“People think I’m ideological but I’m not actually – I’m interested in what works.”

In this episode, we speak to Sir Nick Gibb. Nick focused on education as an opposition MP from the early 2000s. From 2010-2023, with two brief interruptions, he was Minister for Schools. Nick’s interest in specific aspects of teaching – notably phonics and knowledge-rich teaching – goes back over twenty years. He spent his time in government pursuing lasting change in what and how English schools teach. With headteacher Robert Peal, Nick recently published Reforming Lessons: why English schools have improved since 2010 and how this was achieved, describing this work.

With an array of possible topics, my main goal was to understand how Nick led the Department for Education, how he designed change, how he saw it unfold, and what he’d learned from the experience. Nonetheless, the result was a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. We discussed:

  • Why he first focused on education policy and how he set out to learn his brief and identify ways in which education could be improved
  • How to make a government department work, the importance of working through legislation line by line, and why ministers are wrong to blame the Civil Service for their struggles to implement policy: “If you know what you want to do, I think you’ll find that the British Civil Service want… to implement.”
  • The relative importance of standards and structures, and how his thinking changed over time
  • The design of the phonics policy, and why it worked: “You have all these levers and then you start moving them and you realize they’re actually either not connected to anything or they’re made of rubber. You can’t just pull one lever and say, permanent secretary please implement phonics. Because nothing will happen.”
  • Areas of concern, including recruitment and retention, the effect of the Ebacc on the arts, and why children’s love of reading is falling.
  • What he’d have done differently, and the advice he would give other countries trying to improve their education systems

Alongside these big themes, there were many other points of interest, including:

  • The one thing he missed from being in office
  • Why he never became secretary of state
  • Why the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency “had to go”
  • Why governments run out of steam
  • How his training at KPMG influenced his approach to government
  • The academic subject which is more ideological than phonics
  • When and why you should compromise

Whether or not you agree with his views, Nick has been one of the most influential figures in English education over the last twenty years. Our conversation gave me a far better understanding of what’s changed – and of how ministers can pursue improved public services.

Nick’s book is Reforming Lessons: why English schools have improved since 2010 and how this was achieved. During the conversation, I also referenced:

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or read the full transcript, lightly edited for clarity, below.

Transcript

Your interest in education started in opposition. You trained and worked as an accountant. There are lots of other things you might have got into. What drew you into education in the first place?

I came into politics when I was quite young because I believed in ideas. I didn’t come into politics for the fame and glory, such as there is. There’s not much of that anyway, but I didn’t come into it for those reasons. I came into it because I was interested in political ideas.

I was drawn into politics by economics, by the importance of free-market capitalism, democracy, that those societies that adopted those approaches were successful. I was a great fan of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and so on, and I believed in monetarism. That’s what drove me.

But then I was elected in 1997 and then after a few years I did a shadow treasury job and a shadow trade and industry portfolio. I came to the view that we’d won those debates on the importance of monetarism and the free market. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989 and so on.

It turned out I was wrong. We had not won those battles, those battles have to be fought every day. But at that time, I did think we had, so I turned my attention to another area of interest of mine, which was education. I knew there were issues of principle and philosophy in that area, and that’s why I turned my attention to education.

A lot has changed over the last 20 years. If you think about the average child in the average school, what do you think are the most significant things that child would experience differently to 15 or 20 years ago?

I think expectations are now higher in schools. This notion that if a child comes from a poor background, that they wouldn’t be expected to study a knowledge-rich academic curriculum through to the age of 16, I think that has gone. I remember in those opposition years, 2005 to 2010, I was visiting schools every Monday. My heart would sink in many schools when you look around and the whole of the ground floor was filled with vocational training-type exercises, hairdressing salons. They weren’t even particularly highly-paid vocational subjects that they were training young people in.

I just felt this was not right. Why should a 13-year-old girl be learning to cut hair when she can do that when she’s 16 or 17? What she needs at 13 is a really rigorous academic education and they were not getting that in many schools. I don’t think you’ll see that today. I think you’ll see schools being much more rigorous in the academic side of school life.

Then in primary schools, there’s a much better focus now on how you teach children to read than there was before 2010. This notion of phonics we might come onto, but you didn’t really see that as the method of teaching children to read prior to 2010. Now it’s in every primary school and it’s pleasing to see that.

One of the things that strikes me about your story – you’ve already mentioned these school visits – is how carefully you learned your brief. Tell us a bit about how you got to grips with how schools work or don’t work.

One of the things I talk about in the book is, it’s important in our democratic system that people who hold ministerial office or shadow ministerial office take their brief seriously. I think there’s a tendency, particularly in recent decades, to play the game of politics, that it’s all a big game and it’s all about attacking the other side and getting media attention and so on, and not actually spending the time and the hard graft in understanding the portfolio.

I did take my portfolio seriously. Part of it is my nature, part of it is having worked for 13 years for a big accounting firm where you have to be serious, otherwise you’re out, and the clients will want you out. So I took it seriously. I wanted to understand. I had an instinct from my own school experience that there was something happened in the ’70s to our education system that was deeply damaging in my mind.

In my mind I was calling it progressive education, but I couldn’t define it properly. So I wanted to find out. We were declining in those years – the PISA study started coming out in the early 2000s. We were going from seventh or eighth in English and maths down to 25th or 27th in those subjects between 2000 and 2009. [I’ve recently reviewed England’s performance on international tests.] You had employers saying that school leavers couldn’t do proper maths, couldn’t read and write properly. You had universities saying undergraduates were less well prepared than previous generations. There was clearly something not right about our education system, and I wanted to understand what it was properly. That did require proper attention to the sector.

Those school visits, I did try to do two on a Monday. I took the view you could get anywhere you wanted in the country by 11, provided you left early enough. I always set up these appointments in schools, 11 o’clock all over England and a couple in Scotland. I went to Belfast as well. Not just to visit like a state visit type thing, but a proper visit, engaging with teachers, talking to the headteachers about these issues. Then I would meet, through those visits, people who were experts in their field, experts in geography, reading, mathematics, and so on, and I engaged with them and then read around the subject.

