Nicky Morgan has said her proudest achievement as education secretary was the schools White Paper - which she was forced to U-turn on and which prompted legislation which was later scrapped.

In an interview with the Institute for Government, Ms Morgan complained of micromanagement by Number 10, and admitted she tried to keep things secret from Downing Street.

She also revealed that she learned directly about a leaked primary test from an angry teacher before she was notified by her civil servants.

The former education secrertary said she was tasked with “taking the temperature down” following the controversial reign of Michael Gove at the Department for Education.

When asked what achievement she was most proud of at the DfE, Ms Morgan replied: “Well although bits of it won’t necessarily see the light of day, I think the White Paper.”

She said she found it “mindboggling” that politicians were appointed to run Whitehall departments “with absolutely no training whatsoever”.

And it was “quite, quite staggering” that ministers were sent out in front of the press with no media training.

Ms Morgan said the White Paper “attempted to answer the question of ‘Where is our school system going?’”

Published in March 2016, it set out the intention for all maintained schools to become academies or to be in the process of conversion by the end of 2020.

However, only two months later the government had to U-turn on the forced academisation plans.

The Education for All Bill, which contained plans to force schools to become academies in ‘underperforming local authorities’ was axed by Ms Morgan’s successor, Justine Greening, in October.

But in her interview Ms Morgan said she thought “some of the bits” in the paper would “stick”.

When asked what her priorities were on becoming education secretary in July 2014, she admitted that “trying to take the temperature down a bit on education was the big thing before the [2015] election”.

She said she was partly able to do that because she had a different style to Mr Gove.

“We are very different people so I think just not being him and being myself was one thing.”

However, she said she was as committed to educational reform as her predecessor, and that her change of tack actually allowed her to make headway.

“I would argue we pushed on with the reforms absolutely,” she said.

“I think colleagues here in Westminster said they were able to go into schools and have conversations with heads and teachers… in a way that they weren’t before 2014 because there was such a controversy about some of the reforms.”

Discussing her response to the accidental leaking of a primary test online, Ms Morgan revealed that she did not learn about the incident from her civil servants.

“One of the things that I think the civil servants were not terribly impressed with was the fact that I check all my emails myself that come in to my account here in Parliament.

“A teacher emailed me I think complaining about it, or somebody did on Twitter, and that’s how I spotted what had happened.”

Ms Morgan also described her frustration with micromanagement by Number 10, and revealed she tried to keep things secret from Downing Street.

“I think we spent a lot of time, and I understand it’s still going on, of ‘Let’s just not tell Number 10’.

“You’ve got to let government departments get on with things.

“There were lots of things that just took forever, ‘Oh, it’s a bit controversial, we won’t do that, let’s just wait a bit’.

“You just think ‘Actually, it just needs to get out there’, things like responses to select committees, it’s just got to get out the door, it’s going to get worse and worse if it doesn’t.”