Class gap will be a priority, Education Secretary Alan Johnson tells the Fabian New Year Conference, as Estelle Morris says government will need to to pay more attention to the social mix in schools.

Speakers: Fran Abrams, Peter Hyman, Alan Johnson MP, Estelle Morris, Louise Bamfield.

Labour needs to deepen its analysis of why the gap in educational attainment isn't narrowing and to look again at the importance of the social mix in school intakes, former Minister Estelle Morris told the Fabian new year conference education debate, as current Education Secretary Alan Johnson said that closing the social class gap in educational outcomes would be central to the government's next decade agenda.

Morris said she supported the Fabian Life Chances Commission's call to make narrowing the gap in attainment the central objective of the future education policy agenda, with a greater focus on those who risk being left behind, but argued that this could raise some difficult questions about Labour's analysis of educational underachievement.

The Labour government had tended to put underperformance down to 'a lack of aspiration', said Morris. While this played a role, there had been a tendency to downplay other important causes, such as admissions and the social mix in schools. She said that she had changed her mind on this importance of this issue since leaving office and now felt that more needed to be done to manage intake to ensure a better social mix. 'We need to look again at the evidence … this is an issue that most centre-left governments haven't gotten to the bottom of'. She called for more research, but suggested that this would also require a greater political focus on the causes of low attainment, including a willingness to ask questions which could highlight tensions in government policy.

Alan Johnson also emphasised the importance of closing the social class gap. He argued that recent changes to make the admissions code mandatory was an important step forward on intake. In raising aspiration, parental involvement was a key factor, he added.

Johnson did not accept former adviser Peter Hyman's claim that education seemed to be slipping down the political agenda. 'Education is still Labour's number one priority', he said, echoing the priority which Gordon Brown had given education in opening the Fabian conference earlier in the day. Johnson pointed to the increased funding settlement recently agreed for education as evidence of the government's continued commitment, and offered a staunch defence of the progress made over the last ten years.

'When the story of this Labour government is written we will see that education since 1997 has been a journey. We might not have got everything right along the way, but we knew where we were going and what our priority was', said Johnson. His biggest regret of the last decade? That the current work to improve vocational education hadn't started earlier.

Peter Hyman suggested that while the rebuilding and refurbishment programme 'Building Schools for the Future' was good, it perhaps also represented a missed opportunity. 'We should have rethought provision itself, rather than simply rebuilding existing provision', he said, citing developments in policy and research in the United States, including the emergence of a model of much smaller schools and class sizes.

Estelle Morris also called for a more radical restructuring of education, by scrapping GCSE's and going from 5-14 and then 14-19, while acknowledging the constraints of infrastructure in moving to this vision.

Fran Abrams, whose Fabian Review article had provided the point of departure for the session, stressed the need to leave opportunities for 'magic' in the classroom, saying that we have become too obsessed with testing. Recent reforms were probably a step in the right direction but would still lead to 'teaching for tests'. Estelle Morris agreed – there was nothing wrong with testing in itself but the key challenge was "not to lose accountability or data, but to give teachers the confidence and flexibility to take risks and succeed." Johnson insisted that transparency and accountability were "non-negotiable", arguing that lack of transparency had led to the problems of previous decades. But he conceded that threshold targets by themselves were too crude, and that a wider range of measures were needed.

Another challenge was co-ordinating services between agencies, said Abrams, telling the story of an abused girl who suffered because of lack of coordination between her school and social services. The key was to ensure that services are talking to each other, in particular that other services are listening to schools.

Floor contributions focused on the role of faith schools, with calls for their abolition, and for the need to elevate the status and relevance of vocational education.

Johnson pointed out that faith schools were very popular in some communities, adding that sometimes anti-faith school sentiment is really focussed on Muslim schools. Johnson warned that an attempt to abolish all faith schools would cost Labour several seats and could risk the election, though was challenged from the floor for basing policy on pragmatism rather than principle.

Johnson's priority in this area would be to ensure fair admissions in faith schools: the requirement that all schools be responsible for social cohesion could prove to be a really radical step, he said. But Estelle Morris took a harder line, asserting that faith "had no role in education". However, she acknowledged that the real problem was communities living separately – this was why their children are educated separately.

Abrams queried the way we conceive of vocational education ("Why don't we just abolish vocational education and have 'education and training?', she asked) and argued it should be more employer-led. Johnson emphasised that the introduction of 14-19 diplomas was a radical step. We don't want a hierarchical system of status with diplomas perceived as being at the bottom, he stressed: 'these diplomas are something we want parents pushing their kids towards'.

Education: what will narrow the gap? with Fran Abrams, commentator; Peter Hyman, teacher and former Downing Street adviser; Alan Johnson MP, Secretary of State for Education; Estelle Morris, former Education Secretary. Chair: Louise Bamfield (Fabian Society). This panel debate took part at the Fabian New Year Conference 'The Next Decade; on January 13, 2007, at Imperial College London.