Ep 49. From decline to top rankings: How England transformed education with Nick Gibb

This transcript was created with speech-to-text software.  It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Jazmin Boisclair.  

You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.

Ep 49. From decline to top rankings: How England transformed education with Nick Gibb

Timestamps:

[00:00:00] Introduction   

[00:04:05] The state of English education in 2005  

[00:05:50] Problems with progressive education  

[00:08:12] Math teaching in England before the reforms  

[00:13:13] Education: A non-partisan issue  

[00:14:48] Learning from Shanghai and Singapore  

[00:18:01] Competency-based curriculum debate  

[00:22:00] Reading reforms   

[00:26:09] Resistance to the phonics movement  

[00:32:10] Math reforms implemented for primary education  

[00:38:08] The importance of attention to detail in curriculum development  

[00:41:11] Debates on educational standards  

[00:42:41] Reforming initial teacher training  

[00:48:24] The Education Endowment Foundation  

[00:50:21] Liberating the teaching profession   

[00:55:07] The impact of reforms on student outcomes  

[00:57:42] Comparing educational approaches and outcomes in the UK  

[01:00:38] The future of education reforms  

[01:06:24] Advice for policymakers and advocates  

[01:16:00] Reflections and closing remarks  

[00:00:06] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk and Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor and your host. Welcome back to another episode of Chalk and Talk. Today's guest is someone whose work has had a profound and lasting impact on education in England and beyond.   

Described as the most influential schools minister in England's history. During his decade in office, the right honourable Sir Nick Gibb led a series of evidence-based reforms that reversed a longstanding decline in academic performance.  

In this episode, we discussed the state of education he encountered when he first started visiting schools, including the widespread use of ineffective teaching practices and low academic expectations. He walks us through the key reforms he introduced from mandating systematic phonics for reading to improving math instructional methods by studying high-performing jurisdictions, to reintroducing standard algorithms in the math curriculum, to introducing a national phonics screening check and a multiplication table check, and strengthening the national curriculum.   

We also talk about the strong resistance he faced and how he pushed through it to make real change. His reforms have led to dramatic improvements in international rankings with England now ranking fourth in the world for reading and showing major gains in math.  

His work has begun to shape education policy in countries like Australia and New Zealand. It was truly an honour to speak with Sir Nick Gibb, and I hope this conversation inspires others to consider the impact that well-informed, courageous policy can have on student outcomes. Before we get started, I have a quick favour to ask.  

Chalk and Talk recently surpassed 200,000 downloads. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show. If you find it helpful, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating on your podcast app. It really helps others discover the show. And if you know someone who could benefit from the conversations we have here, whether it's an educator, a parent, a policymaker, or anyone passionate about education, please share it with them. Your support helps bring these important discussions to even more people.  

Now, without further ado, let's get started.   

It is a pleasure to be joined today by The Right Honourable Sir Nick Gibb, and he is joining me from England. He is a former Minister of State for Schools in the United Kingdom. He served in that position for a total of 10 years four different prime ministers with his final year in the role in 2023. He also served as Shadow Minister for Schools for five years. He's a qualified chartered accountant and worked for KPMG prior to becoming an MP.  

As minister for Schools, he implemented a series of educational reforms in England, which we're going to talk about today. And following those reforms, England's academic results improve significantly on international tests, reversing a trend of decline. So, as an example, England recently came in fourth in the world on PIRLS, which tests reading for nine-year-olds around the world, achieving its highest-ever score. They've seen similar improvements in math.  

Nick was knighted in 2024 for his services to education. A recent Daily Telegraph article quoted Nick Gibb as the most influential schools minister in England's history. And it is an honour to have you here today, and I am so excited to talk to you. Welcome, Nick.  

[00:04:03] Nick Gibb: Thank you, Anna. I'm delighted to be here.  

[00:04:05] Anna Stokke: So let's go back to 2005 when you started as Shadow minister for schools. And just a note for listeners, so in Canada, I think that's equivalent to the provincial opposition party's education critic. So, my understanding is that you were concerned about the decline in English education and you started visiting schools. So, what led you to believe that education standards were failing?  

[00:04:29] Nick Gibb: Well, we were declining in international league tables such as the one you cited. So PISA for example, we were seventh in the world in reading in the year 2000. We declined at 17th by 2006 and then to 25th by 2009. And in maths we were eighth in 2000, then we went down to 24th in 2006 and 28th in 2009.  

So I was worried about the low position we were in, but also the direction of travel because you know what's gonna happen next if we continue to decline. So that worried me. You heard universities saying that the undergraduates starting were less well prepared than previous generations of undergraduates. You heard employers saying that school leavers, that their maths wasn't as good as it should be, or their reading and writing ability wasn't as good.  

So I knew there was a problem, and I knew from my own experience as an MP when I was elected in 1997 and I started visiting schools, and I was told that in the secondary schools or the high schools, that something like 40% of those children starting high school had a reading age below their chronological age and a quarter had a reading age two years or more below their chronological age.  

