Gillian Keegan

Tim Durrant (TD): You started your first role in government in February 2020 as the minister for apprenticeships and skills. Can you tell us a bit about the conversation you had when you were given that role?

Gillian Keegan (GK): Ah, well, that was quite interesting because I was called in to Number 10 by Dominic Cummings [then chief adviser to the prime minister], which was the first time I'd met Dominic Cummings. He arrived and said ‘Well, what are you doing here?’ to which I replied ‘Well, I’m here because you invited me, so I'm quite happy to leave’. I think what he was doing…is that some of the people who are working with him were trying to get more women ministers to make sure there was a little bit more gender balance. I mean, nowhere near complete balance but to be a little bit more balanced. To achieve this, they were trying to get to know some of the women that were newish to parliament. 

During the interview with Dominic Cummings, he said ‘What's special about you?’ and I said ‘Well, you worked in the Department for Education [DfE], right? Do you remember a place called Knowsley?’ He looked shocked and he said ‘Yeah, it's like a basket case. It's got the worst education system in the whole country’. And I said ‘Well, that's where I went to school and managed to do a degree apprenticeship and make my way to the top of business before coming here’. Then I told him about some of the things I'd done, and he said to me ‘Oh wow, you've had proper jobs, right? You've got experience… like a real person’. 

During the interview he told me that everybody hates MPs to which I replied, I said ‘That may be true but you're a spad [special adviser], which- if you think people don't like MPs, they dislike spads even more’. So, I would say it was a rocky interview. Because I wouldn't back down, which I would say is quite an important thing in politics. There's a lot of people in politics that try to take positions of authority based on their job title – but these change often so I never let that intimidate me, as you wouldn't in normal life. At the end of the interview, he said to me ‘Well, what job do you think you should have?’ and I said ‘Well, if it was me, if I was in your job, I would choose me as the apprenticeships and skills minister’ because I started an apprenticeship age 16. It was a life-changing decision. They sponsored me up to degree level and actually, I could honestly say that businesses gave me more than the education system from Knowsley ever gave me. So, I'm a great advocate for that route, which as well as being a great start to a career can be a second chance route or a route to diversify your skills later. 

And that's what they did. Despite all the huff and puff and positioning, they actually did give me that role, which was fantastic. But then three weeks later, the pandemic hit. So, what you thought the role was and what you were going to be able to do in the role changed completely because obviously what you were dealing with then was the impact of a pandemic on an education system of which this was part.

TD: You met with the Institute for Government a few times early on in your time as a minister to talk about how to get things done in the role. What was the benefit of those conversations?

GK: Well, I think the thing you have to recognise is that the role of a minister is unlike any other role you'll ever do. I've done loads of roles having worked in business for 30 years. I got to very senior levels and I've worked all over the world, so I had a lot of experience. But how this role differs in terms of your accountability, the remit of your role, and the accountability of the civil service, and then all the other people involved in delivering – in  my case, that could be schools and colleges and universities or training providers, or it could be the NHS or whoever – it is a very unusual role. It's a bit like a non-executive because you're asking questions of people who actually execute, but unusual as you take full accountability publicly.

"people don't feel comfortable enough to take accountability. In fact, they feel almost it's incumbent upon them to park accountability in other places"

There's another thing that's quite unusual in it  – and this is what everyone's trying to put their finger on and where it's going wrong – which is that the accountability thread isn't there. It isn't there and clear to see from top to bottom and as a result people don't feel comfortable enough to take accountability. In fact, they feel almost it's incumbent upon them to park accountability in other places – on risk registers, in guidance to other organisations, within business cases up to the Treasury or whatever it is. You have to just recognise that it's unlike any role that you've ever done and therefore it's really important I think to try and get that in your head. The Institute for Government were very good at explaining that when I was saying things or asking questions, what that meant to the civil service, and how they may be interpreting what I was saying and how to communicate very effectively and clearly with the civil service. But also, to recognise some of these things about accountability, constraints and fundamentally, people wanting to shift accountability for things.

TD: How did having done an apprenticeship yourself affect your approach to the role of apprenticeships and skills minister?

GK: Fundamentally. I think most people in the civil service and in politics  – no matter what they say – see apprenticeships as an inferior route to going to a top university in the country. No matter what, they will always see it that way. Now, you do not have this view if you've gone to a comprehensive school in Knowsley – I even got 10 O levels – but there was nowhere to go academically. The next rungs of the ladder were missing. I never know whether I could have got to Oxbridge or not. But it just wasn't an option for me and what I've realised in life is there are many, many smart people that did not get those opportunities to get to even apprenticeships or to a college or a university, and certainly not to Oxbridge. You have to have gone to a pretty decent school to be able to get to Oxbridge, and they have to have largely some experience at helping people to get there as well. I recognise that because everybody I met was super bright. Some of them have gone on to be very, very successful and lead massive companies without even a formal qualification. 

"There's a lot of groupthink in the civil service, in the think tanks and in politics because literally, they are all from the same background" 

This is the lens that many people, I think in politics, view education through. Through the ‘Grade A’ to university route and that's the only thing they've got experience of. There's a lot of groupthink in the civil service, in the think tanks and in politics because literally, they are all from the same background – the majority studying politics or an arts degree full time at a top university. You can talk about diversity, about gender or sexuality or skin colour or ethnicity or whatever. But actually, the one thing that's not very diverse really is people from different backgrounds who didn’t get to study full time at university.

