Nick Gibb

Nick Gibb talks about what makes for an effective schools minister

Tim Durrant (TD): Could you tell us about when you first became a minister? What was the conversation like? What was your first day like?

Nick Gibb (NG): It was very exciting. The cabinet had been appointed first so Michael Gove [secretary of state for education, 2010–14] was already there. I had to ring up to find out where to go and when. In the first few days, I received a bound copy of E. D. Hirsch [an American education theorist], ready for reforms to the curriculum which we had announced in opposition. 

We were ready for government in terms of policy. But none of us had been ministers, and I was coming in as minister of state, so it was a huge learning curve. How the system works for submissions, and feedback on the submissions, where they go, how they get sent on to the secretary of state’s office – all of that was a learning curve. We had spent a lot of time preparing for being in government. I had spent five years in opposition as shadow schools minister, and Michael had spent three years as shadow secretary of state. So we were ready in terms of the broad policy measures we wanted to introduce. 

TD: Having been a shadow education minister, did you have a sense of the department? And how did that compare with when you actually got in?

NG: This is what is new. When you are an opposition spokesman you are dealing solely with policy: your own policy development and your critique of the government-of-the-day’s policy. What I wasn’t experienced in – and I suspect Michael wasn’t either – was dealing with the bureaucracy of three or four thousand people in a huge department. How did the musings, the thoughts and the research that we had conducted with a very small group of people translate into policy implemented by several thousand people? 

That process was fascinating and I came to really enjoy the submission process. You have somebody else to do all the research – which is the slightly tedious side of policy making – and then you can either have it ready, or you can think more research is needed, or the research isn’t good enough or the research is great. That points in a clear direction. So you can see why being a minister is the ultimate goal of any policy maker. The policy implementation process in the civil service in this country is very good, and it is something I really enjoyed working with.

TD: As you said, you knew the policy area, having worked on it for a long time, but as for the actual day-to-day of being a minister, did the department help you along that learning curve?

NG: I think it did a little. Having a good private office and getting on with the private office are key. They would help steer you through it. But I did find that the volume of work was colossal. The red boxes were packed. Sometimes there were two packed boxes. Using your time in a more efficient way is something I had to learn. It is a small thing, but I had to learn how to read while being a passenger in a car. Most of us feel carsick [while reading in a car], but you just had to get over that, because if you are going to visit a school, you need to use the time when you are travelling to it productively. I remember saying to myself: “I am being punished for every wasted 15 minutes I have ever spent in my life.” That is one of the biggest challenges of being a minister: the colossal size of the workload. 

Sam Freedman (SF): For the first couple of years you were in the role, Michael Gove was secretary of state, and it felt at times like there was a battle going on with the sector. How did you find managing the relationships? 

NG: One of the things I learnt in opposition was that you have really got to try to understand what the cause of the problem is. That probably applies to almost every Whitehall department. I don’t recommend opposition – it is a thankless task – but having spent five years in opposition as shadow schools minister was advantageous to us. Because if you want to be a successful minister, I think you have to understand not just policy prescriptions, but also the cause of the problem. Why is London congested? Why can’t young people get on the housing ladder? Why do our state schools underperform? Why were we declining in the international league tables? You really have to understand what is causing the problem, not just rush to the shibboleths or the standard prescription: grammar schools, or better discipline and so on. 

“I don’t recommend opposition – it is a thankless task – but having spent five years in opposition as shadow schools minister was advantageous to us.”

By the time we came into office in 2010, I had visited quite a few hundred schools, in opposition and in my time on the [education] select committee. You learnt something from every visit, and I felt that I understood what the cause of the problem was. I think this was essentially the ideology of progressive education – it lets down children who don’t come from families who have been educated well. I remember going to many schools where there was a whole floor of classrooms where none were teaching anything academic to 12-year-olds. So I had a really good understanding of what progressive education was by that stage. 

So, there was an ideology that we were trying to tackle. I know in recent weeks the word ‘ideology’ has acquired a very bad reputation, but I do think ideology lies at the root of problems in many Whitehall departments. We have just got to discover where it is. Michael and I were very clear that we had to take on this debate about ideology and child-centred learning, for example. The ‘look and say’ approach to the teaching of reading as opposed to phonics; a knowledge-based curriculum instead of a ‘competence-’ or ‘skills-based’ curriculum. In addressing that ideology in speeches and in policy making, you are inevitably taking on those people in the sector who adhere to the other philosophy. 

Then on top of that you have the unions, which are relatively powerful and who also support the progressive educational ideology. So you can see why we were inevitably going to be confronting many in the sector. This ideology had been around since the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s and had grown increasingly strong over those decades. I had a little theory called ‘the tyranny of the expert’, which is that unless you adhere to the prevailing orthodoxy in your sector, whatever sector it is, you do not get promoted, so it accretes very strongly and it is very hard to then undo it. That is what we had to do in 2010. Inevitably that means you are going to be confronting large numbers of people, particularly senior people in the universities who have been teaching this ideology to their teacher trainees. 

Where we made a mistake was sometimes in the language of using a term like ‘the blob’. The phrase comes from a former American education secretary.

SF: And Chris Woodhead [chief inspector of schools in England, 1994–2000] used it.

NG: He did, but it was used in America first. This term had a pejorative tone to it. The trade unions have a job to do – to represent their teachers and negotiate the best pay and conditions they can. I don’t think there is anything to be gained by publicly confronting them. Sometimes speeches were probably a bit too confrontational. I always made a huge effort, in office, to meet with Chris Keats [general secretary of NASUWT, The Teachers’ Union], Mary Bousted [joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU)] and later Kevin Courtney [joint general secretary of the NEU] and Christine Blower [general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT)]. I wanted to have a dialogue and a discussion so that they could see that I wasn’t just the Conservative ogre who they had in their mind, but actually was motivated by wanting to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds and believed that the more traditional approach to education was the way of helping those children. I think it just takes a bit of the edge off the ‘them and us’ battle between the unions and the department.

“I wanted to have a dialogue and a discussion so that they could see that I wasn’t just the Conservative ogre who they had in their mind, but actually was motivated by wanting to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds”

So I did spend a lot of time having those really open discussions with trade union leaders, and I think it is quite important to do that. That doesn’t mean they are never going to attack you. Of course they are. They want better pay, they want better conditions and they are going to want to voice opposition to things they don’t agree with – like the EBacc [English Baccalaureate] – and they are entitled to do that. But I think it is important to have that discussion and dialogue because it helps deal with the level of animosity that takes place within the debate. 

SF: Did you feel that ideology that you’ve talked about was there in the DfE? Did it make it harder to get things done in the department? Did you feel that the civil servants were sometimes trying to block the ideas that you had, or were you able to make that work?

NG: Yes, particularly at the beginning. As you gain more experience, civil servants know where you are coming from or what your vision is, and they know that with experience you will identify where resistance is coming. As a new minister it can be harder to spot this. The ideology rests in the department, it rests in the quangos, it rests in the local authorities and it rests in the educational faculties. We had to take on all of those institutions. So that is why you have to work hard. It is why you have to read everything with an eye to understanding what they are trying to do. There were many times when civil servants were pushing back on policy – whether it was admissions policy or the maths curriculum. You just have to be vigilant about it. 

“The ideology rests in the department, it rests in the quangos, it rests in the local authorities and it rests in the educational faculties. We had to take on all of those institutions.”

