FOR Daniel Kebede, the new Labour government offers hope of renewal for an education sector in crisis.

“The crisis in education is deep and severe. Buildings falling apart. A recruitment and retention crisis which means that we now have a million children taught in class sizes of 31 or more,” the National Education Union (NEU) leader tells me when I catch him on the fringes of last weekend’s Durham Miners’ Gala.

“What I hope is that this incoming government invests in education and invests in our children.” Kebede is pleased at Labour’s immediate invitations of union leaders to discuss the issues facing their sectors with relevant ministers, and publicly contrasted the constructive approach of new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson to his last meeting with a government minister — when he had to push back against the attempt to undermine educators’ right to strike.

But it hasn’t all been good news — with the Prime Minister warning from a Nato summit in Washington, where he pledged billions more a year for the military, that public-sector workers should be prepared for disappointment when it comes to pay awards, despite 14 years of declining real-terms pay.

What does he make of the government’s claim that finances are too tight for restorative pay awards?

“When people were shivering in the cold, afraid to put the heating on, the energy companies made £420 billion.

“When millions of people were using foodbanks, Tesco saw their profits increase 160 per cent.

“The Prime Minister should not be coming into government saying we need pay restraint. What we need is a pay correction.

“And we’re not asking for the 25 per cent that teachers have lost since 2010 in one go. What we’re asking for is a meaningful pay award, inflation-plus, that takes steps to address the decline in teachers’ pay, because our children deserve better.

“We’re in Durham at the moment in the north-east of England. It is a rarity here to have a teacher in secondary school who is a subject specialist in science.

“We need urgent investment in our public services, whether it’s health, education, our prisons, our police.”

Aside from funding, the NEU has campaigned against the “exam factory” model imposed on British schools, which is linked to rising mental ill health among children and teachers, with an arbitrary Ofsted inspections regime whose one-word judgements often tell you more about the affluence or poverty of the students than the quality of the teaching, and whose school visits are so stressful they were implicated in the tragic suicide of a head teacher, Ruth Perry, last year.

Is Labour likely to be more receptive than the Tories to the “abolish Oftsed” campaign? 

“We’re still tied to that model. But what is welcome is that Labour are committing to a curriculum and assessment review that seeks to change the system by which our young people are assessed.

“That’s important because at the moment a GCSE student at 16 sits one high-stakes exam at the end of year 11, and that’s it. As teachers, we don’t believe that is a good form of assessment.

“But if Labour want to be serious they are going to have to tackle the system of accountability as well. The fact of the matter is that Ofsted does not have the trust of the profession. The only thing it does is measure poverty, and as an inspectorate it needs to go.”

Like most of those I met at the Gala, Kebede’s relief at a Labour election win is tempered by concern at the rise of Reform UK, which came second to Labour across much of the north-east, his own region.

Asked what’s driving it, Kebede brings us back to what we were doing on the streets of Durham that day.

“We’re here marking the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 strike. The defeat of the miners’ strike led to an unleashing of neoliberalism, through which we’ve seen the fabric of our society stripped away.

“That has been accelerated by 14 years of austerity, cemented by a cost-of-living crisis in which we’ve seen living standards plummet.

“The way to deal with Reform is to invest in housing, invest in good, well-paid jobs, so people have a stake in society, so immigration doesn’t seem such an issue.

“But we have to be really clear: migration has brought great things to Britain and people like Nigel Farage and his ilk are talking absolute bilge.

“We’ve got a record low birth rate, an ageing population. The idea that this country can pay for pensions, pay for the NHS and public services, without migration is a fantasy.

“I’ll tell you what Nigel Farage is. He’s a spiv. He is a City boy spiv, lying to working people to advance his own political agenda.”

Since Kebede and I spoke, a King’s Speech has set out Labour’s priorities, many welcomed by the labour movement.

Now the question shifts to whether its legislation proves the real change of course our education sector and so many others sorely need.