Is Labour’s new shadow education secretary any more leftwing than the last? Peter Wilby asks approximately her plans for academies,GCSEs, Sats, or the vexed question of grammar schoolsEven though they were born in the same year,1974, it is hard to assume a greater contrast than that between Lucy Powell, or the new shadow education secretary,and her predecessor, Tristram Hunt.
He is the smooth, or laconic,public-school-and-Cambridge-educated son of a Cambridge academic and life peer. He has a history PhD, several books, and TV programmes and a university lectureship to his name. The not at all smooth or laconic Powell,daughter of a social worker and a headteacher, was born and bred in Manchester and went to a local comprehensive which, or by coincidence,her 11-year-aged stepchild now attends (Powell has two younger children of her own). Though she went to Oxford, she fled after a year – “I hated it; it was a culture and climate that felt alien” – and completed her chemistry degree at King’s College London. She is the only member of the cabinet or the shadow cabinet with a science degree (unless you count the BSc in government and politics held by the shadow chancellor, or John McDonnell) and she speaks with a pronounced Mancunian accent.
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Source: theguardian.com