Keir Starmer, it was recently reported, warned his ministers that they could either ‘be disruptors or be disrupted’. Arguably few ministers have done more to meet this call than the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson.
Phillipson has been notably disruptive in numerous areas: restricting the freedoms of school academies; imposing VAT on public schools; curbing the profits of children’s services providers; and reforming the school curriculum.
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On academies, the think tank EDSK has set out in detail the failure of these arrangements and concluded that the system ‘has become unsustainable and undesirable.’ Phillipson is looking to address this situation in her Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The Bill, currently going through Parliament, seeks to curb the autonomy of academies in several ways:
- academies will have to follow national pay scales and conditions of service agreements
- all new teachers must have, or be working towards, qualified teacher status
- academies will have to follow the national curriculum once the ongoing curriculum review led by Professor Becky Francis has been completed – a challenge to Michael Gove’s stultifying curriculum reforms.
- councils will be handed more control over admissions, with the power to direct academies to admit children.
- maintained schools deemed to be failing will no longer be forced to become academies, and councils will also have powers to set up their own schools.
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By any measure these are ‘disruptive’ proposals, threatening to upturn an established arrangement that many Conservatives believe to have been their greatest achievement.
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The second area in which Phillipson is being ‘disruptive’ is more well-known – the finances of public schools. The removal of the 20% VAT exemption to school fees took effect from January 1st of this year. In addition, private schools that are designated as charities will lose their charitable business rates relief which has provided an 80% discount on their premises. Again, an assault on the balance sheets of our most prestigious private schools, is not the hallmark of a minister shy of disruption.
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A third area – and one that has received little attention – is the proposal to curb excessive profiteering by providers of children’s services. Phillipson is requiring providers to share their financial information with the government so that profiteering can be identified and challenged. Additionally, there will be a ‘backstop’ law to put a limit on the profit providers can make. Modest as it is, this represents a symbolic blow against the rampant privatisation of public services.
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For those adversely affected by these various disruptions, the knives have -predictably – been out for the Education Secretary. The Confederation of School Trusts is lobbying hard on the academy proposals, which the Conservative Party is calling ‘an act of vandalism’. The Daily Telegraphhas described the loss of VAT exemption as ‘an act of class warfare.’ And on profiteering in children’s services, the Children’s Homes Association effectively argues that any reduction in their funding would lead to a withdrawal from the market and the collapse of provision.
Much of this has escalated into personal abuse of Phillipson. James Price in the Critic has accused her of trying ‘to poison and brainwash the minds of British youth’. Following a widely reportedly tetchy face-to-face encounter with Phillipson, the self-styled ‘Britain’s strictest headmistress’ accused the Education Secretary of having ‘a Marxist dislike of academies’. And the Daily Telegraph even managed a headline reading ‘Is Bridget Phillipson the nastiest person in politics?’.
Phillipson’s disruptions could – and probably should – be going much further. On academies she could have imposed a ceiling on the inflated salaries of the leaders of multi-academy trusts. On public schools, she could have looked at proposals on moving the two sectors towards ever-greater integration put forward by Francis Green and David Kynaston (https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbaa008/5732846?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false). And in line with proposals from the Welsh government (https://senedd.wales/media/sblbzfg2/24-12-health-and-social-care-wales-bill-summary.pdf) she could have sought to completely end profit-making from children’s care placements, as opposed to curbs on excessive profiteering.
However, the most unexpected response to Phillipson’s disruptive politics has been the shadowy briefing from her own side that she has ‘gone too far’ and created too much of a backlash.
There have been reports of hostile briefings from ‘the highest levels within her own government’ that she has been ‘naïve’ and is ‘battling for her job’; that she is ‘out of favour’ in Downing Street; and that she is being tipped for demotion?
Some will see the hand of Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, behind these and other machinations such as the leaks and briefings against other women round the table – Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, and Angela Rayner, as well as Phillipson herself. For many inside the Labour Party there is a view that any ultimate successor to Starmer should be a woman, and Phillipson could be well placed to make a bid. Those looking to anoint the Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting, may already be rolling the pitch against their opponents.
In the here and now, Phillipson is left in the unenviable position of responding to calls to be a ‘disruptor’, behaving accordingly, and then coming under fire from political foes and friends alike. It would surely be a remarkable failure if the least privately educated cabinet in British history failed to support one of their own who is seeking to reassert the role of the state in education and children’s services.
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