So I knew there was something wrong, and that's why I wanted to find out what was wrong and why, and what was the cause of that problem.  

[00:05:50] Anna Stokke: When you started visiting the schools, what did you find out?  

[00:05:54] Nick Gibb: So every Monday, I had a schedule of visiting schools on Monday, maybe I chose Monday because our votes in the House of Commons are later in the day on Mondays, so it means I could get to anywhere in England, visit a couple of schools and then get back for the votes. And what I discovered travelling around talking to head teachers and teachers, seeing what I was seeing was that this notion of progressive education, now progressive sounds like a good word, but in the education world, it has a very distinct meaning.  

It's an ideological approach to the curriculum and what you teach and how, and I discovered really that the degree to which the school was progressive was the degree to which its standards were weak. I was learning what I meant by progressive, but what I meant by progressive was a kind of low expectations, less focus on academic study, less focus on children, you know, remembering what they're being taught, testing on that, and a kind of loose approach to behaviour as well in those schools.  

And I remember going to some secondary schools, some high schools where the whole ground floor was full of classrooms that were non-academic, they were all vocational. And you saw a lot of hair salons in secondary schools, which I thought was, you know, depressing. Nothing wrong with going into hairdressing as a profession, but why was it that, you know, all, and they're mainly girls of a low academic ability, should all want to go into that particular profession?  

I found it rather disconcerting. And even if you do want to do that, and people have made some very good living from being in the fashion and beauty industry, you’d need to be well educated to succeed in those industries. So, there was something very wrong with our school system, and I developed this sort of semi-understanding of what I thought I meant was the problem, that it was somehow caused by progressive education.  

The problem I had was that I could only name a few examples of what progressive education meant. I had stumbled across the reading issue about whole word, whole language versus phonics. But beyond that, I wasn't as crystal clear as I should have been until I read around the subject books like E.D. Hirsch as The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them, which explained intellectually and with crystal clarity, what progressive education was about, where it came from, and why it was so damaging.  

[00:08:12] Anna Stokke: Okay, so you went around to the schools and you saw some of these things going on, and I have to ask about math because you know, that's, that's what I talk about all the time. How was math being taught in English schools?  

[00:08:25] Nick Gibb: Well, we had a thing called a national numeracy strategy that was introduced by the previous government. What I saw in the elementary schools, the primary schools, was that they were, they weren't using the traditional algorithms for the four rules of number addition and so on.   

In addition, they were using a thing called the Dutch reform method, where you had a horizontal line. 27 + 14? They would say, “We'll round up the 27 to 30, round the 14 down to 10, add the 14 and 10 together and take off the three and add,” and so on. So, they were basically trying to put into a written form a method that you might use in a mental maths strategy.   

In multiplication, instead of the traditional long multiplication algorithm, they had a thing called the grid method where they would take, say it was 27 x 120, they'd say well, there's a seven on the 20 on this, and then a hundred and the 20 that are across the top, then the other axis, and then you multiply all these figures out, you have about sort of, you know, a huge number of numbers.  

You then have to add them all up to come to the figure. Again, the purpose of that was to try and inculcate an understanding of multiplication, but it became the final written method. And then with long division, they didn't do long division the traditional way, they did chunking. So, twelves into 254, they'd go, “Well, 254, I can see there's at least 10 twelves there. So, there's like ten twelves, a hundred twenty. Minus 120 from 257, oh there's another 137. There's another 10 twelves there, another 120.”  

I mean, this is designed to demonstrate that division can be repeated subtraction, but this method became the final written method they were using. When I became a minister, fast forward a few years, I asked to go to the best school in London that was teaching maths in elementary school most effectively.  

I went to the school, taken around the school with some teachers and this girl from the top form who was, I was told, was the best at maths in the school. And I asked her to do that very calculation and she used that method. It took her five minutes at least to do it when it would've taken her two minutes to do it using long division.  

I knew then there was a problem, that if this was an exemplar of really good practice and this is what they were doing that there was a fundamental problem with the way maths was being taught. And we had to, we had to put it right.  

[00:10:38] Anna Stokke: And you're an accountant, so I mean, math is kind of your thing, like me, right? And so, you must have found this really bizarre.  

[00:10:47] Nick Gibb: It was bizarre. And the other thing I used to do, rather cheekily, when I visited primary schools, was I’d have a chat with the year sixes, the top year, as a whole class. Now I'd ask them their tables, and some kids knew their tables, but not every hand went up. I would say fewer than half went and put their hands up.  

And, but, and as you got to the harder ones, very few hands went up. And I would talk to the teachers about this and they, I said, “Do you teach the tables by heart?” And they go, “No, we don't.” So, there was a kind of hostility, this was, you know, it is kind of rote learning — you mustn't use rote learning and it's, and I don’t know how you can do more sophisticated maths without knowing your tables.  

I really don't, because if you are simplifying fractions, you're doing just the most elementary — sophisticated, more sophisticated maths, you need to know your tables, but you cannot be looking at what seven sixes are when you're busy simplifying something. I was determined and I, and then I would go to schools and they'd say, “Oh, we are doing tables,” the children would then go “three, six, nine, 12.”   

