Danny Scott

Bridget Phillipson and I have a lot in common. Like the Education Secretary, who started life in a council house in Tyne and Wear, I grew up on a tough estate. Mine was in Selston, a rural East Midlands mining village. Home life was hard; my mam was blind and illiterate. But against the odds – like Phillipson – I achieved outstanding results at my local state school. Decades on, I'm still proud that my grade As in physics, maths and English were O-Levels, not wishy-washy GCSEs. Labour's mooted education review would almost certainly kick the ladder out from under kids like me Yet while our backgrounds are similar, I couldn't disagree more with Phillipson's curriculum shake-up.

On 6 March 1984, I found myself smack-bang in the middle of the largest industrial dispute in post-war history. As the son of a fifth-generation miner whose bedroom window looked out onto Pye Hill Pit in Selston – the remote Nottinghamshire mining village I called home – I couldn’t help but be caught up in the miners’ strike. And over its 363 days, I watched with bemused anger as a series of nods, winks, slights of hand and outright lies were fashioned into a hard and fast history. So much of what Selston stood for was lost in the strike and its malicious aftermath On one side we had the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) principled president Arthur Scargill and the striking miners, fighting to save British mining.