Keir Starmer heckled by protesters during education speech – UK politics live

Q: Do you think schools need to have single sex toilets? And do you think schools should tell parents if their children want to change sex?

Starmer says there is a need for guidance on this. The government has promised this, but it has not appeared yet. He urges them to release it, so people can look at it. And he says they should put the protection of children at its heart, not “political point scoring”.

Q: Why don’t you back free school meals for all primary schools?

Starmer says there is a debate to be had. He says his view is that there are better ways of spending money. He says the party is committed to extending breakfast clubs.

Q: Poverty, and child poverty, does not seem to have got much of a mention in your five missions. What would Labour do about that?

Starmer says, just as the last Labour government was “laser focused” on reducing poverty, his government would be too.

He says getting rid of poverty is the foundation on which the missions sit.

The resolve to tackle it would be just as strong as under the last Labour government, he says.

Q: Public services are falling behind. You say there is no money for big investment. But when would there be money?

Starmer says Labour has to grow the economy, in every part of the UK. That is why having the fastest growth in the G7 is one mission. Other missions “ladder up” to that, he says.

But he says some of his reforms are not about money. There are reforms you can do without extra investment.

Q: You say you want to change the national curriculum. Why not say what you would do now?

Starmer says he wants to change the curriculum “in a thoughtful way”, which takes the country with it.

Starmer is now taking questions.

Q: Tomorrow there will be another day of disruption in schools. Why should we think you would be better at sorting out the strikes than the government?

Starmer says, if he were PM, he would order Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, to negotiate “every day of the week until this was resolved”.

Back to the Starmer speech, and he has just spoken about the importance of tackling “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. He acknowledged that Michael Gove said this when he was education secretary. He was right to do so, Starmer says.

In fact, the US president George W Bush used the phrase well before Gove.

An organisation called Green New Deal Rising has put out a statement saying its activists were the ones who disrupted Keir Starmer’s speech earlier. It describes itself as a movement of 16- to 35-year-olds “who are making headlines for disrupting politicians to protest the climate and economic crisis and demand a green new deal”.

The press notice includes this comment from Dieudonné Bila, a student who was one of the protesters:

I disrupted Keir Starmer’s speech because I desperately want to see a future government committed to protecting people here and all over the world from the climate crisis. We won’t stand by and allow private companies to continue making billions as heating becomes unaffordable, or be silent in the face of extreme heat, flooding and droughts.

If Keir Starmer wants the support of young people like us he needs to set out a bold vision for the future that gets to the root causes of the problems we are facing. That means public ownership, wealth taxes for the 1%, permanent and progressive windfall taxes for polluters, green jobs for everyone and a national nature service in the first 100 days of a new government.

Starmer is speaking about speaking skills – a line from the speech previewed in his article in the Times. (See 8.49am.)

He says Labour will use money raised by removing tax breaks for private schools to invest in early language intervention in primary schools.

Starmer says Rishi Sunak has given up on educational reform. But Labour will modernise education, he says.

He says that he will introduce “a curriculum fit for the digital age”, that he will “fight for training to be respected as much as university education”, and that he will “drag our education system into the future and shatter that glass ceiling”.

Starmer resumes his speech, and says insecurity places barriers that stop people getting on.

He says the last Labour government had the best record on education, without question.

But it did not eradicate “the snobbery that looks down on vocational education”, he says. And he says that cost the country.

He says there are two questions to ask of the education system. Are we keeping pace with others? And are we prepared to tackled the toxic divides that create a class ceiling.