That is not knowing your tables, that is counting in threes. Knowing your tables is to know that nine threes is 27 as an isolated fact. So, the more I went around schools, the more I realized there was a real problem with not just the written methods that we used for the algorithms, but also they just didn't know the tables.  

[00:12:05] Anna Stokke: I mean, it's great that you went and visited these schools because you got to see firsthand what was going on, right?  

[00:12:12] Nick Gibb: If you are a policymaker, I would say this applies to any, any area of policy, you've, you've got to really understand the sector that you are devising policy for and hope to be the minister in charge of ultimately. The danger with politics is that people think well. Here's what everyone's talking about, so we'll do that.   

Here's what right-wingers talk about, we'll do that. Here's what left-wingers talk about, we'll do that. That isn't good policymaking, and good policymaking is immersing yourself in the sector, really understanding what the problem is that you're trying to resolve, and then working out what caused that problem.  

And then when you've worked out what causes the problem, then you can come up with some policy prescriptions. But it has to be in that order. But too much of politics is about, you know, let's just do this thing because we hate those people, and you know, it sounds good to our base and that is a really bad way of going about politics.  

[00:13:13] Anna Stokke: So on that note, let's actually talk about the political side of things, and you made a lot of reforms. And you were, you know, you're a member of the British Conservative Party and sometimes people think, well, you know, “maybe this is a, a left or right issue,” but is education a left or right issue? What do you think?  

[00:13:33] Nick Gibb: I don't think it is, I really don't. Some of the sort of most articulate advocates of some of the things that you and I talk about in England are on the left, and why wouldn't they be? Because guess who the children are who most suffer from an inadequate, poorly evidenced approach to teaching and curriculum? They aren't necessarily the kids from well-heeled families who, a) they'll probably get a good education at home, b) they'll do well anyway because they're well supported.   

The kids that suffer most are those children who come from families that are not well-educated and they don't have all those advantages at home. And then if they go to a school that doesn't teach them properly either to read or mathematics, they will suffer disproportionately more.  

And the left in politics, you know, they are proportionately on the side of those children. So of course there are people on the left that support this agenda. I know, and I'm sad to say there are people on the right who are taken in by all this thing about, “21st century skills and we need to have industry, we need to have the soft skills that they're demanding.”  

So, we should teach things in groups and we should do project-based learning. So, it is left and right. Both sides bad, both sides good.  

[00:14:48] Anna Stokke: And absolutely what you just said about. People being taken in by some of these things because often what you call progressive education methods, they sound really good, right? It's about critical thinking and 21st-century learning and whatever. How did you overcome that though?  

Like how did you become more informed about better ways to teach things like reading and math?  

[00:15:14] Nick Gibb: Well, we looked around the world as well. So, we looked to the top of the PISA League table, so places like Shanghai, Singapore and we went there and we looked at the Singapore curriculum, which was superb, was very simple, step by step here, you learn this efficient written method in addition, carry the one and all that kind of thing.  

And then on the writing the notes and guidance, it said “Practice, practice, practice.” We took that approach. We had read around the subject as well. Obviously, I mentioned E.D. Hirsch, The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them, the importance of knowledge, the importance of automaticity in things like tables and other mathematical number facts and so on.  

And then also I was introduced to another author, Daniel Willingham, who wrote, Why Don't Students Like School? And he made the very important point that the working memory, which is where all these high-level intellectual activities take place, the critical thinking, the problem solving, the creativity, it can only handle half a dozen pieces of new information at one time.  

So, if I gave you two phone numbers, you could probably remember them. If I gave you 25 phone numbers, you would not be able to remember them instantly. You need to have things in your long-term memory if you're going to critically think because you can't just think about six things that's not, can't do much critical thinking with six facts.  

You need thousands of facts and deep knowledge to be able to critically think and be creative. So, education, William says, is about getting those, that knowledge into long-term memory, and that's what the schools are meant to be doing. That's what your whole education is about. That doesn't mean boring facts, you know, it doesn't mean cats have four legs.  

It means sophisticated knowledge about the battles between the executive and parliament in history and so on, and the complexities of chemical formulas and chemical reactions. All the vast quantity of human knowledge that's been created over thousands of generations is what you are trying to get into the long-term memory of young people.  

And then from that, you'll be able to perform those critical thinking because absolutely those three skills, critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity are really important in a modern economy like Canada and Britain. Of course they are. But you just don't get them by teaching them, “Today's lesson is critical thinking.”  

Because, as I said, you need they all based on, on getting knowledge into long-term memory. And also, they're domain-specific. So, if you are good at problem-solving in maths, you know, don't expect that maths professor to be able to fix your car necessarily. They might be able to, they've been on a car mechanics course and it’ll become very clever, but just because you're good at problem-solving in history doesn't make you a problem solver in maths.   

It really doesn't. And that's something that the progressivists just seem to overlook that it is domain-specific.  

