Bridget Phillipson: did she deliver for schools?

Almost two years to the day since becoming education secretary, Bridget Phillipson lost what she once described as “the best job in government”.

The Houghton and Sunderland South MP presided over Labour’s education policy since 2021, when she became shadow education secretary.

She watched the merry-go-round of ministers under the Conservative government, knowing that once an election was called, she would likely be leading the Department for Education.

“She was really committed to the cause of education,” recalls Ed Dorrell, a former education journalist-turned-partner at Public First who advised Phillipson. “She was very focused on getting the system right.

“Some politicians in top-tier jobs are completely dominated by the politics of what they’re doing, and some spend time thinking hard about the actual subject matter.

“I definitely think Bridget was in that second camp.”

After years of instability in her own party and a relationship with government stretched to breaking-point, Phillipson faced an uphill battle in rebuilding trust.

One of her key pledges was to “reset the broken relationship” between government, schools and families.

It began with a drinks reception with school leaders at Sanctuary Buildings in summer 2024, the sector abuzz with the excitement of change.

“That night was brilliant, everybody was all in,” says Sam Gibbs, curriculum and development lead at Greater Manchester Education Trust.

“I remember looking across the room and seeing people quite divided in education – they were all queuing for selfies.”

She says that Phillipson “came in on a massive wave of hope”.

Two years on, however, it’s not clear whether old wounds are entirely healed.

The National Education Union is due to ballot members on strike action this autumn over pay and conditions – a haunting echo of mass walk-outs under the Tories in 2023.

But significant inroads were made to repair previously fraught relationships with education unions.

‘Vibe shift’

She launched the “improving education together” partnership – a joint agreement with unions and employer representatives to co-create the design and implementation of policy.

Pepe Di’Iasio, the general secretary of the heads’ union ASCL, says she “sought to work constructively” with the sector, but ultimately her ambitions were “undermined by public spending decisions”.

She has been widely praised for securing a 17 per cent cash terms increase in teacher pay over four years. But the rise hasn’t been fully funded by the government, an issue still causing cashflow issues for many schools.

Dorrell says Phillipson inherited many challenges, with most linked to the wider fiscal problems taken on by the Labour government.

“I think at a classroom and headteacher level, as opposed to MAT CEOs, when you get a new Labour education secretary for the first time in 14 years, you expect instinctively that the magic money tree will unfurl itself and funding will flow freely.

“That evidently hasn’t happened, but some of the settlements she has achieved have been pretty good under the circumstances. I think that probably drove some of the trickier relationships.”

Policy expert Loic Menzies says Phillipson’s intention was never “to punctuate history” in education reform but to create a “vibe shift under the banner of ‘evolution not revolution’.”

She did help “detoxify things” but she didn’t quite create a “long-term ‘love-in’.”

“But that’s not necessarily the job of the secretary of state, she is ultimately there to serve the young people and parents.”

Phillipson’s own communication style had its ups and downs; for a politician she is unusually introverted and reserved.

But this meant she rarely looked under pressure when questioned in the Commons or during media interviews.

For others, it was hard to break through and connect with her.

“People are talking about her being rather timid,” says Geoff Barton, former ASCL general secretary.

“They’re misrepresenting an instinctive shyness that I think she has. I think she’s quite a reserved person.

“But we will look back and think that she was the person who was prepared to take on the biggest issue in our education system, which is those people on the margins.”

SEND challenge grasped

One of the biggest challenges was reforming the broken system for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

The plans aim for mainstream schools to become more inclusive by design, which includes introducing three tiers of support, inclusion bases and new SEND plans for pupils. Education, health and care plans will only be for pupils with “complex needs”.

But it took until February this year – more than 18 months – for the proposals to be released, with worries beginning to grow about a stripping back of children’s rights.

Christine Lenehan, the department’s own SEND adviser, revealed to Schools Week in May last year government was considering shake-ups that would likely narrow access to EHCPs.

Tom Richmond, a former DfE adviser under the Conservatives, criticised Phillipson for not having a more thought-out plan when she was elected, adding: “It felt too much like it came too little too late in terms of her thinking.”

But others welcome the time taken – most recently school minister Georgia Gould’s “listening exercise” – to consider a wide range of views.

When finally released, the reforms did not face as widespread a backlash as what followed controversial welfare reforms the previous year, something many feared could happen. But the plans were still criticised.

Leora Cruddas, the chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, points to several successful strategies.

“There was widespread belief that the system did need to be reformed, so that’s helpful. Second, she did a huge amount of work to chart a course through the politics of that. I don’t underestimate how much that took for her to do.