Thinking back, there are things I compromised on which I now wish I hadn’t, such as the primary curriculum. For example, there is a phrase in the primary curriculum about ‘working scientifically’. Now, of course we want children to know how to conduct an experiment in science, and at GCSE that is important, but I think being taught to work scientifically is not necessarily the right thing for eight- and nine-year-olds. I have found since, that teaching children ‘scientific methods’ had dominated science teaching in primary school at the expensive of scientific knowledge, even though the words only appear in a couple of phrases in the introduction to the curriculum. But what you really want children of that age to be doing is acquiring a lot of knowledge, so that they have the ability to work scientifically later. That is just one small example. 

There are also some examples of resistance. I had a very big row with officials over the primary curriculum’s maths section phrasing numbers in the millions without commas. Officials in the department wanted to have gaps between groups of three zeros, rather than a comma. I thought this was confusing for children, because the common method of writing a million is with commas. So I said that they should use commas, not gaps. They pushed back on that really hard, saying that people from Europe use a dot for the comma, so if they are coming here they find it confusing to have a comma. I said: “I understand your point but let’s have the commas.” They kept pushing back and in the end I had to talk to Tim Oates [director of assessment research & development at Cambridge Assessment who led the review of the English national curriculum from 2010 to 2012] to try to understand where this was coming from. I succeeded, but it took a battle, and I still don’t understand why they were so vociferous about this issue. 

There were many examples like that, where you really had to push back. I remember towards the end of my first period in office, the primary maths curriculum had the word ‘practice’ – in the notes, not the statutory curriculum. It was in the notes 64 times, but after it came back from an informal consultation, the officials had excised every reference to it. The idea that you do not practise when learning arithmetic is absurd. Practice is really important for any complex skill. I had to push back, but I got it back into the curriculum.

SF: You say things got better over time. Is that because the personnel changed, because you found different ways of working with them, because you just were more experienced?

NG: It is a combination. As you gain more experience, the officials realise that they are not going to get away with it. Initially, they might try to ‘slip this past the minister’, but later they just couldn’t. I was also more proficient at identifying those things. I had some help as well. We had a person called a ‘teacher in residence’ and they acted as a quasi-special adviser. I didn’t have a special adviser, which would have been helpful. The officials began to realise that the resident teacher or policy adviser was speaking on my behalf, because we shared the same vision. That also helped. It meant that fewer submissions came to me with problems in them; they were designed to deliver our policy. 

SF: There have been three people who have done your job since you stopped doing it, and none of them has that kind of experience. It must have put the department back in control, I guess, just having that kind of turnover at ministerial level. 

NG: Yes, given I had spent five years in opposition thinking, reading and meeting people. 

SF: Impossible for these people who get two to three months at the job!

NG: Yes, and also coming in on day one with the decision making power without having done any thinking or meeting or talking or reading. Inevitably, they are going to lean too much on the advice of officials. One of my other reflections about civil servants – I do think we have one of the greatest civil services in the world – is that what they are good at is implementation. I don’t think they are good at policy making. Why would they be? If you are involved in the political world, you have to get involved and you have to start talking and thinking about issues. They are not – they are in the civil service world – and so they haven’t done the thinking, the philosophy, the reading of what we believe in. So they are really bad at making policy. If you have a minister who relies on the civil service for policy making as opposed to policy implementation, you will have poor policy. I think the reason why governments last three or four terms and then return to opposition is because of that gap between having been in opposition as a party and having the time to do that thinking. You lose that good policy making.

“One of my other reflections about civil servants ... is that what they are good at is implementation. I don’t think they are good at policy making.”

SF: You worked with five different secretaries of state over your various stints. How did you find working with them, or what did you learn in terms of what makes an effective secretary of state?

NG: They were all very different. Michael Gove is a phenomenon: intellectually brilliant, phenomenally hardworking and he understood the ideology that led to poor standards and problems for disadvantaged children. Working with him was a white-knuckle ride, because he was so demanding and he did want all the things we had thought about in opposition implemented. While it was great and exhilarating, it was stressful and really hard work. But I did learn a lot from him about how to go about translating ideas into policy making and reality. I didn’t always agree with some of the philosophies or priorities of subsequent secretaries of state.

“Michael Gove is a phenomenon: intellectually brilliant, phenomenally hardworking”

SF: Looking at the other four secretaries of state you worked with – Nicky Morgan, Justine Greening, Damian Hinds and Gavin Williamson – what do you think about their individual styles, not them as individuals, and what made for an effective secretary of state? What were the key skills to be really good at the job?

NG: I don’t think people would say those secretaries of state were unsuccessful. They performed their roles effectively, and I would say with success. My issue with some of them was that they didn’t necessarily share the same vision, and I don’t think they had come to the same conclusions about why the English education system was underperforming.

SF: How do you manage that as a junior minister, if you think the secretary of state has misunderstood something quite critical about the nature of education in this country? How did you try to influence their thinking?

NG: That was a key part of my role. I would have heated discussions with secretaries of state about some key principles. Sometimes I would win and sometimes I would lose, and the key for a junior minister is that if you lose you have to accept it and work to ensure that the resulting policy is successful. You have no choice – the alternative is to resign. You just have to keep making the case. 

I did lose arguments. I remember losing the argument on one tiny thing: how you present EBacc outcomes in the performance tables. I wanted it to be a threshold, so if a pupil didn’t have all five pillars, including a foreign language GCSE, then the school scored a zero in the performance tables. Officials wanted an average points score that meant that if a pupil had just four out of five pillars you still gained some points in the league table. I fought that very hard and I ultimately lost. You just have to go with that, and there are plenty of examples of losing debates. Some secretaries of state might be more in tune with the thinking, some less in tune, and you lose more with the ones who are less in tune.

SF: In the first period you were there, Dominic Cummings became special adviser to Michael Gove. Did you work much directly with him? How did you find that relationship?

NG: I worked less directly with him than Michael did, obviously. They were very close, and they worked together. But I have a huge amount of respect for Dominic – he is brilliant. As with all brilliant people, he has his quirks and flaws. But I did find him very effective in terms of dealing with the civil service. He would make sure that that didn’t prevent us implementing our agenda. For example, if we were getting advice that a particular issue was at risk of judicial review and we would never get it through, he would go out and demand an alternative legal opinion from outside the civil service, which, as a new minister, I wouldn’t have considered. There were many examples where he just seemed to have an innate understanding of how the system worked.

SF: When he was in No. 10 for a couple of years, working for Boris Johnson, were you able to use that relationship at all? Did he engage in education?

NG: He engaged some of the time. I remember having a couple of meetings with him and officials, but I wouldn’t say that I would pick up the phone and ask: “Can you help me with my battle with the secretary of state?” I wouldn’t do that anyway, because the worst thing a junior minister can do is go over the head of the secretary of state. If you disagree, you have really got to go through the proper route, otherwise you will have a really bad relationship. He was representing the prime minister. I did know that he shared our values and vision about how to improve standards, but other than that he was there from the prime minister’s perspective.

“the worst thing a junior minister can do is go over the head of the secretary of state”

SF: In terms of some of the big policy processes you were involved in, you’ve talked about the curriculum. That was probably the biggest single reform that you led. How did you find the process of doing it, as opposed to the outcome? How would you do it differently if you were back and had a chance to do another curriculum review?

