A former Department for Education adviser has strongly criticised the Liz Truss government for “deprioritising education” and questioned whether any school policy reform will be delivered before the next Parliament.
Sam Freedman, who worked for the department under former education secretary Michael Gove, told the Schools North East conference that if the Schools Bill goes ahead, the powers it gives the government over multi-academy trusts (MATs) will be stripped back.
He also predicted that the government will not be able to get any new grammar school policy through the House of Commons and Lords and said he did not think the SEND Green Paper proposals would result in new legislation in this Parliament.
In a stinging criticism of government and Westminster politics, he also said it was “ridiculous” that schools were having to operate amid such a “chaotically” led system, with five education secretaries having been in place at Sanctuary Buildings in the space of 12 months.
Mr Freedman described the recent Conservative Party conference as “more of a saloon bar fight than it was a party conference” and said it had finished with the “very real possibility that the prime minister might not last until Christmas”.
He added: “It is all very febrile at the minute in the world of politics. But to be fair to Liz Truss, it was pretty chaotic before she arrived.”
Mr Freedman, who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and a senior adviser for Ark academy trust, highlighted how there have been five education secretaries in the space of 12 months: Gavin Williamson, Nadhim Zahawi, Michelle Donelan, James Cleverly and now, Kit Malthouse.
‘There is no way you can have coherent policy with this kind of turnover’
Commenting on the instability in government in recent months he said: “It is ridiculous to expect schools to operate in a system that is this chaotically led.”
He added: “There is no way, no way you can have any kind of coherent government policy when you have this kind of turnover in any department, and especially education.”
He said any of the education secretaries appointed since Gavin Williamson could have done a half-decent job but none have been given the chance or time to do so.
Adding: “It’s meant that for schools, in terms of policy, it has been extremely incoherent and confusing for a long time.
“What you can say about the Truss government and their view of education is that they have decided it’s not that important.
“It has been very clearly deprioritised as a policy area right from the start when Truss spoke outside Downing Street just after she became prime minister: she said her priorities were the economy - which is going really well - energy policy and health policy. There was no mention of education at all.”
Mr Freedman also highlighted how there was now no special adviser in education in Downing Street following Rory Gribbell’s move to the DfE.
“This is not something I have ever seen before in the time I’ve been working around Westminster politics and it’s causing all sorts of confusion because there is nobody who knows anything about education in No. 10 - which there needs to be if they are going to make good policy.”
‘Nobody can tell you if Schools Bill will go ahead’
Mr Freedman questioned whether the Schools Bill would still go ahead and he said that the government had no mechanism to ensure that it achieved a system where all schools are based in MATs with 10 schools.
He said to school leaders in the North East yesterday: “In reality, for those of you who aren’t yet in a trust, no one is going to make you. It’s very much your choice as to whether that is a step you want to make.”
Mr Freedman also talked about the difficulty that the government’s Schools Bill got into earlier this year.
The bill aimed to create a regulatory framework to allow the government to hold a fully MAT-led school system to account.
However, large swathes of the legislation have now been withdrawn and are set to be redrafted amid concerns in the sector and in the House of Lords that the legislation would have given Whitehall too much centralised control over the way academies were run.
Mr Freedman said: “Unfortunately because it was so rushed, so garbled and so poorly drafted that the Lords ripped it to pieces, all of the really important clauses of the bill have been removed. Now it’s sort of a placeholder bill…it was supposed to be coming back to the House of Lords in September but it has been delayed and, in fact, nobody can tell you if it still happening.”
Mr Freedman said DfE ministers didn’t know whether the bill would proceed and he suggested even the prime minister doesn’t know as she has not decided about it yet.
He told the session at Schools North East that if the bill does proceed, the redrafted clauses on regulating MATs are likely to give the DfE much less power over schools than had been originally proposed.