“Georgia coming in and then leading that conversation nationally was a very significant moment for those reforms.

“There’s the combination of a secretary of state with courage and conviction and a schools minister who was able to do the relational piece and speak to a wider variety of stakeholders with very different views.”

This includes sometimes conflicting and competing thoughts from councils, schools and parents about the right course.

Dorrell reflects: “At the very core of the strategy was the idea that when the white paper was published, no one who cared about the contents should be surprised. We pitched on it so extensively and spoke to so many people.”

Caroline Barlow, co-chair of the Heads Roundtable, says some “bigger impact” on SEND sooner would have been beneficial, “but it is so complex and interwoven with other factors that there was no chance of doing that straight off the bat.

“They needed to understand it fully.”

The new government could still face uproar when the finer details begin to be released.

“It kept getting pushed back so the steam went out of it a little bit by the time the white paper was published,” says Rachel Filmer, a founder of parent campaign group SEND Rights Alliance.

“But I don’t think the government seems to understand that the reason that parents and many teachers and SENCOs are so concerned about these reforms is because we are worried they won’t work.”

Ofsted battles

Phillipson also faced having to repair the sector’s relationship with its inspectorate.

She became education secretary just months after a coroner’s inquest found an Ofsted inspection had contributed to the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry.

Labour almost immediately scrapped single-phrase headline grades and asked Ofsted to develop new report cards, which would explicitly measure inclusion.

Inspections under the new framework began last November, and while some leaders have praised the process as more collaborative, they still face a significant backlash.

For instance, schools with higher disadvantage are more likely to be downgraded for measures such as achievement.

Jonny Uttley, a former multi-academy trust chief executive who now works with the Centre for Young Lives, is full of praise for Phillipson. But he says reforming inspections is “one of the areas where she fell short”.

“One of the mistakes made is ploughing on with allowing Ofsted to reform itself,” he says. “The reform was meant to be about reducing the high stakes and never having a headteacher take their own life again.

“That’s the bottom line and what has been delivered is so far removed from that.”

For Barlow, there needs to be clarity on the connection between the DfE and Ofsted.

“I hear some people saying that the DfE should do more. I hear other people saying they are deliberately separate bodies.

“There is an absolutely growing imperative within the sector that Ofsted is still not what it was intended to be, post review.”

Meanwhile Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the NAHT heads’ union, is calling for a “circuit-breaker to fundamentally reset” inspections.

But Cruddas doesn’t believe Phillipson could have done much differently.

“There were some parts of the sector that campaigned for some of the changes that were brought in – I’m not sure we fully understood some of the unintended consequences of those changes.

“But because inspection is such a tinderbox with such huge consequences for accountability, it is inevitable, perhaps, that there is always going to be a lot of heat and light around changes to an inspection framework.”

There isn’t universal condemnation of the reforms. Simon Garrill, the chief executive of the Orion Education academy trust, finds the framework “useful for school improvement.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s the tail wagging the dog. The changes that this framework is causing in schools are pretty good, around tracking the most vulnerable, making sure you’ve got interventions in place.”

Curriculum evolution

Phillipson also set the wheels in motion early on planned curriculum and assessment reforms, appointing Becky Francis, the chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, to lead an independent review.

The review promised “evolution, not revolution”.

Phillipson accepted most of Francis’s recommendations, with a new curriculum now expected from 2028.

“I was deeply honoured to lead the review,” Francis says. “I thought that signalled a trust in evidence.”

Phillipson “navigated the complexities especially in an environment of fiscal constraint and the long-standing debates in education with thoughtfulness and care and values-driven determination”.

Dorrell says the final review document was “quite nuanced” rather than “something that was trying to headline grab. She didn’t try and rewrite the history curriculum herself in her office at her desk.”

“She’s very clever and thought very hard about stuff. She would settle on positions that were not strictly sensational in loads of areas – like the curriculum review – because she thought about the real life of schools and the real impact changes would have.”

But there are “lots of progressives in education who I think hoped that Bridget would be a progressive with a big P, and she’s not really,” he says.

In keeping with the review’s mantra, Phillipson did not make sweeping changes to the assessment system, despite calls from some groups to scrap GCSEs.

Gibbs praises the “long overdue tonal shift around teachers to this idea of teachers as curriculum makers”.

But “until we change the assessment system, you are going to be limited in what you can do with the curriculum.

“While we’ve got progress 8, we’ll have people who are just going to be focused on exam grades.”