NG: It is an interesting issue because governments in the past would say the curriculum is very much embedded in the ‘secret garden’ and that ministers should keep out. But I had come to the view, as had Michael, that the curriculum was part of the problem: that we had this so-called competence-based curriculum that sought to teach the skills of, for example, a historian to eight-year-olds, as opposed to the stories of British and world history. The same with geography and science. It involved us having to rewrite the primary curriculum in great detail. I am not sure we got all the members of our expert panel [which reviewed the national curriculum from 2010 to 2013] right. We certainly got the chairman, Tim Oates, right. 

I had always been aware, from as early as Ken Baker’s 1988 reforms, that many experts were very much imbued with an ideology that was not evidence based and that led to failure. So I was already aware that you had to appoint the right people to these panels if you wanted the most successful outcome. I wish I had been more rigorous about who we had on some of those panels, although with some noted exceptions I am not unhappy with the outcome of the primary curriculum. But it is difficult to touch on an area that is quite sensitive for ministers to be involved with – what it is that children are learning in the classroom – so you do have to be careful. I think Michael got himself into a bit of a problem, particularly on the history curriculum. You do need to use experts to write a curriculum. They might not necessarily be Conservative, they have just got to be experts who base their advice on the evidence.

“it is difficult to touch on an area that is quite sensitive for ministers to be involved with – what it is that children are learning in the classroom – so you do have to be careful”

SF: There was a row with the initial expert group, wasn’t there?

NG: Yes. One of them resigned and caused a little bit of noise publicly. So appointing that person was a mistake.

Selection is key. Whatever panel it is, you want those panels to be as balanced as they can be because you want the resulting product to land well with the sector. But then you also need to make sure that the resulting outcome reflects your vision of how to improve standards, because ultimately we are accountable to the public. We say to the public at elections that we want to raise academic standards in our schools, we want to rise up in the international league tables; our understanding of the sector and the cause of the problem mean that we want to have a curriculum that contains certain things. So we need to be able to produce those curricula to help us deliver what we have promised the public at the election. 

But we also need to make sure that the sector buys into the policy change, whether that’s reforms to, say, teaching standards or the curriculum. Getting that balance right is crucial. That is why good communication with the sector is so important. For example, the National Numeracy Strategy was dreadful. For instance, they had something called the ‘Dutch reform method’, which was almost like a form of estimation in performing simple addition. Instead of long multiplication, they had the ‘grid method’, where you separate out the figure into tens and units and multiply all those numbers in a huge square grid. Instead of long division, they had the ‘chunking method’. It was ludicrous. 

“good communication with the sector is so important.”

I showed this to some experts from Shanghai, and they just laughed. It wasn’t happening anywhere else in the world. So we had to change all that. This wasn’t just what was written in the documentation, it was also happening in all the schools I went to. I remember going to a school that I was told was an example of a really good school in terms of maths. A girl from Year 6 was taking us around because she was the best at maths, so I asked her to do some simple long division. It took her five minutes using the ‘chunking method’. She could have done it in half, or even a quarter, of the time if she had just used traditional long division. So we had to get that into the curriculum.

SF: It’s interesting that that was so contentious at the time, but there’s no demand to change the curriculum now.

NG: No, there isn’t.

SF: Whereas in Scotland, where everyone was involved and it was a big consensus process, their curriculum [the Curriculum for Excellence] is actually quite contentious now.

NG: Yes, that’s true and their curriculum is failing.

SF: It doesn’t necessarily follow that because something is controversial initially that it ends up being controversial. 

NG: You are right. I think it does show that if you really do understand what is causing the problem and you have really done the research, the thinking and the reading, then it is worth having the row, because you know that ultimately it will work, which it has in England. 

SF: The policy you’re probably most associated with in the sector is synthetic phonics, and something that you were advocating for a long time. By the time you’d got to the department, Labour had already moved some distance on bringing in synthetic phonics. How much did you feel that it was a policy you kept having to push and there was still resistance to, or how much did you feel you were almost pushing an open door by the time you got into the building?

NG: There was still a lot of resistance to it in the sector. A number of academics were still very opposed to it. I did actually work with Labour when we were in opposition – on the changes to the national curriculum, the Rose Review and the [education] select committee report into teaching and reading. But I was unhappy with the changes that it made to the national curriculum; I didn’t think they had gone far enough. So we were able to go one stage further and change it. 

Then the key policy lever was the phonics screening check [administered to all Year 1 pupils], which was very important. But there was resistance, and there probably still is. Even a couple of years ago there was a big report trying to criticise the government’s “obsession” with phonics. But actually it has been very successful – if you talk to teachers who were sceptical but who introduced a phonics reading scheme, you will find that they became supporters. 

SF: Do you think the screening test made a material difference to how much it was being used in schools?

NG: Yes, I do, absolutely. The purpose of the screening check was both to identify children who might otherwise slip through the net, and to make sure that schools were teaching phonics and were not just teaching reading by sight. It has been very successful. It also demonstrates that there is still more to do in terms of getting the training right for primary school teachers to teach phonics in the most effective way. We are not there yet. Leaving aside this year’s results as they have gone down because of Covid, if you look back at 2019, 82% were getting the national figure [the phonics screening test threshold mark] up from 58% in 2012. But only 71% of disadvantaged children were passing the check by 2019. 

There should be no difference between the two sets of children because the check isn’t dependent on cultural background. It is mechanical: you don’t need to have a home with books in or go to the theatre to do well. If it is taught well, you will do well whatever your background and, indeed, whatever your ability. So the fact that there is a gap implies that the teaching isn’t great in too many schools. Middle-class children living in a leafy suburb who maybe learnt to read at home will do well in the phonics screening check regardless of how well phonics is taught in school. But children from families that do not teach them to read at home will do badly. In some schools poor teaching is masked by this. 

“Middle-class children living in a leafy suburb who maybe learnt to read at home will do well in the phonics screening check regardless of how well phonics is taught in school.”

SF: If you were secretary of state now, what would you be prioritising?

NG: I would try to make sure that we close the gap between disadvantaged children and non-disadvantaged children in phonics. I am a trustee of a big multi-academy trust (MAT) that has had a lot of focus on their phonics, and their average score across the trust is something like 87% now. They have closed the gap between girls and boys, and they have almost closed the gap between pupil premium children and non-pupil premium children. That is what we are trying to do. That is the goal. They are almost achieving it in that trust, and we need that nationally. We cannot have this gap in phonics between disadvantaged children and advantaged children. There is no need for it. 

I can understand why there might be a gap in Key Stage 2 because that requires a lot of knowledge for which reading is essential but, even so, we want to close that gap too. I would also want to focus on the next phase of reading, as phonics is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition. You have got to learn the mechanics of reading but you have also got to read a lot. I am not sure we are doing enough yet on that. It is better than it was, but children need to read a lot in school and be read to every day in school. Another thing we are doing with the MAT that I am a trustee of is that there is a daily 20-minute reading session. Every day, in every year group and every class, right up to the upper sixth [form], they are read to by their teacher for 20 minutes from a set novel. And it is a challenging novel for whichever age group it is. It’s great. They will read the whole book together.

I think we need to get away from this idea in both secondary and, indeed, primary teaching that you are, as 12-year-olds in Year 7, learning how to pass a GCSE question in literature. No, you should be learning to read something more challenging than the Michael Morpurgo you read in primary school. You should be learning to read harder books, whether reading as a class or at home. You shouldn’t necessarily be analysing it as though you are aged 16 and taking a GCSE. That is the case in too many schools. 

