREW MARR: We'll fall further behind.

ED BALLS: We'll fall behind, exactly right.

ANDREW MARR: Okay.

ED BALLS: And I want to be world class. The fact was in the, in the post war period, up to nineteen ninety seven, we'd basically been flat and we were letting down too many children.

Since nineteen ninety seven we've been doing better, standards have been rising. But we need to do better still and do better for every child.

ANDREW MARR: A lot of people will listen to you and say hold on a minute, actually exams have got a bit easier. Schools have learned how to box tick and jump through hoops and all the things that governments ask them to do. The real standard of education, in real classrooms, has not got better recently.

ED BALLS: I don't think that's true. The experts that I listen to don't say that. As you know though I've said I'm going to act on that particular issue.

I'm going to establish an independent standards regulator who will give parents and teachers the confidence that standards are improving. I think it's really depressing every summer how some commentators come out and say dumbing down, pupils aren't doing so well. It's all easier.

Even that actually our kids are working harder and they're doing better. And teachers, we've got the best generation of teachers. So don't run down teachers and children. They are doing better, doing well. We can do even better in the future. And I want to help them to do that with the Children's Plan.

ANDREW MARR: And you're focusing particularly on the early years. As you know a lot of teachers really dislike the, the SAT test, particularly SAT 2 which is the one that children sit at eleven and say it's extremely stressful, gets in the way of proper teaching, gets in the way of proper learning.

ED BALLS: Well I ..

ANDREW MARR: They give you the figures you need but it doesn't help them.

ED BALLS: I know that some teachers and teachers unions want me to abolish national tests and I'm not going to do that. And the reason is cos I think parents want to know the information, not only about their child but how their school is doing.

We have reduced the number of schools who are called failing from over six hundred in nineteen ninety seven to less than thirty now. The reason we've done that because we've published information about school performance including schools which are failing or coasting. That's important to have, to have that information for parents. We're not going to take that away. But it is time for a change.

And our Children's Plan will I believe pave the way for a change away from the rigidity of the national testing we have at the moment which says that every child does the same test at the same age towards testing which is more in line with the needs of the child, their own progress, test them when they're ready at the level which makes sense for them. I think if we do this it will be much more popular with parents and with teachers but still give us the comparative information school by school.

We're doing this at the moment in about five hundred schools. We're getting the first results now. If those results work, and I think they will, then I want to move to a much more flexible approach to testing which will take the burdens off children and be better for teachers to track the individual progress of every child.

ANDREW MARR: And what about reading, writing and arithmetic? Because there's been a lot of worry about slipping standards there.

ED BALLS: The, the interesting thing about the, the Pearl study a couple of weeks ago is it showed the the group of young people who weren't doing so well in reading wasn't the low achievers or the average it was actually the highest achieving children who are reading less.

And one of the things that I said at the time was that in the international tables our children are spending more time playing computer games, less time reading. And we've all got a responsibility as a society, including parents, to get our children reading more. So it's partly about parents.

But it's also about what happens in school. And that study also showed that we're doing less reading in school and setting less reading in homework. What I'm also going to do in the Children's Plan is ask Sir Jim Rose who is a very respected expert on primary education, to do the first root and branch review of the whole primary curriculum, the first in more than a decade.

And he will look at the primary curriculum and see how we can take out some of the clutter, reduce the number of set subjects so that we have more space for maths and have more space for reading. Also make sure that every child is being taught a foreign language in primary school.

Make sure we get to the basics in primary school so that all our children are ready to learn in secondary school. And I think that review is a very important opportunity for us to get to world class in the way in which we're preparing children for, for learning and then for adult life.

ANDREW MARR: We have notoriously been a country bad at speaking other languages. Is that why you're going to add a language to the back to basics message that you're sending?

ED BALLS: I think it's also, as well as us being bad at languages - and I to be honest was taught you know, I started late and have never done well at languages. I think what the evidence shows is that if you're forcing fifteen and sixteen year olds to do a language when they're not motivated to do so, it doesn't work. And when we got Ron Deering to look at that he said don't force fifteen and sixteen year olds. Start it earlier.

What we've been doing is training teachers. We have two thousand trained teachers now in primary schools. We've got, we'll train four thousand more over the next couple of years. I want every young person to be taught a modern foreign language in primary school.

And if you can start it early and get kids interested in language when they're at that age, it's more likely that they'll go on and do better in secondary school after that. So I'm hoping that this new Rose Review of the primary curriculum will give a real kick to, to language learning in primary schools.

ANDREW MARR: A lot of your, your critics, a lot of Conservatives, a lot of ordinary parents and teaching watching will say hold on a minute, you guys have had ten years. And now you've got another ten year plan.

You have not achieved when it comes to educational standards, when it comes to the proportion of people being able to read, write and do proper sums at the age of eleven. You haven't achieved what you'd hoped to achieve by now. Why should we believe it's going to be better in the future?

ED BALLS: But the fact is that at eleven years old there are a hundred thousand more children who are making the grade in reading and maths than there were in nineteen ninety seven.

ANDREW MARR: Ah but there's more chil.. there's more children in the country.

ED BALLS: No..

