How Bridget Phillipson earned an F

How will history judge Bridget Phillipson, if it bothers to judge her at all? Her time at the Department for Education was, like that of her friend and fellow ex-minister Rachel Reeves, marked by a fundamental lack of coherence. There was no overarching vision beyond a desire to improve the life chances of the country’s most disadvantaged children. That ambition is admirable in itself, yet leading a nation’s education system demands far more. Too often, Phillipson appeared indifferent to excellence, motivated less by fostering a culture of intellectual ambition than by pursuing social justice and settling scores with imagined enemies.

Phillipson’s two years in office will ultimately be remembered for the divisions she sowed rather than the solutions she found

Phillipson’s two years in office will ultimately be remembered for the divisions she sowed rather than the solutions she found. Like the Prime Minister she supported to the end (and who defended her in one of his final PMQs), her tenure must, on balance, be judged a failure. Attempts to rewrite the record are already surfacing, but they are unlikely to survive for long.

The reality is that Phillipson’s tenure produced no clear or obvious successes, but rather a catalogue of unambiguously damaging outcomes. Even her more questionable achievements collapse under scrutiny. Take the Curriculum and Assessment Review. Many in the sector feared that the appointment of Becky Francis — an academic who had previously described schools as “damaging organisations” because of their reliance on discipline and surveillance — would yield disastrous results. While the outcome proved less extreme than many anticipated, the resulting reforms to Progress 8 and the retreat from the EBacc were still met with widespread dismay and widely viewed as a deliberate dilution of academic standards.

Defenders argue that her attempt to reform Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision was both brave and long overdue. Few working in schools would dispute that the system is in desperate need of overhaul. However, the Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper, accompanied by a £4 billion funding package, came to epitomise the broader malaise of the Starmer administration: exhaustive consultation that produced confusing proposals, ultimately risking the replacement of one broken system with another.

Other consequential initiatives, such as the expansion of state-funded early years childcare and extra investment in primary school breakfast clubs, followed a similar trajectory. Welcomed in principle, they foundered on execution. School leaders warned that universal breakfast clubs imposed unfunded financial and staffing burdens on already stretched schools, often duplicating existing provision. Meanwhile, nursery providers argued that the expansion of early years childcare was severely underfunded and rendered unworkable by chronic workforce shortages, threatening overall quality.

A clear pattern emerges, familiar across so many of Starmer’s government’s failures: proclaim a noble ambition, wrap it in moral certitude (with a large dose of sanctimoniousness), and then stumble on execution, leaving the sector in a worse state than it was before.

For Phillipson and Reeves, the immediate priority upon entering office was not addressing the systemic crises facing state schools, but introducing VAT on independent school fees. Sold as a fiscal windfall for state education, the tax secured popular support on the simple premise of helping fund the 94 per cent of pupils who attend state schools. Yet that promise quickly unravelled. The latest School Workforce in England report shows that, far from gaining ground, the state sector lost 1,900 teachers in the space of a single year. Meanwhile, closures across the independent sector have simply heaped further pressure onto an already struggling state system.

That the tax was introduced in January only reinforced the impression of a Secretary of State intent on settling old scores rather than acting with measured, statesmanlike objectivity. That the Secretary of State for Education did not visit an independent school during her time in office, and never expressed any sympathy for the distress her policies caused the families who had to leave their schools, says a lot about her.

That negative impression only deepened as other, now largely forgotten, decisions were taken to save the Exchequer a few pennies at the direct expense of academic ambition. The decision to axe the Latin Excellence Programme was widely condemned as spiteful and unnecessary (a move the historian Tom Holland bluntly described as “shameful”). And who now remembers Phillipson’s decision to withdraw the Large Programme Uplift for the IB Diploma? The Diploma is globally recognised as a gold-standard qualification, yet by stripping away its state-funding uplift, the government effectively ensured that it will increasingly become the exclusive preserve of fee-paying schools: a bitter irony for an administration that claimed to broaden opportunity.

Towards the end of her tenure, Phillipson attempted to reclaim Kemi Badenoch’s description of her as a “spiteful class warrior”. She returned to the phrase repeatedly, desperately trying to ‘own’ it, but the jibe clearly struck a nerve because she knew it resonated far beyond the Conservative benches. When she posed in her office holding T-shirts emblazoned with the insult, the episode projected not defiance but desperation. It was a rather sad spectacle: a minister who entered office with grand ambitions reduced to performative stunts in an attempt to protect her reputation. It had the opposite effect.

The curtain has now fallen on Bridget Phillipson, and there will be no call for an encore from many teachers or school leaders. But if Lucy Powell represents a fresh start, it is difficult to see where it begins. For a Prime Minister who promised hope, the outlook for education remains remarkably bleak.