Bridget Phillipson is standing up to welcome us into her large, very smart new office. A government red box is sitting on her desk, and a big union jack fills one corner. She is smiling broadly but wears a look that suggests she is not 100% at ease, not entirely comfortable, in her plush new surroundings. Opulence is not her thing. The secretary of state for education’s room was expensively refurbished with faux vintage clocks and tables, a cream leather sofa and chairs, to create a boutiquey feel, under the tenure of her Conservative predecessor, Gillian Keegan. Phillipson quietly but deliberately drops this into the conversation early on. It is exactly two weeks since she was appointed, aged 40, as the youngest ever education secretary (other than Michelle Donelan, who lasted less than two days under Boris Johnson’s imploding premiership in 2022). Phillipson’s path to power – she was brought up in the town of Washington, Tyne and Wear, in a street of council homes by her mother who was on benefits, and without a father – began in childhood poverty. Now this. The last fortnight, she says, has been surreal. “When I hear on the news that ‘the education secretary today announced … ’ I have to remind myself that it is actually me they are talking about,” she says, laughing. This is her first newspaper interview since being appointed by Keir Starmer to the job she has always wanted. As soon as we get under way she comes across as an intriguing mix of reserved, shy, careful – but at the same time politically astute, and very direct. She is crystal clear about her mission and above all how to use her own powerful backstory to explain and project it. “I know that in my own life I defied the odds,” she says.
Her upbringing may have been materially impoverished but in other ways it was rich. “I grew up in a family that prized learning, was encouraged to read from an early age by my mam, sat doing times tables with my grandad, who was always giving me extra books and taking me to museums. “I was also incredibly lucky to go to incredible state schools, they really pushed me to succeed, every step of the way, to apply to Oxford. The opportunities I enjoyed, I want all our children to have them.” Much of her focus as education secretary, she says, will be on working-class children, as they are the ones who she says most need ladders of opportunity out of poverty, and whose chances have been reduced so greatly by 14 years of Tory government. Wealthier parents, she says, can afford to buy their children life chances in the form of private education or extra sport, music or drama at weekends or after school. “It is about working-class kids having every chance to succeed because they are the people who need a brilliant education,” she says. At no point when talking about her upbringing does she become visibly emotional, but uses her experiences as the evidence base for her case. Phillipson got to Oxford University, she says, thanks in large part to the last Labour government. “I spent a long time growing up feeling that my community was forgotten about, ignored, crime was high, we were just left to get on with it. In 1997 the Labour government came in – I was 13 – and there was a step change; for example, I received the education maintenance allowance [which no longer exists in England] to allow me to stay on at sixth form. My family would have pushed me to have stayed on – they would have found a way to do it – but I know that some of the people I was at school with … their families just could not have afforded it.”
When at Oxford, as now in her position at the top of government, she does not so much rail against privilege as want to widen it. “I didn’t resent people who had had an easier time of it,” she says of her student contemporaries. “I felt I had as much right to be there as anyone. I just want every person who has got what it takes to have the same opportunity.” If she is crystal clear about her broad mission, she is somewhat less so on how to realise it at a time when funding is so tight and her party has just committed to operating within a very strict set of fiscal rules. She says she is determined “that we deliver the biggest transformation in education that we have seen for a generation”, with measures including the recruitment of 6,500 more teachers paid for by ending tax breaks for private schools, free breakfast clubs in all primary schools, much more focus on “early years” education, reform and broadening of the national curriculum, and building a better relationship between government and teachers so that teaching becomes the “go to” profession for young people.
On Friday she announced a new review of the national curriculum to be chaired by Prof Becky Francis, one of whose specialist subjects is social inequality. After it is completed all academies will have to teach the national curriculum up to age 16, giving parents certainty over their children’s education, and unwinding one of the key policies of successive Tory governments. Phillipson seems intent on broadening the range of learning, so that it is not just the core academic subjects, but also sport, music, art, drama – too often nowadays the preserve of the more privileged – which will be central to school life. “Sadly at the moment too many working-class kids are being shut out of opportunities to play sport, to get involved in music and drama and creative subjects. That is what parents want and I want.” Asked how this will be paid for, she suggests – perhaps based again on her own life story – that money is not the only way to achieve great things. “I do not believe you need to choose between high standards and breadth,” she says, adding that “decline in sport is a major issue”. Much can also be done, she suggests, by cultivating a sense of a joint mission between government and the teaching profession. She describes it as “resetting the relationship between government and schools, once more making teaching the go-to profession for our best graduates.”
Phillipson is under no illusion, however, that soon it will get very tough. Hard choices will have to be made in many areas of her brief. Not least over teachers’ pay. The independent pay review bodies are now recommending above-inflation pay rises for teachers and other public sector workers, paving the way for some very difficult discussions with the teaching unions this summer and autumn. Just as, if not more, testing for Phillipson will be the issue of child poverty, the eradication of which she says is so central to the government’s purpose and close to her heart. Last week it was announced that she would co-chair a new taskforce on the subject with work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall. When pressed on whether the Labour government will end the two-child limit on benefits, which all the evidence suggests is a major driver of child poverty, Phillipson is once passionate and evasive, the idealist and the politician rolled into one. “I understand that people want us to move as fast as we can but I do have to say that the fiscal inheritance that the Conservatives have given us is absolutely dire. It cannot be underestimated.” She added: “I grew up in poverty. I know the impact it has. I know how it makes you feel. I am determined that we will lift children out of poverty. It won’t be easy and it won’t necessarily be quick but I am absolutely determined that we get there. It is why I am in politics. It is what I came into politics to do.”