Coming from that background, gives you two things. First of all, it gives you strength and conviction because you know it, nobody would have to convince me that apprenticeships were a life changer, I know it because I saw it. That's the first thing and I think that's important in politics because it does give you a real authentic voice. But the other thing is, it made other people a bit more wary of taking me on because they knew that I had that authentic journey through life. They knew that I knew what I was talking about. They also knew that I'd done very well in business so they couldn't really dispute what I was saying. I think it was a real strength.

"nobody would have to convince me that apprenticeships were a life changer, I know it because I saw it."

Then when you're actually out talking to people – talking to apprentices, talking to people who are taking on apprentices – the fact that you're there in this position of government, having been in their position 20 years earlier, is hugely empowering and inspiring to them as well. I used to say to everybody, there is nothing special about my journey that is not replicable. Anybody sat there right now could replicate it, and if they wanted and chose to later in life, they could also go into politics and they could also offer a lot to politics, as I think I did.

TD: The Covid pandemic hit shortly after you were appointed. 

GK: Yes, three weeks after!

TD: How did that change the way government was working? How did it change your role? 

GK: Well, it changed everything. From trying to work out how to introduce T levels [technical qualifications launched in 2020], improve technical education, improve our college infrastructure, improve our apprenticeship offer, broaden it, work with more businesses, make sure that more people had access to them and were aware of them. Instead of that being the main role, it was dealing with a pandemic that was going to mean that nobody could go to college to study for their course or apprenticeship. Some apprentices could go to work if they were in a job that was on the list of critical workers and some of them couldn't go into work. Some of the apprenticeships were cut short. Some of them were accelerated. For example, we worked to get all the nursing apprentices on the frontline as soon as possible. It just changed the role completely as we were then dealing with what was obviously a global crisis in terms of the pandemic, a health crisis that was affecting everything else. We had to introduce things that I never would have planned to do. 

The other thing was the environment. I've always found learning from people the most important thing. I ask lots of questions. That's why I first came to the Institute for Government. I asked lots of other ministers and former ministers from various parties about what were the things that they'd learned. But during the pandemic, there was nobody to learn from. There were basically the five ministers in the Department for Education as we were at the time, the private offices of those ministers who were there, and the permanent secretary, maybe one or two others and nobody else. Not only was there nobody else in the department, [but] there was nobody else in government and there was nobody else in the city of London. It was the most surreal time – even Pret [A Manger] wasn't open – it was the most surreal experience! It was so scary because London's a vibrant capital and it is one of the centres of the world economy and to see it completely dead – cranes just hanging where they were left, coffee shops not open, everything closed and thinking, jeez, what is this going to do to the whole economy, to the whole of the city of London and then to the rest of the economy? It was a stark experience of what many people now have views about, but I could see the stark impact of almost on day two. Because I could just see all of these businesses – whether they were independently owned  or large – just stopped dead, and the economy was stopped dead globally. 

Hopefully we'll never experience anything like that again. But one of the things I find astonishing about the political debate since has been nobody has had the courage to turn around and say that stopping the world's economy for more or less two years – or disrupting it massively for two years – has had a huge impact on everything. Everything from education to health to courts to asylum processing to any single thing that people were not doing. It will take a decade to get over it and that is the expectation that should have been set at the time, and it hasn't been. Everybody's going to be chasing this now because expectations have not been set correctly. By pointing to political parties and saying ‘It’s because you didn't do it, I would have done it better’. Nonsense. I would defy any one of those politicians to overcome the impacts of closing down a global economy in just a couple of years.

TD: You were a minister for about 18 months in education. You then served for about a year in the Department for Health and Social Care and then you were a minister for a little while in the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office.

GK: Very little. That was like an internship!

TD: What were the different departments like and how did they compare? 

GK: Very different. Education I did obviously twice, because then I went back as the secretary of state. I did longer in the Department for Education so that's the one I know better. The Department for Health, again it was the second half of the pandemic. We had to deal with the latter waves when Covid came back and then we had to lockdown again. We had to obviously make sure [we implemented] all the learnings for care homes et cetera. I was social care and mental health minister and of course we had a ballooning of mental health needs – a quadrupling actually. 

One of the things that I think is common across the public sector is that it is very difficult to deliver, if you've had a quadrupling in demand, to increase the public sector capacity to the point that you can deal with these increases in demand very quickly. You need to train more teachers, or you need to train more special educational need teachers, or you need to train more mental health professionals. All of that takes a long, long time. And even though you can try – or you could at the time – to backfill with some immigration, actually the Overton window [a concept to describe the range of ideas or policies considered acceptable by the population at a given time], as they say, may have shifted. So that's not even possible anymore. But even so, there's a limit to how much that can do. I think the other thing you need to be able to communicate is how you can build the public sector services at a rate when the demand has just completely outstripped supply and that's often going to be the case. That's a fundamental challenge in some of those departments. 

Of course, the Foreign Office was completely different. I was the minister for Africa, the whole of Africa. It was only seven weeks, but it was so strategic because actually, most of the geopolitical factors that are impacting us – both our security but also economically – are being played out in Africa through Russian and Chinese strategy. Whether that's conflict or economic. I would spend pretty much every day in what they call the high side [the highest level of security clearance], with the security and intelligence services. That gave me a fascinating insight, not only to the geopolitical threats that we have which are super strategic and long term. That's another thing. Other countries, particularly authoritarian countries, do have the ability to be more long term and strategic whether we like it or not. Democracy can interfere, and then politics does interfere with long-term thinking. It is something that I got great insights into but also great insights into how our country is seen across the world now. 