That’s how you become an expert in the field. That’s what I did for those five years.

We’ve got a generalist civil service and a culture of generalist ministers and quite rapid reshuffles. Is the solution just that time in opposition, and shadow ministers need to use that time? Are there other things that government, the prime minister, or the civil service could be doing that would allow more of this domain expertise?

I think you hit on the right phrase. I think domain knowledge is important in the civil service and the approach in the civil service is to move people around every couple of years. I don’t think that is right. I think people should move around in a way that suits the business. That’s how the private sector works. You don’t move people around in your company every two years because that’s the way it’s done. You put people in place who are going to serve your business interest in the best way, the clients, or the production, or the service you’re providing.

We need to do that in the civil service. I was always amazed by how little the civil servants I was dealing with – and those by definition would always be senior ones – how little they knew of the other areas of the department’s work from their own. As I was there year after year, it became clear that they had very little corporate knowledge of the recent past. I was the receptacle of the corporate knowledge of what had been happening. It’s in every area of government, not just education. It’s a very technical world we live in, and it does take time to understand the sector that the government is trying to regulate or oversee.

The other thing about civil servants is – I think they’re very accomplished. The British civil service is  the envy of the world. I think that’s right. I think there’s no corruption in our system. It’s highly competent. But they’re good at delivering – I don’t think they’re very good at policy. Why would they be? They don’t have constituents. They don’t spend their teenage years and their twenties  going to think tank conferences, debating, and meeting other people that are keen on getting into politics. You are talking about these ideas all the time. That is a very different route from the civil service who are very cerebral, but they haven’t been spending their spare time at these conferences and debates. So why would they be good at policy?

I always take the view that the reason why governments don’t survive more than 10 or 15 years is because the real work of policy development by politicians takes place in opposition. As you’re in government a long time and you move people around – if they suddenly put me into defence or into agriculture, I wouldn’t have a clue. I’d have to spend at least two years trying to understand the issues. Therefore what happens is that those ministers who have suddenly moved to a different department rely on the civil service for policy advice. That is a big mistake. Policy has to come from people who are deeply involved in the political system.

You ran an effective campaign on phonics while in opposition. Tell us a bit about that. What does an effective opposition campaign look like?

This is before I asked Michael Howard if I could go back on the front bench with the education portfolio. I was a backbencher at that point, because I’d resigned from the front bench, I just wasn’t happy with the leadership at that point. So I went onto the Education Select Committee and we went to various visits. That’s where my interest began in reading. I had met Ruth Miskin, I think in 2004. Because in my own constituency, I was visiting schools and I was told in the secondary schools that something like 40% of children starting in Year 7 had a reading age below their actual age. A quarter had a reading age two years or more below their chronological age.

I couldn’t understand this. I spoke to the primary schools and said, how often do you hear children read? They said once a week. I thought, “This can’t be right.” My mother was a teacher. She heard children read every day, and she had to, despite having 40 children in her classroom. So I thought something was going wrong.

I immersed myself in this area. Then I realized there was this issue of the reading wars going back to the 1950s, with a book in America called Why Johnny Can’t Read, which attributes the decline in reading standards in the States to this new, “more informal method,” I think he called it, that was very different from the way reading had been taught for centuries prior to that. He blamed that on the fact that Johnny, aged nine, still could not read.

I got involved in that and then I’d asked the select committee chair if he would do a small inquiry into the teaching of reading. He said, “Yes,” which was great. We got the Reading Reform Foundation. There was this wonderful study, called the Clackmannanshire Study, that had just been concluded, a seven-year longitudinal study in a small borough in Scotland. It showed absolutely unequivocally the success of systematic synthetic phonics compared with other methods of teaching children to read.  So I asked the academics from that study, Rona Johnson and Dr. Watson from Hull and St. Andrews universities to come and give evidence. Ruth Miskin gave evidence, Debbie Hepplewhite gave evidence, and the committee supported my conclusions that we should have a review of the National Curriculum.  So that was a great success. I’d actually written to a lot of MPs in the House of Commons about this study, and I’d raised a question at Prime Ministers Questions.

So at that stage, I was associated with this issue of phonics in the House of Commons. Then, as a consequence of that recommendation, the Labour government established the Rose Review.  That was a review into the most effective way of teaching children to read. That concluded that you needed to focus on systematic phonics with fidelity to a particular scheme. So that was a great victory and I think people saw it as a victory that I was partially responsible for. I think it shows again that if you, feel passionately about something and you’ve done the research and you know your subject, you can use the parliamentary system, even in opposition, to affect change.

It sounds like it’s downstream, again, of domain knowledge. What to look for, who to invite in, and that then gives you the weight of evidence in favour of the changes that you’re suggesting.

It is. I mean, there’s a downside to the approach I’ve taken to politics, which is you do become monocultural. Gibb is the the phonics person, don’t ask him about wider issues of the economy or defence. I do have very well-informed views about other aspects of politics. No one’s the slightest bit interested in it. So that is the downside. But the upside is you can – if you’re lucky and you work hard at it – effect change, even when you’re not in government.

You stayed in post as schools minister for the vast majority of a 13-year period, which is extremely unusual. If one is a junior minister and one likes what one’s doing, what does one have to do to stay in office for that long?

It’s difficult really. I don’t know why. Lots of it is luck, isn’t it? I was out of office twice, so I didn’t succeed on two occasions. David Cameron was key to our reform program. Michael Gove drove the whole process in government, but without David Cameron supporting Michael and me, it would’ve been very difficult. I think he did understand the ideological battles that we were fighting, so that did help. I think you do stay in office if you’re regarded by the whips, regarded by Number 10 as an effective minister. I’ve heard comments about other ministers that Number 10, regards as effective. What they have in common is being just good at what you do. And the red box comes – this lead-lined, red leather-covered square box, with a strange locking device – and it’s remorseless with its paper in it, that you have to read and respond to. I actually quite enjoyed reading the submissions in the red box. That’s the one thing I missed from being in office. But it is a time-consuming activity. But you have to do it, you have to finish the box, you have to do it. I’ve put of hours into that.