[00:18:01] Anna Stokke: Is that what you refer to as a competency-based curriculum? So, in Canada, I hear people sometimes talk about a three Cs curriculum, and the idea is to focus on critical thinking, creative thinking, and collaborative thinking. And by the way, I would say these are all things that can't be defined or measured, so you, you call that a competency-based curriculum in England?  

[00:18:24] Nick Gibb: Yes, I do. And the problem with it is, and what they'll say back to you is, “Well, of course we teach knowledge. When we're teaching those three Cs, we teach knowledge.” But the problem is, the knowledge takes second fiddle to the skill, and therefore all the knowledge is geared around teaching that particular competence.  

And we introduced a competence-based curriculum in 2007, and that's exactly what happened. So it's, it isn't just those three skills, it's also things like the domain skills, like a historian understanding evidence and chronology. As though we're trying to train all our children to be historians one day, which, you know, the most will not, what we want children to know is some history, and we want them to be able to write and précis and read quite complex history books is really the skills that we want.  

So, what happened with the history curriculum, for example, in England is that because the knowledge didn't really matter, it was the skills that mattered. There were schools for teaching the same knowledge over and over again. They were teaching The Tudors, Henry the Eighth and all that, and the causes of the Second World War.  

But what about all the great things that happened prior the Tudors? What happened about the stuff that happened in the 17th century when our constitution was basically formed, the Bill of Rights and the Civil War that we had. I mean, the kids don't even know we had a civil war.   

And there was a survey done by a professor in of economics in Cardiff University, and he was testing undergraduates, and these were undergraduates, and they didn't know who was the monarch in Britain during the Spanish Amarda, well, clearly, Elizabeth the first.  

They didn't know who Brunel was, what his profession was. They didn't know, they couldn't name a single 19th century British Prime Minister, some did, but the percentages were very low in this survey. So, this was the problem.  

And you might think, well, “Does it matter if they don’t know a 19th century prime minister?” Well, I say it does because you can't really be a critical thinker about politics, or indeed history, if you don't know what happened and the big battles that happened in the 19th century, in the 18th century, in parliament, the abolition of slavery, the reform of the electoral system, we basically brought in democracy—not totally because women couldn't vote by the end of the 19th century, but we went from, you know, only a small group of people voting to vast majority of men being able to vote during the 19th century.   

And then that was extended in the 20th, early 20th century to the whole population.  

[00:20:50] Anna Stokke: And the response to that though would be, “Well, you could Google it.” So, what do you say to that?  

[00:20:56] Nick Gibb: And that not a new argument, they now say AI. This was an argument made in the 1920s. This is a thing Hirsch talks about, that this isn't new. None of this is new. And what they said in the, 1920s in Teachers College at Columbia University in New York, incidentally, where it all really stemmed from, based on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they said, “You can look it up. Look it up in the encyclopedia. You don't need to go through the boring process of remembering this stuff. You can just look it up all the time.”   

And the danger that is, as I said, the working memory hasn't got time to look that up or the capacity to look it up and remember to together with the other 35 things you have to look up to be able to form a view about something.  

So, it is utterly nonsense even with AI, even with all this information to our fingertips. I can look up anything, you can look up anything you want if you know what to look up. But you just can't do that at the same time as trying to work out or solve the particular problem that you're trying to solve, you just have to know stuff.  

Otherwise, it just becomes too cumbersome for you to be able to solve that problem.   

[00:22:00] Anna Stokke: We're going to get to the math reforms and we're going to talk a lot about the math reforms because I'm really excited to hear about that, but let's start with reading. So, what are some of the reforms you implemented with respect to reading?  

[00:22:13] Nick Gibb: By the way, kids that struggle with reading struggle with math, and those improvements in reading have a bigger impact on math than they do on English in our, some of our studies. Reading matters to everything, including math. As I said, I was worried as an MP about children's reading ability.  

I knew something was going wrong. And in 2003, I met a lady called Ruth Miskin, who was a very accomplished head teacher of a primary school who realized herself that the way she had been trained was wrong. And she learned about phonics and she tried this in her school in East London, a very deprived part of East London, and all her kids were reading, and she became a beacon school.  

People would go and visit and find out, and then she devised a proper scheme called Read Write Inc. I met her and she introduced me to this whole debate about the reading wars that had been going on since the 1950s, again, started in America, and then came to this country. The debate was between the whole-language approach to teach reading where you repeat high-frequency words and you learn by sight because that's how accomplished, experienced readers read.  

And the argument is that you should try and teach that skill to beginner readers. And it just, essentially, it doesn't really work. I mean, for bright kids, they'll read anyway. For less able children or even some bright boys who then just end up memorizing texts, they don't learn to read and then it's exposed by the time they're nine, they realize, “Actually, I can't read these more complicated words in the history lesson” and so on.   

I then ran a campaign before we came into government about this and got the last government, the previous government to make a minor change to the curriculum, but when we came into office, we were ready because I thought that wasn't, they weren't going far enough.   

So, we changed the national curriculum to require teachers to teach reading using systematic, synthetic phonics, learning the sounds of the alphabet, and then to blend them into words, c-a-t, cat, we introduced a phonics screening check, this is a test for six-year-olds.   

