Hinds back at DfE, as long-serving Gibb steps down

Longstanding schools’ ministers Nick Gib has left his role, as part of the government’s reshuffle last week. Mr Gibb, who has been – over three separate stints- an education minister for more than decade, will also stand down as an MP at the next election. Gibb was a key figure in implementing the education reforms made by the post-2010 coalition and Conservative governments. These included major changes to the national curriculum, the wider introduction of phonics, and the push for greater academisation of schools. Mr Gibb said he was ‘proud that over my 10 years as a minister standards in schools have risen. England is 4th in the world in reading as a result of the phonics reforms and we are rising internationally for maths and English. We have transformed the curriculum so that it is knowledge rich.’

Education secretary Gillian Keegan paid tribute to Gibb, saying in a letter that he had ‘dedicated more than a decade of your life as minister for schools and the reform you’ve brought in have changed millions of children’s lives for the better’. She added: ‘Your time in office, working with school leaders and teachers, has transformed the entire school system with a relentless drive to improve standards and outcomes for the next generation.’

However, commenting on Gibb’s decision to stand down, general secretary of the NEU Daniel Kebede expressed a different view: ‘All the problems facing the educational system have deepened during the period in which Gibb has presided over schools’. Characterising Gibb as a ‘centraliser’ who has sought to ‘micro-manage’, he added that during his time at the DfE it had ‘asked school leaders to deliver more and more with less and less’.

Gibb has been replaced as a minister by former education secretary Damian Hinds, who was previously at the DfE from 2018 to 2019.