Getting more knowledge is also vital. It is really important to teach knowledge, not to obsess about the skills of a historian, a scientist or a geographer. You need to have knowledge and vocabulary. Robert Pondiscio is an academic who talks about effective readers and how more effective readers have a wider vocabulary: the greater vocabulary you have, the more reading you are able to do, because you can understand what you are reading. That means having children knowing geographical terms, such as what a peninsula or promontory is, the same in history and so on. The more you know, the better you will be able to read. So if I were secretary of state, I would have a focus on making sure that schools increasingly adopt a knowledge-based curriculum.

“if I were secretary of state, I would have a focus on making sure that schools increasingly adopt a knowledge-based curriculum.” 

SF: What was it like being in government over the Covid period, particularly the first six-month period from when it hit? How were you taking decisions? How were you communicating with each other? 

NG: I remember going to the first few COBR [the cross-departmental committee that meets in the Cabinet Office and deals with emergencies] meetings when the issue first emerged, and then of course the junior ministers were pushed out and it became the cabinet. But you could see this thing coming. Some of the big decisions about whether to keep schools open were taken for health reasons. It wasn’t an easy decision, because it wasn’t like flu where children were suffering more than adults. Children were suffering less than the older population. So there were many debates about closing schools, but ultimately the decision was taken as advised by the chief medical officer. Then we had to work out very rapidly how children were going to continue their education at home. Many very rapid decisions were taken. Then we had the decision about cancelling exams and what to put in their place. The whole focus of the department became one of having children maintain their education while they were at home.

SF: At what point did you realise how big an issue Covid was going to be? When did you start thinking of it as a crisis?

NG: Before March 2020. [The UK’s first lockdown began on 23 March 2020.] But I was clear that we were going to have to buy computers very early on. It was a way of children being able to continue to be taught while they were at home. We then engaged in the biggest procurement of laptops and tablets we had ever had. But we got frustrated sometimes that things were not happening as fast as I was promised. This is one of those issues that can be quite frustrating for a minister: things like procurement are very much taken out of your hands because there is a process – there has to be a process. I could talk forever about procurements that I have been frustrated over. But we got there in the end, and we got those computers out to schools.

SF: How do you feel the DfE performed generally during the pandemic, both in terms of the ways in which decisions were made – thinking about exam cancellation as well – and in terms of implementation?

NG: There was good and bad. Good in the sense that we had regional commissioners who were out on the ground and fed back intelligence on a daily basis. We would meet, and we knew what was going on in the schools up and down the country. It was fantastic. However, normally, it is easy to make decisions in education but during Covid the decision making was frustrating because No. 10 had to make many of the decisions (at the national, Whitehall level) and that process wasn’t as smooth as it might have been. You can understand why – there was a major crisis going on, and none of us had prepared for this in opposition so we were having to make big decisions very quickly. 

SF: Where do you think the responsibility lies for what happened in 2020, with the exams in particular? Where do you think the mistake was that led to the U-turn around the algorithm?

NG: My view is that all decisions in democracy are the responsibility of ministers. We wanted to make sure that children could still have their qualifications, even though they wouldn’t be able to take an exam. We hoped they could take an exam, but ultimately it was proved that it was not going to be possible, so we had to have estimated grades based on rough evidence. We didn’t want this to lead to grade inflation, which could potentially render those qualifications tainted for those youngsters who wanted their GCSE to be as valuable as any GCSE in other years. So we then had to rely on the experts and the regulator to come up with a method that would be both fair and, hopefully, keep inflation to the minimum. 

“My view is that all decisions in democracy are the responsibility of ministers.”

The problem was really a structure-of-government issue: due to what I would call the Cameron doctrine in opposition, you would need a non-departmental body to conduct regulatory issues, and you would have policy making and admin done within the department. So we abolished quite a few quangos, such as QCDA [the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency], to get the policy and the admin into the department. But when it came to things such as exams, where you wanted to have a layer of separation between ministers and the results of the exams, the doctrine was that there should be a proper arm’s-length body, not a departmental body, regulating it. Then, in governmental terms, the expertise rests with Ofqual [the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation]. It would have been wasteful to replicate that expertise in the department. So all the advice that we would normally get from officials on technical issues, such as the algorithm you would use to make sure that the teacher estimates were adjusted to minimise inflation, came from Ofqual rather than the department. 

Because Ofqual is a separate entity with its own board, chair and chief executive, it wasn’t embedded in the department, so there was a distance between the two. And I think therein lies the problem. If I were restructuring Ofqual, I would bring it into the department, maybe like the STA [Standards and Testing Agency], which is an agency but it still has independence. If I were to go to Coventry (where the STA is) and try to take a sneaky look at a SATs paper, I would get nowhere near it. Even now, even after the exam has been set, it is very hard for me to get hold of a paper because they do not want these papers to be spread around. 

So I think you can build in protections. The chief executive of the STA is a civil servant who operates in the department. They are not separate, which I think is probably a lesson for that particular issue. But on exams, once the problem was identified, we did adjust and managed to put in place a solution within a day, and the exam boards readjusted the A Level grades very rapidly. 

TD: You were a minister for nearly 10 years. How do you think doing the same role effectively over that period of time allowed you to get into an issue in a way that, as we talked about, many ministers who are there for shorter periods can’t?

NG: The key is that it is not just the 10 years. It is also the five years prior to that in opposition. As you get more experienced in those 10 years in office, it builds on what you have learnt in opposition and the thinking time that you have had. As a minister, you need to keep doing that thinking and meeting. Being experienced also enables you to think – I could read a submission much more efficiently in year three than I could in year one. That leaves you much more time to think about things and that is why I was able to engage in new ventures such as the model music curriculum and the Mandarin Excellence Programme, which weren’t developed in opposition. I think if I had been moved after five years to, say, agriculture, I would have to have learnt everything from scratch. I would have got there in the end, but I wouldn’t have been as effective as an agricultural minister as somebody who had been in agriculture during the opposition years.

TD: What was it like leaving government in September last year [2021]? Were you expecting that?

NG: I was not expecting to go – maybe I should have been! I was surprised. I suspected that Gavin [Williamson] would go because he had been very high profile during the problems we have discussed, but I thought if he was to go then they would want the continuity there. I was very sad to be leaving. There is always more to do, and I don’t think I was bad at doing what I did. I think I was quite a good minister. I have tried to maintain that interest in education policy and, as I said, I have become a trustee of two big multi-academy trusts. 

TD: What about in parliament? Are you able, as a backbencher, to use your ministerial experience to understand and scrutinise government?

NG: Yes, I do. For example, there were many concerns about the Schools Bill, which I have raised with ministers and special advisers and the previous secretary of state. It almost goes back to the opening question about the civil service. Almost within weeks I felt that the civil service agenda was coming to the fore with the bill. They wanted to regulate academies, and the essence of what makes the academies programme so successful is they are not regulated as heavily as other state schools. They are meant to be regulated like an independent school, to give those schools the autonomy to push up standards and to free them from the control of the educational establishment who are wedded to an ideology that we know doesn’t work. 

TD: Looking back at your time in office, what was your proudest achievement?

NG: I think it is reading. It is just fundamental to a child’s life chances and to their later education. There is no doubt now that phonics is on the tip of the tongue of every primary school teacher. They do phonics. How effectively it is taught is still a matter for debate. It needs to improve. But at least they are trying to teach children through phonics and they are not teaching children to read through the old ‘searchlights’, multi-cueing method. That is an achievement. And we have risen through the league tables that came out in 2016, from joint tenth to joint eighth, our highest ever score. 

