Bridget Phillipson

The time has come to build towards a bolder future of universal early years education so disadvantaged children no longer missed out.

No parent should have to choose between a summer day out to the beach and kitting their child out for school.

We’re supporting councils to intervene early to help as part of our new deal for young people to ensure they realise their potential through worthwhile training and stable careers.

While local authorities do incredibly difficult work, often against real constraints, it’s not consistent enough.

Accurate, timely tracking is not a box-ticking exercise, it’s the difference between a young person getting support early or falling through the cracks entirely.

This is one of the defining challenges of this government. Fixing it is crucial to the prosperity of our country: we cannot afford to let a generation of young people drift away from opportunity and more fulfilled lives.

This was wrong, and we are sorry.

Even a white working-class boy growing up today on the same street that I did, he just can’t see the point in going to school at all.

But this report lays bare the fact that those promises to so many people in our country have been broken.

I think it’s vital that we don’t use stories like mine to obscure the wider story of working-class communities.

It’s an approach that tells white working-class kids that to succeed, they have to either be exceptional or exceptionally lucky.

As this report makes so depressingly clear, the distant dream of social mobility has failed a whole new generation of white working-class kids.

My mother bought that home to give me and our family a better life and that’s what families in our country will always seek to do.

It’s faintly ridiculous and it’s just another highly personalised attack. I mean, the numbers and the way that’s being presented is just not accurate.

I think it represents just a continuation of the nonsense that we’ve seen in recent days from the Conservative Party. It’s a manufactured smear on my family.

This is about all of us across society taking action, and yes, that means supporting parents as well.

This is a big, big, big generational challenge.

We know that children born into less well-off families are more likely to arrive at school further behind their more affluent peers.

Class is a huge driver of outcomes, never mind in our politics, but right across society.

The report is also clear, and the evidence is also clear, that children arrive at school not ready to learn, having not achieved the levels that they should.

For the first time in a long time white working-class children have a government that will fight for them.

The communities in this report are my communities. I know what they've given this country and what this country has failed to give back.

If you want robust political debate, I'm here for that every day of the week, but I think reducing this to Nazi analogies, reducing it to that level of highly personalised abuse, I think says more about Kemi Badenoch than anybody else.

I said that the public will see her for who she really is.

It says more about her that she sinks to this level. Every passing week at Prime Minister's questions, she sinks lower and lower, completely devoid of any kind of grace.