Julie McCulloch, a former policy director at ASCL who now leads the Education Policy Institute, says Phillipson followed a “really careful path” by building consensus on some of the major changes in her brief.

“But I kind of wonder whether there was a bit too much consensus. I think she struggled to articulate a really clear compelling vision.

“I suspect was that was as much to do with not being given a huge amount of leeway by a very cautious prime minister.”

This debate over the government’s education vision – or lack thereof – leaked into the school structures space.

Structures rumble

In opposition, Phillipson pledged to end the “needless micro-management of schools” and looked to “smooth the differences” between academies and maintained school sectors.

She wasn’t “interesting in wholesale structural reform”, but civil servants were tasked with coming up with options.

So it was a surprise to many that one of the government’s first big pieces of legislation – the children’s wellbeing and schools bill – proposed sweeping new controls over academies.

The schools white paper earlier this year also revealed that the government wants all schools to join or form trusts. Councils and local area partnerships will be given power to launch chains.

“That was a significant moment,” Cruddas says. “She is the first secretary of state to have talked explicitly about a system designed for children… rather than make the case for structural reforms on its own merits.

“I think she really believes that it shows her conviction around what she believes. That was always going to be difficult for her to land politically, and yet she did.”

But tensions did rumble with the academy sector. The wording of the original bill would have put a ceiling on teacher pay in academies, some of which choose to pay above the pay scales for maintained schools.

“That was a difficult moment for us … but I think we weathered that through sensibly together, securing amendments that were quite important,” says Cruddas.

The bill was watered down to put a floor, but not a ceiling, on teacher pay.

The pay of academy trust chief executives, however, is due to be restricted. Government permission will be needed for any new appointment on more than £174,000.

Reflecting on the school reforms, Menzies said: “You can certainly see why there were bits of academy freedoms that didn’t always seem to make full sense. The idea of a national curriculum that wasn’t actually national. The idea of schools running their own admissions is problematic.

“But you can also see why that’s going to feel like a threat… and the full story of what are trusts and who does what within that system still hasn’t been worked through.”

But the idea behind Phillipson’s RISE school improvement teams – another flagship manifesto policy – “was good in many ways,” he says.

“It was one way of addressing the fact that we had an accountability system with lots of provision for sanctions, but not so much in terms of support”

Child poverty legacy

Though many of her critics will remember Phillipson best for taxing private school fees, another huge legacy will be her work on addressing child poverty.

Key policies have included school breakfast clubs, 30 hours of government-funded childcare and more school-based nurseries, as well as extending free school meals to all households on universal credit from this September.

Keir Starmer recently described lifting the two-child benefit cap as his proudest achievement as prime minister, even though he dragged his feet for over a year and punished MPs for backing an earlier motion to abolish it. Phillipson was among those who argued for the change.

Di’Iasio said alongside the SEND plans, “she deserves credit for tackling the appalling high level of child poverty”.

Phillipson, who grew up in poverty, had personal ties to the issue. Her outgoing social media post this week referenced her work “to break the unfair link between background and success”.

“That is the agenda that sometimes goes under the radar from an education point of view,” says Dan Morrow, the chief executive of the Cornwall Education Learning Trust.

“She saw poverty and education as two sides of the same coin, which is it’s not just about social mobility and allowing a small number of people to do well. It was about trying to address it with universal provision.”

Richmond says: “I think she will be remembered for her absolute commitment to support young children and addressing child poverty.

“There is still potential for [her policies] to make a difference to young people around the country.

“I fear, though, that ultimately she will be remembered for the things that didn’t work properly and the things that weren’t delivered well, or indeed things that were ignored entirely.”

Never-ending cycle

Phillipson will continue to be a full member of Burnham’s cabinet, one of a small number of ministers from the Labour right to survive his purge this week. She continues as minister for women and equalities, a role she held alongside her education role since 2024.

She is the third longest-serving education secretary since 2010. Michael Gove still holds the record of four years and two months. She nearly beat Gavin Williamson, who served for two years and one month.

The sector has welcomed the stability she has brought during the past two years, especially as Lucy Powell’s appointment makes her the tenth to occupy the position in 10 years. Five served in 2022 alone.

“The constant churn does have an impact,” says Garrill. On key policy briefs Phillipson “approached things quite sensibly, she tried to take her time to build up a sensible rationale for change.

“What you then want is someone not to come in and chuck the baby out with the bathwater. We just need some stability in the sector.”

Morrow reflects: “I do think that ultimately, she has laid strong roots for continued improvement, not just in relationships, but in the deal our children and communities get. And for that, I think she should be celebrated and applauded.”