Then being okay on the media and okay in the House of Commons, all these things matter. But I think just being diligent about the job day-to-day, and again, that I think goes back to my KPMG days: you have to be diligent, otherwise you’re, done for in the professions.

Various listeners asked why you were never made secretary of state. Was it something you’d have liked to do? Were you happy doing what you were doing?

In those early years, I don’t think I would’ve been ready to be secretary of state, frankly, because I was not a deeply political person. I was new to being a minister, as all the government was in 2010. After a few years I thought, “I can do this now and I understand the politics better.” I did hope that those reshuffles that came around – particularly after I’d gone back into office in 2014, I did a seven-year stint and saw a number of secretaries of state appointed – I did hope that I would be, and I think I would’ve been good, he says, obviously. But I didn’t really play the game of going to these dinner parties and being a schmoozer in the House of Commons. I would do my work. I was exhausted by the end of the day – back-to-back meetings. Then I was always up early next morning to go running and trying to do some parts of the box during the week.

I don’t know where people got the energy from to then go to these dining clubs. I have a lovely home life and I want to be with Michael in the evenings – as much as you can, with being an MP and all the pressures of voting and debates and so on in the Commons. I don’t know where people find the time to do all that stuff. But because of that, the people who make decisions about who’s in the Cabinet probably felt they didn’t know me well enough to take that decision.

You mentioned the idea in the book that education is a case study of governmental reform. One of the more interesting leaks in the last year has been Labour sources saying “Dominic Cummings was right.” The civil service won’t do what we want it to do. Very politely, you mention even in the acknowledgements, that “civil servants were mostly happy to implement policies.” You also talk about having quangos pursuing policies which were orthogonal to national policy.

You’re a minister that wants to deliver the government’s agenda. What should you do or more pertinently, what did you and Michael do, and you continue to do, that made sure the Department for Education more-or-less did what you wanted it to do?

I wanted to understand what was going wrong with the education system. I came to the very clear view – and especially after I’d read E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham – that it was an ideology that was causing the damage: the child-centred learning and progressivist approach to the curriculum, teaching, and behaviour. There’s a academic I’ve been speaking to the last couple of days who talks about the “paradigm cartel.” I used to call it the “tyranny of the expertois.” In any field, there tends to be a dominant philosophical approach, whether it’s medicine or whatever. If you don’t adhere to that orthodoxy, you don’t get promoted. That’s very much the case in education – certainly since the ’70s, the best part of half a century – if you’re not a progressivist really, you don’t get a senior position in the local authority education department.

We had to deal with those institutions, and we’d had quite a few meetings with those quangos in opposition. We quizzed the CEOs, and it became very clear that there was a problem there, and they had to go. David Cameron had an important speech in 2009 to the Reform think tank about governance. He said that, if it’s a policy or an administrative matter, those decisions should be taken in the department, by the minister accountable to parliament. If it’s a regulatory function, like the nuclear industry or even education in the regulation of exams, that should be a quango – a quasi-autonomous non-governmental department.

But when we came to office in 2010, whole rafts of policy were being decided by these quangos, not least the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority [QCA, which later became the QCDA: Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency] – who had in 2007 introduced a competence-based curriculum, which was appalling – totally unaccountable. I’m not even sure how much the ministers knew about the details of that. So they had to go. They just had to go. I’d had some run-ins with the QCA even in opposition. I say in the book about how they responded to some of our my parliamentary questions that I thought was outrageous. I was sent for by the chairman of the QCDA, as it was then called, and asked why I was asking all these questions. I said, “Because you’re preparing for a competence based curriculum.” And I wanted to expose the issues. He said, “We haven’t got time to reply to your questions. We’re busy implementing a curriculum.” I was appalled by that and, I drafted this big long letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons, which, in the end, I didn’t send. But it confirmed that there are parts of Whitehall where people think that their decisions are not accountable to anybody.

David Cameron’s Reform speech was very important in saying, “No, those decisions should be taken by departments and by ministers accountable.” So we did that. We abolished the QCA, and a whole raft of other quangos. The quango Partnerships for Schools was building schools with no classrooms in them, no walls, it was terrible. The noise of trying to teach in those schools. What were they thinking? So they had to go. Then of course the whole academies programme was about moving schools away from local authorities where lots of the progressive ideas rested.

In the department itself, there were a lot of civil servants who understood our agenda and were very supportive and helped us to deliver it. There were others that were opposed, but you could identify those quite easily. There were others that didn’t have a view and they just did their best to implement things. But I don’t buy this argument of Labour – or indeed other Conservative ex-ministers have said the same thing – that you just can’t get anything done. I don’t agree with that. If you know what you want to do, I think you’ll find that the British Civil Service want that. They want to implement.

What they’ll do is give you really good advice. They’ll say, “If you do this thing, minister, the whole world will fall down. So we advise you not to do that, but why don’t you do this other thing, which is quite similar.” You can then take a view about those things. Sometimes I’d get that kind of advice. I’d say, “No, I don’t believe the world will fall in if you do this thing. I think you’re wrong and here’s why you’re wrong. Because I’ve spoken to all these experts and they say, ‘This will work.'” You can have that debate and then they will implement what you want you – you take the consequences if they’re right and you’re wrong. So that’s the process you have to go through. If you know your stuff, and you’ve done the research and the work, you can implement policy in government. I just don’t buy the argument that the deep state is preventing democratically-elected ministers from making decisions.

There’s a strong suit of attention to detail. You’ve already mentioned the red box. You talk about a meeting where you went through every bit of guidance going to schools. You talk about going through policies line-by-line and editing. Why was that necessary and did it become less necessary over time as civil servants became more attuned to what you were trying to do?

The quality of these submissions – these are the four or five page documents that outline the policy you’re trying to implement, and you get more and more of them as the policy’s implemented – they became better. And I had really good advisors over time: Robert Peal, who I wrote the book with, then later, Rory Gribbell, who was an advisor with me for four years. These are brilliant people who, were in the bowels of the department making sure that those submissions were right. So that was a good thing.