Now, I already knew this to some extent because I'd worked in international business. I'd been based in other countries, and I've worked all over the world. I already knew – which is one of the things that makes me super proud of our country – that we are held in very high-esteem by most other countries and by most other industries across the world. That's the same even now. People ask, is that still the same post Brexit? Yes, it is. We're held in a very high regard. I saw again that through the eyes of the Foreign Office, and it just gives you that extra understanding really of how important we are, how important our institutions are, how much we are a leader in many things – particularly in intelligence and security – and in doing the right thing. Like the war in Ukraine, taking leadership positions which are difficult to take and difficult to sustain and then continuing to show leadership. 

Even though it was only seven weeks, I saw the outward facing us to the world, how they see us, and some of the threats we face and how brilliant our security and intelligence services are at dealing with them.

Amber Dellar (AD): You were then appointed secretary of state for education in October 2022. What was it like to return to a department that you had worked in as a junior minister?

GK: It was fantastic. One of the things you're always suspicious of – and this is because of that short rather than long-term nature that's involved in our politics at the moment is what did they do after I left? We can come up with many reasons why our politics is so frantic whether that is – media shift, social media, the membership choosing the party leaders and then the ambition of people who quite frankly should look in the mirror and realise they're not up to the job. But this is just the environment that we're in. But if you get the chance to return to a department one of the things you think is, did they actually  implement what I asked them to do, or did they just take a little baby step and then once I had walked out of the department, stopped it? How much did your work continue? How many of your policies are still being implemented now? 

In my case, the policies were all the policies of the Conservative government that had been working on all this stuff a long time since they were in opposition. In opposition, we looked at school standards around the world, how we could learn from others to improve our maths, our literacy and other aspects of our school standards. How we could change our school systems so that the accountability was in the right place and the results were going to get better. How to strengthen technical education and how to get businesses and the Department for Education and colleges and universities working more closely together. How to ensure that whatever was being studied academically was not too far away from what the workplaces needed, and the apprenticeship system was obviously a big part of changing that, as well as T Levels. 

All I was doing was trying to implement all of those policies and a couple of them that I had on my watch were introduction of T Levels. Even though it was the pandemic, it had been way overdue, and it had been part of a review that had been done probably about 10 years earlier, and this is the thing – it takes so long by the time these things get implemented. I thought it’s now or possibly never so I'm not about stopping because it's not convenient because there’s a pandemic. So we went ahead and introduced the new T levels during the pandemic. 

As well as implementing policy, government is also all about continuously learning and improving services. How can we improve the apprenticeship system, make it easier to find opportunities in your area. Also, I put the apprenticeships on UCAS [Universities and Colleges Admissions Service], for example – all these things that I was leading on yet you never know, when you walk out the door if they happened, and if they had happened, would they continue. You can imagine, if somebody comes back quite quickly as the secretary of state, they're probably pretty horrified as well to know ‘God, what did she actually ask for, and how much of it got done now?’ 

Luckily, most of it did get done, and that was really good to see because the suspicions that everybody has – that experience proved to me that they were unfounded, that actually they were carrying on doing the job. I think that probably changes massively if there's a change of government because clearly, they come in with a different approach. But it was lovely to see the same people. They knew me and I think they know that I was pretty unconventional because I wasn't really so impressed by the title or status, as it were. I was impressed by the ability to get the chance to do something. I always knew it was going to be temporary, so I was more businesslike perhaps than maybe a lot of people. 

The people stay a long time at the Department for Education so I knew many of them and I was delighted to be back. Obviously, I was surprised and delighted to be secretary of state, but it was lovely to go back knowing some of the people and knowing a lot of the agenda already. Even though I wasn't responsible for schools or other bits [in my first role in the department], you're in team meetings all the time and so you learn very quickly about the things facing the children and families minister or the schools minister or all the other roles.

AD: How did you find working with your private office and your political team? How was the quality of advice that you received from them throughout your time as secretary of state?

GK: Well, look, I think the quality of advice – sometimes it's good and sometimes it's inconclusive. It depends. Sometimes there are questions that can be analysed and answered and sometimes they're really much too big for that and you've got to take them in bite-sized chunks. I think one of the policies perhaps that I was involved in really from the start right through to fruition and implementation was the introduction of the free hours of childcare. There had been 15 hours for a small number of some three- and four-year-olds and some two-year-olds, but not widely available across the country. We were introducing free childcare from nine months up until kids started school as an economic policy, which is how we managed to get it through and in the budget. That was one of the insights I had with the Treasury. If you have an economic policy, you've got more of a chance of getting it through than a social policy when times are difficult. 

That was an example where you had to do the advice in chunks and you had to look at everything – from the market, the market sustainability, the economics of the market, how you could make sure we, the taxpayers and everyone else didn't get ripped off. If we were going be the big purchaser of 85–90% of childcare, how to make sure the parents actually got the benefit of the policy? How to make sure the kids got a very good education as well as being in childcare? It was a massive policy.

I think where you can see it through from start to finish and you see how it all breaks down and how it interrelates, that's fine. If you're coming partway through, often I used to say it felt like I'd been given a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box at the front, so I didn’t know where everything should go. That's part of the problem if you're partway through implementing something or if it's part of a wider cross-ministerial thing. Sometimes the advice is good and sometimes the data isn’t available for you to make a sensible decision. I sometimes felt that no sensible businessperson would be able to make a decision based on the data, based on the facts presented, and based on the information in that case. However, you're often expected to and when you ask for more analysis you are often told we do not have that data, we do not collect that data, in any form, let alone digitally.

AD: Education policy is an area where the Conservative government had a clear set of reforms and a clear agenda. To what extent did you feel like the priorities of your role and the priorities of the government were clear for you when you stepped in? 

