Keir Starmer, it was recently reported, warned his ministers that they could either “be disruptors or be disrupted”. In doing so called upon them “to do more to reform public services and deliver on the government’s agenda.”
Arguably few ministers have done more to meet this call than the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. She has been notably disruptive in three areas: restricting the freedoms of school academies; imposing VAT on public schools; and curbing the profits of children’s services providers.
The freedoms accorded to academies have created a confusing and unsatisfactory situation. Children are being educated in schools with different governance arrangements, and potentially a different curriculum. These schools have freedoms to decide the pay, terms, and conditions of new staff.
Disruptive proposals
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:
- National pay scales for all teachers: for the first time academies will have to follow national pay scales and conditions of service agreements.
- Qualified Teacher Status: in line with the position in maintained (non-academy) schools, all new teachers must have, or be working towards, qualified teacher status.
- Following the national curriculum: academies will have to follow the national curriculum once the ongoing curriculum review led by Professor Becky Francis has been completed.
- Admission controls for councils: councils will be handed more control over admissions, with the power to direct academies to admit children.
- Ending automatic academy orders: 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.
By any measure these are ‘disruptive’ proposals, threatening to upturn an established arrangement that many Conservatives believe to have been their greatest achievement.
The second area in which Phillipson is being ‘disruptive’ is more well-known – the finances of public schools. In its 2024 election manifesto the Labour Party stated that in government it would remove the 20% VAT exemption that has applied to private school fees. This measure duly took effect from 1 January 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.
It has been estimated that these measures will raise about £1.5 billion which the government has earmarked for state schools. Again, an assault on the balance sheets of our most prestigious private schools, is not the hallmark of a minister shy of disruption.
A third area – and one that has received little attention – is the proposal to curb excessive profiteering by providers of children’s services. As far back as 2022 a seminal report by the Competition and Markets Authority found that the UK had ‘sleepwalked’ into a dysfunctional market for children’s social care in which excessive fees were being paid for services that too often failed to meet the needs of these most vulnerable of children.
The CMA report failed to recommend imposing a cap on profits, but Phillipson is taking steps to do so by 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, albeit a measure that will only be used if providers do not voluntarily put an end to profiteering.
The knives are out
The Confederation of School Trusts is lobbying hard on the academy proposals, which the Conservative Party is calling “an act of vandalism”. The Independent Schools Council has misleadingly claimed four in ten parents would quit private schools and place huge strain on state schools, with the Daily Telegraph describing the measures as “an act of class warfare.” And on the matter of 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 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?”
The oddity about this invective is that 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 and sought to return some academies to the state sector – currently 55% of pupils are enrolled on over 10,000 academy schools. On public schools, she could have looked at the proposals on moving the two sectors towards ever-greater integration put forward by Francis Green and David Kynaston. And in line with proposals from the Welsh government 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 this disruptive politics has been the shadowy briefing from her own side. Arguably Phillipson’s background is archetypal Labour: brought up in a poor single parent family in Sunderland; attended the local state school; studied modern history and languages at Oxford and returned to the North East to manage a refuge for women affected by domestic violence, before launching her political career. And now, in line with the Prime Minister’s urging, serving as a ‘disruptive’ minister.
How then to explain 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 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’ 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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