John Bald: Gibb’s account of how the blob was beaten

John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.

Nick Gibb is the longest-serving education minister in British history. Nicky Morgan famously said he was “so good they appointed him twice,” and then – shades of Dick Whittington – Rishi Sunak appointed him a third time. Unusual, too, to have served so long in the second tier, albeit as a Privy Councillor. At our first meeting, in 2006, he told me that this was the work he wanted to do, and did not want promotion. Unlike most politicians saying this, he meant it.

Gibb’s book is a valuable and highly personal view of this unique career, with accounts of battles fought, on the ground – wresting control of schools from the hegemony of local authorities – and in the air, against the pervasive orthodoxy of “progressive” thinking that had taken control of education away from elected representatives and given it to unelected, self-perpetuating bureaucracies, culminating in Labour’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). At its demise, this behemoth was consuming £200 million of public money annually, to no effect other than sustaining its own ideology.

Towards the end of his tenure, Gibb  takes “some satisfaction” in The Economist’s view that, “Under the Conservatives, England’s schools have improved.” Broadly speaking, both he and The Economist are right. The big battles, at least for the moment, have been won. Over four-fifths of secondary, and two-fifths of primary schools are now academies, and Labour does not seek to change this. Progressives, defeated by the evidence of improved standards, have been driven back into their fastnesses of university education departments and some parts of the DfE.

On the other hand, Conservative support among teachers is at its lowest ebb – one survey had it below five per cent – and our opponents are highly skilled at the long game. Civil servants will not disobey a direct instruction from a minister, but the DfE’s heart beats on the Left, and its favourite institution is the London Institute of Education (IoE), to which it directs government contracts and funding at every opportunity. A recent example was removing the national languages centre from York, which had been represented on government working parties, to the IoE, which has been the DfE’s intellectual home since the 1960s.

Gibb cites another, more telling example. Following the bonfire of the quangos, the government found itself with £137 million, saved from another source, that had to be spent by the end of the financial year 2010-11 or returned to the Treasury.  A DfE official suggested setting up a new organisation, The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) as “our own What Works clearing house”. It was duly staffed by former Labour officials and turned into a mega quango, undoing all the hard work that had gone into dismantling the others. It has contributed nothing to forwarding the government’s agenda – the one exception, an investigation of phonics, was impeded by Covid. Its latest director described grouping children according to their abilities and learning needs as “symbolically violent” and is now leading on the curriculum for Labour.

Gibb defends the EEF on the basis of one study of teaching assistants – good as far as it goes, but not respecting the limits of its evidence – but is frank about the series of errors and mishaps in the early stages of Academy expansion, notably Perry Beeches, which had been highlighted by David Cameron and Michael Gove before its collapse. He declares himself “a fan” of Dominic Cummings, though this is scarcely consistent with the negative comments about him throughout the book, particularly in Cummings’ briefing against Sir Michael Wilshaw, which led to Cummings’ departure from the DFE, and also to Cummings’ block of a separate certificate for the English Baccalaureate. The SEND fiasco was not part of Gibb’s remit, though perhaps it should have been.

Overall, Gibb’s satisfaction in his achievement is fully justified. Establishing phonics as the basis of reading teaching was a decisive factor in the improvement of English schools’ performance in international assessments while those in Scotland and Wales were declining. The check on multiplication tables is an important first step in dealing with the long-term lack of basic skills in arithmetic that has for too long been kicked down the road to FE. Removing Labour’s fake qualifications and equivalences and re-establishing examinations in the face of widespread corruption and cheating in the coursework era were essential to restoring integrity and a degree of reliability to the system. Widening the reach of educational debate to include thinkers like Hirsch, Willingham and Lemov, and championing the work of innovative headteachers like Sir Michael Wilshaw and Katharine Birbalsingh, established an intellectual base that provided a badly-needed and credible alternative to progressivism.

Michael Gove and Nick Gibb returned schools to their proper purposes, and stemmed the tide of progressive theory that had swept across the English-speaking world during the last century. We have reason to be grateful to them, and for this detailed first-hand account of how it was achieved.

Nick Gibb and Robert Peal. Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved. Routledge £18.99