In terms of attention to detail: first of all, language matters in terms of education policy. There were certain forbidden words I wouldn’t allow. I always talk about getting the documentation right for a policy – that’s only half the battle. You then ought to implement the policy, but it’s a necessary condition to get those documents right, because that sets the policy. So I spent a lot of time making sure those documents were properly well drafted.

Alistair Campbell also complains about the quality of drafting sometimes. It was very mixed. What annoyed me was the quality drafting in the submissions was quite good. Then there’d be a draft of a public document: it was terrible. Because that wasn’t in their name. The submission was in their name, so they got it right. But when something’s in my name, or the secretary of state’s name – it doesn’t matter, we’ll let them sort it out. So that did irritate me. I had to spend a lot of time either pushing back or redrafting.

Also in things like legislation: there are thousands of pieces of secondary legislation that go through the House of Commons and the House of Lords every year. MPs don’t really give it that much attention. So the only person that can give it attention in a democratic sense is the minister. So I would go through these pieces of secondary legislation line by line, and for most of them, it was easy for me to do on my own, because I understood what we were trying to do. There were challenging ones on the regulations for things like teachers’ pensions. I’m an accountant and I struggled. So for those ones I would have meetings with the relevant civil servants and the lawyer going through every single line.

My thinking – again, it’s KPMG thinking. Say this goes wrong. Say there is some howling error in this legislation. I’m then asked to explain myself. I can’t say, “I just signed off. Couldn’t be bothered to read it. It’s too hard.” I’ve got to say, “No, I had the discussion and this particular clause, I was told meant this, and I accepted that.” If you do this, and you make sure you understand every clause or piece of secondary legislation, generally things don’t go wrong, because that process would identify these flaws. So that’s why I did that. It’s very important, this side of things. It’s important for democracy that the minister’s on top of the legislation. Otherwise we’re not living in a democracy.

You talk about the importance of, saying “No.” You said that in the later years you saw your role as being a bit of a Dr. No, trying to maintain everyone’s focus on what mattered most.

There’s pressures from all kinds of interest groups, piling on pressure on the department. Departments like to do what the sector wants. They see that as their role in a way: it’s the path of least resistance. But if you are a reforming government, as we were, that isn’t the way – we didn’t want that to happen. You’d have things like the Times Commission saying things; the unions coming up with policy proposals; Conservative MPs coming up with policy proposals that were completely bonkers. And you have to be wary of these things and say “No.”

It’s hard to say no to a major newspaper, or to groups of MPs who might be quite senior in the party. But you just have to do so. I didn’t win every battle, frankly. There all kinds of things that are in the curriculum that I ideally wouldn’t have had in there. But I did my best to stop those things, and I did stop quite a lot of bad things happening – because they can undermine what you’re trying to achieve in the reforms.

I thought the example of character was quite interesting: of Nicky Morgan coming in and being very keen on character and you couldn’t stop it. But when she’d moved on, the character awards stopped being a thing.

Yes. And due to inertia more than anything. I wasn’t against what she wanted to do. We do want children to have resilience and to do more than just study Pythagoras. They’ve got to be engaged in sport and all kinds of other activities at school, and their school ethos. But I always worried that this was a Trojan horse for the introduction of more progressivism into the curriculum. But actually she didn’t do that. If you look at the organizations that she contracted with, like the school rugby activities, she wasn’t going to do that. But I was always wary that it might do that.

There is evidence you can teach maths, English, history, geography, and science. There’s not that much evidence you can teach character – that you can change people’s characters. I wanted to make sure that the behaviour in schools was such that a conscientious child was able to work, study and do well. We’ve achieved – not 100% success – but we’ve moved the dial, and there’s things like warm/strict behaviour now in schools. It’s very strict, but it’s not a cross strictness. It’s a warm, loving strictness, because the teachers want the best on their pupils. I think those ideas are becoming more popular in schools now.

Can you say something about speed? You talk about having the Academies Bill ready to go: it’s passed on the day that parliament rises so that you can have the free schools policy running. You also talked about how long it takes for a cycle of qualification reform to go through. What would you tell a minister about how fast to go? There’s a tension there with going through everything line-by-line and making sure everything’s done in the right way.

You don’t have long, you have to assume that you’re not going to win. You’re more likely to win if you have done things that improve people’s lives. So speed is of the essence. We did a lot of work in opposition, and people like Lord Lingfield helped us, with Conservative lawyers, to draft an academies bill. We knew what the policy was. We thought we knew what legislation needed to change, so we were ready. The parliamentary draftsmen had their own views and they changed quite a lot of that, but it was in a state ready for the parliamentary draftsmen. We didn’t have to go through all the all the other processes to get to that point the bill was ready.

We were elected in May. The bill was ready in June, and it was on the statute book, when the House rose at the end of July. Started in the House of Lords. So that was about preparation. It wasn’t a particularly long bill, but it was a very significant bill. It extended academies from just secondary schools that were in trouble, to all secondary schools that were good, or in trouble, and to primary schools. So that was already to go. Then we allowed the notion of setting up your own school, the free school program. We had 11 free schools opening in September 2011 – because the legislation had all been ready by 2010, so that parents groups and school groups were able to open schools very quickly. It does matter.

The GCSE and National Curriculum reform inevitably takes time. First of all, you’ve got to get the new curriculum drafted. That means appointing a review panel, then going through all the subjects. The actual work of redrafting takes time. Then you have to consult, which takes time. Then you have to respond to the consultation. So we started our curriculum review in January, 2011, I think this is pretty rapid. We started with primary, we were ready with a final version of that – and I was in and out of office in this point – but it was ready for schools to see in September 2013.

They were then given a year’s lead time. You can’t say is a new curriculum, teach it tomorrow. Teachers need time to prepare. So they were given a year: it became compulsory in 2014. Then you want to test the new curriculum. There was an argument to wait four years, the whole Key Stage 2. I said, “No, that’s too long a period. The schools have had plenty of notice where we’re moving.” We had the new test two years later, in 2016. So there you go 2010 to 2016, and that was a rapid period. The GCSEs: we started later and they took longer. We were still doing GCSE reform in 2017, and then those exams were like 2019, for some of these smaller subjects. So it does take a long time and I don’t think you can speed that up, because they have such an impact on the sector that there has to be plenty of time for consultation and lead time for schools to adjust their teaching.

