It takes a long time for Bridget Phillipson to trust someone. She engenders trust readily and easily – the education sector fell for her in a big way – but she’s incredibly cautious in reciprocation. The people she regularly consulted over her time as education secretary were a very small group; the inner circle she genuinely trusted even smaller.

As she departs Sanctuary Buildings, will she come to regret such cautiousness?

One read of her tenure is that she walked a clever line of continuity on things like curriculum, trusts and standards: giving enough signals of change to her political stakeholders while minimising disruption to the sector.

This argument suggests she knew she would need all her political capital for SEND reform, and that she used it to good effect to tackle a problem her predecessors repeatedly failed to address.

Moreover, those in this group say she rebuilt the government-sector relationship after the damage caused by the governments before her, and that she leaves education in better shape than she found it.

However, there is another view of her time as education secretary, too.

In this version, her reform agenda lacked clarity and vision, which resulted in mixed signals on curriculum, trusts and standards that left no one satisfied – and nobody clear on what her goal for education actually was.

This argument says the SEND reforms ended up as an ideological argument, not a practical one, and we’re seeing deep, challenging cracks emerge already as a result.

And this group says the DfE under her watch extended its reach into the day-to-day running of schools and trusts to an unprecedented and unnecessary level and, despite hundreds of changes being made to schools, she leaves them in no better shape than she found them.

Some context needs to be considered before you put yourself on a spectrum between these two views.

Phillipson was education secretary under a chaotic, risk-averse and highly interventionist Number 10. At one point, Downing Street had put its own people in Sanctuary Buildings to oversee operations. The room for manoeuvre was often minimal. The ability to articulate a personal vision – or implement it – was severely restricted.

The political context was also challenging. Phillipson was instinctively aligned with many in the sector in being flexible on pedagogy, accepting of trusts as the structural vehicle for schools, concerned about the extent to which curriculum had become too “knowledge” focused, and aware of the fact that so much of the fun and humanity of classrooms had been squeezed out.

Her party, however, had a spread of different views on those issues, which she had to carefully manage.

Critics, though, will point to the fact that the likes of Wes Streeting or Shabana Mahmood seemed better able to manage the same interventionist approach of Number 10.

Which brings us back to trust. I got to know Phillipson relatively well. She is very smart, unusually down-to-earth, and has a fantastic, dry sense of humour. While at large events or on stage she presents as awkward and anxious, in a smaller setting – or one-to-one – you can clearly understand why people like her and want her to do well.

But she never seemed to capitalise on that likeability and respect while in charge at the DfE. She lost key potential allies in the sector, one after the other, as they never felt they could break into the tight circle of people she trusted. Worse, they felt undermined by those three or four people closest to her and, ultimately, they gave up trying.

This meant she did not get the advice that might have helped her steer a clearer course through the constraints I have listed, and it also meant she did not get as much support as she could have had when compromises had to be made.

Ultimately, that – alongside an inability to get the civil service working in the way it could and should have – continually undermined her time in charge. It meant she did not have the masters of the dark arts to fight her corner, or enough influential sector figures to back her. Nor did she keep close enough the people who could give her the nuanced feel of the sector to ensure she understood its mentality and rhythms – and thus enable her to move in synchronicity with it.

Lucy Powell, her successor, would do well to heed these lessons, and Phillipson would be wise to attempt to address them for her new slimmed-down brief.

What Phillipson can say with confidence as she departs is that she left the sector no worse off, that she worked incredibly hard to try to make things better, that she handled pay negotiations with skill, that she at least took on the SEND challenge so many had shirked, and that she began a much-needed shift in thinking about school less as an economical vehicle and more as a holistic route to adulthood.

But she will not be able to claim she achieved something transformational with this sector, nor that she found solutions for its more complex problems, both of which she and her party certainly had the potential and political capital to do.

She’ll be frustrated by that, and the sector should be frustrated, too: this was a unique opportunity missed.

Jon Severs

Editor, Tes

Bluesky: @jonsevers.bsky.social

Twitter/X: @jon_severs

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