GK: I think education was very clear. I think all the work that had been done before, which wasn't ideological, wasn't partisan and was genuinely a really, really great example of what a Conservative government can do well, which is basically – look at what works everywhere else and take on board those policies. We genuinely wanted to improve the outcomes for kids like me in Knowsley. That's what it's all about. All the schools in Knowsley were judged as failing and they closed every single one down. But when you've still got Knowsley Council – who were absolutely useless – fully responsible for it, what's going to change? What's the magic insight that's going to make some of these areas be able to provide the education that kids deserve? 

"Nobody likes change. Nobody likes change management. Until afterwards it’s done successfully. Then everyone thinks it's great."

I think the insight that they had, which I think was an important one, was it's not the kids. There's nothing different about the kids. It's the system; we needed to free education from under the single control of councils. I was very proud of the work they'd done, and I thought it made perfect sense to me. I know it was tough to implement reforms because quite often, any change management – whether you do that in business, in politics or in public service delivery – is difficult. Nobody likes change. Nobody likes change management. Until afterwards it’s done successfully. Then everyone thinks it's great. But when you're doing it and at the time you're doing it, there are a lot more people who are upset. Of course, when you're trying to reform something as big as the public sector, there are a lot of stakeholders that they can try and get involved and try to knock you off track. I would also give massive credit to all of the people who really made sure they stuck to the principles of reforming our school system and introducing academies and free schools.

The number one customer for the education system in this country are the children, their parents, and I would argue, businesses and organisations that go on to employ young people. The customer is not the sector. That is something which I'm very clear of. I worked in sales and marketing most of my career, you have to be clear who the customer is and in my view it isn't the sector. It isn't the people who have got a vested interest. It is the people who are really depending on it. I think that clarity will enable them to do the right thing, but what it meant for me was I was very clear. I was clear about the stages. Start with school systems, then move on to technical education. Work with businesses to reduce this gap between the education system and businesses. Do that throughout schools with T Levels and through colleges with all kinds of new qualifications which being developed or updated at Levels 3, 4 and 5, HTQs [Higher Technical Qualifications], and more apprenticeships, all the way up to degree apprenticeships – which were, of course, my favourite. 

I wanted to put apprenticeships on the map, but I thought I'm never going to convince people that apprenticeships are as good as a purely academic route unless I convince them by linking degree apprenticeships available at the same university offered in conjunction with an aspirational business brand such as JP Morgan. That there are huge benefits to the fact you are working in the business as well as doing a qualification and that is going to mean you'll be miles ahead of anyone who's in university because you'll be in the business, learning from all the people in the industry as well. Actually, degree apprenticeships are at least as good as going to study full time and, in some cases, you could argue, they are better. I knew that working with leading employers would change the opinion about apprenticeship of many people. People who previously thought apprenticeships were only for people who were “not academic or good with their hands”.  I knew I had to champion degree apprenticeships for many people, including parents to see apprenticeships as interesting, and then that cascaded down. We were strategic. We knew what we were doing it for. It was the right thing to do. It's still the right thing to do and I think we were largely successful at implementing it. 

AD: One of the problems that came to light in August 2023 was the RAAC [reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete] crisis and the massive safety risk that posed to educational settings. When did you first find out about that issue and how did you respond? 

GK: That was very interesting, and somebody should do a case study of this because it was really an interesting case. I was aware of RAAC because I'd read about it. It was a general building thing. But the first time I was really aware that there was an issue was when there had been some problems in other non educational settings, so it was on the DfE risk register. I had a problem with the risk register anyway because it wasn’t actively managed. I could see this as I used to attend the DfE board. I would advise every minister to go to their departmental board and look at two things. Look at the risk register and whether it's being actively managed or whether it's a passive, cover-your-ass statement and know the difference between the two. The second is look back at what the board actually talks about and see how many times it discusses what's on the risk register. I could almost guarantee that it will not be that often, because I could almost always say that it is a cover-your-ass piece of paper as opposed to something being actively managed to mitigate the risks that are often huge. 

In this particular case, I became aware of concerns, so I asked for some advice on it. I wasn't very pleased with the advice because the advice basically said, ‘carry on as normal for a bit’. What had happened is that the department had been identifying whether RAAC was critical or non-critical in – what could only be described with hindsight as – a less than scientific way of doing it. What had happened is that all schools with critical RAAC had been closed or partially closed and non-critical RAAC was to be monitored. The problem occurred when some ceiling panels identified as non-critical started to fail. Now, in actual fact, the youngest panel of RAAC was out of its life in 2024, the very newest one. So the state was already taking a risk with a building material that had been reclassified to only have a life that had already ended. It had stopped being used in, I think, the 90s and most of it was used in buildings from the 50s and 60s. This was obviously something that happened way before any of us were involved, but you can only deal with the risk when it comes to light. 

One of the things that struck me was nobody wanted to take the decision to close schools with previously identified non-critical panels, which was, I thought, the only decision to take once I'd heard accounts of non-critical panels fall and having these checked by building engineers. I had also asked the Institute of Structural Engineers to explain what was the difference between the non-critical panels in other buildings which had fallen and the non-critical panels in the schools? Nobody could tell me the difference. As far as I was concerned, that was it. There is no way you could take a risk, with teacher’s or children's lives, knowing that the non-critical panels could fall down and in fact had in other buildings. The chance of it happening was quite low, but it could happen, and if it had happened, I could never have lived with myself. Sometimes things are so clear. 