I’m keen to get into standards and structures, the tension between those, and changes in your views or in government policy. You talk about a debate in opposition about the relative importance of standards and structures. Can you sketch out the differing views and where you came down on that?

I was always a standards person. I was initially in opposition sceptical about structural changes. I always thought it’s just too easy to do that and not worry about the detail of what’s taught. So I wanted phonics in reading. I wanted East Asian Maths and knowledge-rich curricula. I knew they’d be a challenge to implement, but I was determined.

I thought the academies program that Michael and Dominic were very keen on was fine. I wasn’t opposed to it, because I knew it would get schools away from local authorities. But I didn’t think it was the driver of standards. We had that debate, and it didn’t really matter because Michael said, “We will have both.” So that was fine.

Once in office, I came to realise – I should have realised earlier – you do need both. Because had we just had all my standards stuff: we want schools to teach the multiplication tables and use East Asian maths. You’d have these local authorities saying, “You could do that if you want to, but we don’t think it works. And your career might be in jeopardy if you implement all that stuff.” So I think you do need the structural changes to enable schools to be autonomous from that influence

If you do it the other way around – if you give schools autonomy – why wouldn’t they continue doing the same thing? That was always my worry about the structural reforms. What would make them change? You can’t think that some internal market mechanism will push up standards. Because progressive education is so entrenched in our education system, that needed something: I call it blowing up the concrete. You needed something to unleash that entrenched approach to education that was there. From the top, you needed some push to say, “We think reading should be taught this way. We think maths should be taught this way. The curriculum should be much more knowledge-based.” So I came to the view – I think we all agreed at the end – you absolutely need both, and one feeds off the other.

Now, if you look at some of these multi-academy trusts and the work that they’re producing, the curriculum content, it’s phenomenal. It’s way beyond anything Michael Gove or I could have thought up. The West London Free School, where Rob is the headteacher, they have a whole curriculum organization for primary and they sell their curriculum to 300-400 other primary schools. There’s really good stuff coming from other multi-academy trusts – Reach, Ark, and Harris – and if you think about all the debates that are happening in the teaching profession about pedagogy and so on, that has been unleashed by the autonomy of the academies and free schools programme.

I’m trying to work out the sequencing here. Do you think that on day one, becoming an academy, that freedom is starting to have good effects? Or do you think it had to wait for things like the curriculum review and Ofsted changes for more academies to start pursuing those changes?

It did have to wait for those things. There were some exceptions. Schools like King Solomon and Mossbourne, Harris and Ark, were doing great stuff anyway. But what we were trying to do in office is change the whole intellectual climate of our school system. You needed a bit of yeast in the system, a catalyst in the chemistry, to get that change. I remember having this conversation with one of the union leaders and she said, “You’re contradicting yourself. You’re autonomous in one stage, and on the other hand you’re telling teachers to use phonics.” I said, “Give me this one pass, because it’s so important children learn to read.”

Beyond that, it was important to seed these ideas into the system. To enable those teachers that did agree with us – [giving them] the confidence to go about implementing what they felt was right, but felt intimidated from putting right, the power to do that through the academies program. You do have to have that intellectual leadership if you’re trying to address what we believed, and I think it is right: it was the ideology of education that was causing the decline of standards in our schools. You can’t just hope that some systematic change will address that, given how long it’s been in place – since the 1970s, probably even earlier – there has to be some political leadership that addresses that.

But that isn’t just Nick Gibb and Michael Gove mouthing off. It’s based on our discussions with teachers and experts who would support us. One of the things I did in opposition is – you meet teachers and form relationships with people that – you knew what they were doing, and they had a very clear view about mathematics, or reading, or the history curriculum. You kept those people close, because you knew they could help you, first of all hone the arguments and get the policy right, but also then to help sell the policy into the system. So it’s very important that you know who those experts are. Tom Bennett was our expert in behaviour, Ian Bauckham in foreign languages, Ruth Miskin in reading – there were others in reading as well – Debbie Morgan in mathematics and so on. So this is an expert-led, but politically-led, drive to change the intellectual climate.

The other thing that struck me in reading your book was understanding academy trusts as a system. Patrick Collison, very smart tech billionaire, has this question: if a company is no longer working, it will go bankrupt. But there are systems and institutions that cannot go bankrupt and therefore we have no method for weeding them out. Historically, whether you’re a hospital. a school, or a police force, there’s an understanding that whatever happens, we need that service to be provided. If it’s not doing a very good job, we’ll put in Special Measures, or a new leader, but often you end up with places that don’t get any better. With Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs), you overcome that difficulty because a) a school can be made to move from its own control, or from one trust to another trust. But b) there’s also now an incentive, “If I don’t do this, I, as a headteacher, may lose my job and the governing body and so on.” That seems like another part of the mechanism: more incentive to act, and also consequences – supportive consequences – but consequences if you don’t.

There were a few Multi-Academy Trusts in existence before we came into office, I don’t think we envisaged that the ultimate policy would be a trust-led system. This evolved, over time. It became very clear with the success – of Ark, Harris, Star Academies in the North West, Outward Grange, and Northern Education Trust, there were other examples that emerged over those years – of effective leaders, headteachers that became CEOs and drove brilliant practice that worked. Then you saw these schools that had been Requires Improvement or worse for years – year after year providing a substandard – taken over by these brilliant people and made Outstanding within two years. There was so many wonderful examples like that. So it is a system that did evolve over time. We never really envisaged that would happen. But I think it has worked.

If you think about the structure of trusts, what are the incentives? There are some that are not effective, so there is oversight of them by the Department through the regional directors, or Regional Schools Commissioners, as they were. They will look at the bottom-performing trusts and there’d be reviews of all the trusts to see how they’re doing. So there’s always that oversight that happens in the state. But I was always conscious also that oversight didn’t start becoming intrusive. Particularly in those high-performing trusts: ignore them, managed by exception, don’t start managing the high-performing ones.

