The former leadership candidate also used his keynote speech at Manchester's Labour party conference to slam the scrapping of the Building Schools for the Future programme, a decision he dubbed 'shortsighted, arbitrary and unfair'.
He said he was proud of Labour's education legacy, which has provided 4,000 new or refurbished schools since 1997.
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And he attacked education secretary Michael Gove's plans for free schools, which would see groups of parents form schools free from local authority control.
He said: “What really upsets me is that as Michael Gove is dashing the hopes of children in state schools around our country, he and David Cameron area also travelling round promising new school buildings to a few parents - but only if they are willing to opt out of the state system, and any relationship with the elected local authority, and set up one of their go-it-alone DIY free market schools - a policy which we know from Sweden delivered lower standards and greater inequality.”
Mr Balls namechecked the newly rebuilt Mossley Hollins High in Tameside, which is due to open in February and was built with BSF money, praising its new library, science labs and dance studio. And he warned coalition education policy, including the scrapping of BSF, could signal 'a return to the 1980s'.
He said: “When the Tories and Liberal Democrats say we have to cancel our school building programme because getting the deficit down as fast as possible is the number one priority, when they say that there is no alternative to these cuts now, let us remember – that is what Margaret Thatcher said in 1980, and we saw the devastation to our communities, to manufacturing and youth jobs as unemployment rose year by year for half a decade." Fuelling speculation about David Miliband's future in the cabinet, he added: “I want to pay tribute in particular to David Miliband who, as schools minister, made the inspired decision to launch the BSF programme.
“Conference, David has made a massive contribution already – and we all know he as a huge contribution to make in the future too.” Tweet
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He said he was proud of Labour's education legacy, which has provided 4,000 new or refurbished schools since 1997. What a joker>
The state of our education since labour took control ,pupils leaving school cannot read or write ,teachers being attacked,truency a massive problem.Its not the quality of the building its the quality of learning (teaching). "sows ears and silk purses come to mind."
"He said he was proud of Labour's education legacy, which has provided 4,000 new or refurbished schools since 1997..."
...and thousands of children who can't read or write; have no knowledge of their culture and their history; and who are bone idle to boot.
Amazing....
Labour are totally against schools having any independence from state and council control..
Yet matters are different with healthcare, building schools and public buildings, prisons and prisoner transport, and a whole host of other state functions which the Labour Government have outsourced over the last 13 years...
How strange? A cynic might think they are reluctant to give up indoctrinating and controlling the next generation
The BSF programme was a very slow a bureaucratic way of delivering schools.
The greatest achievement of Ball’s and Labour over the last 13yrs in education is to ensure that every school has a lunch time crisp monitor!
Ed Balls. Never has somebody had such an appropriate name.
Labour has not provided "4,000 new or refurbished schools since 1997" that is yet another myth perpetrated by the likes of Ed Balls and his Labour acolytes.
The cash was loaned money in the guise of the PFI/BSF programme. It is estimated that this money, which is off balance sheet, coupled with PFI cash for fire stations, police stations and hospitals actually doubles the national debt.
This cash will be being paid by our children for the next thirty years. The quality of the build of these schools is shocking, and many only have a guaranteed life for the period of the PFI payments. On the handover back to local authorities in two/three decades time, we could be left with schools worse than what we had, and a bigger backlog of repairs than Labour inherited in 1997. Truly shocking.
What does 'The Boy Named Sue' know about anything? Another career politician--- GET A PROPER JOB!
Never have the state schools of Britain been worse. The children are being let down. Get the politicians off the backs of the state schools and give parents a free choice and you will see improvement at once. Ed Balls went as a boy to Nottingham High School for Boys but then stopped other poor children from having free places at the school, just as at MGS, Bolton School, Bury GS, Withington Girls and the other direct grant schools.
Ed Balls always talks a load of um.....rubbish
I have never forgiven Labour for the comprehensive balls up! I passed my 11+ to go to grammar school and finished up going to school with a load of scruffy, ill-educated louts from the council estate.