How ‘progressive' teaching destroyed our education system – and threatens to return under Labour

Telegraph

09-08-2025

For decades, Nick Gibb has dedicated his political career to improving the education of our children. At a time of frequent change in other departments, he remained minister for schools for most of the 2010s, trusted by a succession of Conservative prime ministers to drive up standards in state schools across the country.
In a new book, 'Reforming Lessons', co-authored with secondary school head teacher Robert Peal, he remains as passionate as ever about the need for effective improvement of schools.
Here, in extracts from that book, he describes how he and Michael Gove inherited a system founded on progressive dogma that imperilled pupils' life chances. Then he outlines both the battle to turn education around after arriving in office and why Labour must not undo the successes he helped to deliver.
How 'progressive' learning let down a generation
In 2016, six years into my time at the Department for Education, I was joined by a policy adviser – Rory Gribbell, a maths teacher who had recently trained in Southampton. During his own teacher training, Rory had been given a handout from a 1991 book on the philosophy of mathematics education.
The handout offered a tabular overview of 'Five Educational Ideologies'. A 'progressive' ideology of maths teaching, it claimed, believed in a 'child-centred teaching' approach based on 'activity, play, exploration' and should be equated with a 'liberal' worldview of 'caring, empathy, human values'.
In contrast, the 'industrial trainer' ideology of maths teaching, which believed in 'hard work, effort, practice, rote… drill… chalk and talk', should be equated with the 'radical Right', and a 'crypto-racist, monoculturalist' worldview.
Rory, a thoughtful, 20-something teacher with an interest in evidence-led teaching methods, was understandably perplexed to hear it suggested that this made him – in essence – a fascist.
Unfortunately this jarring tale came as little surprise. By 2016, I had been paying close attention to education reform for 13 years, since my appointment (while in Opposition) to the House of Commons Education Select Committee in December 2003. From the beginning, the more I learnt about teaching methods, the more I came to suspect that an existing orthodoxy on what made good teaching was the single biggest barrier to school improvement.
In January 2004, I had my first of two revelatory experiences: meeting the primary school headteacher Ruth Miskin. She explained how, for decades, the education establishment in England had proscribed an effective, evidence-based approach to teaching reading called 'phonics', simply because its formal, didactic approach contradicted the 'progressive' orthodoxy supported by the education establishment.
Ruth told me how, instead of endorsing evidence-based approaches, New Labour's National Literacy Strategy was recycling the same approaches which, for decades, led pupils to underachieve. I spent the next two years campaigning for phonics teaching to be given more prominence in the National Literacy Strategy.
Following the success of this campaign, I was given the job of shadow schools minister in May 2005 and began to widen my interests away from the teaching of initial literacy in primary schools and towards curriculum and teaching methods more generally.
This led, in the summer of 2006, to the second of my two revelations: discovering the work of the American educational thinker ED Hirsch. In his 1996 book, The Schools We Need, Hirsch explains how the American education establishment had become dominated by an intellectual thought-world. Loosely termed 'progressive' education, it takes principles of political progressivism and applies them to the realm of education – with the fundamental principle that the child has agency in the classroom, and the teacher is a facilitator whose job is not to teach from the front, but to construct an environment in which their pupils learn for themselves.
Among progressive educators, the stuff of learning – chemical formulae, historical dates, French irregular verbs and so on – are not seen as a means to achieving complex skills like creativity, critical thinking or problem-solving, but as potential impediments.
Similarly, they see poor behaviour in schools not as the fault of the child but the fault of the teacher or institution. This belief gives progressivists their aversion to rules and sanctions in schools, such as uniform policies, silent corridors or after-school detentions.
Finally, when 'progressive' educators fail to bring the breakthrough in pupil attainment they promise, they look to social inequality and deprivation to explain away their failure, leading to a school culture in which failure is accepted.
These ideas were beguiling in their appeal, idealistic in their intent, but destructive in their implementation. In 1999, the Moser Report found that 6 per cent of Britain's adult population had a 'very low' literacy level, and a further 13 per cent had a 'low' literacy level, defined as below that expected of an 11-year-old child. In practical terms, this meant that one in five British adults could not – for example – use a telephone directory to locate the details of a plumber.
