Parents and teachers must give Labour’s school reforms a chance

Elephants are famous for protecting their young. They travel in herds, circling and shielding their loved ones, and will fight to the death to protect them. No animal is fiercer or more frightening in defending what it holds dear.

I am reminded of elephants when I observe what traditionalists are doing, in light of education secretary Bridget Phillipson’s wide-ranging reforms – defending at all costs the legacy of Michael Gove on schools.

What he achieved – albeit building, as he acknowledges, on the work done by Labour – was extraordinary. He drove through academisation, raised academic attainment for the most disadvantaged, and put education standards and excellence back at the heart of the education agenda.

By a distance, he was David Cameron’s most successful domestic secretary of state: indeed, he stands out as the most successful of all domestic departmental ministers in the entire 2010-24 period of Conservative governments.

After Gove left the education department, the flame was carried by long-serving education minister Nick Gibb. Success of the strategy was proven to all by the rise in pupil performance in the international school performance league tables overseen by the OECD.

The Conservatives don’t have much to celebrate in their 14 years of rule. This is one reason why they are fighting to the death to protect Gove’s legacy – lashing out furiously at Labour’s education secretary at any opportunity, most recently yesterday, when she gave a speech that went out of its way to praise Gove.

She talked about her own fraught journey through the school system to Oxford – a journey not at all dissimilar to that of Gove himself. Both have the authenticity and passion of people who have risen against the odds and know what they are talking about.

Gove, one of the most genuinely courteous figures in politics, has yet to extend the hand of friendship to Phillipson in the way that she has to him and his legacy.

This matters because the world in 2025 is different from the world of 2010. For all the Conservatives’ prodigious achievements in schools, the truth is that the world has moved on. In 2025, employers are seriously dissatisfied with the too-narrow skills that schools (and universities) are teaching.

The school system in 2025 is failing one-third of our young people by not recognising their intrinsic gifts and qualities, instead telling them that they have failed at GCSE, ingraining a self-fulfilling sense of incompetence. A third of young people in 2025 are suffering with mental health problems – a situation not helped, and perhaps exacerbated, by the focus on exams as the only measure of a young person’s capability and worth.

Teachers are dissatisfied and leaving the profession in droves: there are serious shortages across the country, particularly in certain subjects, such as maths. The focus on academic achievement by 2025 squeezed out time for the arts, for sport, and for character development, which are enjoyed every day by children in independent schools but should be the right of all throughout the state sector as well.

2025 is not 2010. What is needed in 2025 is an education secretary who will take the agenda not backwards but forwards, and who understands how to leverage AI safely to deepen human intelligence and humanity, not undermine it. Phillipson has shown she is prepared to take on the teaching unions and the education “blob” by introducing a new and more comprehensive inspection system for schools – a move that gives parents the information they want, to empower them as consumers.

She refused to dispense with grading altogether, which the unions wanted her to do. She may have to water down further some of her proposals on academies, in search of a greater end: school improvement for all. After all, the only good test of a policy proposal is "Does it work?"

It is still early days for Phillipson. But just as Andrew Adonis, and other ministers serving under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, praised Gove’s serious reforming zeal for all young people, the time may come when the right acknowledges what Phillipson is striving to do in order to enhance life opportunities and build a strong Britain. There are serious shortcomings in the school system we have now; it is far from the perfect regime that elements of the right persist in asserting it is.

Elephants famously have long memories. It is time for the elephants to move on.

Anthony Seldon is founding director of Wellington College Education