"There is no way you could take a risk, with teacher’s or children's lives, knowing that the non-critical panels could fall down and in fact had in other buildings. The chance of it happening was quite low, but it could happen, and if it had happened, I could never have lived with myself."

RAAC had been on the department’s risk register for about five years and for years they've been saying ‘We need £7 billion to rebuild older schools to mitigate this risk’. £7 billion is a lot and that was to rebuild every school that had been built in that period. I looked at it and said you don't need to rebuild every school. You need to do a survey – but don’t expect head teachers to do it. Because that's the other thing: people write guidance and push down accountability, but unless you know that the people you're pushing down the accountability to have the resources and the skills to do it, you are not doing your duty and that's actually a big problem in how the public sector works. So, this problem was pushed down to the schools. The schools don't even have caretakers, most of them. Who's going to check this, apart from if it's visible and actually crumbling? 

I along with other ministers decided ‘No, we're going to take back that responsibility. We're going to directly survey all the schools’. We found out actually there wasn't 7,000 affected schools as everybody was screaming at the time. There were 236 I think in the end, and it cost about £230 million to fix them all completely and keep every child safe and every teacher safe. What I learned from that was that RAAC was being used as a Treasury bargaining chip. It was on a risk register but wasn't being actively managed when it came to light. Nobody wanted to grip it because they knew that it would create fear, which it did. But it's better to have that fear and then manage it, than have the lack of fear and then have to deal with an awful problem if it happens and then managing the actual reality that something could happen in our schools.

I think the work we did, and particularly the Lords minister – who was the school systems minister, Baroness Barran – was excellent. She brought it to my attention in a way that made me think ‘We need to fix this now. It's gone on long enough’. The civil servants involved had used it to try and scare the Treasury into getting a huge pile of money to rebuild schools instead of actually working out how much it would cost to manage the risk and fix RAAC by identifying where it was in which buildings and then considering how many of them needed to be completely re-built. As it turned out, about 110 to 115 schools needed to be completely rebuilt. We decided some schools were just so riddled with it, we may as well re-build the whole school. For about half of them – RAAC was found in a block, or a classroom or a particular area of a building which we could rebuild or make safe. It's a lesson and it's one I'm very glad I learned because going through and looking and seeing how many times it had been mentioned in the board minutes and finding out the answer was zero was very insightful.

AD: Another thing that happened during your time as secretary of state was the series of schoolteacher strikes in 2022–23. How did you approach those relationships and how do you think ministers can work effectively with frontline public service staff?

GK: When I was younger, when I started work aged 16, there was a lot of union strikes across the country and at that time it was largely in the private sector. If you look today, there's much less unionisation in the private sector. But there is heavy unionisation of the public sector. When I looked at that, I asked a lot of teachers ‘Why? What does this provide? What do you get from this union membership?’ and some said ‘Well, actually it's indemnity insurance. If anybody accuses us of bullying or inappropriate behaviour or not doing our job, then the union protects us’. I think that's something that they have across the whole of the public sector, which is a reasonable thing. 

However, when you look at the union structures now and look at how many people are voting to elect the leaders of the public sector unions, there'll typically be turnout of less than 10%. It's the worst of all worlds in a way. It's got a use which is very important, but the unions seem to be being taken over by what I think are more militant types of trade unionists. You see that a little in education. If you look at a trade union leader’s job description, what's in it? What is in that job description? How are they seen to be doing their jobs well? To get better than average pay rises, to get improved conditions and quite often how they think they can do that is by going on strike. You are in a situation where it's quite difficult to negotiate if they decide they want to go on strike as you don’t really have direct lines of communication to teachers.

Now, what happened in the case where I was the secretary of state was, I was negotiating in good faith. I think our teachers do a fantastic job and I was very open to some suggestions to improve flexibility of the working conditions and reduction in and automation of workload. Flexible working hours is going to be the part of the answer to maintaining a growing workforce – having a more flexible offer for teachers of all ages. All of that, I was willing to work on, but it was very difficult to negotiate what the actual rate of increase was because it was following the period when we had a very high inflation period. Inflation had gone up. I think it spiked at 11%. When I was actually doing negotiations, inflation was back down at 2% or 3%, but people were very unsure. We'd had a very stable inflationary period and then it was very unstable. That made it very difficult to negotiate. 

But in the end, it felt like what the heads of some of the biggest unions actually wanted was a general strike. They wanted all of the public sector to go on strike – I believe – against the Conservative government. They used school funding and basically said that the schools were not being funded well enough, even though we'd increased school funding to more per pupil than it had ever been in history. But it was very difficult to get those messages across. What I realised was the position of unions has changed in the country and is very much dominating the public sector. The public sector – what they get from it and therefore how engaged they are in it – means that you can have very low turnout electing people with particular political views. You have this difficult environment where you are trying to improve working conditions, you are trying to work as constructively as possible and I didn't have a direct route to communicate very well with teachers. It was being done via the unions. 

"it felt like what the heads of some of the biggest unions actually wanted was a general strike." 

The communication aspect – when I was saying ‘No, we've put this money into teaching and actually it means that the per pupil head… here’s all the figures. Even the IFS [Institute for Fiscal Studies] has said increase in real terms and per pupil’. But no matter what, there was a school cuts website put up by the unions which – the way it appeared was that every school was going to get their funding cut. So, all the teachers thought they were striking about cuts whilst in fact there wasn't a cut to the actual funding. I'm not saying that with funding, everybody says ‘Oh, that's brilliant. We've got loads of money’. They don't and they never will. Actually, there's more pressures on schools because we do have more children with special educational needs getting extra support and that's there in the budgets as well. But it was a real lesson in – if somebody wants to create conditions for a strike, they can and they will. The BMA [British Medical Association] are doing that again and they'll continue to do it. Then the only question is, do they care about public opinion? Sometimes they may and sometimes they may not, and the union leaders may have different views from the people they're leading. In fact, I would say they almost certainly do in many cases.

