Rishi Sunak really cares about education. You can tell from the way his floundering campaign, which has been desperately flinging policies at Conservative Party members in the hope that some of them might stick (“Ban all building on the green belt!” “Put a quota on refugees!” “Funnel money from deprived urban areas to Tunbridge Wells!”), has decided to focus on it this week.
In between lamenting his wife’s exorbitant shoe collection and rapping along to Vanilla Ice in his interview with the Sunday Times, the beleaguered former chancellor set out his plan to reform the education sector. He plans to scrap the “overly narrow specialisation” of the post-16 curriculum in favour of something broader that will prepare young people for the “economy of tomorrow”. In other words, he wants to copy what France does and introduce a baccalaureate system (branding it a “British baccalaureate”, of course) that will require pupils to study maths and English all the way to 18. Education policy solved.