During the 2000s, a decade which I label 'Peak Progressivism', schools had the choice of going – broadly speaking – in one of either two directions. Some school leaders were true believers and worked with enormous effort to fulfil the promise of the progressivist ideology. In such schools, learning was personalised and classrooms were replaced with 'social learning environments'. There was no breakthrough in pupil results.
In a second type of school, any conviction that these ideas might work was lost, but no alternative philosophy of education could thrive in its place. Instead, lip-service was paid to the progressivist ideology, failure became expected, and cynicism reigned.
There was a third type of school that was still very few in number, but in which we invested our hopes for future reform. This was the school that departed from the progressivist ideology and attempted to put into practice new philosophies of education. Much like charter schools in the United States, or 'friskola' in Sweden, these were state schools that operated outside of local authority control, giving them the autonomy to pioneer new approaches to teaching and school organisation.
By 2010, when I entered government, these successful early academies provided a vision for how system-wide change in English education might look. Everywhere else, however, progressive ideas had become, quite simply, a professional creed to which those working in state education had to subscribe if they wanted any hope of career advancement. Suffice it to say that, during my years as a shadow schools minister, I never met a member of the education establishment who did not at least pay lip service to its ideology.
My own school journey
My school career began the same year that Labour launched its policy of comprehensivisation. In September 1965, I was dragged – crying and screaming – into the first year of Langtons Infant School, in Hornchurch, Essex, aged five years old. Thus, my 13 years of school education overlapped entirely with what was then the most ambitious period of education reform in English history.
My first secondary school was a grammar in Kent. Then, after my family moved to Yorkshire, I finished my education at two recently established comprehensive schools: a former grammar school turned comprehensive in Roundhay, Leeds, where standards remained high, and a comprehensive school in Wakefield where standards did not. It was at this school, which was notorious for classroom disruption and pupil violence, that I took my A-levels, and gained the same number of A-grades as the rest of my year group combined.
This was not, I hasten to add, due to any genius on my part, but simply because – unlike most of my peers – I had the fortune of having been taught at some excellent schools before attending a failing comprehensive.
My mother was a primary school teacher. This meant that conversations around the dinner table often strayed towards the merits and drawbacks of different types of teaching methods and schools. When I left school in 1978, my primary political interest was economics and the monetarist revolution soon to be unleashed by Margaret Thatcher. However, education was a close second. It was one of the main motivations behind my decision, as a young chartered accountant living in London during the 1990s, to embark upon a career in politics.
The inheritance
When I arrived at the Department for Education in 2010, with Michael Gove as education secretary, the progressivist grip on English education was still very much in force.
In 2005, Tony Blair had announced 'Building Schools for the Future' (BSF), a £55bn programme to rebuild or renew every secondary school in England. A project of this type was undoubtedly needed, with many pupils still attending crumbling schools that had not been updated for decades.
However, in many of these BSF projects, the progressivist ideology was built into the bricks and mortar of the school. Schools minister David Miliband promised to 'transform our secondary schools into innovative learning environments' with 'open-plan learning areas' and 'amorphous learning pods'. As a result, in each school, dozens of teachers struggled to keep control, and hundreds of pupils seethed with frustration at their inability to learn.
I still encounter teachers with horror stories about what came to be known as 'schools without walls'. Bexhill High Academy, in East Sussex, opened in 2010 at a cost of £38m with 15 open-walled classrooms dubbed 'education pods', where 90 pupils would learn at a time. Two years later, it went into special measures, and five years later, it reportedly required a £6m grant to add classrooms.
The most notorious example of a 'school without walls' was to the east of Liverpool in Knowsley, one of the most deprived boroughs in the country with consistently poor education outcomes. Eleven secondary schools were flattened, and in 2009, seven new schools were opened in their place, costing £157m.
Dubbed 'centres for learning', they had no classrooms but 'base areas' divided into different zones. Three years after the strategy was launched, Knowsley remained the worst performing local authority in the country on almost every measure, and many local residents had taken to calling their schools 'wacky warehouses'.