AD: You also made the case for embracing artificial intelligence [AI] as secretary of state. What were the views within the department on AI during that time? 

GK: I would say in general we had a similar view that while some people may be more cautious and some people may be more bullish, the reality is it's something that cannot be ignored. Therefore, you had to embrace it, and you had to look for opportunities. The whole thing about AI was how to train the models so they'd be more reliable within specific things that we may want to use them for in education. That's why we had hackathons. We had actually – they were brilliant – we brought lots of software engineers and AI companies together and involved, head teachers, the heads of IT within schools and colleges and universities and some of the kids as well who were users, to try and work through how we could come up with a framework to then test a sandbox. To test some of these models. That's the way we left the work. 

I think it was the right thing to do, and I think we were doing the right work. I have no idea what's happening with it now. I would hope that it's been embraced because it was a good piece of work, but I've seen other good pieces of work where they've fallen on the ideological line. I don't really know, but I've worked in technology pretty much all my career. If you think you can ignore new technology – you might be ignoring it – but it's not ignoring what you're doing, so you are just being ignorant. That is it. That's what I would say. 

You really need quite an agile environment, and this is one of the areas where we may have a Brexit benefit… if you are not having to agree rules in consensus with 27 other countries like we did when we were part of the EU, this area of AI could be an area where that agility actually bodes very well for us as a country and also as an economy if we can get it right. It's going to be much easier to navigate as a single country, you'll be able to be much more agile to take advantage of opportunities in an area that's growing and avoid over-regulation which will kill it. Or will kill it in some countries, it won't kill it overall.

AD: Special educational needs is one of the biggest issues facing this government. To what extent was that on your radar and a priority when you were secretary of state?

GK: It was massively on my radar and a priority. We had special educational needs reform. Actually, we had a green paper when I was in the health department and I was leading that with the Department for Education at the time as the mental health and social care minister. I also had learning disabilities in my profile, which is adult learning disabilities, but every child becomes an adult overnight at the age of 18. So, we had started work on this already. This is another thing – the same as mental health in a way – where you're dealing with something that massively explodes in terms of need and you're trying to understand why. What has changed? There are generations that have been through big traumas before, like the second world war, but you didn’t hear about mental health. What has changed now? Now of course, societies grow and there's a growing understanding of various things. But what has changed? In special educational needs, it's actually gone up massively within one single decade. What has changed to make that happen now? 

Partly it's because there is more recognition and more understanding and more ability to diagnose. But we've also built some incentives in the system where – because you could get some particular support for your child with special educational needs – we've inadvertently and unwittingly created an incentive where people don't think they're going to get any support for their child if they have some mild special educational needs unless they have an ECHP [Education, Health and Care Plan] or unless they have a recognised, diagnosable condition. It's come from parents really wanting to see whether there's something more their child needs or even getting diagnosed. There was very much a concern when the last generation was bringing up their kids that they were very reluctant to label a child or whatever. Compared to now, parents actually want the label to ensure that their child gets the support they need. But it's created a huge need. What that's meant is that because we set in legislation that every child should have the best outcome, that's been used to take councils to court to ensure that if the state provision doesn't match a private provision, the state will pay for the child to go to private provision. What's happened is the amount of money has ballooned, but it’s also going to a smaller number of people than the overall need. It's a very unfair system. 

Then you've got the other aspect, which is the transport – another thing which again has quadrupled. I went back to a school in Knowsley and I was there for nine o’clock. I was watching taxi after taxi dropping off child after child. I couldn't understand what was happening. It's a very deprived area – where's the money coming from for all these taxis? People do not get taxis or did not get taxis. It was really a rare thing. It turns out they're all being paid for by the state. I asked what's happened? Have we amalgamated two schools, miles away from each other, and this was part of the compromise until we get buses? Or what is it? The answer that came was that it was all for children with special educational needs. But you could tell that there couldn't possibly be that amount of special educational needs in that one school. It wasn't a special educational needs school. It was a mainstream school, and I am sure that you wouldn't have had anything like that a few years before. So, we really have to look at that budget and the use of that budget because if you decide that’s what you want to do, then we need to bring back more special educational needs buses. Or we have to have a different approach. But you can't be spending money this poorly. 

"you can see that councils are under pressure to deliver their statutory duties which there is massively increased demand and that they cannot control the demand for."

Again, it's impacting the councils. The councils have got three things which are really their statutory duty that they're being overwhelmed with: transport for special education, special educational needs provision and adult social care. I've worked on all three and I'm not saying therefore I should have fixed them all, because they are big things. But you can see that councils are under pressure to deliver their statutory duties which there is massively increased demand and that they cannot control the demand for. You always need to have ways of controlling demand to some degree in any system the state puts in place, and we fail to do that in a number of cases. How you do it retrospectively is going to be difficult, but it will need to be done.

TD: You worked as a minister for three different prime ministers: Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. How did they compare as prime ministers?

GK: Well, the first thing I'd say is two of them, I didn't vote for. There's a lot of people that feel they need to vote for somebody to get a job, and I would say don't do that because you'll only regret it if it's not somebody you feel proud to support. Being prime minister of this country is a hugely significant job. You need to really, really be careful if you're one of the very few people who is responsible for choosing a new prime minister. That's why I'm very much against both parties having this system where the membership chooses the leader. I think it's anti-democratic to be able to change from one prime minister to another without the country choosing, personally. But anyway, that’s my views on that. 

