Bridget Phillipson’s education bill is pleasing no one

It seems the minister is empowering local bureaucrats and ideologues at the expense of headteachers.

Bridget Phillipson’s ill-fated Children’s Well-Being and Schools Bill continues to attract opposition. In a Telegraph article on 17 March, Amanda Spielman, the former head of Ofsted, said the “Schools Bill will cut the autonomy of schools and school groups right back, even though this has clearly been a contributor to system success”. Phillipson’s opponents caricature her as an unsmiling Marxist, which reveals how little they understand Marx. Another view is that she has been captured by the teaching unions, which have long opposed the autonomy academy schools have on pay, recruitment and the national curriculum (all of which the bill seeks to reverse). The so-called magic formula of the coalition government’s Michael Gove-led reforms of education, which accelerated the academy programme introduced under New Labour, was “freedom plus accountability”.

Phillipson wants less freedom and even more accountability: she is reasserting the power of the state over all schools; in January she introduced VAT on private-school fees. “Our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery,” she unwisely posted on social media by way of an explanation for the new tax. “Our children need mental health support more than private schools need new pools…” The implication here being that the 7 per cent of children who attend private schools are not “our children”, which is not the politics of the common good. Politicians, particularly the Education Secretary, should cherish all schoolchildren irrespective of their socio-economic status.

The early months of the Labour government, before the removal of Sue Gray as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, were characterised by incoherence. It was during this period that Phillipson embarked upon her education reforms. Starmer allows his senior ministers a lot of autonomy (that word again!): but how does Phillipson’s education bill relate to Wes Streeting’s neo-Blairite restlessness at the Department of Health or Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall’s coming welfare reforms or, indeed, the turn towards security and rearmament announced by Starmer? I have spoken to Phillipson, and she is not a Marxist but a credentialist: she believes all teachers should be formally qualified. Her life fortunes were transformed by education: as the daughter of a single mother, she rode an educational escalator all the way from her state school in Sunderland to Oxford. One admires her dedication and seriousness of purpose. But her instincts seem to be those of a top-down bureaucratic Fabian. There are many inadequate academy schools but the trend in recent years has been of improvement in maths and reading as measured by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment tests. Phillipson says she inherited a demoralised post-pandemic teaching profession. Will her bill improve teachers’ well-being and morale? Or is she merely empowering local authority bureaucrats and ideologues at the expense of headteachers?

Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher of the high-performing Michaela Community School in north-west London, told my colleague Hannah Barnes that Phillipson is reluctant to listen to those who work in schools. If true, this would contrast markedly with the approach of Streeting, who when in opposition consulted widely with doctors on the front line, notably GPs. When he and Starmer announced the abolition of NHS England (NHSE), I turned to my old friend Dr Phil Whitaker, whom I appointed as New Statesman medical editor, for guidance. He was scathing about NHSE. The NHS relies on a balance between medical generalism and specialism to function efficiently and holistically, he told me. “As generalist doctors in the community, GPs manage the vast majority of patients ourselves. And we act like fine sieves, filtering through to the hospital sector only those patients truly in need of specialist care. NHS England has presided over the decimation of the GP workforce. Health needs that can’t be met in a much-diminished general practice don’t go away – they turn up instead in the hospital sector, increasing system pressure and cost.”

Streeting visited Phil at his practice near Bath in June 2023; their conversation was published in these pages. “By the time Wes took office,” Phil says now, “he understood the pivotal importance of strong general practice better than probably any health secretary in my lifetime, hence his promise to ‘bring back the family doctor’ and the determination to shift care out of hospital and into the community.” We should welcome the return of the family doctor and continuity of care.

Tennis in Britain is not a sport but a fortnight, wrote Tim Adams, in On Being John McEnroe. He was talking about the Wimbledon fortnight. British tennis has a new superstar, Jack Draper, the big-serving “lefty” who is as personable as he is handsome (he is naturally right-handed but plays left-handed). He is relatively unknown in his home country because he has not had a good run at Wimbledon. That will change soon enough. Draper is now ranked seventh in the world after he won a Masters 1000 championship at Indian Wells in the Californian desert. I wrote about him last summer when I filled in for Hunter Davies’ column. My interest in tennis has been revitalised by my son’s love of the game – he obsesses over the data, the equipment, the rankings – and we closely follow the tour. “Drapermania” will soon be upon us.

This column appears in the 21-27 March 2025 issue of the New Statesman magazine