In July 2013, only 381 of the 900 places at Christ the King Centre for Learning (cost £24m) were filled. The school has since closed.
Watching tens of millions of pounds being wasted on these vanity projects made me extremely angry. It pains me to think, not only how much better those millions of pounds could have been spent, but also how many children were let down. There are no more concrete examples of the destructiveness of the progressivist ideology during the tail end of the New Labour years than these follies of educational futurism.
Fixing our schools
As prime minister, David Cameron gave me and Michael Gove maximum freedom to hit the ground running in 2010. He trusted Michael, believed in the need for radical reform, and – from the very start – left us to get on with it. Nothing could have prepared civil servants for the speed with which we planned to pursue our reform programme. The academies bill was ready to be debated in Parliament just two weeks into the new government.
The bill sought to expand radically the academies programme. Existing schools, including for the first time the roughly 17,000 primary schools in England, were given the chance to convert to academy status, with those rated by Ofsted as 'outstanding' pre-approved to do so.
We made no secret of our motivation: we wanted the power of local authorities to diminish and new, more dynamic groups of schools to emerge in their place. As I said in my speech in the House of Commons: 'We want all our schools to be run by professionals rather than by bureaucrats or by bureaucratic diktat.'
The Academies Act passed just before summer recess, giving school leaders the summer holiday to consider academy conversion. By the time the new school year began in September, 181 schools had submitted applications to do so. By January 2011, there were 409 academies.
From then on, the number of schools converting to academies grew and grew, from hundreds to thousands, to the overwhelming majority of the sector today. Though no one could be sure of this outcome at the time, the Academies Act would change the structure of English state schooling more than any other measure since the beginning of the process of comprehensivisation in 1965.
By the autumn of 2010, mass academisation was under way, but we knew any benefits of this grand structural change would take years, perhaps decades, to be felt. To articulate other aspects of our reform agenda, we published a white paper on November 24 2010.
Entitled 'The Importance of Teaching', it was a direct challenge to the unacceptable culture in schools at the time, where an academic curriculum was believed to be unsuitable to most children from poorer backgrounds. Michael and I were determined to eliminate what George W Bush famously called the 'soft bigotry of low expectations', and which claimed subjects such as history, Spanish or physics weren't right for 'these kids'.
We promised to provide high-quality phonics training and committed to ensuring children 'master the core arithmetic functions by the time they leave primary school'. The paper also promised 'to restore the authority of teachers and head teachers so that they can establish a culture of respect and safety, with zero tolerance of bullying', giving head teachers significantly more power to make their schools calm and safe.
We cut the volume of paperwork issued to schools by 75 per cent, some 21,000 pages. And the ruthlessness we brought to cutting regulation we also brought to cutting quangos.
We also changed the funding for schools so that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds gave rise to significant extra money for schools. Introduced in 2011, the pupil premium gave schools an extra £488 for every pupil in receipt of free school meals they admitted, amounting to some 1.2m children from the UK's least well-off households.
It fundamentally changed the behaviour of school leaders, giving them the motivation to change their admissions codes and proactively recruit the least advantaged children in their community.
By the end of our first two years in government, there were few areas of the education landscape that had not been touched.
Naturally, the establishment resisted. The general secretary of the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) wrote an open letter to Michael Gove opposing a check on phonics abilities for primary school children. It was counter-signed by the doyens of the education establishment: professors, chairs of subject associations and the general secretary of England's second-largest teaching union.
Ten years on, we can say with some confidence their predictions have not come true. Since the introduction of the phonics screening check (an informal test that asks children at the end of Year 1 to decode words using their phonics knowledge), England has risen in the international league tables for reading ability amongst 10-year-olds from 10th place in 2011 to eighth place in 2016 and to fourth place in 2021. This placed only Singapore, Hong Kong and Russia ahead of us.
Most gratifying of all, it is in the results of the lowest attainers where the greatest improvements have been made. We can now confidently claim, as headlines did in May 2023, that English pupils are 'the best readers in the western world'. Of all the reforms I was able to introduce in government, the promotion of systematic phonics teaching in primary schools has been the most important.