They were very different. And they were very different in different times. I didn't vote for Boris, but I was supportive of Boris and I loved his Levelling Up agenda [a Conservative government policy aimed at reducing regional inequality] because it spoke to me and where I came from. I saw a real opportunity for the country to take all these brilliant, talented people all round the country especially outside of London and the South East and give them the same opportunity and investment to make sure we're firing on all cylinders. You can see some small examples of where that's happened – in the West Midlands or in Manchester, or Teesside or Liverpool. In certain sectors, you can see some really great examples now. That I was hugely in favour of, and I thought it was absolutely the right idea. 

Then the pandemic struck. I think one of the things that really strikes me is you never know what you're going to get in your time of prime minister. You don't know whether there's going to be a war, a pandemic – I mean, not many people would have spent much time thinking about that previously, but obviously will now – or a national strike, or something else like a huge economic downturn, something else that impacts your country. You really do need to be able to deal with whatever it is. That is the shame. I think Boris' temperament was very much more for building and not for dealing with this impossible crisis. You can't really do much about that because we couldn't foresee that that was the case. 

"I think Boris genuinely had the best ability to really get the country to accept him, warts and all. And they did, because he never pretended to be anything different than he presented as."

Temperament is important for a prime minister. Again, I didn't back Liz, but I didn't think she had the temperament, in my view, to be prime minister. But actually – and I'm quite surprised that this happened – but I was one of few who was still given a role despite supporting someone else for leader. I don't know why that happened. I was technically demoted to the Foreign Office. However, anybody who's ever walked into the Foreign Office, you know within three steps of going up that grand staircase, that even though it was technically a demotion – the first time ever had in my life – it didn’t actually feel like one. I was very grateful to get that opportunity because I learned such a lot, even though I describe it more like an internship really because it was a short period of time. 
Rishi, I did back. I backed him when Liz became prime minister and I continued to back him. I didn't think I was going to be secretary of state though. I thought I might get back to a minister of state where I’d been before, so I was really delighted because there was no inkling of that during any of our discussions. That exceeded my expectations. But Rishi is more my kind of person. He'd done an MBA at Stanford. I'd done the Sloan Fellowship which is like an MBA for experienced businesspeople at London Business School. We spoke the same language. We thought in similar strategic ways. We were problem-solving people.

That is, I think, some of the base characteristics we need actually in terms of temperament for being prime minister of this country. But as is proven currently, you need more than that. The country needs to trust you. Now your past actions will catch up with you if you have had any past actions where you may have not been altogether truthful. I think that's the first thing – all of this is being done in plain sight. Then you need to have the courage of your convictions. You need to own what you are, and the country will accept you. The country will absolutely accept you, I believe, as long as you're genuine and you are yourself. 

I think Boris genuinely had the best ability to really get the country to accept him, warts and all. And they did, because he never pretended to be anything different than he presented as. I think the importance of temperament is shown. I think that Rishi did have the right temperament. I don't think Liz did. But then the ability to engage and excite the country, I think both Rishi struggled with that and certainly Keir Starmer is struggling with that. You have to be an extraordinary person to lead the country in these times with 24-hour newscycles and social media and politics still needs to be able to attract extraordinary people.

TD: You were in government in the run up to the election and the polls were pointing to a change of government. What is it like being in government in that atmosphere?

GK: It's not a great feeling because obviously you believe in what you're trying to implement. I did believe in what we were trying to implement. I think the pandemic blew a massive hole actually in our ability to do that. But I did think Rishi and Jeremy Hunt were stabilising the economy after the pandemic. I think they had done some of the right things and that was proven in reducing inflation rates and where they were going. The Bank of England hadn't yet caught up, but that was only a matter of time. I think they had the right idea. I suppose from one perspective I thought our chance of re-election was blown before Rishi came in. That was unfortunate but that's just where you are in the political cycle. 

"from one perspective I thought our chance of re-election was blown before Rishi came in"

I felt fearful for our country, if I'm honest. Everybody felt things can only get better, change, we're going to be the change for this and the change for that. I'll be completely honest. I didn't think there was much experience in that team, including Rachel Reeves. The civil servants at the time will tell you exactly what I said. It just doesn't make sense that someone's talking about their graduate traineeship when they're 42 as their most significant work experience. Something doesn't add up. I just really feared for what they would do with the economy when the economy was so fragile. It's very unusual that the economy is this fragile, but it is because of the pandemic and because of global changes that are happening. AI is even yet to hit in many cases and we're in such a financial hole with huge amounts of debt that is costly to service.

Usually, we get the government we need. The last successful Labour government inherited a very strong economy which meant they could focus on some of the social justice elements, equality and some other reforms that they were effective at to some degree. But that's because the economy was very strong. I always fear and maybe it's a bit stereotypical, but certain governments have a vibe that they can implement certain things. For example, it's always said that the Conservatives would find it very hard to implement big changes to the NHS – a) because of the Lansley reviews [health care reforms driven by former Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley] and b) because there would just be screams about us trying to privatise it or whatever. That narrative could – even though that's not true – it could still become dominant. The economy is fragile and everything that's happened in the last 17 months has made it worse, and that's a tragedy. We all knew that. We didn't know exactly what would happen, but we just knew that was what was going to happen was going to make things worse. The timing just wasn't right, but you can't do anything about it.

