Former schools minister warns against dismantling successful education reforms
Former Schools Minister Sir Nick Gibb has issued a stark warning against dismantling the education reforms that have transformed English schools over the past decade.
Picture by Curated Lifestyle for Unsplash+
As the current Government seeks to limit academy freedoms and embarks on a comprehensive national curriculum review, Gibb argues: “Abandoning evidence-based approaches risks reversing significant progress, and squandering the hard-fought reforms which have seen England rise in the international league tables.”
“Our education system is far from perfect, and there remain many aspects that are in need of attention and reform. However, in doing so, I hope that the new government does not change the fundamental architecture of the system we built,” Gibb states in his forthcoming book Reforming Lessons, co-authored with comprehensive school headteacher Robert Peal.
Gibb, served as Schools Minister for over ten years between 2010 and 2023 and worked alongside Michael Gove in opposition and during Gove’s period as Education Secretary between 2020 and 2014. Gibb emphasises that the reforms implemented during his tenure have “already recorded unarguable improvements in pupil outcomes” and, if maintained, will “deliver even greater improvements in the years to come.”
Reforming Lessons chronicles the reforms introduced by the Coalition and then Conservative Governments, which preceded a grassroots movement of teachers, which were described by one writer as a “Cambrian Explosion” of evidence-based practice in our schools.
Nick Gibb said: “The greatest legacy of the reforms that Michael Gove and I introduced has been this effervescence of new thinking on teaching methods and the curriculum. It is no exaggeration to say that today, when visiting one high-performing school, I see more good teaching in a day than I did in a decade of school visits prior to becoming a minister.”
Before the reforms
Prior to 2010, Gibb describes the UK education sector as characterised by a “progressivist ideology” that dominated teaching methods. This approach emphasised child-centred learning, skills over knowledge, and relaxed behaviour policies. Despite nearly doubling state expenditure on education from £49.7 billion in 1998 to £88.6 billion in 2010, the Labour government’s centrally directed initiatives failed to yield significant improvements in pupil outcomes.
International surveys during this period showed stagnant or declining performance, and the system faced issues such as grade inflation and low-quality qualifications.
Gibb served as Schools Minister for over ten years, making him the longest-serving education minister in recent British history. The reforms he oversaw focused on improving literacy through systematic phonics, enhancing curriculum rigor, and raising academic standards across UK schools.
Gibb’s journey to reform came through encounters with evidence-based approaches like systematic synthetic phonics for teaching reading, which had been sidelined by the education establishment. This led him to discover the work of American educational thinker E.D. Hirsch and to develop a diagnosis that progressivist ideology was holding English schools back.
Positive impact of reforms
Since 2010, improved standards have been attributed to the reforms: in the 2022 PIRLS survey of reading ability among 10-year-olds, England ranked 4th in the world, beaten only by Singapore, Hong Kong, and Russia. This compares to England placing 19th in the world rankings back in 2006.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on global education, England’s ranking in the 2022 PISA tests held up well, with continued improvement in Mathematics, rising from 27th in 2009 to 11th in 2022.
Armed with this data, Gibb and Peal argue that schools implementing knowledge-rich, teacher-led approaches have shown dramatically better outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged pupils. Many academies and free schools, which were given the autonomy to diverge from the orthodoxies of the education establishment, have led this movement.
Gibb highlights several such schools, that were once seen as controversial but have now achieved remarkable turnarounds after implementing these reforms, as examples of their effectiveness across diverse pupil populations. These schools are now held up as national exemplars of excellence.
Among many examples, Reforming Lessons points to two free schools in South Yorkshire with similar demographics but different teaching philosophies that led to vastly different results. The school following a knowledge-based curriculum with high behaviour expectations ranked third best in England for pupil progress in 2023. Meanwhile, its neighbour implementing a more progressive approach placed 2,774th in the country.
For disadvantaged pupils specifically, the contrast was even more pronounced, with students at the knowledge-rich school achieving an average GCSE grade of 6.3 across eight core subjects in 2024, compared to just 3.2 at the progressive school.
“Whatever direction the Labour government chooses to take its education reforms, it should be wary of knocking down the pillars which have made such gains possible,” Gibb warns.
Lord Gove, Education Secretary from 2010 – 2014, said: “Reforming Lessons compellingly explains how Nick’s close study of effective classroom practice from around the world, underpinned with an understanding of the science of knowledge acquisition, ensured we had a programme ready for government.”