Nick Gibb, the former Conservative MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, was schools minister from July 2014 to September 2021, and from October 2022 to November 2023. He left parliament in May this year and is writing a book on the reforms he oversaw
Q: What is the most important lesson from your time in office?
A: If we want our public services to improve, or other problems we’re facing, you’ve got to have politicians who are serious, not playing the political game. And you’ve got to give them the time to immerse themselves into the sector that they’re trying to reform, to understand it.
This is why reshuffling the whole time is a disaster for government. It took me five years to gain any kind of proper understanding of the education system.
Q: What are the principles for effective policy-making?
A: The period in opposition was really important. Michael Gove was shadow education secretary for three years, I was shadow schools minister for five. I visited schools every Monday in those five years, learning, meeting people talking, challenging, reading.
That matters. The best policy-makers in a democracy are people that are elected. Their job depends on knowing what people think.
If you’ve been in power for 10, 12, 14 years, you get further and further away from that time in opposition. And you then rely more and more on policy-making that comes from the officials, and that’s when it becomes weaker. I have huge admiration for civil servants; they are bright, committed, hard-working. But their job is to methodically implement challenging policy.
We need to find a way that ministers can think these things without necessarily going into opposition.
Q: Who was the best secretary of state to work for, and why?
A: Do I need to tell you? Michael Gove. He’s a phenomenal politician; incredibly bright, incredibly energetic. He had a proper understanding of what he wanted to do in education. I often talk about that period when we first came into office being a kind of white-knuckle ride, because it was such hard work. I often said to myself, I’m being punished for every wasted 15 minutes in my last past life. It was just a wonderful period.
Q: What is the achievement you’re most proud of?
A: There are four things (I’m allowed to have four? I was there a long time!) The first is obviously phonics and changing the way reading is taught in primaries.
Millions of children, particularly the less able, are now not struggling. I meet parents who say … ‘whenever I hear my child sounding out letters, I think of you’, which is nice.
Second, changing the maths curriculum in primary to reflect what is happening in Southeast Asia… those changes are why we’ve gone from 17th to 11th in PISA. And there are record numbers taking maths [at A-level].
You need ministers challenging orthodoxies when the evidence says the orthodoxies don’t work
The third is the knowledge-rich curriculum. The fourth is do with teachers. The working title of my book is Freedom to Teach. I’m not sure that will remain the title, but that sums it up.
England is way ahead in terms of teachers taking control of the secret garden and writing and blogging and attending conferences and so on.
Q: Why do you think phonics worked as a policy?
A: The evidence was there. The political challenge was landing a new test in a sector where the unions are hostile even to existing tests. There are two things to that: I always tried not to be a polemical figure. The ideas I was promoting were challenging enough without me layering on top the “let’s be a typical aggressive politician”. Having a good personal relationship with union leaders and respecting their position allowed us to have proper discussions about policy that was informed and respectful.
And then having to compromise. Ideally when you introduce new tests, you’d publish results on a school-by-school basis, but I knew that would have been a step too far.
It’s just trying to understand when you have to compromise, which people don’t necessarily associate with me. They should!
Q: If you were still in office, what would have been the next big thing?
A: I would have done more on sports. I think the way sport is taught in schools over emphasises the skills, and de-emphasises exercise. Also music.
The other thing is about the quality of some failing schools. Some, and even within the 88 per cent that are ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’, have terrible results.
There are fewer of them, but there’s still too many that are just not delivering. Getting 45 per cent reading, writing and maths combined in a primary school, or 17 per cent achieving the Ebacc are unacceptable figures.
How do we get schools to apply the methods that we know from other schools around the country work?
While Boris Johnson was still prime minister, I was going round to local authorities, giving them notice I wanted to discuss these schools. We’d have the regional schools commissioners to discuss the academies.
This is me being Mr prescriptive and Illiberal again, but what are we going to do with those schools?
I would have looked at how do we get them to apply the methods that we know from other schools around the country work. Is there some mechanism where they are required or expected to adopt [those] methods of teaching?
We’ve got so much accumulated evidence now, there’s no excuse for not doing it. Whether it’s phonics, maths mastery, knowledge-rich curriculum, school behaviour policies.
That would have been my focus – popular or not.
Q: A theme across the past ten years is the clash between autonomy and government prescribing how schools should do things. How do you square those things?
A: You need both structural reform and a standards agenda. If you just have structural reform, there’s a danger that nothing changes and that the sector just uses the autonomy to do what it’s always done.
You also need ministers challenging orthodoxies when the evidence says the orthodoxies don’t work.
When the evidence is so overwhelming for these things – knowledge-rich, maths mastery, phonics – politicians have a duty to engage in this debate, at the very least.
Q: The teacher development ‘golden thread’ reforms and things such as the Oak National Academy are centralised policies. What stops politicians with a different view enacting rapid change?
A: That’s always the argument about not doing stuff. We live in a parliamentary democracy, and if you want to elect somebody to do something else, you are free to do that.
If a new government wants to abolish the phonics screening check, it can do it tomorrow. It can take powers; it can get rid of powers. So I never really worried about that.
The key to changing things is to demonstrate the effectiveness of your ideas. That’s what we have done.
Q: Your approach was to bring reforms quickly. Labour is taking more time, speaking to the sector. What are your thoughts on that?
A: The party has to be aware it will be judged on how effective the policies are, not on whether 70 per cent of the people it consulted were in favour of it.
If you compromise too much away from what you think will work, guess what? It won’t work.
Q: Did you do too many things too quickly?
A: No. We spent a lot of time in opposition preparing. When we got into office, we were ready with a worked-up bill for the Academies Act… We had identified what we thought the causes of Britain’s decline in its education system was caused by. And we had what we thought were the solutions.
Q: Does Treasury dominance have a positive effect on government?
A: What sometimes worries me about the Treasury approach is that it comes along half way through a year and says “find £900 million of savings for next year”, when your discretionary budget may be £5 billion. You then start questioning a whole bunch of small programmes that work, that have taken up hundreds of hours of civil service and ministers’ time developing, and you see them succeeding. But it says “sorry, that £20 million programme has to go”. It seems a very odd way of managing things.
The Treasury has a view that schools are well funded, because internationally they are. But it doesn’t then say how they could be more efficient. If the room is too hot, you don’t go to the thermometer and push the gauge down and hope the temperature will change. You turn the radiator off.
But sometimes the Treasury thinks because it’s said it, it will happen in a painless way. You have to be cleverer, longer-term and more strategic to find savings.
Q: What is the biggest challenge for Bridget Phillipson?
A: I wasn’t happy with our standards, even though they’ve improved hugely.
There should not be a single child in any school who is not getting a good result in phonics and who does not do well in their SATs in reading. So that’s a challenge.
Teacher recruitment is the other challenge. People forget we put a lot of effort into this. We put in a new team of officials four or five years back, we brought in new marketing people, changed our advertising agency, looked carefully at bursaries, brought in the early career framework. We never let up on policy initiatives. And, just to be slightly defensive, we recruited 27,000 more teachers in that period, so we haven’t gone back.