From a personal viewpoint, I was 56. I'd been working since I was 16. I've done 30 years in business. Financially, I had already secured my position, so I was in a very different position. I think for anybody else not in that position, it's really hard because you're going to lose your job. You're going to lose not only your ministerial job, but also in many cases, your member of parliament job. Then you're going to have to go back and look for a new job. 

Something seems to have happened which means it is much more difficult for former politicians to find jobs. They used to be seen as people who had a good experience of both private and public sector. Maybe the professionalisation of politicians has meant they haven't been able to bridge those worlds as much, but it's certainly been very difficult for a lot of my colleagues that have been looking for roles. For me personally, I was a bit older, and I was in a different position and I was just so grateful, really grateful to even have been a minister because I never expected that to happen in my life. To be in the House of Commons for seven years as an MP and four and a half years as a minister, despite all that turmoil, I think was an unbelievable experience in life in general. I'm very grateful and I don't regret a single minute of it. But when you know it's coming to an end, if you've got all the risks that normally ensues with job security et cetera, then it is incredibly difficult. Unfortunately, I think that's a sign of the times. There'll be many, many current MPs, particularly in the governing party, that will suddenly see that this whole thing could end before they've even got it started. It's a very difficult thing personally to deal with that, particularly if it impacts your financial security and your ability to provide for your family. That's really difficult.

TD: What achievement are you most proud of from your time as a minister?

GK: Survival would be one! Surviving all the turmoil. In terms of the things that actually were implemented that I'm most proud of – putting apprenticeships on the map. They are on the map, and they will stay on the map. Delivering free childcare for kids from nine months old until they go to school. I think that's really going to make a big difference to women's lives. I've employed so many women who have had to give up their career in part because of the overbearing costs of childcare, and I think that's going to make a massive, massive difference. And I will say fixing the ceilings because everyone else is going to gain credit for it. But I think everybody knows, including many teachers, that we gripped a problem that wasn't an easy one to do. But you've never heard of it again. Why? Because it was fixed. 

TD: What advice would you give to new ministers on how to be most effective in the role?

GK: Well, lots really, but I think two things. The first thing is when you go into the department, they will want you for as much time as they possibly can. They'll take up every spare minute of your time. Do not ignore parliament. To get anything through, you need to take your parliamentary colleagues with you. That means they need to know you. They need to have discussed things with you, not just when it's convenient, not just when you've got legislation going through, but make sure that you're always listening and engaging with colleagues so that you have their respect, and they know that you respect them. It's so fundamentally important. If you do that and put the time in, you'll find it much easier when you have difficult things to deal with – whether it's legislation or whether it's other things that you need their support for. 

"I asked lots of ministers what they've learned, what they wish they'd done differently, et cetera. And that was really, really insightful. Then I worked with the Institute of Government. That was really insightful as well." 

In terms of the ministerial job, it's always tempting to think that everybody who came before you – particularly if they're a member of a different government – are stupid or just didn't do the right thing because their ideology got in the way. Or whatever else you think. I don't take that view and I think it's really, really healthy not to take that view. Everybody who works in politics comes there really with the best intentions. Everybody really does. Whether its civil servants, people working in the offices, or the elected politicians. They really do all want to do the right things. The question is, why are they so often thwarted? What is it that stops them? That's the bigger thing that you're looking at in terms of the system and that thread of accountability we were talking about. 

But as an individual minister, you should go in and the first thing is, ask everybody who's been a minister, from other parties as well, and this ‘Ministers Reflect’ series will be great for that because people will be able to listen to lots of voices. They can always ignore them but listening to them is important. I asked lots of ministers what they've learned, what they wish they'd done differently, et cetera. And that was really, really insightful. Then I worked with the Institute of Government. That was really insightful as well. 

"Identify who the real customers are. In the case of the Department for Education, it is the children, the parents and the organisations they'll go on to work for, businesses or otherwise. Be clear who are the people that you're really serving."

Michael Gove said something to me – to a few of us actually – about Chesterton's fence. It's something that somebody's done before and you think, why on earth have they done that? That makes absolutely no sense. Chesterton’s fences are fences in the middle of a field that do not seem to serve any purpose. Before you get rid of the fence, make sure you know who put it there, why it was put there, and did it serve a purpose? Does that purpose still exist? Because what you find is there is legislation layered on legislation layered on earlier legislation. There's lots of things which are interconnected, and you can't always see the wiring diagram. In fact, you can virtually never see the wiring diagram. You can only ask to make sure anything you're doing doesn't have unforeseen consequences, and then continually ask, and ask and ask again. You'll really only learn if you're out listening to the stakeholders. Identify who the real customers are. In the case of the Department for Education, it is the children, the parents and the organisations they'll go on to work for, businesses or otherwise. Be clear who are the people that you're really serving. And continue to ask questions and discuss with your parliamentary colleagues.

TD: Is there anything we haven't asked you about that you would like to mention?

GK: There's one thing which is skills, and people having not only the temperament, but the ability to do the job. This is more advice for people who are either appointing ministers or secretaries of state because what you really need is a good blend of skills. People always say we need to avoid groupthink and yet, probably the most groupthink you could imagine is inbuilt into our public services, public sector, political system, civil service. There's a lot of people with very, very similar backgrounds. So when you're in that position, if you are in that position, try and get a team with genuinely different views because at a ministerial level it can make a big difference. You can have people who have come from different walks of life, have got different experiences from their professional life, who come with a real knowledge of something. If you can, try and at least build some diversity of background and experience in your own team, then even at that level you can try and compensate for the lack of it in the rest of the system.