Meet the man who saved England’s schools

‘You had 14 years in power,’ runs the refrain. ‘What did the Conservatives achieve?’ Often it is those with a Conservative outlook who are the most exasperated. After all, it wasn’t just that the Conservatives failed in their promise to reverse Gordon Brown’s legacy of high spending, tax and borrowing. They presided as all those numbers went shooting up even higher. Regulations became ever more onerous. A socialist might have had cause to rejoice. But from a Conservative perspective, what was there to celebrate?

The answer, of course, was the improvement in school standards. The evidence is so overwhelming that even the most sneering gloomsters would struggle to refute it. I saw it not just in the statistics, but with the experience of my youngest two daughters, who enrolled at a local primary school around the time the reforms were kicking in.

It was puzzling that the Conservatives didn’t make more of this success story during the general election campaign last year. Why were there no visits by Rishi Sunak to Michaela, the remarkable school established by Katherine Birbalsingh?

This is the school the Left fought so hard to prevent from opening. Last year, Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, refused to congratulate Michaela when asked to do so in the House of Commons, on achieving the highest Progress 8 scores in the country three years in a row – something never done before. We await this year’s exam results. But we can already see how transformational it has been to the children of Willesden fortunate enough to get a place.

This is the place where the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ is crushed to dust. Pupils from there are often from ethnic minorities, single-parent families and deprived homes. They thrive in an environment of academic rigour and robust patriotism. The resentment of grievances is banished and a culture of gratitude is instilled.

Michael Gove, who was Education Secretary in the early Cameron years, is rightly given much of the credit for the reforms. He was up for a ruck – powerfully making the case in speeches, articles and interviews against the ‘enemies of promise’. Less noticed was the contribution of Nick Gibb, the doggedly determined Schools Minister. He managed to stay in post while Education Secretaries would come and go. ‘After Michael Gove left to become chief whip in 2014, replaced by Nicky Morgan, I took to describing myself as akin to the boy with his finger in the dam, unwilling to move for fear that the water would burst back through,’ Gibb recalls.

Ministerial longevity meant Gibb usually knew more about the matters to be considered than his officials.

While the success of the reforms might appear obvious, those ideologically opposed to them have still not been converted. The education unions are as militant as ever. But there is also the powerful educational establishment, or ‘blob’, which will never be convinced.

Gibb has written a book, ‘Reforming Lessons’, co-authored with Robert Peal, the headmaster of the West London Free School. The account is not merely of historical interest but has clear lessons for politicians in the need for preparation and determination to achieve their chosen objectives.

The American educationalist ED Hirsch’s book, ‘The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them’, was a great influence on Gibb, but he researched far and wide. Time spent in opposition before 2010 was used absorbing the details of different educational methods and coming up with clear plans of how standards could be improved by pursuing what worked. His greatest obsession, of course, was phonics.

While Gibb would have a voracious appetite for the briefings provided by the civil servants he did not rely on them alone. ‘I have a large group of people I talk to. I like experts in their field,’ Gibb said in an interview with the Times Educational Supplement in 2022. ‘Debbie Morgan on maths, Tim Oates on curriculum, Tom Bennett on behaviour, Ian Baukham on languages.’

Gibb’s own school experiences were important to him.

‘My first secondary school was a grammar in Kent,’ he says in an extract from his new book serialised in the Telegraph.

Then, after my family moved to Yorkshire, I finished my education at two recently established comprehensive schools: a former grammar school turned comprehensive in Roundhay, Leeds, where standards remained high, and a comprehensive school in Wakefield where standards did not. It was at this school, which was notorious for classroom disruption and pupil violence, that I took my A-levels, and gained the same number of A-grades as the rest of my year group combined.

This was not, I hasten to add, due to any genius on my part but simply because – unlike most of my peers – I had the fortune of having been taught at some excellent schools before attending a failing comprehensive.

There is no shortage of horror stories from Gibb concerning the expensive failure of ‘progressive education’. One that struck me was the idea that schools, or ‘learning centres’ as the progressives would prefer to ‘reinvent’ them, should not have classrooms.

Gibb records:

Bexhill High Academy, in East Sussex, opened in 2010 at a cost of £38m with 15 open-walled classrooms dubbed ‘education pods’, where 90 pupils would learn at a time. Two years later, it went into special measures, and five years later, it reportedly required a £6m grant to add classrooms.

The most notorious example of a ‘school without walls’ was to the east of Liverpool in Knowsley, one of the most deprived boroughs in the country with consistently poor education outcomes. Eleven secondary schools were flattened, and in 2009, seven new schools were opened in their place, costing £157m.

Dubbed ‘centres for learning’, they had no classrooms but ‘base areas’ divided into different zones. Three years after the strategy was launched, Knowsley remained the worst performing local authority in the country on almost every measure, and many local residents had taken to calling their schools ‘wacky warehouses’.

In July 2013, only 381 of the 900 places at Christ the King Centre for Learning (cost £24m) were filled. The school has since closed.

Had Labour won the 2010 general election, such madness would only have got worse. Instead, thanks to Gibb far more of our children are learning to read. England has risen in the international league tables for reading ability among 10-year-olds from 10th place in 2011 to eighth place in 2016 and to fourth place in 2021.

Gibb became Sir Nick in the New Year’s Honours list this year. Few knighthoods have been more deserved. At a time when so many Conservatives are plagued with self-doubt, taking a copy of ‘Reforming Lessons’ to the beach this summer could be just what they need to pep them up. The ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ can be applied to government ministers as well as school pupils. Gibb shows us that, in both cases, failure is not inevitable.

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