Advice for England’s latest Secretary of State for Education.

I love Rory Stewart’s memoir about being a politician; its one of the best books I’ve read about British politics. Among his many observations about the dysfunctionality of government is that ministers typically know nothing about their briefs prior to taking their jobs, and don’t stay in post long enough to get any command. There may be worse examples than Education, but I doubt it. The advice is to the newest Secretary of State for Education is simple: before you do anything significant read my dad’s last book, and spend a week talking to some of your predecessors (particular recommendations below).

Now some facts:

First, in the 82 years since 1944 43 different people have served as Secretary of State, 2 of them twice, totaling 45 different terms. Very few of these people entered the post with prior knowledge of, let alone expertise in, the education system. In recent years I can only think of Gillian Shepherd (who had been a teacher and an HMI), Estelle Morris (who had been a teacher, as well as junior minister in the department) and Michael Gove (who had shadowed the post for several years). Maybe this didn’t matter as much between 1944 and 1988, when education was administered largely by local education authorities. During that period the only curricular requirements on schools were that they had to teach Physical Education and Religious Education to all students and that they enforce a daily act of worship. But the 1988 reform act shifted powers away from local authorities to central government on the one hand and to schools themselves on the other, a process which has continued in the staggering amount of legislation we’ve seen since then. A new Secretary of State has a lot to learn.

Now notice that just 8 Secretaries of State account for 34 of those years, leaving the rest serving 48 years between them (an average of about 16 months each).[1] Even highly capable people take many months to learn a complex job, even when they are given expert help. Education is a particularly difficult brief because holders of the post, in addition to lacking expertise, are often hampered be prejudices they’ve accumulated from their ideological outlooks and their own unrepresentative educational experiences as parents and students (which lead fool them into believing they know more than they do).[2] It’s worth noting that the list of Secretaries of State, while it does include the names of several highly capable people (the people I’ve mentioned so far, in the cases of Shepherd and Morris for good, in the case of Gove not, are highly capable, but also Hogg, who’s tenures lasted a few months each, Stewart who lasted no time at all, and Short whose tenure, despite being much longer than the mean, is well described by his name), also includes people who were not really very capable, especially in recent years.

Lucy Powell seems up to it. But, as usual, she doesn’t seem to have any prior knowledge or background in education, and she’ll have lots of opinionated people around her with similar levels of knowledge. She could benefit from reading my dad’s last book. It is very long, much longer than he thought wise, in fact, but his co-author Mick Waters, I think correctly, convinced him to stick with it and include lots of very extensive quotes from the interviews they with all but one of the still-living former Secretaries of State at the time, as well as numerous other educationalists. The interviews contain a lot of wisdom (as I hasten to add, does the analysis of the authors themselves).[3] The evidence of this book is that she’d do especially well to talk to some of her Tory predecessors: specifically Gillian Shepherd, who was a very good Secretary of State; Michael Gove, who was a very effective one (again, I’m not a fan of what he did, but he is very talented, mastered the machinery of government, and held the position long enough to understand the system and accomplish what he wanted); and Lord Baker. Baker is the most interesting character in the book, freely admitting that his lack of understanding of the education system led him to adopt policies that did not achieve the aims he had (something that Mrs. Thatcher also basically admits in her memoirs). Baker’s admission is all the more impressive because he is making it to my dad, the person who was the de facto leader of the opposition to his policies at the time. (For what it is worth the interviewees all got to review and approve the quotes used in the book).

She also might learn something from Gillian Shepherd that isn’t in the book. When she became Secretary of State Shepherd asked my dad to meet with her which, of course, he did (they had a lot in common — similar age, entered teaching and entered administration at roughly the same time, both very connected to East Anglia).. His first question to her was “Why do you want to talk with me?”. Her reply was, “Because all of my advisors and my colleagues have specifically told me not to”.

[1] Yes, I know, the Coalition and Tory governments of 2010-2024 were just taking the piss, especially post-2015, with 10 Secretaries of State in 14 years, 9 of them in just a decade. But Labour has governed for 15 of the years since 1997 and Powell is the 8th Labour Secretary of State during that time, if you don’t include John Denham, who had the higher ed brief for part of the time Ed Balls was Secretary.

[2] For many years it was normal for Tory Secretaries, and not that unusual for Labour Secretaries, to have attended — and even to send their own kids to — private schools. That was certainly a additional hurdle to their understanding education. But almost everybody who has held the post has had pretty good experiences with schools, much better than many people, and even those with bad experiences have had their own bad experiences. People just generally seem to find it difficult to step back from their own educational experiences and understand that they don’t represent anything interesting about the system.

[3] The missing one is neither Gove, who, to his credit, cooperated, nor John Patten who, even more to his credit in my opinion, agreed to participate without even demanding that Mick did the interview (which, I think, Mick did anyway), but Shirley Williams whose dementia had already progressed too far for her to participate.