“There is no doubt now that phonics is on the tip of the tongue of every primary school teacher.”

The children who helped us reach those figures are the least able, and that is very, very satisfying. I am also quite proud of the model music curriculum and the Mandarin Excellence Programme. We have got 72 schools that are teaching Mandarin to a very high standard. It is a very hard language to learn and children study it for eight hours a week. They will find that learning it will be a great advantage for their career choices. 

TD: What advice would you give a new minister? How would you recommend they make the most of their time in office?

NG: The key to being a successful minister is to understand the causes of the problem you are trying to solve – not just rushing with a policy prescription from a smorgasbord of standard choices. That is hard because the fundamental cause of the problem will not be obvious, whatever area it is in. I am not sure until Michael and I came in that people really understood or acknowledged that the problem with poor standards is progressive education ideology, the child-centred learning approach to teaching. So whatever department you are in, try to identify the problem – low standards, not enough housing or crowded roads, for instance – and try to really understand what has caused the problem. Then you can implement the solution. Do not rush into the solution until you have understood the cause of the problem.

Nick Gibb discusses returning to government from 2022 to 2023

Tim Durrant (TD): You returned to the Department for Education just over 12 months after you left office. What was it like coming back into the department?

Nick Gibb (NG): I felt that I hadn’t been away that long, so things were very familiar. It is interesting, though, when you come back. Let me give you an example of something that made me very cross when I returned. For quite a few months in my previous iteration of a seven-year stint, I was very cross that the regional commissioners (senior civil servants located in regional DfE offices) didn’t include the phonics screening check results nor the EBacc [English Baccalaureate] entry figures in the template of metrics they used to assess the performance of schools in their region.

And so I pressed the issue repeatedly over the years. They gave all kinds of reasons why they weren’t included, but in a nutshell, they said it was because neither phonics nor the EBacc were accountability measures. And I said: 

“Well, it is an accountability measure. I introduced it and although it is not published on a school-by-school basis, it is an accountability measure. It is on RAISE and it is on ASP [RAISEonline and Analyse School Performance – two government portals containing school performance data], and Ofsted look at it. And EBacc is an accountability measure. It is the second item in the headline figures in the performance tables.”

So eventually, after insistence from me, it was included in the template.

But when I came back into government in October 2022 I discovered to my horror that both the phonics metrics and the EBacc entry figures had disappeared from the template. And what annoyed me about it was the constitutionality of it. It wasn’t just a sort of, “you have disobeyed me”. It was that I, as a minister, had insisted on it. It had been conceded. I shouldn’t have had to have had the battles I had. No one else, no other ministers were resisting this. And in the interregnum, no other minister had said: “Oh, let’s get back to getting rid of phonics and EBacc.” None of the ministers who came in that period said that.

And yet the officials took it upon themselves to ease back to what they felt was an easy path, and I found it deeply disconcerting because of the constitutionality of it, more than the issues themselves of phonics and EBacc. It was the kind of arrogant disregard for constitutional proprieties that made me very cross indeed.

“It was the kind of arrogant disregard for constitutional proprieties that made me very cross indeed.”

And it was always these obfuscated excuses that “it was never meant to be” and that “actually it was there, but was omitted by mistake, etc.”. But it was not there and it came up because I was preparing for a meeting with an MP and there was a briefing on their schools which didn’t include those two metrics. I stopped the briefing there and then and immediately asked for a meeting with the permanent secretary about it.

Although not true of all of them, civil servants tend to think that politicians are a legal necessity, but that they themselves do the real work and drive the policies because they are more connected with the sector and they know what the sector would accept and not accept. I am afraid I don’t agree with them. I think I have quite a good understanding of what the sector wants, and I also know what the public wants and what parents want.

So there is this tendency to think that they are right and that ministers are wrong – and that is different from giving advice. I always want advice. Let me hear the advice and then I will take a view. The issue with the template was I thought indicative of that kind of attitude, which I think is very unhealthy in a democracy. To an extent, I think ministers bring it on themselves in a way. If they are not thorough in their own research, in their own policy development, that does then lead to this kind of attitude.

TD: So you just mentioned, there were other ministers doing that role while you were out for that period from 2021 to 2022. Did they have much effect on the direction of policy or was a lot of it being driven by officials?

NG: I don’t think that there was a lot of change in that period. There was a white paper that came out – the schools white paper – which was a disaster. So that is an example of inexperienced ministers coming in. The problem with that white paper was that it undermined the autonomy of academisation, they were undermining the fundamental policy change that we had made in 2010 – indeed, prior to 2010 with [then schools minister, Lord] Adonis – that had delivered higher standards. That white paper then led to the Schools Bill. That would have undermined the fundamental principles of autonomy for academies. So I talked to people in the House of Lords and help them draft amendments to the bill and that I think helped to kill it. And Lord Nash and Theo Agnew [both former schools ministers] were very clear in the debate about the damage the Schools Bill would do.

To lose a bill – an education bill – is just incompetent. And I think that they should have been aware and it was just a lack of experience in education policy that led to that.

TD: Because of the new ministers coming in and not having that background?

NG: Yes.

TD: When you were reappointed, did you have a conversation with Rishi Sunak? Did he give you a sense of what he wanted you to be doing?

NG: I am just trying to remember how that reappointment happened – whether it was a phone call or did I go in? I think it was just a phone call.

Finn Baker (FB): You mentioned the withdrawal of the Schools Bill. The formal withdrawal happened about two months after you returned to the department. Were you involved in that decision or was the bill already dead by that point?

NG: It was pretty much dead. There were some things in it that we were quite keen to have but there were also duties to work with other local organisations and local authorities. It was those kinds of issues that were the problem with the white paper.

One of the main purposes of the academies process was to take schools away from the control of local authorities and this brought in duties: “A clear role for every part of the school system, with local authorities empowered to champion the interests of children and a new collaborative standard requiring trusts to work constructively with all other partners” [Department for Education, Opportunity for All, 28 March 2022, emphasis added]. That all sounds very good but the reality of it was that you undermine that separation between the local authority and the academy, so this is the problem. “A new arms-length curriculum body” – they can’t even spell ‘arm’s-length’ correctly in the white paper; they missed the apostrophe – “that works with teachers across the country to co-create free, optional, adaptable digital curriculum resources”. If that is the Oak National Academy [an independent public body providing online lessons and education resources], that is fine, but I feared it might be another QCA [Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the predecessor to Ofqual]. It is the whole direction of travel of the white paper that was so troublesome.

And the bill that followed was undermining those fundamental principles of autonomy and freedom and that was why it had to be scrapped, even though there were other things in it that were quite good, such as wanting an average English and maths GCSE score to go up to 5.5 on average. So all those were the good ambitions, but you don’t deliver it by undermining the autonomy of academies.

FB: And aspects of the bill cropped up elsewhere once it had been withdrawn. There were two private members’ bills to try and establish a register of children not in school and in the recent King’s Speech the new government committed to that as well. Was there an attempt in the department to salvage elements of the bill or was that driven by backbenchers?

NG: No, we wanted that – I wanted the register as well. So there were things in the bill that were worth having. That is why we then relied on the private members’ bill process to introduce the register.

TD: And can I ask a behind-the-curtains question? When you’re relying on private members’ bills, as ministers are you talking to your backbench colleagues and suggesting that the government would look favourably on such and such a bill?