ANDREW MARR: Fifty six per cent are getting, are getting those, getting those ...

ED BALLS: And that percentage ..

ANDREW MARR: ... that's way below what you wanted ..

ED BALLS: And that percentage has gone up substantially since nineteen ninety seven. We've got the best generation of teachers. We've got more children doing well. Everybody knows that our school buildings are transformed. We've got books and we've got much better buildings.

There has been a sea change in education. And we've gone from being I think below average to being above average as a country.

But I agree with you. It's not yet world class. We haven't yet broken the link between educational attainment and poverty and disadvantage.

ANDREW MARR: And ..

ED BALLS: There's more to do. And our reforms in the next decade will take us forward.

ANDREW MARR: My question is really why that's happened. Why, you know why you haven't got as far as you wanted.

ED BALLS: I don't accept we haven't got as far as we ..

ANDREW MARR: Is it true - well you, no you, you said as a government that you had certain percentages you were going to hit and you haven't hit them ..

ED BALLS: No ..

ANDREW MARR: .. so you haven't got as far as you wanted.

ED BALLS: I think we've gone up.

ANDREW MARR: Actually ..

ED BALLS: And we want to do even f... further. It's more that I'm more ambitious ..

ANDREW MARR: Well, all right. But is it because you've run things from the centre, you've had all your targets, you've had your ... and actually now that you, now you have to give more power, more genuine authority to head teachers in individual schools, for instance these academies and these specialist schools. You know you need more of those, you need more genuine autonomy for head teachers.

ED BALLS: I think it's a balance. Because we want more autonomy for, for head teachers, to make sure that they can drive performance in their schools. But we also want to make sure that governing bodies and government is tough on schools which aren't doing well enough.

And there is a balance to be struck there. And I don't think that just to devolve and decentralise and leave it all to schools is good enough when we have schools which at the moment in my view aren't making the kind of progress that they could be making, be making and we need to keep the pressure on.

So the, I don't apologise for demanding that we do more for children. But at the same time I think in the curriculum we want heads and primary and secondary school head teachers to have more space, to be flexible, to be innovative in the way in which they teach. And academies also give us that opportunity.

ANDREW MARR: Well you were saying - I have to ask you. You were saying in the papers, your statement that girls should look to the Spice Girls and Margaret Thatcher as role models has caused a certain amount of ribald amusement, particularly some of the activities of the Spice Girls over the last few years. What's your explanation for this?

ED BALLS: Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister to be a woman in our country. And whatever you think of her - and I dislike many, many things that she did - the fact is that she was a role model for women to see that you could reach the highest job. The Spice Girls delivered girl power which inspired a generation of young girls to believe that they could do it.

And I know from friends of mine who are off to see the revival concerts, mothers and daughters now in their twenties who were teenagers ten years ago, they were inspired by the Spice Girls. And that doesn't mean you have to endorse everything that they did.

ANDREW MARR: ...

ED BALLS: Role models do matter. And role models, and particularly girl role models saying you can do it, you can aspire, you can achieve, that's great and we want more of that.

ANDREW MARR: On the whole, the cultural side generally, you've had a go at the commercialisation of childhood, the sexualisation that you see on adverts and kids' programmes. And the heavy drinking that a lot of children are getting into. Now we can all understand why you're worried about these things. But as government can you actually do anything about them?

ED BALLS: This is dangerous territory for politicians.

ANDREW MARR: Yeah.

ED BALLS: You're completely right about that. But I think we've got a responsibility as politicians also to give a lead and to respond to the concerns of parents. And we've been consulting round the country for our Children's Plan in my new job.

Parents and teachers and children all say this is a time of great opportunity for children but also there are new pressures on children, on families - the internet, commercialisation of TV, advertising, balancing work and family life. Parents aren't asking us to run their lives. It's parents who are in charge. I don't want as a parent to have the government telling me what to do. But at the same time parents want information, they want the right regulation ..

ANDREW MARR: So do it by information rather than by finger wagging as it were?

ED BALLS: Yeah. Certainly not finger - it's not finger wagging. But in some areas regulation is right. So in the case of food standards we've regulated on school foods.

ANDREW MARR: Okay.

ED BALLS: And also on school food advertising. On alcohol, we're going to look at alcohol advertising. We've got Tanya Byron looking at the internet and the way in which that's regulated.

And more generally I'm saying let's give the, let's look at the detail, the evidence. Give parents information about commercialisation. Don't rush to judgment but it's important to have a debate about these things.

ANDREW MARR: Back in the summer Gordon Brown was riding high. Lots of talk including from yourself about a possible early election. What went wrong?

ED BALLS: There was lots of talk everywhere about early elections. As you know I can remember looking out of my window and seeing you doing your warm up for your programme at the beginning of the conference. And that was the talk everywhere. The fact is he made his decision. He's explained it was his decision.

ANDREW MARR: It was a big mistake wasn't it?

ED BALLS: I don't think it was a big mistake. I think it was something that ..

ANDREW MARR: Or maybe it was a big mistake to say that it wasn't anything to do with the polls.

ED BALLS: He has said that he, in retrospect, should have acted early to shut down the speculation. But the fact is round the country I don't think at the moment our difficulties are about the election. I don't find the voters ..

