With the General Election under a hundred days away, and the campaigns gathering pace, the contest for Cambridge, where incumbent MP Julian Huppert holds a significant majority of 6,792, is beginning to hot up. Tristram Hunt, Shadow Education Secretary, is not the first, and certainly will not be the last, Labour politician who will be in Cambridge over the coming months, trying to secure a seat that the Liberal Democrat’s have held since 2005. Despite this majority, Hunt is confident that Labour stand a “very strong” chance of reclaiming the seat, arguing that the recent advances in the local elections – where Labour regained control of the City Council – demonstrated that “people were coming back ” to his party, as well as a lack of trust for the amber side of the coalition. Hunt, who studied at Trinity College, endorsed the Labour candidate Daniel Zeichner as a “great local campaigner with strong Labour values”.

This was Labour’s National Campaign Day, with students and activists converging on Cambridge from different parts of the country, including a sizeable contingent from the Oxford University Labour Club, to canvass in the Cherry Hinton ward, a traditional stronghold. With a turnout of around 70 people, this was, according to Cambridge University Labour Club Chair Fred Jerrome, their biggest campaign day yet – an indication of how Labour’s message “is inspiring people to get involved and actually participate in politics to try and make a change”.

Tuition fees will undoubtedly play a major role in the election debates in a city where students make up a substantial proportion of the voting bloc, although MP Huppert has consistently opposed the hike. Hunt appeared reluctant to deviate from the official script, confirming neither Labour’s, nor his own, position on tuition fees and refusing to comment on rumours of a proposed reduction from £9,000 to £6,000. He did, however, guarantee that clarification on the issue was imminent, calling February ‘next generation month’, which will allegedly see a series of high profile policies being rolled out in education.

When asked whether students were currently getting value for their money, Hunt replied “not always”, claiming it often depended on the department, course or college. Without offering any substantive suggestion for how Labour would rectify the increasing disparity between what students pay and receive, the Shadow Education Secretary recommended that students “demand high levels of transparency, accountability and value for money” from their investment.

Over the past year, Hunt has attacked the Business Rate Relief being extended to private schools, arguing that many are not doing enough to earn this subsidy and appealing to them to help state schools by lending teaching staff and helping with university admissions. This is in light of a report published in 2013 by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, which revealed that between 2002-2013, the percentage of state-educated students at Russell Group universities actually fell.

Even more sobering was the reality that the odds of a child eligible for free school meals being admitted into Oxbridge were almost 2,000 to one, whereas the odds if you were privately educated stood at twenty to one. Although this is hardly a ringing endorsement of Labour’s record on social mobility, Hunt understandably decided to focus on the fact that this attainment gap is growing under the current government. His solution? To raise school standards, which he defines as “great teaching in the classroom and strong headteachers”, delivered by increased school autonomy and a potentially radical reform of OFSTED.

The frozen fingers and wet feet by the end of the canvassing session, as the snow began to settle on the ground outside, contrast sharply with the heat and intensity of this election campaign. The Cambridge seat may well go down to the wire, with a Labour Party desperate to regain office, and the Liberal Democrats trying to cling on to one of their many seats coming under acute pressure from both the opposition and their coalition partners.

Hunt’s message of the sense that ordinary people are “working harder and harder, but standing still” was clear, although his vision for education still requires the clarification that is apparently going to arrive within the next few weeks. Whether Labour’s message is resonating with people on the doorstep is equally ambiguous, although, with the days until the election having dropped into the double digits, the Cambridge seat is very much up for grabs.