NG: Yes, if you win in the [private members’ bill] ballot, coming in the top 10, then you want a bill that is going to get onto the statute book. And there are some criteria: it mustn’t be too long; it mustn’t be too controversial; and it mustn’t involve spending money. And so if you do win the ballot and you don’t have a clear view about what you want to do, then this is a two-way process. They might come to you and say: “I am interested in doing something in education.” And you as the minister would say: “Well, here’s maybe three or four suggestions” – what we call ‘handout bills’.

FB: Moving on from the Schools Bill, the issue of RAAC ­– reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete – entered into public consciousness in the summer of 2023. At what point were you first aware of the issue?

NG: Well, it wasn’t my responsibility, it was Diana Barran’s [minister for the school system and student finance] but you get copied in on everything and I was very exercised by it.

I remember having some stand-up rows with officials. I remember having one conversation in the car park at Chichester railway station on the phone because there was this notion that they categorised risk into four categories: low, medium, high and critical. And the view of officials was that ‘critical risk’ was the most crucial – yes, we must put those rooms out of use and take action. My view was: “I am worried about low risk; I am worried about medium risk; I am worried about high risk. Are you saying that children can go into a classroom with a low risk of RAAC falling?” And I remember having rows with civil servants over this and saying: “Absolutely not.” There must be zero risk.

I think it was my obduracy that led to the decision – that ultimately went down very badly with the media – that we were going to evacuate all rooms with identified RAAC, regardless of risk.

You can see how things can so easily go wrong. There is this weight of pressure on you not to take action. Even the Institution of Structural Engineers were not particularly helpful.

You are also a layperson on all this. So I just thought: “Well, let’s say the low risk – whatever low means, say 0.01% – does happen and a beam falls on a child and (a) kills them or (b) injures them. How would I feel?” Let alone the political risk that comes with all that – that is almost incidental to the fact you might have maimed or killed a child. Again, I was quite shocked, not by the complacency but by the insouciance of allowing other people to take this risk simply because of a reluctance to close classrooms and parts of schools all over the country. 

But I was very comfortable with the RAAC decision that we took and I did the media on a lot of this. I was shocked, though, by the hostility of some of the media. I remember having an interview with Nick Robinson on his podcast, Political Thinking, and I told him that I was shocked by his questions to me on the Today programme about the decision. I was shocked by all the media response really. The decisions we made on RAAC were absolutely the most responsible decisions to take. It was eliminating risk. I make a comparison to airlines: you do not go on an aeroplane with a low risk of crashing. They have a zero-risk safety policy and that should be the approach we take in school buildings. I do not understand why it would be anything different.

“The decisions we made on RAAC were absolutely the most responsible decisions to take.”

And yet when we made this announcement, it was as if it was our fault. Yet these buildings were built in the 1970s. One of the most hostile interviewers was [former secretary of state for children, schools and families] Ed Balls, and I had been given a briefing – which I didn’t use because I am not that kind of confrontational politician – which showed that he had actually not taken action in his period as secretary of state when he should have done. Maybe I should have deployed it in the interview, but I didn’t.

So anyway, I was very comfortable with the decision. Together with Diana Barran I knew I was responsible for the decision, even though it wasn’t my area of responsibility. I had pushed this hard. In fact, I would have gone public had the decision not been made. I would have resigned. Because even though it wasn’t my responsibility, it was a collective responsibility – I was not going to allow it. And actually what happened over the summer was that a beam that had not been categorised as critical did fall. It was in Scotland. I think that then helped trigger the final decision, but I was having the rows before that.

FB: When you’re working in a department that’s the subject of crisis like that, how much support do you get from elsewhere in government? Is the response driven by the individual department?

NG: Yes, it is. We didn’t get much support, to be honest, because RAAC was in the health service and the hospitals. I think it was easier for them to take out rooms than it was for us because every room in a school is used. So if you take out four classrooms, you have got to put in portacabins and things like that. It is not easy. Whereas in a hospital you can move things around a bit. But no, there wasn’t support across government. To be frank, they were quite cross with us because we had unilaterally, if you like, made this decision.

TD: One of the Institute for Government’s recurring messages is about the importance of capital spending in government and how under recent governments of both parties, there hasn’t been a focus on capital spending for public services. What’s your view on that?

NG: I didn’t have capital in my portfolio, but I do have a view about the Treasury and these sorts of things. I am a hawk when it comes to public spending and I 150% support George Osborne’s [chancellor of the exchequer, 2010–16] determination to bring down the deficit. We had a £156 billion annual deficit. That is not the debt – that is how much we were overspending in one year. In 2009/10, we were overspending by 11% of GDP. You have to bring it down. It is not sustainable, which means big, difficult decisions have to be taken. We protected schools for those aged 5 to 16, we protected the NHS and we protected international aid. And those were the right three priorities. But other things took the brunt: capital was one; some Whitehall departments saw 40% cuts; there were big cuts to local government support. But I agree with that totally.

What I do not agree with is the way that the Treasury operates when they are demanding savings. So, for example, in one recent year we awarded a 6.5% pay award to teachers and the Treasury says: “You’ve got to fund that.”

But they said: “Find £900 million of savings to fund the second year of the settlement.” But, of course, we don’t have £900 million of unspent funding and the vast majority of the revenue the DfE receives from the Treasury is ringfenced for allocations direct to schools. So what happens is you go through this artificial exercise where you take underspends and you cash those in, and you take some budget lines that were capital and you turn it into revenue and cut it. But when you have RAAC and you have £1 billion of repairs to do, that is not a responsible thing to do. So then we have to look at potentially cutting small programmes that we have been working on for years and which civil servants and ministers have put time and effort in and which were successful.

“What I do not agree with is the way that the Treasury operates when they are demanding savings.”

So every year they look at the Mandarin Excellence Programme, which costs £10 million a year. They say they want that £10 million a year. I reply “No, it’s really successful. It’s in nearly 100 schools. We’ve got nearly 10,000 pupils who are on the way to fluency in Mandarin. Security people want it. Business wants it. Why? It’s the most successful scheme we’ve ever implemented in education! Why would you even contemplate cutting it?”

And they go through all the programmes. After I left they cut Now Teach, which is quite expensive support for this charity, but it was helping the over 50s think about coming into teaching. It was run by the FT [Financial Times] journalist, Lucy Kellaway – brilliant, wonderful, I supported it the second I met her and wanted this programme to expand quicker than she wanted. And she was delivering. People were coming into teaching – really accomplished people – but the charity has had to fold.

So my reflection on all that is that departments should always, every year, themselves – without the Treasury telling them to do it – monitor every programme. Ask: “Is this really delivering value for money?” And take a really hard look and then, if they’re not, cut them, regardless of what the Treasury has said. Just stop them.

But what you can’t have is the Treasury coming in and saying “find this” when that will lead to insane decisions being taken. It is a really inefficient way of running departments. The other thing that happens is the Treasury sign-off on every item and so you have got these contracts with third parties and they are waiting for the renewal. They are waiting and waiting. There comes a point then when they don’t know where the money is coming from, so they have to issue termination notices to their staff. And then at the 11th hour, they get the money, it is disruptive and it means they can’t recruit or retain the best people. It is a very odd way of operating and I think there must be a better way of doing it. And one of the consequences is that we keep chipping away at capital because you have to find these savings to fund some imperative and the annoying thing is that some of those imperatives are: “We want to make an announcement in the budget about education.” There was one about the FE [further education] sector, to give more money to the sector for skills. And we were told: “By the way, you’ve got to find savings to fund it.” Well, let’s not make the announcement then. You are now deciding the priorities of our department, and you don’t have the knowledge.

