This week Ed Balls asked the Treasury for a £2.6bn increase in spending on children’s services from 2011 onwards – a move that may come as a surprise to those who can remember as far back as two months ago when he was the first minister to outline how his department would cut spending. Balls told the Sunday Times in September that “the squeeze will begin after 2011” and described how £2bn could be saved from the schools budget through curbing teachers’ and teaching assistants’ pay and reducing numbers of senior school staff.

This recent U-turn, in which Balls requested a 4 per cent cumulative increase in DCSF’s budget from 2011 (versus the 5% cut he announced in September), prioritises political positioning over a clear policy direction, sending mixed messages to the senior school staff who are expected to implement the raft of new initiatives announced in the Queen’s speech while wondering if their jobs are still at risk.

In his Labour Party Conference speech in September, Balls promised not to “shirk the tough decisions to deliver the recovery we need and to get the deficit down”, but he is now more keen to present himself as a staunchly pro-spending antithesis to threatened Tory cuts. Balls admitted in a Sky interview over the weekend that the Queen’s speech is primarily a tool for differentiating Labour from the Tories: “To be honest, that is what politics is about. It’s about differences of values and differences of choices facing our country. The Queen’s Speech will lay out very clearly different choices.” If some of the dividing lines are becoming more clear, Balls’s position on protecting education spending beyond 2010 unfortunately is not.

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