Very controversial because you're testing six-year-olds, but it was done in a very non-stressful way that the child would read to their own teacher from this list of 40 simple words, 20 of which were pseudo words, they weren't real words because we wanted to test that children could know how to decode, they weren't just learning these words on sight.   

When we introduced it in 2012, it was compulsory in all primary schools in the state sector. 58% reached the pass mark, and then each year went up. And then by the time COVID came, it had reached 82%, and then it dipped due to COVID down to 75% an it has crept up, now it's back up to 80% following the restoration of the test.   

What's interesting is when you are looking, when you go around to primary schools, you will actually see it happening. It's not as if this is just some paper exercise and teachers are teaching to the test. There has been a genuine change in all our primary schools.   

In my own view, some teach it better than others. It shouldn't be 82%, it should be 99%, frankly, passing. And there shouldn't be a gap between disadvantaged children and the national school, which there is, it's a lower figure for disadvantaged. That shouldn't be the case. This is not dependent on your family background, it's just a mechanical exercise, just if it's taught well, they'll know it.   

And as a consequence of the phonic screening check, we went from 10th in the world to eighth, and then from eighth in the most recent PIRLS to fourth in the world, reading ability of nine-year-olds. And the phonic screening check has been adopted by some of the states in Australia, starting with South Australia in 2019 and now New Zealand has adopted the phonic screening check in that country as well.   

So, it's spreading around the world. What I, and what I know is that it works, it absolutely works. Phonics is the way to teach children to read. All the evidence from the United States Reading Panel, the Clackmannanshire study in Scotland that was undertaken. And it's, it's wonderful to see.  

[00:26:09] Anna Stokke: And it sounds like a simple reform to make, right? This is just a quick phonics check at age six. You said, though, that it was a bit controversial. So, what kind of opposition did you face?  

[00:26:21] Nick Gibb: Oh, massive opposition. It was, people would write letters to The Times. People accused us of just teaching children to bark at text, this was the phrase, “You're just teaching kids to bark at text,” and what they would, what they had misunderstood was that they were conflating comprehension with reading.  

They say really isn't just about barking at text, of course it isn't, of course it's not. But you can't read if you can't bark at text, if you can't decode these squiggles on the page you won't be able to comprehend. So, they conflated comprehension and decoding, and you need both. You need to teach the skill of decoding as though you're teaching the scales on the piano.  

At the same time, you need children to increase their vocabulary, they need to be read to every day by the teacher. In a vocabulary-rich environment is the way it should be taught. So, so the vocabulary is increasing at the same time. And then once they have de managed to decode effortlessly words, then you can move on to the children reading more and more books on their own, increasing their speed of reading, which is very important, and then their love of reading.   

And children love it if they can do it. If you are, if you are eight or seven and you struggle with this thing because somebody's told you to look at the picture, look at the context, try and guess the word based on what you've noticed so far. I mean, it's just a nightmare. This is unpleasant, and children give up. I mean, one of the technical things about this whole issue is it's very important that when children practice their phonics, they use a book that is phonically consistent with what they've learned.   

So don't have a book the word elephant in it if you haven't done the ph grapheme so that when they're practicing, they can do it. Don't make them find other strategies for identifying the word elephant if they haven't learned those particular sounds.   

[00:28:08] Anna Stokke: So where did the strongest resistance come from?  

[00:28:12] Nick Gibb: It came from the academics in the university. So, of course, we've been teaching generations of teachers to teach using whole-language or whole words as it was, or multi-cueing. So, their careers, you know, were bound up in this methodology. It came from some people, like authors, some famous children's authors in this country thought it was a, would kill the love of reading, and they were just wrong.  

I don't think they had a vested interest in it, they were just mistaken. And then, of course, the early years lobby campaigned against it. So did a lot of the trade unions who didn't like the test, particularly, what schools held to account through the test. Even things like testing six-year-olds was controversial, having 20 false words, that was controversial even within the phonics movement that was controversial.  

But we just plowed on and we had to make all kinds of decisions. In hindsight, sounds like a sensible thing to do with the phonic screen, we came up with that policy, and that was hard. And then we had to work up, devise a test, and we had to set the pass mark and so on.  

So, everything, every step of this journey in phonics was controversial, and people forget that when they look back and say, “Well, of course you did that.” Everyone's in favour of phonics now, of course, I say they're not even now there, there are some people who still periodically criticize the last government for being obsessed with phonics.  

[00:29:30] Anna Stokke: Well, it looks like you were right. The test scores tell us that, do they not?  

[00:29:34] Nick Gibb: They do. I mean, but fourth in the world. But it's more than that. It is, we don't just do this to go up in international league tables. We do it because we want children to enjoy being educated. And they do enjoy, and I get, I meet parents, friends of mine who've got children or even sort of acquaintances and people I don't know who know me, will say, you know, “I was thinking of you. My five-year-old came home and they're reading, they've only just started school, and they're sounding out the letters just like you talk about, and it's wonderful.”   

