Congratulations are due to the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson. Not many ministers achieve much at all, let alone ticking off the core of their agenda within a year of taking office. But figures to be released this week, which show that over 13,000 children have had to leave private schools over the past academic year, are merely the latest confirmation that Phillipson is well on her way to achieving what she set out to do when she took office. Phillipson can already boast that she is the most destructive education secretary since 1979.
One assumes that has been her aim since being appointed last July, given that she has spent the past ten months doing everything in her power to destroy two of the most successful elements in British education – private schools and academy schools. It is, after all, difficult to discern any other purpose to the wrecking ball she has directed at both.
‘Worse’ is, of course, a subjective term.
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