![]() “But I would not espouse a period of opposition. “Without the Cameron period in opposition we wouldn’t have been able to win. ![]() David Cameron changed the image of the Conservative Party, stopped us being the nasty party. A lot of good things were done in opposition. Gibb: “I think using opposition is important. “So here was a head teacher of 20, 30 years’ experience as a teacher, asking officials at County Hall whether she should be teaching multiplication tables, I found that very odd – it should probably be a decision for her, not some adviser.”ĬonHome: “What you’ve just demonstrated is the value of a period in opposition, in order to have time to think. Maybe I should go and ask West Sussex what they think.’ “And one example which I gave in the TES interview was a school I visited very early on in my constituency, and I asked the head teacher whether the children learned their multiplication tables, and she said ‘Oh, no, we don’t do that here. ![]() ![]() “So we had to free up schools and allow them to make decisions away from the control of local authorities, which was key. “The other was also making sure the schools had autonomy over their decision-making, so they weren’t beholden to the education Establishment that resided in the local authorities, the universities, the Department for Education and the quangos. So one was all the standards agenda, how to teach maths, how to teach reading, what the curriculum should contain, it should be knowledge-rich. “And that’s what we worked out in opposition we needed to do. “So once you’ve come to the view that there’s a particular approach to education – so for example a competence-based curriculum, or a whole-language approach to teaching reading, or a progressive way of teaching maths, or downgrading the importance of academic subjects in secondary school – once you’ve come to the conclusion that that philosophy of education is failing, particularly disadvantaged children, then obviously the answer is to challenge that approach. “And I could almost tell within a few minutes of talking to a head teacher what the results would be, just based on the philosophy of the head teacher and the school. Gibb: “I think that what Michael and I discovered in opposition – and during the opposition years I had visited quite a few hundred schools, now I’ve visited probably over a thousand – and what I discovered in my visits is that the degree to which a school was progressive – to be defined – was the degree to which its results would be underperforming. “We spent five years preparing for government, 2005-10, and Michael came in in ’07-10, and I think it was that preparation and then the delivery, Michael’s drive, that I think helped to achieve the things we have achieved.”ĬonHome: “What would you cite as the high point other than phonics?” “But I do think in terms of domestic non-economic policy, Michael Gove and to some extent me, I think our policies have achieved a great deal. I f we hadn’t brought that down, which we did, with a lot of pain, we wouldn’t have been in a strong position to have borrowed the furlough money for Covid and so on. “That was crucial, bringing down the deficit after the banking crash, £156 billion deficit a year, 11 per cent of GDP. I don’t think you should underestimate what David Cameron and George Osborne achieved in the 2010-2015 Government. Gibb: “I think it’s been one of the success stories. The Schools Minister detected the absurdity of the maths teaching methods introduced under Labour, and got these scrapped, but freely concedes that the disastrous collapse in the teaching of foreign languages which occurred when these were made voluntary has yet to be reversed.Īt the end of the interview, Gibb warns that the Conservatives have got to work out what to do about inequality, demonstrated by FTSE chief executives earning 100 to 130 times the average salary, a disparity so excessive that it is undermining faith in capitalism and free markets, especially among the young.ĬonHome: “Is it fair to say that education has been the big success story of the last 13 years?” Gibb, who has had an astonishing three separate stints as Schools Minister, amounting to over ten years in all (from May 2010 to September 2012, July 2014 to September 2021, and October 2022 to the present), was an early champion of phonics, which have enabled English schoolchildren (but not unfortunately those in Scotland and Wales) so markedly to improve their reading performance by comparison with other nations. Nick Gibb, Schools Minister, tells the story of how, in opposition, he and his colleagues concluded that progressive teaching methods led to failing schools, and worked out what to do about it. Education is one of the Conservatives’ big success stories of the last 13 years.
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