Bridget Phillipson’s reactionary blitzkrieg at the Department of Education is by far the most malignant aspect of the Government’s agenda (to the extent that it can be said to have one).
But Conservatives must at least give her this: the Education Secretary is providing an object lesson in the just-do-things school of exercising power.
The contrast – not just with her Tory predecessors but with the almost the entire tone of Conservative government between 2010 and 2024 – is striking. Inherited legislation you dislike? Kill it. Want your own man or woman heading a critical quango? Create a vacancy. Despise the whole direction of reform for the past twenty or thirty years? Roll it back.
No endless wringing of hands or consulting of stakeholders. No whingeing that doing this or that would not be a good look. Not even fierce and direct denunciation from the paper of record deters Phillipson from her self-appointed mission.
Tories are usually counselled that turning the clock back is impossible; not, apparently, if you’re Labour. Why? Phillipson surely cannot take all the credit (or blame), although like Michael Gove she seems to have a lot of individual freedom of manoeuvre as Sir Keir Starmer tries to work out why he wanted to be prime minister.
Rather the ease of her advance rests on two other factors. The first is that Labour is much better at building structures than the Conservatives, and so there exists still a voluble chorus of ideologues and special interests (sometimes called ‘the Blob’) prepared to row in behind the Great Leap Backwards – not least elements of the Civil Service, which embarrassed Nadhim Zahawi in 2022 by drawing up its own attack on academies and inserting it into a schools bill whilst he wasn’t looking.
This seems to have weighed much more heavily than media criticism, for understandable reasons. No politician likes bad press, but it is much more personally difficult to attend meetings and conferences where everyone tells you (in so many words) what a bad person you are, and that is the gauntlet to which ‘stakeholder engagement’ subjects every minister.
Unless an individual politician possesses unusual strength of character, the only real armour against this is sufficient personal investment in the policy and knowledge of the area. This is usually only fostered in opposition, and it is thus no surprise that the Conservative schools revolution petered out following Gove’s removal from the Department (although Nick Gibb’s tenure in the Schools portfolio is a model for long-service, NCO-style ministerial appointments).
Second, as I have said before in another context, the Tories did not finish their revolution. Gove’s reforms were a welcome step forward, as were the New Labour measures on which he built, but they remained fundamentally a series of liberalising interventions to an unreformed underlying system; options by which individuals and individual institutions could deviate from the norm, rather than a new norm.
As a result the basic pillars of Phillipson’s mediocre Valhalla – local authority-controlled schools, the National Curriculum, Qualified Teacher Status, et al. – were left in place. It is much easier to merely reimpose a regime than re-establish one outright, and it is that easier task which we left to Labour.
Then there are those areas we all but ignored altogether, for fear that they would Not be A Good Look. It would have been the work of a single bill to allow existing grammar schools to expand, for example, even if we had not the stomach for anything else. But time and again, minister after minister shied away.
Today’s righteous (and right) anger about the Government’s spiteful smash-and-grab on private schools, meanwhile, is in stark contrast to our almost total silence on the subject when in power. Nothing was done about the explosion in fees, whilst low-hanging fruit such as reviving the Assisted Places Scheme were left on the bough.
Defeating Phillipson’s agenda should be a rally cry for Conservatives. But it will not be enough simply to eject Labour from office and then roll back some of her most egregious policies. If Gove made some bold reforms to the status quo, a future Tory government must create a new one. The old order, and the swarm of special pleaders it sustains, must be dismantled.
Of what might such a Year Zero consist? The most important thing must be a decisive relinquishing of government control. Every state school, or group thereof, must be if not specifically academies then at least autonomous and grant-maintained, with complete control (or near it) over the curriculum. Any freedom afforded private schools should be afforded state.
This freedom should also extend to employment: schools, or school groups, should be the legal employers of teachers, on their own terms, and with pay coming not separately from the DfE but from the grant funding. At a stroke this not only gives all schools the freedom to hire the best talent – and pay for it – but breaks the stranglehold of the teacher training providers over the pipeline.
It would also mean an end to national pay bargaining, replaced instead with proper negotiations between empowered schools and staff over the division of a finite and comprehensible budget. Provided that grant funding was kept level, any gradual equalisation of teachers’ salaries with the private sector in lower-cost parts of the country would mean more money for capital projects in those schools, providing some automatic levelling up.
All this would have the effect of largely breaking down the distinction between state schools and private. A bold government (and we’ll need one) could finish the job with two other moves.
First, scrap the requirement that the Secretary of State needs to approve new schools, and let such projects navigate the planning system on the same terms as do independent schools now. This is essential to driving up standards in the long term; school choice only works if parents have options, and a cluster of bad schools ought to represent a clear opportunity for a good competitor.
Second, allow schools to levy top-up fees and parents to spend their child’s share of the education budget towards fees if they wish. This would not only be a major boon to low-cost private schools, such as the Classical Schools Network of which Miriam Cates wrote on Friday, but also permit a revival of the once-common model of schools with a real mix fee-paying and non-paying pupils.
Finally, a decisive way to structurally combat grade inflation would be to take it out of our hands by making the iGCSE and/or International Baccalaureate the standard British exams, reducing the education sector’s ability to set its own homework and allowing for direct comparisons with our international peers on the full range of results.
There is plenty more that might we done (we have not even mentioned a home fees regime for private schools with charitable status, for example), and much in the above list that some might shy away from.
What it illustrates is the scale of what a real revolution looks like – and how much more difficult it would be for a future Phillipson to overturn. A decade into such a new order and the structures and special interests that make possible her counter-revolution would be gone. School leaders would be habituated to independence, teachers to a normal job market, and parents to choice.
Or we could simply make another series of limited if liberalising interventions in the first flush of power and let the deep forces of the school sector reassert themselves again. Phillipson has at least confirmed the certainty of that. As Evelyn Waugh almost put it:
“The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Secondary Modern in arms.”