I was always wary of that, and that’s why I always wanted the regional directors or Regional Schools Commissioners to be senior civil servants, line-managed by the permanent secretary, therefore accountable to ministers and Parliament. Rather than having them elected and having their own autonomy. That should never happen. Then there are other issues, because there are league tables of the Multi-Academy Trust brands. I wanted those tables to be sharper and clearer. I didn’t quite manage to get that through. But nevertheless, every year there’s a league table of MATs and you can look up to see how your MAT performs compared to others.

So there is an incentive in a MAT to continually improve, whereas local authorities, less so when they were running our school system. I don’t remember any local government election that was determined by the quality of the schools, even in areas where the schools were terrible. It wasn’t an election issue. What determined the election results of local councillors was the national state of the parties. So I don’t think there really was any accountability for education to local level. Now there is in those trusts, because they have a board of trustees and because they’re big – some of these trusts have very high-quality people on them – and if the CEO is not delivering, they will either of their own volition, or nudged by the regional directors, they’ll move the CEO. I think it’s a much more dynamic system now that’s actually leading change.

It’s not hard to find out what to do. You look at the top of the league table. If you want to find out what to do to improve your trust, go and visit Mercia School in Sheffield or Eden Girls School in the North West. You’ll find out how to improve your school and trust by following their example. That’s all very transparent, and that’s why I’m so optimistic: we have a really good school-led, MAT-led system, that’s going to lead to continual improvement – provided people don’t mess it up.

I’m a secondary school teacher, so I saw the phonics policy very much as an outsider. The thing that strikes me is that it seems there was pretty clean adoption of phonics – which is not a term that I would usually apply to almost anything in school improvement, because it’s so complicated, or very much within government policy implementation. You’re in a position where you say, “There is a specific form of phonics we want to make sure everyone’s doing.” What were you and others thinking as you designed a policy to make sure that happened?

One thing you learn when you’re a minister is that you have all these levers, then you start moving them, and you realize they’re either not connected to anything, or they’re made of rubber. You can’t just pull one lever and say, “Permanent Secretary, please implement phonics,” because nothing will happen.

The Phonics Screening Check was key. This is a one-to-one test for six year-olds, 40 words. Very, very controversial because a) you’re testing six year-olds, what are you doing? People think they’re all going to be sitting in rows in a big exam hall taking a test. No, it is a very friendly test: a child to their own teacher. Forty Words. Half the words are made up words to make sure the child is decoding and not reading the word on sight – again controversial. So we put a little monster next to each false word: “This is the name of a monster.” We introduced that, and that was principally designed to make sure the school was teaching phonics. It also identifies children who are struggling, which is a good thing to do. But the main purpose was to change behaviour in the school.

I had wanted it to be published on a school-by-school basis in the same way we published the Key Stage 2 assessments. I took a political view that we wouldn’t succeed in doing that. We’d just had a boycott of the SATs in 2009-10, which we recovered from. But the idea of implementing a controversial test for six year olds, and then publishing the results on a school-by-school basis, I knew that wouldn’t land. So we said that it wouldn’t be published. It would be marked locally, but collected by the local authority and the government, and available to Ofsted. So it was still accountability measure, but it was slightly different.

The other levers: we changed the Teachers’ Standards, so that any primary school teacher – to qualify and to continue – had to be able to teach systematic synthetic phonics. We changed the [Ofsted] inspection framework: we made sure that inspectors listened to the weakest readers read, rather than the average child. We had this funding as well: £23 million matched funding to schools to buy materials from a catalogue we had put together. We got a really good former teacher, Gordon Askew to go through all the training and materials available to approve or disapprove of them. So that I think had an effect. As you see, there’s multiple levers you have to use, not one, to get that policy implemented.

It very much reminds me of the Tim Oates work around control factors, saying, “If you change an assessment or change training, nothing’s going to happen. You have to make sure everything changes.” So there’s never someone saying, “You shouldn’t do it like that, because our frameworks don’t match up.”

I was always careful, when we had any kind of bidding process for funds, or whatever primary schools were bidding for: if you didn’t have a good phonics result – other than school building, which is separate issue – but if it was to be a beacon school or a computer-based school, you had to do well in your phonics.

Again, I asked listeners what I should ask you, and there were various suggestions around policies that some listeners were not huge fans of. Inevitably, you can’t do everything in Government. I’m curious to know your thinking about trade-offs. So in saying, “We’re going to come in, do phonics, and do the various elements of knowledge-rich teaching,” that you wanted to pursue, were the trade-offs that you anticipated and accepted and were the side-effects which emerged unexpectedly?

There are trade-offs. You go back and think, if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have made some of those compromises. For example, in the primary curriculum, there is still the notion of working scientifically in science. I think that’s latched onto too much. I don’t think eight year-olds need to learn how to work scientifically. I think that’s something that can be left for later. I think they need to know the stuff, and they love knowing stuff.

For example, I see this lesson a lot in primary schools, where the child asked to rub two bits of metal together to make it magnetic. They do it 10 times, then they do it 20 times and then 40 times, and they see how many paperclips it picks up, and they record it all, as though they were doing an experiment. That’s a bit boring frankly. But it’s teaching children to work scientifically. It takes 40 minutes. That 40 minutes could have been spent, on the most wonderful lesson about the Earth’s magnetic fields. There’s a trade-off in the time at school. I think it’s better spent in those early years – particularly primarily and early secondary – in acquiring a lot of really complicated knowledge. Then, as you become a more sophisticated student, you can start understanding the processes behind the way science is developed. So I regret that we didn’t I didn’t stop that. Part of that was coming in and out of office during that period as well.

Recruitment and retention has been particularly challenging in the last few years. Is there more the government could or should have done, or could or should be doing now, to make sure we’ve got as many good teachers as we want in the classroom?

The problem is we have a strong economy, even with the ups and downs of economic policy. It’s still a country with a thriving business sector that wants good quality graduates. We weren’t asleep at the wheel on this. We had a whole new team of people come in to improve the marketing of teaching, to try and change the image. We put a lot of effort into the marketing side, and we won awards for some of our adverts that were on TV and social media. We had very generous bursaries for shortage subjects – we put a lot of money into that.

