Andy Burnham is right, but we need to call this what it was: state-sanctioned vandalism. The Conservatives systematically stripped sport, music, and drama from state school timetables, dismissing them as frivolous extras while preserving them for elite private schools. They treated working-class children as industrial units to be tested and processed, not young people who deserve a full, rich life. The defense from the educational establishment was always economic efficiency. Teach the basics, pump up the league tables, ignore the rest. It was a narrow, philistine view of education that left an entire generation poorer for it. Every child deserves access to sport, instruments, and the arts, not as a luxury, but as a birthright. If we only teach state school kids to read and count while private schools teach theirs to create, perform, and lead, we are simply baking inequality into the timetable.