FB: Shortly before you left office, the prime minister announced proposals for a new post-16 qualification – the Advanced British Standard – directly at party conference. That obviously involved him quite closely in education policy. What’s it like working in a policy area that is a prime ministerial focus?

NG: I’m going to say more about all that maybe at some point, but Rishi did listen. I was concerned about some of the proposals that he had come up with and I didn’t really agree with abolishing A Levels. They go back to 1951 and they have a worldwide reputation for excellence. And I suppose that it is a consequence of his own educational background. I remember visiting Winchester [where Rishi Sunak went to school] when I was in opposition and it was a wonderful school. Superb. And I met the sixth form particularly and they were so good. They had researched the Rose review into primary reading [a 2006 review by Jim Rose, former chief inspector of primary education] and asked me really informed questions – just spectacular. I just thought, look at all this work just for my visit. Presumably they do it for every visiting speaker. So they are just amazing. But the thing about Winchester is that they don’t really fuss about GCSEs. They are all about the A Levels and university. So this kind of notion – wanting to rip up the system – it is fine for Winchester, but it is not fine for many other schools that need these benchmarks. And the A Level, as I said, has got a very good reputation.

But in the end I was able to persuade the prime minister that we should keep at least 90% of the content of the A Levels and that was what was worrying me, that we had this really good curriculum, which was really rigorous, and I didn’t want to lose that. I didn’t disagree with the notion of maths or that if you were an arts-type student, you should continue with maths, and that if you were a scientist, you should be working on your written literacy and on literature. So that was fine. So in the end, we came to a position where I wasn’t opposed. What worried me was the branding of A Levels: establishing a new brand, the ABS [Advanced British Standard], is always a very difficult thing to do.

FB: And when working closely with the centre of government, were you working directly with the prime minister or the policy unit? Who do you deal with in the centre?

NG: It was both. Eleanor Shawcross [director of the No. 10 policy unit under Rishi Sunak] was sort of driving this. But I wrote a couple of papers for her, to be seen by the prime minister. I did have one meeting with the prime minister in that period as well, so it was very much him but on a day-to-day basis we would be dealing with Eleanor. But then there was one meeting where he dropped in to talk about something and he said that he was persuaded by one of my papers. So they didn’t want to go ahead with it without my support, which is nice because I was just a junior minister. And so he was very respectful of my experience and knowledge. But, you know, the prime minister, that is their role: they are driving the overall strategic direction of the government.

FB: And what about the secretary of state – Gillian Keegan – in these conversations? Was she involved? Or were you dealing with the prime minister directly?

NG: Well, they are very hierarchical. I have always noticed that with No. 10, they don’t like going to the junior minister. So what happened with this one meeting was that – and I knew that there was this strange choreography – I had a meeting with Eleanor and she said: “Oh, well, the prime minister might drop in.” So there is a way of dealing with that sort of thing. So many of the arguments and back-and-forth was between Eleanor and me and the prime minister, but ultimately Gillian was very much engaged as well because she had to sign off on what was finally agreed.

TD: Let’s turn to broader reflections. You worked under six different education secretaries between 2010 and 2024. Did their attitudes to schools vary? Did their engagement with your portfolio vary? And what impact did that have?

NG: Yes, they did vary. The difference is that Michael and I – Michael Gove – we were in opposition together. And I may have mentioned this in the previous interview, the reason why governments fail ultimately – or not fail but why they leave office after 13, 14 years – is because time has distanced them from the period in opposition when the real fresh thinking about policy takes place.

“the reason why governments fail ultimately ... is because time has distanced them from the period in opposition when the real fresh thinking about policy takes place”

And the work we did in those three years with Michael – and I was five years in opposition, I was visiting schools every Monday and really trying to take the portfolio seriously – it wasn’t just: “What points can I make against Labour?” It was about: 

• “Why are we declining in the international league tables?”
• “Why are universities unhappy with the undergraduates coming in?”
• “Why are employers unhappy with school leavers’ maths and English?” 

And really trying to understand all that. So I visited schools, talked to teachers, read, met lobby groups and so on, and I came to a very firm view, a clear view about the causes of the problems with our education system. I read E. D. Hirsch and understood more about progressive education – what it meant, what it was doing, why it was bad – and developed and honed the argument. And Michael also came in and he was very wedded to what he had learnt from the charter schools in the United States and free schools in Sweden.

So by the time we came into office in 2010, we were ready with the Academies Bill. We had a clear programme for reforming the curriculum, bringing in the phonics check, autonomy for schools, behaviour policy and so on, all set out; admissions code changes, teachers’ standards changes, regulation about employing teachers – we changed those. So all that was ready to go and we were very clear. So I did it for two and a half years and Michael did it for four years and I came back when Michael left.

But the other secretaries of state who came after Michael had not been through that process. They may have been somewhere else and they all have their instincts and they are Conservatives, so their instincts will not be that far away from ours, but they hadn’t done the work. So that is the challenge you have when you have different secretaries of state coming in.

But, when I was reappointed in July 2014, there was a tweet from David Cameron saying that I was the voice of high standards. Because I had been reappointed by the same prime minister, there was a slight deference to what I was doing. So they didn’t come in and undermine what I was doing. They would listen and I would often get my way. I wouldn’t always get my way because there is always this slight notion of: “Oh, Nick is a bit of a zealot” – no doubt whispered in the ear by civil servants – and I lost quite a few battles on things like performance tables and how you record EBacc achievement and so on. But, although they didn’t have the same experience, and they had different priorities – Justine Greening was about social mobility and Damian [Hinds] would want to talk about character education and so on. They all had their idiosyncrasies but they didn’t really undermine what I was doing and they let me continue.

TD: You also worked under four out of the five prime ministers from the 14 years of Conservative government. We’ve talked a little bit about Rishi Sunak’s involvement on the Advanced British Standard, but did different PMs have different approaches to education and to your policies? Did they change things?

NG: I don’t think we could have reformed education in the way that we did after 2010 without David Cameron. I think people really underestimate the effectiveness of David Cameron as prime minister. He really understood the issues because he was shadow education secretary for a few months before he became a leader, but more importantly, when he drafted the 2005 Conservative manifesto, he was really engaged in the issues and he understood progressive education. So he was absolutely supportive of Michael – and me – and I think without that we could not have moved the reform agenda on in the way that we did.

After David, we had Theresa May and she was again supportive, particularly because of Nick Timothy [joint Downing Street chief of staff, 2016–17] who had been director of the New Schools Network. So again, deeply knowledgeable about education and understood the reforms. So we had massive support.

Then after that Boris [Johnson], who I don’t think was that interested in education. Whenever I bumped into him in the House of Commons he would go: “[cheering noise] phonics!” But that seemed to be all he knew.

But yes, I think that David Cameron’s role was absolutely pivotal.

“Whenever I bumped into [Boris Johnson] in the House of Commons he would go: ‘[cheering noise] phonics!’ But that seemed to be all he knew.”

TD: And when we spoke last time, you spoke about your relationship with experts and you’ve talked about the work you did and the reading you did to build up your knowledge on the policy area. How did you go about building those relationships with experts?