One of the great things Nicky Morgan did was she had this workload survey. We surveyed teachers and asked them, “What are the things that take up time unnecessarily?” Because our teachers were spending eight hours a week more than the OECD average at work, but not eight hours a week more on teaching. It was the average on teaching. They were spending eight hours a week on things other countries weren’t doing. So we tried to identify what they were to try and improve retention. We identified all kinds of things and we did a lot of work, and that was very successful. We reduced that eight hours, I think by five hours.

Ultimately salaries do matter. As a minister in a spending department, I was always making the case to the Treasury. I wanted a £30,000 starting pay for teachers, many years before it came in – because ultimately these things are determined by the Treasury. We need to do more to improve the status of teaching. I think that’s very important. Improve behaviour, improve retention.

The Early Career Framework we introduced was designed to make the experience of a young teacher coming into teaching, the first two years – we lose about 12% in that first year because these teachers come into school, 23, 24 years-old, first job, first flat, and then we say design your teaching plan every night till midnight. They’d been through a training that taught them about sociology, not classroom management. So we tried to make that experience better in order to improve retention. But it’s early days yet. I think it’s been a successful policy, but I don’t know what impact it’s had on retention yet.

It’s often said that the last 15 years have had a negative impact on the arts, through things like Ebacc. In the book, you are quite sceptical about that impact. Do you want to say something about that?

I don’t see any impact. It’s important that children take the Ebacc combination: English, maths, at least two sciences, a humanity – history or geography, and a foreign language. This isn’t a peculiar combination of subjects. It’s absolutely common in most jurisdictions around the world up until 16, and in some countries up to 18, particularly the foreign language. Most of those are compulsory to 16 anyway, like English, maths, and science.

There’s a lot of criticism from the arts sector that we are driving out the arts because the arts aren’t in the Ebacc. With the best will in the world, a lot of children don’t want to study arts to 16; only 6-7% have ever studied music to GCSE. I’d like that to be higher, I’m hugely supportive of better music in schools. If you look at the qualifications they’re taking, there is no reduction in the proportion taking arts subjects, particularly if you combine it with some of the vocational art subjects. So I don’t buy that argument. The Ebacc is seven or eight subjects – depending on whether you take double or triple science – there’s plenty of room to do one or two more GCSEs.

What I wanted to do was to improve the quality of things like music, so that there were more 14 year-olds who felt equipped to take GCSE Music. I’d like to see it at the levels it’s at at the West London Free School. I forget the figure, but it’s way beyond 6% – it’s 15 or 20% take it. At Northampton School for Boys, they’ve got 20 choirs and ensembles – wonderful. That’s what should be happening is in all schools and that’s why we introduced the Model Music Curriculum. You can make similar arguments for arts. But art and design, I don’t think those GCSE numbers have fallen as a proportion at all. Design and technology has been a problem. We did get the Dyson Foundation to help us redraft the GCSE, to improve it, but those numbers were falling before we came into office. They’d been falling in other parts of the United Kingdom where there’s no Ebacc. So I never bought this argument.

I do think that the Ebacc – what was happening was that the most disadvantaged children were being entered for qualifications that had less value in the marketplace than the combination I’ve just described – that were taken for granted by middle class parents for their children. I think it’s a social justice issue that more children should be taking that combination.

What did you change your mind about while you were in office?

I had a period out of office when I lost my job, which was devastating at the time – it was my birthday in 2012. I went to become a trustee of the David Ross Education Trust. So for the first time I was an employer of teachers, not a figure holding them to account as an MP or a minister. I think I realised that – I should have realised before and I think I probably did realise before – that our teachers are highly-educated people, they’re professionals, they work hard, and they’re conscientious. Where schools fail, it’s not because they haven’t bothered, it’s because this school is implementing approaches to the curriculum and teaching that the evidence says doesn’t work.

So I started to realise that we needed to support, rather than berate, teachers when things were failing. That’s a change I learned by being a trustee and visiting schools in the trust. That’s why we did more things like the hubs programmes: to try and spread best practice from the schools that were doing it well. So that’s where we had Maths Hubs, English Hubs, foreign language hubs, and Behaviour Hubs. I think some of the trade union leaders thought there was a change of tone when I came back into office in July 2014. But again, it’s about learning, isn’t it? Learning how to do your job better than you did it before.

It’s 2010, you’re starting all over again. Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

I would’ve taken possibly a different approach to some of the compromises I made on the curriculum. I think I would’ve made the curriculum more knowledge-rich than we have done. We had a debate about Key Stage 3 – and indeed history and geography at Key Stage 2 – about having a higher-level curriculum. If you look at the history and geography at Key Stage 2 and 3, it’s three or four pages each, very high-level. I think what was successful about our curriculum reform was – if you look at the English, maths and science in primary – year-by-year, very detailed. I think, in English and maths, it has been very successful. The science is more honoured in the breach, because it’s very hard and we don’t have proper textbooks to help teachers. It’s another big battle. So I wish that we had spent more time on those other subjects, including music. That’s why we have a Model Music Curriculum. I initiated a Model History Curriculum [now shelved] with Christine Council before I left office. Ofsted talks about Key Stage 3 being the “Wasted years.” I wish we had gone into great detail in the curriculum for that.

The other thing I was trying to start doing some work in was, what worries me is that some schools feel pressured to start teaching the GCSE course in Year 7. These children aren’t old enough to learn that. For example, they’re either teaching the texts – which is an egregious example – in Year 7, that they’re going to study in Year 10 and 11. Or, more common, they’re doing different texts, but they’re being set questions that are for a 14, 15, or 16-year-old. “Why did the author use this language? What was the theme of this or that? What was the main idea of the book?”

I don’t think 12 year olds should be doing that. They need to be introduced to harder literature, not the Michael Morpurgo they were reading in Year 6. Not necessarily fully-fledged adult literature, but moving towards that. Making sure the children understand the narrative – what’s happening – but not dissecting it in a way that’s not appropriate for that age group. It can put children off the love of reading. I think that’s why we do have problems, if you look at the international surveys about the love of reading. I would just like children to be doing the text in class and encourage to read at home, harder and harder books, that they get to love, but age-appropriate. John McIntosh was always talking about making sure that the books that you were introducing children to read were only a certain jump higher, otherwise you can put them off totally. So I wish I’d done more work on that.