ANDREW MARR: Well that's where it started.

ED BALLS: .. are particularly talking about that. Look we had difficulties from the very beginning. Gordon Brown dealt with a whole series of tough crises and through foot and mouth, the terror incidents, the difficulties about gun killing in August. And then all the difficulties since then around Child Benefit and information.

ANDREW MARR: But this has, this has been ..

ED BALLS: But the fact is governments are tested ..

ANDREW MARR: They certainly are.

ED BALLS: .. by difficult circumstances. And the question is have you got the leadership and the vision to take things forward as a country and ...

ANDREW MARR: And some people, and some people say no of course as you know to that question.

ED BALLS: And, and every government has these difficulties. And every government is tested. And every government at this stage ..

ANDREW MARR: Well you say that ..

ED BALLS: .. is challenged.

ANDREW MARR: You say that. I can't ..

ED BALLS: But the question is can you rise to the challenge.

ANDREW MARR: I can't remember a government where in such a short space of time you've gone from there to there. And a series of events, one after another have happened. Most of them self inflicted.

ED BALLS: Well I don't think it's true to say that most of them are self inflicted. If you look at foot and mouth, if you look at the terrorist threats ..

ANDREW MARR: No, no I'm talking after ..

ED BALLS: If you look at ..

ANDREW MARR: .. I'm talking about the election, I'm talking about the way Northern Rock was handled. I'm talking about what appeared to be the swiping of Conservative policies in the pre budget statement. You know those, those are not things that came from outside. They came from inside.

ED BALLS: On Northern Rock, I think personally on the basis of my experience, Northern Rock has been well handled, in a very difficult circumstance where global events were impacting on our financial system from around the world. And actually Alistair Darling has made the right calls and has delivered stability in our economy through a difficult time.

The case of the Child Benefit leak it was appalling to find that information leaked but it's very hard to say that was the result of a government ministerial decision. But it's a difficulty that you deal with. The question is though are we competent, can we make the right decisions. But also on the big issues are we setting out the right direction for the country. The fact is in the Queen's Speech we are leading the world on climate change.

We are building more houses for family. On education we have very clear leadership but also clear divides between, between ourselves wanting education to eighteen, and to have diplomas to break out of the divisions in education for decades. And the Conservative ..

ANDREW MARR: You can really ..

ED BALLS: .. Party opposing us on those very, very big and momentous reforms.

ANDREW MARR: You can really, you could really say that over the last few weeks it has not been a catastrophe, and that it's still steady as she goes.

ED BALLS: I'm saying that it's been a very difficult few weeks and governments are tested in difficult few weeks but ..

ANDREW MARR: Were you disappointed ..

ED BALLS: .. when we get ..

ANDREW MARR: .. by how Gordon Brown responded to it, particularly in the House of Commons?

ED BALLS: No, I wasn't at all.

ANDREW MARR: No? You didn't think those, that those were difficult, difficult exchanges where he seemed to be faltering?

ED BALLS: Well it's tough.

ANDREW MARR: I mean you've been alongside him for a long time ..

ED BALLS: It's tough ... it's tough being prime minister. And the fact is it's very easy if you have Vince Cable, who I think has been, who's done well as Leader of the Opposition, of the Liberals in the last few weeks, told some good jokes. But it's easy to read out a joke. It's very easy for David Cameron to read out a script.

The difficult thing is to be the prime minister and answer and to be held to account for all the things which are going on and to have no warning of the issues which are going to be raised. I think he's done that well. He's doing it better by the week.

ANDREW MARR: You, you know him better almost than anybody else in politics. You must be sitting alongside him and saying you've got to raise your game, you've got to do better.

ED BALLS: Course I haven't. I've been ..

ANDREW MARR: No?

ED BALLS: .. saying to him that we've got to get ..

ANDREW MARR: Shouldn't you have been then?

ED BALLS: That we've got to get to the big issues. The fact is that the next election people are not going to judge the next election on what happened in PMQs in October. They aren't going to judge it on some of the difficulties in the last few months.

They're going to judge it on who's got the vision for the future, who's got the policies to match. The interesting thing about the Conservatives is that they want the whole issue to be personality or competence cos the fact is ..

ANDREW MARR: And they're way ahead of you. They're way ahead of you in the polls now. Can you turn it round?

ED BALLS: But when - definitely. Of course we can turn it ..

ANDREW MARR: Right. Okay.

ED BALLS: .. of course we can turn it round. And just remember in nineteen eighty six when Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister, the Westland Crisis, she lost cabinet ministers. She'd lost Cecil Parkinson cos of a scandal. At that time we had a new leader of the Labour Party. We were ahead in the polls. But she won the next election decisively. We will do exactly the same.

ANDREW MARR: Maybe that's ..

ED BALLS: We've got the vision, the experience, but also the policies ..

ANDREW MARR: Okay.

ED BALLS: .. which will make the difference.

ANDREW MARR: Maybe that's why Margaret Thatcher's your role model. Thank you very much. Just don't go away.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

Your comments

Disclaimer: The BBC may edit your comments and cannot guarantee that all emails will be published.