Nick Gibb: My new book explains how we Conservatives transformed English education

Sir Nick Gibb was the MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton for 27 years until last year and Schools Minister for 10 of those years. On Monday, his and Robert Peal’s book, ‘Reforming Lessons‘, is published.

When Michael Gove was appointed as shadow education secretary by David Cameron in July 2007, I had already been shadow schools minister for two years.

I’d spent those years trying to understand why our school system had seen significant decline in international league tables such as PISA (the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment) during the decade. I visited schools all over the country every Monday to see what was happening in classrooms and to meet teachers to discuss their analysis of the problem. Michael energetically started similar engagement, including looking at best practice overseas.

By the time of the 2010 general election, we were clear about the reasons for decline and had a clear plan. Following the election, in coalition with reasonably like-minded Liberal Democrats and with Michael as Secretary of State and me as Schools Minister, we set about implementing far-reaching reforms to the English education system.

During the first four years, with Michael at the helm, we initiated far reaching change across the school sector, and I spent much of the remaining decade overseeing the implementation and further development of these reforms. By 2021, England had risen to fourth in the world in the reading ability of its nine- and ten-year-olds; and from 27th in Maths in 2009 to 11th.

Because of that success, I was urged to write a book explaining what Michael and I had set out to do and why; and how it led to such significant improvements in academic standards in England’s 23,000 state schools.

I wasn’t keen on embarking on such a daunting project, but when Robert Peal, the extraordinary joint head teacher of the West London Free School who had been a brilliant ministerial adviser at the Department of Education from 2015 to 2016, offered to help, I took the plunge.

It took us a year or more to write but on Monday, Routledge our publisher, will release our book Reforming Lessons. It’s the inside story of England’s education reforms and the role of  ministers  in introducing major reform.

The book explains how during those five years of Opposition, we came to a clear understanding of why our school system was failing, evidenced not just by our precipitous falls in international rankings but by complaints from employers about poor literacy and diabolical maths skills amongst school leavers. Meanwhile, universities moaned about their undergraduates’ increasingly poor preparation for degree-level study.

School visits were augmented by devouring the work of thinkers such as the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham and the education theorist ED Hirsch, to name just two.

A corrosive and pervasive education ideology became increasingly dominant in our education system from the 1970s onwards, reaching its peak in the 2000s – something Peal chronicled in his previous book, Progressively Worse. It led to teaching methods and a curriculum that simply did not work for vast numbers of children.

This so-called ‘child-led’ approach to education, held that children shouldn’t have their creativity and inherent goodness corrupted by being force-fed vast quantities of irrelevant knowledge which, the argument went, they could look up in an encyclopaedia. Teachers should not, they said, be “sages on the stage” but simply “guides on the side”, nudging pupils to learn by “self-discovery” or project work.

This ideology led to attempts to teach reading without teaching children the sounds of the alphabet and how to blend those sounds into words. Instead, pupils were exposed to “real books”, encouraged to repeat high frequency words, and intuit new words from the story or grammar context or even the picture.

Our book explains the battles we waged to ensure primary school children were taught to read using methods that the evidence said worked: systematic phonics.

Similar failed ideological approaches had been adopted for teaching maths, so we looked around the world at those countries topping the international league tables and learned about their curriculum and their teaching methods.

This led us to make very significant changes, including ensuring all children know their times tables by the age of nine, including the tweve times tables. We introduced a timed computer-based test at the end of Year 4 to make sure schools were instilling this skill, something many educationists had dismissed as “rote learning” but which the evidence suggests is key to understanding more complex maths.

Summarising our reforms makes them sound easy to implement but at every stage Michael and I were confronted with opposition from education professors in the universities who had built their careers advocating failed progressivist methods and from the teaching unions. These battles took their toll on both Michael and me, but we pressed on.

We knew we had to free schools from the oversight and overbearing influence of the education establishment which was so wedded to these failed ideas of progressivism. The academies programme, invented by the former Labour schools minister Andrew Adonis, was the vehicle to give schools the autonomy they needed to adopt methods that the evidence showed worked rather than the assertions of ivory tower education academics.

Today, 83 per cent of secondary schools are academies run by independent charitable trusts rather than by local councils, with their funding provided directly by central government through a funding agreement. Nearly half of all primary schools are also now academies.

We show in the book how the revolution in the structure of our school system in England came about and its evolution into highly effective groups known as multi-academy trusts (MATs) that are driving up academic standards across the system.

You’ll notice how I use the term England. Education is a devolved matter and both Scotland and Wales took very different approaches. No routing of progressivist ideology in Edinburgh or Cardiff; in fact, they both doubled down on it, introducing new “competence-based” curricula where high level objectives such as creating “responsible citizens” or “successful learners” replaced detailed subject knowledge.

As a result, Scotland has fallen to 30th in the world in maths and in science; and Wales has fallen to 33rd in reading and maths and 34th in science.

If there’s one achievement I’m most proud of, it’s the liberation of the teaching profession from the shackles of conformity to progressivist, child-centred educational ideology and instead able to adopt the methods that the evidence says works best for their pupils. Teachers in England are looked on with admiration abroad for their engagement in the debates about curriculum and teaching methods, the best approaches to classroom management and pupil behaviour.

The blogosphere is stacked with brilliant think-pieces by hundreds of teachers; researchEd conferences – founded by the teacher Tom Bennett in 2012 – fizz with debate; and multi-academy trusts are producing their own high quality curriculum content and teaching materials that they then make available to other schools.

Other countries, looking at England’s rise in the international league tables, are examining England’s experience. Six Australian states have introduced versions of England’s Phonics Screening Check, a test for six-year-olds to make sure they are on track in learning to read; New Zealand introduced the Check this year.

Delegations of policy makers from around the world are visiting England’s best performing state schools such as Michaela in Brent, Mercia School in Sheffield, and Eden Girls’ School in Coventry to find out how these schools manage to achieve such high academic standards.

You’d think, from reading this, that the job is done. It most certainly is not. Reforming our schools needs to continue. I wish we had been able to do so. But the blueprint for reform is there for all to see.