How ‘naïve’ Bridget Phillipson’s education U-turns left her battling for her job ...Middle East

The Labour Party has made a rocky return to government under Sir Keir Starmer.

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.

Bridget Phillipson has had one of the most tumultuous starts, with decisions made by the Education Secretary on school policy and free speech in higher education coming in for heavy criticism, leading to U-turns.

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.

Her name also crops up in speculation about which Cabinet ministers face possible demotion (even if No 10 vehemently deny that any reshuffle is planned). And the internal hostility is not going away. This week, speaking to The i Paper, one Government insider accused Phillipson of presiding over dysfunction. Commenting on the recent U-turns, they wondered aloud: “What is going on in the Department for Education?”

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)

England rose up international education league tables over the period, and while there is debate about why this happened, Tories believe that reforms brought in by Michael Gove – including giving many more state schools extra autonomy by turning them into academies outside of local government control – have been pivotal. Any attempt to change the Govean settlement was always going to trigger a barrage of criticism from the Conservative Party and right-leaning newspapers.

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

While the backlash was predictable, it nevertheless appeared to catch Phillipson and the rest of the Government off-guard. In a move which was chalked up as a U-turn, Phillipson issued a clarification that a provision in the bill forcing academies to follow national pay rates would introduce a “floor but no ceiling” when it came to teacher salaries.

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.

As well as the party political dynamic, the other reason the schools bill has proven particularly contentious is because it has reignited a long smouldering debate in the education system between so-called “traditionalists” and “progressives”.

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.

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.

This years-long ideological struggle reared its head in a meeting which Phillipson held earlier this month with Katharine Birbalsingh, the founder and head of the high performing Michaela School in Wembley, west London. Birbalsingh – who describes herself as “Britain’s strictest headmistress” – published an open letter afterwards tearing into Phillipson, whom she accused of having “a Marxist dislike of academies”.

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).

Phillipson and her team are alive to the political risk she is facing, and a fightback is under way. Earlier this month, she delivered a speech at the centre-right Centre for Social Justice brimming with references and language seemingly designed to assuage the fears of education traditionalists (Gove was praised as a “great education reformer”).

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’

But a source who has worked with Phillipson says there is “no justification at all that she’s ‘woke’ or soft on standards”.

“She’s very, very interested in rigour. She is committed to standards to the point of almost fixation,” they told The i Paper.

Phillipson spoke at the CSJ about how she was brought up in poverty by her single mum on “a tough street in the northeast of England”, where “crime was a big problem”, but that “great schools” had given her opportunities to succeed.

She said that experience had formed the “core” of her politics and her determination to ensure that other children have the same chances.

The source says this is key to understanding Phillipson: “She’s really interested in working class kids not being let down. The implication that she is anything otherwise is because of a wilful misreading of her position.” However, they admitted that Phillipson and the Government could have told a “better story” about the bill.

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.”

Getting the schools bill through Parliament may be Phillipson’s biggest current challenge, but it is not the only area where she is under pressure. A shake-up of Ofsted inspections has also run into difficulty. While education unions welcomed her decision in September to ditch one-word ratings for schools, Phillipson’s replacement system – school “report cards” with a five-point grading system across up to 11 areas – has proven unpopular in the sector.

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.)

Phillipson’s spending decisions are yet another area she has come under fire. A £4m Latin Excellence Programme designed to broaden access to the subject has had its funding pulled, provoking condemnation from public figures such as the historians Mary Beard and Tom Holland. Funding for the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme – a scheme aimed at encouraging teenagers to take up higher level maths – has also been reduced.

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.

The former DfE source said that Phillipson had showed “naivete in dealing with the Treasury”. They said that following teacher pay awards, the Treasury “try it on every year” to claw back any money they can from the department. “Most DfE spending is ringfenced and allocated to schools according to formula, it’s very hard to touch that. So what the [DfE] civil servants do [to comply with the Treasury] is they go through all the spending programmes, they cut them here, they cut them there. That’s why the Latin programme got cut, despite the fact that these are very small programmes that have massive impact.”

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.”

More broadly, he said higher education institutions are “increasingly frustrated by the fact that they are not a key priority for the DfE”. “Universities might be better off being put elsewhere in Whitehall because they’re not just bigger schools,” he added.

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.

Hillman said the whole episode was “an odd one”. “A U-turn they thought would be popular followed by another U-turn when they realised it wasn’t as popular as they had hoped,” he said. “It shows up the lack of a plan or a big vision on what higher education is for and its role in modern society.”

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.

It remains to be seen whether Philipson has left her fightback too late. Her allies say that brickbats are inevitable for any minister who wants to change things, and insist she is not troubled by them. The clash with Birbalsingh is probably not too serious – as the Labour MP Matt Western commented on social media, the headteacher’s attack was “so aggressive” that it probably undermined support for her argument. But criticism from other quarters may be more dangerous. At the end of last year, a leader in The Times claimed: “If there were an award for the minister presiding over the most wrong-headed policy agenda, it would surely go to Bridget Phillipson.”

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.

“It’s not a way to survive in politics to generate that kind of opprobrium in the newspapers, so I think her days are numbered.”

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.

“The Tories’ record in education is one of failure: one in three children are leaving school without a firm foundation in English and Maths, one in five children is persistently absent from school and 300,000 children are in ‘stuck’ schools allowed to underperform year after year.

“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.”

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