I wish I’d done more on sports. I started to dip my toe into sport. If you think phonics is ideological, you should wait till you start dipping your toe into sport education. I was amazed by how much ideology there is in that.

You offer some specific reforming lessons – advice to ministers trying to do something similar elsewhere. Can you tell us a little bit about them?

I talk about immersing yourself into your sector, so you know what you’re talking about and understanding what the problem is you’re trying to solve. Don’t just zoom in with an answer. You’ve got to know, what is the problem? We identified falling standards, international league tables and so on. Then you’ve got try and understand why they’re falling. Don’t make an assumption, understand, test, talk to people. When you’ve understood the problem and what’s caused it, you then need to work out, almost separately, how do you resolve that problem? So they’re all separate strands of thought. Then you’ve got to test that with people to make sure you’re doing the right thing.

There’s ideology – not just in education. We know there’s ideology in economics, but there’s ideology in housing, in road planning. If I spent more time researching, I bet you there’s ideology in health, agriculture, and defence. I think a good Conservative minister, particularly, if they’re really immersed in the subject, it will emerge. “Why are so many people hostile to cars, even with electric cars? Why are they still closing roads? Who is this academic from America who’s advocating that cars should be kept out of towns?” That’s the kind of thing that will emerge in any area, and then you can start to address that ideology. As Conservatives, we are generally not people who are ideological. People think I’m ideological, but I’m not actually, I’m interested in what works. It sometimes sounds ideological, if you are challenging a prevailing ideological orthodoxy.

When you are in office, you need to be absolutely on top of those documents. There’s a tendency to think, “I’m the big chief minister. I don’t trouble myself with the details. There are other people that will do that for me.” I can promise you those other people are not as motivated as you are to get this policy right. So you have to make sure it gets done. Inevitably that means either doing it yourself, or checking and checking and checking that it’s right. The battle of ideas is never won. You have to keep making the case – as we should have done, and I didn’t – on the economy and the free-market. You have to keep making the case why knowledge-richly matters: cognitive overload, working memory, how you get those higher-order thinking skills that we all want of critical thinking, problem solving. That comes from knowledge, not from shortcuts and looking things up.

You need to compromise. But compromise judiciously: don’t compromise for a quiet life. If you’ve come to a very carefully-crafted view that this is the way to improve things for people and then you say, “But I’ll get all this hassle. I’m not going to improve life for people enough. I could have done it more, I could have made your life much better, but I’m not going to because it’s a lot of hassle and I don’t like the criticism.” That’s not good enough. I remember saying to ministers around the world, “Don’t compromise unless you absolutely have to. We absolutely had to compromise on things like performance tables for phonics and the multiplication tables tests we introduced for nine year-olds. But don’t compromise because you want to be loved by the trade union leaders – because you’ll just undermine your reforms. Actually politically, it’s not the best thing to do. Even if it sounds astute in the short run, in the long run it’s not, because your policies won’t be as effective, and you’ll be judged – come the election – on the effectiveness of your policies.”

We now have a government of a different stripe making various changes. Which aspects of your legacy do you think are best placed to survive?

The phonics will stay, I think the phonics check will stay, which is pleasing. It’s been there since 2012, it’s sat this June and millions of children are reading better than they would otherwise. I’m pleased and proud of that achievement. Although I’ve never taught a single child to read, there are 250,000 teachers in primary schools who’ve done that. We set the right policy framework to enable that to happen in a better way.

The thing I’m probably most proud of is the liberation of the teaching profession, because it is unique to this country. You talk to policy-makers around the world, and they look to England and the intellectual resurgence in the teaching profession. Teachers are writing curricula, they are writing blogs – they’re even running podcasts, Harry. They’re writing papers and establishing ResearchEd conferences – Tom Bennett established, they’re now global – a thousand teachers turn up on a the first Saturday of the academic year. Why would they do that? They’ve got schools to go to. It’s brilliant that they’re turning up to these conferences, because they’re interested in evidence-led approaches. I think that is something I’m very proud of, and I don’t think you can put it back, that can’t be closed down. They’re out of the secret garden now: there’s no fence around it: teachers are in there. The quality of thinking about behaviour policy, retrieval practice, knowledge organisers, the content of the curriculum, pedagogy generally – it is way beyond anything that Michael Gove, or I, or Dominic Cummings could have thought up because we have unleashed professional autonomy to deliver those kind of things. That is something I’m very proud of.

Is that the why? Teachers in America, Australia, and Canada all have access to the internet and social media, and could all perfectly well write books – and yet there is something more here. Do you think it’s this unleashing – that all those ideas can have a home because you can find a school or a trust which will use them?

It’s a combination of all those things. It’s a combination of social media. Other countries have social media too, but I think that was important. Nevertheless, in this country, when I tell Americans that 80% – I have to say eight-zero, so they don’t think I’m saying 18% – of secondary schools are now essentially charter schools, they fall off a chair, and nearly half of primary schools are. That autonomy enables teachers, particularly if they have the support of the head or the trust to do things that, in the past, they would’ve felt intimidated from doing if it didn’t conform to the West Sussex way of doing things. There’s there free school programme: now 650 free schools, that are essentially private practice of teachers. They can set up their own practice. So you get the Michaelas, the Mercias, some of those Eden schools in the North West, then the old free schools, King Solomon, Reach and so on. I think that has had an impact.

Then you’ve got the political leadership that has said, “You can teach multiplication table test; in fact, we think you should teach multiplication tables.” My mother was telling me she was not allowed to get the children to chant the tables, and she had to do it with the door shut when no one was looking. Now you can – if that’s how you feel they’re best taught, you should do that. We’ve changed the whole way reading is taught. So we have enabled teachers – given them permission they didn’t necessarily have before – to think for themselves and do the things that many in the education world were saying were old-fashioned and Gradgrindy – they’re now at liberty to do. When they do them, they see this dramatic impact on the children: reading better, learning better, knowing more.