The blob strikes back
We also reformed the curriculum to make it more challenging and more specific, rectifying the aversion to knowledge that influenced the existing curriculum. After various phases of consultation, it was published in September 2013. Schools were given a year to prepare for first teaching in September 2014.
But the regulator – Ofsted – was still judging schools by old progressivist standards. In October 2012, a primary school in Rochester's report stated that the quality of teaching 'is not good because… Lessons are sometimes dominated by the teacher.'
After Michael Gove left to become chief whip in 2014 [replaced by Nicky Morgan] I took to describing myself as akin to the boy with his finger in the dam, unwilling to move for fear that the water would burst back through. Progressivist ideology was the default to which officials would inevitably return if not actively encouraged otherwise.
Civil servants would habitually avoid the use of the word 'pupil', as that implied a hierarchical relationship with teachers. The term 'teaching' was avoided, with 'learning' used wherever possible instead. Supposedly elitist terms such as 'academic' were unwelcome, the word 'discipline' remained largely unmentionable in official documents.
From 2014 onwards, then, one of the most important jobs I had to do at the department was to say 'no' – no to the demands we row back on terminal exams, no to suggestions that we add non-academic subjects to the national curriculum, and no to initiatives that would distract teachers from their core mission, which should always remain, quite simply, to teach.
Because progress was undeniable. maths reforms saw the ranking of English pupils in the international Pisa tests move from 27th in 2009 to 16th in 2018 to 11th in 2022.
More evidence came from north of the border, where Scotland has always had a separate education system from England. While a Scot, Michael Gove, fought back against progressivist ideas in England from 2010, the Scottish government endorsed them. Much concern has been driven since by Scotland's falling results in international league tables. In science, Scottish scores have been in freefall since 2012.
Money is not the answer. Schools in Scotland have long been better funded than in England, and the gap has grown over the past 15 years, but power remains firmly in the hands of the devolved government and its 32 local authorities. Both seem stuck in the progressivist thought-world. I am sure there are many Scottish teachers on the ground who are desperate to try alternative approaches, but they do not have the autonomy to do so.
And even more precipitous a decline in the international league tables than Scotland's has been that of Wales.
The threat of Starmer's Labour
At the time of writing, the Labour Government is still developing its education policy, but the early signs are not encouraging. In England, the political drive for reform has stalled. The Labour Government shows little understanding of the reasons for England's rise in the international league tables. There has to date been no attempt to ensure that the worst-performing schools adopt the practices and curriculum content that we know bring success. Curriculum and teaching methods are vital to this, but behaviour remains the sine qua non of any school turnaround.
As every single one of the top-performing state schools in England demonstrates, pupils thrive when the culture is underpinned by clear and consistently enforced rules. The drive to embed these reforms remains crucial.
The academies programme must be allowed to continue its evolution into a multi-academy, trust-led system, where groups of academies work together to deliver ever higher standards. In such a system, best practices will spread as trusts, competing to grow in both size and esteem, learn from each other. If the Labour Government wishes to continue the steady improvement in England's schools, it must encourage that development and resist the blandishments of teacher unions determined to halt progress in its tracks.
From 45 years of active political engagement, I have come to believe that ideology is at the root of most problems in public service delivery. By ideology, I mean guiding principles which become orthodoxies within a sector and about which it becomes unthinkable to ask questions or challenge. This is true of almost all government departments, from the Treasury to Transport, Housing to Health. Such ideologies never defer to evidence, which is why they inevitably drive failure.
Conservatives, by their nature, eschew ideology in favour of the practical. However, this can make them wary of challenging ideological positions in order to avoid appearing to be ideological themselves. In education, Michael Gove and I had spent our time before gaining office reading, speaking to teachers and visiting schools. We gained confidence in our diagnosis that an ideology of progressive education was the fundamental problem in English schools.
From the teaching of reading and maths, to the content of the wider curriculum, to pedagogy in the classroom, not to mention classroom configuration and behaviour policy, ideological progressivism was driving practice. And it was failing.
I hope that the new Government does not change the fundamental architecture of the system we built. As a direct consequence, England has become one of the most improved education systems in the world over the past 15 years. But the battle of ideas is never won, so we must never stop making the case for what we believe.