And that's very gratifying as a policymaker and I've met so many children prior to 2010 when I was visiting schools. One example I cite in articles I've written about a girl, this is in 2009 just before the election, I went to see a school—I went there not to see phonics, I went there to see a voluntary reading scheme called voluntary reading. And we listened to this nine-year-old girl read, it was a book about dinosaurs.  

She just could not read a single word. Eventually, she read the word “even” and there was rejoicing, you know? And I said, “Well, do you mind if do this?” And I just covered up the first letter E, I covered up the E of even and I asked the girl if she could just read that word, and she could not.  

So in many ways it was a wild guess she got the word even and she couldn't read the word then. And it was so upsetting to me because this girl was a couple of years away from high school. She could have been taught to read and she hadn't been. I don't think you'll see that, examples like that today in our primary schools unless they're very particular circumstances affecting that child.  

[00:31:18] Anna Stokke: And I should ask, because you mentioned that there was resistance from education academics and some children's authors. What about the classroom teachers?  

[00:31:28] Nick Gibb: Yes, there was resistance because who am I? This Nick Gibb fellow and Michael Gove, the secretary of state. One's a journalist, one's a chartered accountant. Neither of you are teachers, telling us, “I've been here for 20 years running this classroom. Who are you to tell me how to teach reading?”  

So there was that, I have to say, and they had a point, but so did we have a point. We cite all this evidence. So, there was resistance, but you know, when they, when it's implemented in a school and they see these children reading, it does change minds, it really does.  

[00:32:10] Anna Stokke: Okay, so let's move on to math, my favourite subject. So, what are some of the reforms that you implemented in math?  

[00:32:18] Nick Gibb: Well, we really did focus on primary, that was where the real problem lay and all that, of course, then does impact on what happens in secondary. And as I said earlier, we looked around the world and we looked at the Singapore curriculum—I went to Shanghai and Hong Kong and saw maths in those two parts of China, and it was astonishing.   

Those children were two years ahead in Shanghai, the top of the league table. And what we learned was the children, there were 42 in a class, so these weren't small class sizes. One teacher, very focused, engaged, but they took every step of the algorithm, whole lesson on a tiny step of the algorithm. And you contrast that with what I saw in England in a school I was taken to where they spent half a lesson teaching these children the long multiplication algorithm.   

And I looked around the class and three-quarters weren't put in the line in the right place. Then after about, you know, 20 minutes of this, the teacher then said, “Right, take out your laptops. We're going to learn the Japanese method.” And this was some kind of weird triangle thing. I had never heard of it or then, or since. I'm sure you know all about it.   

But these poor kids, they hardly grasped all the complexities of the long multiplication algorithm and yet they were then asked to try and learn this other method. So, the good thing about what was happening in Shanghai was that it was a whole lesson just on a tiny bit of the algorithm. So, and we had a lot of exchanges with Shanghai. We had teachers, our teachers going out to Shanghai, we had Shanghai teachers coming to England and they loved coming to England. And they, you know, they saw some of our more creative approaches with the arts and things, which they liked.  

But they also taught maths in the way they teach math in Shanghai. And we had exemplar lessons. I remember going to see one and they had this wonderful teacher, I think it was year four, she was teaching grade four. It was a whole lesson on two digits by two digits, times two digits, both ending and zero.  

So, she did 70 x 30, so 70 x 30. Wait, what's step one? Throw away the zeros. What are you left with? 7 x 3. What is 7 x 3? 21. How many zeros did we throw away? Two. How many zeros do we pick up? Two. 21, zero, zero. The answer is 2100. I looked around the room, every single child was getting it right, and as she went through the methodology and how you set it out, every single child was getting it right.  

It was wonderful. And there's a whole lesson on that. And then the, because then the children did other examples of, you know, other two digits ending in zero. So we learned from that and we did those exchanges as well, over several years until Covid, and I think it's just been resumed, I think, because we were trying to in introduce a concept called maths mastery.   

Every child should be adding and subtracting fractions because it's not String Theory, it just might take some children a bit longer and need a bit more support and help, but they should all be moving along at the same time and learning the same thing. So, we learned that concept of math mastery, we brought it to England, we set up a series of maths hubs. These are sort of schools that are doing it well.   

We've got a national center of excellence in the teacher of mathematics that we contracted to come in and make those schools even better, and then we spread that practice across the maths system. So, we changed the national curriculum which is a legal requirement, year by year, setting up precisely what needed to be taught every year, that was controversial.  

One of our people resigned over it, one of our panel members of the curriculum review because they said it should be key stage by key stage. The key stage is about three years or four years, these days two. We want it much more precise. This year you will learn this, and this year you will learn this.  

And in fact yes, it wasn't done by term, it was done by year and it was very detailed. And then we started work on the multiplication tables check. So we'd already started and implemented the phonics check, we took the same principle, but for multiplication tables. We wanted every child to know the tables to 12 x 12, not 10 x 10, which is the previous system. 12 hours a day, 12 months of a year, you know, 12 is quite a useful number to be able to multiply.   

