Labour needs to make more of a concerted effort to get across its plans for education, according to Tristram Hunt.

Writing in the Guardian, the shadow education secretary said that while “the fundamentals” of the party’s education manifesto were sound in principle, properly articulating this during the election campaign was poor.

The manifesto outlined Labour’s plans to shift the focus of policy towards quality teaching, strong leadership and smaller class sizes.

It also documented the party’s plan to overhaul Ofsted, boost the renown of careers advice and investing in creative subjects.

While this chimed with the public, Mr Hunt said that Ed Miliband, Labour’s now former leader, “allowed himself to be perceived as uninterested in schools policy”.

“And in our increasingly presidential politics, the media refracts every issue through the party leader’s personal capital,” he elaborated in his piece for the newspaper.

“This, coupled with sincere concerns about “initiative-itus” and teacher exhaustion, tempered our radicalism, allowing the Tories to seize far too much of the education mantle.”

Mr Hunt added that the next leader of the Labour will have to put education at the heart of their vision of the party’s “political project”.

This is vital if it is going to win the next general election, after suffering a bruising defeat in May that was far worse than most commentators and pollsters had expected.

Some of Labour’s core pledges in their education manifesto were ringfencing the education budget for 0-19-year-olds, capping class sizes for primary school children to 30 maximum and cutting university tuition fees, which the party introduced in 1997, to £6,000.