Michael Gove has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Education secretary really is the best job in government, though sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Lives can be transformed – hopefully for the better – as a direct consequence of the decisions you make. But you are also firmly in the firing line. There’s no other area of public policy in which everyone is an expert. Only a minority of us have fought in battle, studied the impact of nitrates on chalk streams or contemplated what the correct approach to sanitary and phyto-sanitary standards should be in a trade agreement. But we’ve all been to school. And we all have views – sometimes deeply entrenched and emotional – about what constitutes a good education and therefore sensible education policy.
So any education secretary who wants to change things can expect to run into controversy. Ken Baker was held up to execration by teachers’ unions and academics in university education departments for introducing what was considered an over-rigorous national curriculum, paper and pen tests which would leave too many students feeling like failures and an inspection regime which judged schools against each other. David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and Ruth Kelly in turn were criticised by the same unions and scorned by the same university departments for, respectively, insisting on higher standards of numeracy and literacy, bringing in ‘unqualified’ teachers to the classroom (through Teach First) and giving more schools greater autonomy through the academies programme.
During the four years I spent in the Department for Education I built on their work. Sure enough, I found myself being attacked by the same people for much the same reasons. But while I didn’t (most of the time) go out of my way to seek confrontation, I felt the whole point of being in office was to drive change. I wanted England’s children to have the very best education they could.
My own life was transformed by education. I spent the first four months of my life in care. But I was lucky to be adopted by loving parents. Both had left school at 16 and they wanted opportunities for their own children they had never been able to enjoy. Their hard work allowed them to invest time and money into my, and my sister’s, schooling. My mother worked at the school for the deaf in Aberdeen my sister attended and my father’s small business profits (small in every sense) were devoted to sending me to the city’s only fee-paying school for boys.
I was lucky. But I was conscious that if I had not had that parental love and support, a child like me who had been in the care system would have most likely faced a truncated or disrupted time in school, would have left with few or poor qualifications, and would have limited horizons in the future. My aim in government was to ensure that a child’s future did not depend on contingency or chance, on accidents of birth or the lottery of geography. Every school should be supported to strive for excellence.
In opposition I pointed out that, for all the gains we had seen in state education over preceding years, we were still falling behind nations that we should regard as comparators. And, worse, the gap in our schools between the educational achievement of richer and poorer children was growing. The ambition I set was to both raise the bar and narrow the gap. It was, I maintained, both economically inefficient not to make the most of every talent and socially unjust to allow the already privileged to benefit more from schooling than those with fewer advantages.
Making the case on both economic and ethical grounds seemed to me the right way to secure funding for schools at a time when austerity was looming elsewhere and the best way to convince others that failure to reform was a moral failure.
My aim in government was to ensure a child’s future did not depend on contingency or chance
I was helped enormously by my colleague Nick Gibb, that rare thing in politics: a man without ego, only principles. He had developed a policy programme which would improve reading in primary schools through the effective implementation of systematic synthetic phonics, a programme to improve numeracy by ensuring every student could achieve maths mastery, a programme to improve discipline by giving head teachers new powers over behaviour and a programme to end grade inflation by making exams and league tables more honest. He had based his approach on close study of effective classroom practice from around the world and underpinned it with an understanding of the science of knowledge acquisition culled from wide reading of authors such as Daniel Willingham and E.D Hirsch. He was both Sam and Gandalf to my faltering Frodo.
The economic case we made helped convince George Osborne in the Treasury to ringfence school funding. The ethical case we made convinced David Cameron to throw enormous political capital behind the revenue George gave us. And the detailed work Nick had undertaken gave us a programme ready for implementation straight after the coalition government was formed.
We were also lucky in that the Liberal Democrats, at that time, had developed ideas on education strikingly similar to our own. That was down to the party’s education spokesman at the time – David Laws, the single brightest and nicest Liberal in history, not excepting William Gladstone, Richard Haldane or Herbert Asquith. When we went into coalition with the Lib Dems we faced, at least initially, not a messy compromise but a happy consensus.
If we had the money, the plan and the allies, why did we run into problems? Well, that’s down to one big thing and many small ones. The big thing is that arguing that any system or organisation needs to change will be interpreted by many within that system or organisation as an attack on them. I argued that there was much to be proud of in our school system and in every speech praised brilliant state schools, lauded great heads and maintained (which was true) that we had the best generation of teachers ever in our schools. But in the ears of many, that praise was drowned out by the case we were making for urgent change. The generous words were a string serenade lost in the drum roll and trumpet cry for reform.
Could that have been avoided? Could I have done better at ‘carrying the profession with me’? Can a public service ever be reformed without those within it hearing the case for change as, at the very least, an implicit rebuke to them for their acquiescence in under-performance?
It might be possible. But I haven’t seen it done. As ministers of every party have found, and are finding, challenging incumbents in any field, even in the gentlest fashion, inspires resistance. Indeed, without that challenge, without showing you are resolute for reform, you won’t find allies within the quiet majority of professionals who know things can be better and who want the apologists for under-performance to be held to account. By demonstrating that we would not back down, voices within education were raised in our support and new voices were attracted to our cause. The heads of multi-academy trusts who were empowered to transform under-performing schools, the principals of new free schools liberated to aim higher, those teachers who believed in greater rigour and ambition, they became more numerous and more vocal precisely because the rising chorus of opposition to what we were doing in government convinced them that we were serious about change.
Challenging incumbents in
any field, even in the gentlest fashion, inspires resistance
And the small things that caused problems? Everything from my maladroitness in cancelling funding projects my predecessor had invested in (such as the gift of free books through the charity BookTrust) to the knock-on effect of requiring a 19th-century novel to be taught in GCSE English literature (some schools abandoned the texts they’d been teaching already instead of augmenting the curriculum with just one more book – so stories developed about me ‘banning’ Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird when some teachers had chosen to ditch them rather than do a little more work).
The allegation that I had indeed banned these enlightening texts even led to a crowd of Socialist Workers party activists invading the Department for Education one morning and occupying the entrance hall in protest. It was, remarked my aide, the first time a Tory minister had been denounced by Trotskyites for being too anti-American. Such are the curious workings of the woke mind that Of Mice and Men was subsequently erased formally from the GCSE curriculum in Wales because it was deemed ‘racist’ and ‘psychologically and emotionally’ harmful for some black children. Wales’s children’s commissioner, Rocio Cifuentes, wanted to spare the principality’s 16-year-olds unnecessary trauma. As I said, education policy is the one area everyone has an opinion on – and is therefore treacherous ground for any politician.
Together that big problem – resistance to change among many incumbents – and the little problems – the clumsy execution of some policies – were weaponised by those same teaching unions and their friends in academia who disliked being held to account for not doing better for our children. I now look back on that time with a greater degree of equanimity because I feel the changes we made were vindicated by the progress our children have made in every international measure of school performance. But I am left with one lesson I would pass on to anyone who gets the chance to do what is a wonderful job: if you find the unions are praising you and the academics in university education departments proclaim themselves your allies – ask yourself, as Mrs Gaitskell did of Hugh: ‘Are the wrong people clapping?’
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