And by year four, not by year six, and we brought in a test. Children were given six seconds to answer each question from the moment they said, “Ready for the next question.” Then you six seconds to answer it. 25 questions. It took many years to pilot to get it right. I can't remember which year, I think 2020 we rolled it out, but it was the middle of COVID, so we kept it voluntary until after COVID, I think it was 2022 it was compulsory.   

27% of children achieved full marks, 25 out of 25, and the average score out of 25 was 20 point something. And this year it's just risen up to, I think, 42% of children have got four marks and the multiplication tables checked. And when I go around schools now and I ask children of year six or year five, indeed every hand goes up, but they all know their tables.  

[00:37:11] Anna Stokke: And so that's at age nine?  

[00:37:13] Nick Gibb: Yeah, age nine.  

[00:37:14] Anna Stokke: Another simple thing to implement that probably has a huge impact. So the phonics test and the times table test, those are excellent ideas and really we should be able to implement that anywhere, right? I mean, everybody, everywhere needs to know those things, so it makes a lot of sense.  

Did you do anything about calculators?  

[00:37:35] Nick Gibb: We did. One of my predecessors took out, when I was out of office, she took, she said, “We are going to have no calculators in the end of primary school tests.” So, we had a test, anyway, it was already in place before we came into office at the end of primary school in reading, writing, and maths and we just basically took the calculators out for those tests.   

There's plenty of time for calculators in the next, you know, five years of high school plus two years of sixth form for doing more sophisticated math. Well, let's just use this primary school phase to make sure that the proper arithmetic and mathematics is firmly embedded.  

[00:38:08] Anna Stokke: So, I wanna ask about your changes to the math curriculum. The politician might have some ideas that the curriculum should be changed, and they give this to the people that work in the Department of Education, and those people have their own ideas about how the math curriculum should look.  

And there might be some differences of opinion. I'm just curious how you selected people to work on that curriculum and ensure that it didn't get hijacked.  

[00:38:39] Nick Gibb: Well this is the challenge of every minister in every department. You really have to know your own mind and you, and therefore, you have to have done the research. You have to have built up allies who really, who share your outlook, who share your analysis of the problem, how to put it right.  

So we made sure that we had a chair of our curriculum review who was in tune with our thinking, but even then, as I said, we appointed one or two people who didn't agree with it year by year, and they resigned in a big, you know, huff. It was a nightmare doing a curriculum review, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.   

I remember one example, and there were many of these types of examples, where in the notes and guidance, it said, “Practice. Learn how to do these things, practice." And this word practice read right through the curriculum. I counted with a word count, 64 times. It went out for informal consultation with the maths teaching community. Came back, the officials in the department had excised the word practice, every reference to it. I was furious about this, and I rang up the chair of the curriculum review, “What's happening,” and he said, “There's an ideology that says that practice is boring and tedious.”  

And I put it back essentially, and I think the lesson is you have to get across the detail. You, every document, and I was assiduous in doing this as a minister and everything I touched, you have to be on top of the detail. Every single piece of paper that goes into what we have in England called a red box, which is what minister get every night and on the weekends, because otherwise, things either incompetently slip through or deliberately try to slide it through, so you have to go on top of that.  

And the other example is, I had a big battle over the use of a comma in six-figure digits. They didn't want to have a comma in a million. They wanted to have, instead of having a comma after one and a comma after three zeros and a comma after the next three zeros, they wanted to put a space.  

And I said, “Well, no. You're not having a space, you're having a comma because that's what we all do.” And “No, no, no. You've got people from Europe coming to England, they use a full stop instead of a comma. It’s only fair if we have a space.” And I said, “No, no having a comma because that's what The Times newspaper uses and that's what's in all the government documentation. We're going to have a comma in both the tests of primary school and in the curriculum.”  

And they fought really hard, but I didn't understand why they were fighting hard, but at the end, it was just such a bonkers idea. I just said, look, I'm the minister. Ultimately, it's going to, we're having commas. So this the kind of life you lead as a minister, you know, these little battles every day. Every day was a battle. There's no question. Every day was a battle of some sort.  

[00:41:11] Anna Stokke: I think you're pretty tough. I think a lot of ministers would just say, “Well, I'm gonna listen to the experts, right? I'm gonna listen to my experts.” And they would just let this go. And I mean, what you did standing your ground, that is just amazing. And it would have a huge impact on a lot of kids, and I wish more ministers of education would do this type of thing.  

[00:41:35] Nick Gibb: Well, it is interesting. We had lots of debates that weren't necessarily as, battle-strewn and as that. So for example, what year do you do the phonic screening check? There was an argument for doing it in reception so you're not wasting a year, or I felt that was too soon. There was an argument for doing it in year two, I thought that was too late.   

In the end, we settled on year one, end of year one, which is kids would've been there nearly two years by that stage in our system. And there was an argument about when do you do the multiplication tables check? We chose year four, nine-year-olds because you, if you wait till year six, then the worry is the schools will just obsess about multiplication tables and they'll neglect the other stuff. Didn't want that.   

