Downing Street infighting, embarrassing scandals and unpopular decisions like means-testing winter fuel payments have seen Labour’s poll ratings slide. But while the whole Cabinet has felt turbulence, the ride had been rougher for some ministers than others.
And the flipflopping has been followed by hostile briefing against her, apparently from the highest levels within her own Government. In January, one national paper reported that Phillipson was “out of favour” in Downing Street over her changes to academies, with No 10 said to be shocked by the scale of the backlash to the bill containing them.
There are deeper reasons which help explain why Phillipson is under pressure. In part, it is about party politics. The Conservative Party arguably had a patchy record in government between 2010 and 2024, but when asked to list their successes, the domestic policy area which Tories most readily cite is education.
Conservatives see Michael Gove’s school reforms as one of their biggest success stories (Photo: David Levenson/Getty Images)Phillipson has done exactly this – with bells on. Last year, she brought forward a Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill which if enacted in its current form will turn the clock back on the academy school revolution. The bill would force academies to follow the national curriculum and constrain their autonomy in relation to areas such as teacher recruitment and pay.
Backlash over move to rein in academies
Bridget Phillipson speaking in a Commons debate on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Photo: House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire)
Allies of the Education Secretary are currently standing by other elements of the bill, arguing that it is about spreading excellence throughout the country and meeting parental expectations of “core standards” in all schools.
The former favour teacher-led instruction, knowledge, tests and discipline, with the latter advocating for a more skills-based and child-centred approach. Traditionalists applauded the Tories’ school reforms and some now accuse Phillipson of bowing to a resurgent “Blob” (see box) – the term Gove used for the teacher unions, academics, councils and civil servants whom he saw as in thrall to progressivism and hostile to his changes and huge expansion of the academies’ programme.
The return of ‘the Blob’?
Is “the Blob” really back and dictating education policy? Those who think so point to a couple of things. Firstly, Phillipson’s centralising legislation is similar in some respects to a schools bill unveiled by the Conservative education secretary Nadhim Zahawi in 2022. That bill would have given the DfE sweeping powers over academies.
Nadhim Zahawi when he was Education Secretary in 2022 (Photo: James Manning/PA Wire)But Zahawi was forced to gut it after an outcry from within his own party (in the event, the whole bill was dropped when Rishi Sunak came to power). The parallels between the two bills have led to claims that the DfE is quietly but persistently pursuing its own agenda to impose new controls over academies. One Government source told The i Paper: “Ministers can say they want to do X or Y and officials can often say it may be too difficult or unworkable and then just suggest a plan they have straight from the drawer.”
While it is difficult to verify such claims, a source who used to work at the DfE told The i Paper that some parts of Phillipson’s bill – such as a provision allowing councils to force academies to expand the number of places they offered in some circumstances – were repeatedly proposed by officials in the department under the Tories, but always rejected.
The second claim made by those who buy-into the narrative of a resurgent Blob is that Phillipson is too close to the teacher unions, and specifically the National Education Union. The NEU, which has a leftwing leader in general secretary Daniel Kebede, has long been hostile to academisation.
The former DfE source accused Phillipson of getting “all of her information from the NEU”. “Unlike previous Labour governments – Blair and so on – and previous Tory governments, who tried to build on the successes of the previous government, she comes in with an arrogant, high-handed view that it has all been a disaster,” they said. Allies of Phillipson say the idea that she panders to the NEU is nonsense. The fact that the union is threatening the DfE with strikes over its latest teacher pay offer and has also come out hard against her Ofsted changes certainly shows that there is far from perfect amity between the two.
Katharine Birbalsingh (Photo: Justin Tallis/AFP)
DfE minutes of the meeting obtained by Schools Week meanwhile showed that Phillipson had asked Birbalsingh to “lower her tone” and “allow her to finish her sentences” during the encounter (although this account has been contested by Birbalsingh).
A source who used to work in the DfE interprets this as a frantic attempt to undo damage from the bill. “No 10 are furious and alarmed by the narrative that’s developed because of Bridget Phillipson that this government is not pro-standards, and that’s what she’s trying to redress,” they said.
‘She’s not soft on standards, she’s fixated on them’
“She’s very, very interested in rigour. She is committed to standards to the point of almost fixation,” they told The i Paper.
Bridget Phillipson meets pupil Aicha, four, during a visit to a nursery at Ark Start Oval, East Croydon last year (Photo: Yui Mok/PA)She said that experience had formed the “core” of her politics and her determination to ensure that other children have the same chances.
They added that her CSJ speech was not a “lazy reset” but a “statement of her personal views and values”. “I think we will see more of that.”
A school leader who is generally sympathetic to Phillipson’s overall policy direction told The i Paper that the proposed cards “have not landed very well at all”. “Just about everyone is unified in saying that they can’t see how they’re going to operate in a consistent and valid way,” they said. “It’s just too complicated.” (More encouragingly for the Education Secretary, a poll by the More in Common think-tank found that 65 per cent of parents preferred the new system.)
Unexploded Tory bombs
The DfE insists these “tough decisions” are needed to help fill the £22bn “black hole” which Labour claims it has inherited. An ally of Phillipson’s also claimed the Tories had deliberately engineered programmes to end in the middle of the academic year to “leave us some unexploded bombs”. But the decisions triggered accusations that Phillipson is indifferent to academic excellence when it comes to state school pupils.
It has not been plain sailing for Phillipson in higher education either. Labour have raised the cap on tuition fees. Given it had been frozen since 2017, the Education Secretary’s allies argue this took some political courage. But experts have questioned how much difference it will make to the sector’s financial health. Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank, told The i Paper: “Ministers say they’ve been brave to raise tuition fees but they’re only going up with inflation and every penny is being taken back in higher National Insurance Contributions so it does zero to help institutions.”
Another ‘U-turn’
Free speech in academia has emerged as a particular flashpoint. Shortly after the general election, Phillipson announced that she was pausing implementation of the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act and might repeal it altogether. The legislation – which had been passed by the Tories – contained various measures aimed at ending “cancel culture” on campuses, including allowing the higher education watchdog to fine institutions for failing to protect free speech. The move to pause it was met by a volley of criticism. Almost 700 academics, including Richard Dawkins and several Nobel Prize winners, wrote an open letter warning that many university staff had been “hounded, censured, silenced or even sacked” for exercising free speech. Then, in January, the DfE announced that implementation of the act would go ahead, with some amendments.
However Phillipson’s allies say that it was not actually U-turn but a genuine pause designed to make an unworkable system fit for purpose, saving universities huge amounts of money which otherwise would have been spent on pointless litigation.
The ex-DfE source said: “If you think about the headlines she has generated… there’s no way you can go around using that amount of political capital.
A Government source said: “Bridget Phillipson has done more to improve children’s life chances in eight months as Education Secretary than the Conservatives did in 14 years.
“Nothing is going to stand in the way of this government delivering the change voters elected us to deliver: better life chances for for every child, not just the lucky few.”
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How ‘naïve’ Bridget Phillipson’s education U-turns left her battling for her job )
Also on site :