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Teaching union ATL general secretary Mary Bousted challenged the Labour Party at the weekend to reverse the chaotic Tory education policies fuelling inequality.
Ms Bousted told the Campaign for State Education (Case) conference on Saturday that Education Secretary Michael Gove had created a twin crisis in school places and teacher supply which he was unable to solve.
And the leader of Britain's third-largest teaching union challenged shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt to "take on the Daily Mail."
Mr Gove banned local authorities from opening new community schools so he could create a boom in the number of academies and free schools.
Parliament's public accounts committee said that this would leave a shortage of 256,000 school places next September.
And the Academies Commission found that the shortage has become worse due to academy leaders who use their freedom to handpick top pupils.
Ms Bousted added that reforms to teaching training had created "chaos and confusion" that would leave schools short of qualified staff.
She said: "The only solution to this problem is to have national oversight of place planning and to let local authorities build schools and to have all taxpayer-funded schools working under the same admissions system.
"And the question we have to ask of Labour is this - is it prepared to take on the Daily Mail and to address the manifest inequalities in our education system and to reverse the disastrous road currently being travelled by Michael Gove?"
Case leaders will meet Mr Hunt in January to discuss policy aims agreed at this weekend's conference by 100 teachers, governors and experts.
Prospective Labour MP Catherine West said there was a "small window of opportunity" to influence Labour policy before the manifesto is finalised.
She admitted that Labour's right-wing policy was "part of the reason we've lost a lot of good education people from the party."
She said: "We've privatised education and said that it was down to families to fund.
"No, it's not. It's about the future of our country."