NG: It is about just immersing yourself in the sector. I would say this if looking at other portfolios – housing or trying to run the health service – that it is what you have to do. You have to really understand the problem you are trying to solve. So the health service: Why does it cost £150 billion a year? Why is it inefficient? Why are waiting lists so long? Why aren’t we doing more operations and getting more done? And why are people having such a poor experience? I don’t understand why – well I have an instinct but I don’t really know. So you have to spend years visiting hospitals, finding out who the people are – the thought leaders – and there will be some thought leaders that you know you are not going to agree with.

So what I did is just talk to people. Then you get introduced to people. So I was introduced to Ruth Miskin at the Reading Reform Foundation and I was introduced to people who really understood mathematics and how it should be taught and so on. My researcher found Hirsch actually and I read his work and got in touch with him. There is no science to it other than throw yourself in and take it seriously. I think that is what you really have to do.

“There is no science to it other than throw yourself in and take it seriously.”

But then when I would visit schools, I would try and identify people that I thought were good and would help us. So you then meet people like Ian Bauckham [now chair of Ofqual], a headteacher in Kent and he helped us a lot, and Tim Oates, who was at the QCA. I met him in opposition, he then went to Cambridge Assessment and we asked him to head up our curriculum review, and Amanda Spielman [former Ofsted chief inspector]. All of the Ark people [Ark schools, a multi-academy trust]. 

So that is what you have to do. You have to try and understand the problem, talk to people and you will meet people who share your analysis of the problem and then you bring them in. So what’s the Polonius phrase: “Grapple them to thy heart with iron bonds”? [Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3: “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel”] And that is what we did really – just identify people who would be able to help us, because it is no good just me doing it because, you know, I am not a teacher.

But it does require you to have a proper analysis of the problem you are trying to solve and be absolutely sure that your prescriptions of how to put that right are correct and keep challenging yourself the whole time: Is phonics right for reading? Are you sure?

Read the research. I was introduced, via talking to people, to the fact that there was a study happening in Clackmannanshire – a longitudinal study – and so I got myself immersed in that and met the academics.

You do rely on experts – and I know there is this sort of hostility to experts that Michael talked about. But you have got to make sure that they are the experts that reflect your philosophical outlook. I get accused sometimes of picking and choosing people. I found experts in every field: there is Tom Bennett [behaviour management adviser to the Department for Education] on behaviour, there is Ian Bauckham on foreign languages, there is [the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Maths’] Debbie Morgan on maths, there is Ruth Miskin on reading and so on.

So you have your experts, and I do pick and choose them, but I pick and choose them because they have convinced me that their prescriptions are the right ones for the problem we are trying to solve. There is no point in picking a progressive whose advice would be more of the same – things that I think caused the problem in the first place.

FB: Before we move on, it’s quite rare for junior ministers to remain in post for as long as you did and to be so publicly associated with a particular policy area. What was that like?

NG: I liked it because I am not a typical jobbing politician. The downside for me is that I think it prevented me from going into cabinet because you need some breadth of experience, probably in other areas. And also to get that level of experience I neglected to do some of the things you need to do to go into cabinet. So I wasn’t political enough. I wasn’t assiduous enough in building relationships in the House of Commons. Some of that is because I couldn’t be bothered. Not interested. I like to go home at night, I have a lovely marriage, I run every morning and that’s why I’m healthy and I like those kinds of things. But the downside to that is you don’t get into the cabinet, which I would have liked to have been. And I think I would have been an effective secretary of state for education.

“I think I would have been an effective secretary of state for education.”

But the upside is that I felt I was good at my job and therefore, as the years went by, I found it increasingly easy to make policy. I was like a sort of engine ticking along, beautifully tuned, because I knew that I could identify within minutes of reading a policy paper why it was so good (or not). Whereas if you are coming into something new – if I had been suddenly put into defence – I would have had to spend hours on that paper. So it became – and it still is – hard work, but I just found the job easier as time went by because of that expertise.

FB: Staying in post for so long meant that you became a controversial figure with some in the education world. Did that bother you?

NG: No it didn’t because I assiduously avoided reading social media. Sometimes people say: “Oh, they are very cruel about you.” And I would say: “Oh, I didn’t know that. Don’t tell me that.” So I protect myself from that. Because I have got a lovely, happy personal life, I don’t worry about all that.

And what was interesting, I did this interview with the Times Educational Supplement [TES]. I agreed to it after I left office in September 2021. I was persuaded by a friend of mine, Amy Leonard, who is a brilliant comms [communications] adviser, and because she is a friend, she persuaded me to do this interview with Jon Severs, editor of TES, against my better judgment because I don’t like dealing with journalists generally. And anyway, she said: “Oh, he’s very honest and he likes what you’ve been doing. He’s interested in what you’ve been doing and he finds your role fascinating.” So I did it and it turned out very well and Jon took the paywall down from the interview. And that really changed a lot of people’s perception of me. So it had a big impact on my reputation. But generally speaking I don’t listen to the criticisms.

“I meet people now – teachers who say: “You made a big impact and I’m grateful to you”, and things like that.”

What is interesting is that increasingly since that interview, there are quite a lot of positive things happening and I meet people now – teachers who say: “You made a big impact and I’m grateful to you”, and things like that. So why go into politics? Why do people want to be MPs and want to be ministers? Do you want to do it because you just want to be famous and flounce around? If you think about most people who are interested in politics, they do it because they are interested in how the country is run. They have strong views about the economy or whatever it is. That should be the motivation for then taking the next step of actually standing for office and becoming an MP and becoming a minister. If that is your motivation then all the other things do not really matter – if you are effectively changing policy and making things better than they were.

TD: Two final questions from me. First, you left government in November 2023. Why was that the right moment for you?

NG: Because I felt that I wanted to do something else at some point soon. I could have hung on until the election – which I thought actually was going to be November 2024, so I was giving myself a year. And to do something else, because of all the rules about ex-ministers not doing this and that, I wanted to give myself a lead time.

So there was that. Also, there was a point where there was an opportunity to become a diplomat. That didn’t actually happen – the election was called too early and there was some other complication to do with the appointment of another ambassadorial position that annoyed Labour, which meant that mine fell as well. So that was really why. There was that opportunity to become a diplomat and while that didn’t come to fruition, I wanted to start the next phase of my life and I thought I needed to start early. It was not an easy decision because I loved being a minister and I felt that I had let some people down by stepping down – people that were my allies and had really helped deliver our agenda. I felt a bit guilty in doing so.

TD: But you wouldn’t change it?

NG: No, it was the right point. I had done 27 years as an MP, 10 years as a minister. Even the two or three years that I was out, I was still doing the same kind of things – pushing – and then five years in opposition doing all this. I felt I had made my contribution. I think things had changed, from my perspective, for the better. I felt that I had done my bit and I just wanted to do something for me for the remaining years of my career. Although having said all that, some of the things I am doing now are continuing this agenda internationally and through UNESCO and other organisations. But there does come a point where you want to do something new in the remaining active years you have left.

TD: My final question, then, to wrap everything up: what do you think makes a good schools minister and what would your advice be to those doing the job in the future?

NG: I think the same thing applies to being a good minister in every area – housing, health, agriculture, the economy. You have really got to understand your sector, understand the problems you are trying to solve, and then really understand how to deal with those problems – properly, seriously – rather than just looking for the next press release, the next announcement or the next attack on the opposition. That is what it should be about.