‘You can’t get a first-class education in second-class schools’: Labour’s Bridget Phillipson sets out her vision

‘The chickens are coming home to roost.’ Bridget Phillipson on 13 years of Tory neglect of education. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

It is a Friday, a day of train strikes, so Bridget Phillipson cannot easily get back to her Houghton and Sunderland South constituency. Instead, the shadow secretary of state for education is in London being bombarded by media requests for comment on England’s crumbling schools.

The state of the country’s public services reminds her of her own upbringing in the north-east, in Washington, a former mining town between Sunderland and Newcastle in Tyne and Wear.