They don't want just multiplication tables, they have a lot more they need to learn. And we, and there were big debates about long division. There was a whole bunch of experts who indeed, including people that I trusted who thought long division should wait till high school. And I just said, “No, this is simple. This is just an algorithm, it's not, this is not String Theory.”  

[00:42:41] Anna Stokke: So, we should talk about teacher training because you can implement these reforms and you can tell teachers that they should use systematic phonics and they should teach the standard algorithms, but if they're being told not to use those approaches in teacher training, that's going to undermine those efforts. So, I am wondering if you can talk about your reforms to initial teacher training.  

[00:43:04] Nick Gibb: Good issue to raise. We didn't really touch teacher training properly until 2018. We came into office in 2010. And basically my experience had been both in opposition and in government that I was like hitting a brick wall talking to the educational faculties of the universities. They just didn't really want to debate.  

And I would go to visits and I would be taken to a meeting room for 90 minutes, they would talk at me and there was no dialogue. So we, what we did do with these trainers, we tried to take the power of the training of the teacher brought it to the school level. So we had, we brought in a thing called School Direct where schools themselves could direct the training, but they still had to use the universities.  

So in the end we introduced a thing called the Early Career Framework. It was a better curriculum for teachers in the first two years of their career in the classroom, after they'd left university and done their postgraduate certificate of education. And that was evidence-based. It was based on all the things teachers really need to manage a classroom, behaviour, knowledge, all those things, that set of ethics.   

And it was all evidence-based. We set up a thing called the Education Endowment Foundation, a kind of What Works center back in 2010. They signed off on everything that was in this Early Career Framework and it went down well, extra mentoring for teachers. We then took that upstream to teacher training and we said, right, “We're going to use the same principles, and this is going to be what we call the core content framework of what teachers should be taught in their training at an educational faculty of university.”  

And they all said they would support it. I don't think they really did in reality and then we got the inspector to inspect those faculties on the basis of that core content framework, and some actually didn't get through that inspection. Then we decided to do a market review of teacher training.  

And I mean, essentially, we asked every school-centered teacher training and universities to reapply for accreditation, and they had to demonstrate how their courses were in tune with this core content framework. And some didn't get through that and they had to revise their system some, and then some dropped out and they couldn't do teacher training.  

And then we said, “Right, now, show us a documentation. You said you'd do it, you signed up to it, now show.” And that's when a lot fell down, they had to redo their documentation. So it was a hard slog. We had a lot of controversy with, particularly, the top universities, Oxford in Cambridge, in particular, said we were interfering with our academic freedoms.  

We said, “No, you can teach what you like, but we are just the contractees, if you like, you are our supplier. We're giving you this money to train all our teachers, we want you to train them in accordance with the evidence. So, you do what you like on other things you want to teach them, but they have to learn this.”  

And in the end, they conceded, and I think, I think it's had an impact, you know, you hear things about whether in reality they're delivering it on the ground. But it, I think it has had an impact of just making sure that teachers are trained in according to the evidence. And I do hear, I do hear schools I trust saying to me that the teachers that are coming through now, the newly qualified teachers are not as imbued with a lot of the progressivist ideology that previous generations of teachers have been.  

So I think it has been, I would say, partially successful in reforming teacher training.  

[00:46:35] Anna Stokke: So just following up, I think you said something about there was a way for schools to train the teachers? Can you say a little bit more about that?   

[00:46:45] Nick Gibb: Well, we have the thing called School-Centered Initial Teacher Training where they can train their teachers. What they can't deliver is a postgraduate certificate of education, which most graduate teachers want, they want that extra bit of paper. So then they have to use the universities. And then we had School Direct, where again, they could direct the training either to another school centre, the initial teacher training or to a university.  

So we were just trying to give more control over what was taught to those trainee teachers to the schools than before. And with a School-Centered Initial Teacher Training, you can give them qualified teacher status, you just couldn't give them a PGCE, and I think that's something that, you know, I'd like us to be able to change in further reforms.  

We also established a National Institute of Teaching, and the idea behind that was to take the principles of really successful schools and multi-academy trusts like Michaela or ARK and Harris and get them to train teachers in tune with that approach because we know that's very successful and that has been going a few years now and is proving successful as a kind of competitive challenge to the existing university providers.  

[00:47:59] Anna Stokke: Okay, so they'd get like a content degree in some subject, a teachable subject.  

[00:48:05] Nick Gibb: Exactly. So teacher teaching is a graduate profession. You either do a Bachelor of Education from the age of 18 for four years or the most common route is to have an undergraduate degree in something. Provided, that's a relevant degree for the subject, you then get a PGCE to become a math teacher, a physics teacher, and so on.  

[00:48:24] Anna Stokke: So you mentioned the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). Can you say a bit more about that?  

[00:48:29] Nick Gibb: We were very unhappy with the quality of research and evidence from the educational faculties. We felt it was poor quality. So a typical piece of research might have been, we tried this thing, nine out of 10 teachers said it was great, there was a real buzz in the room, and, therefore, we think it's great. So that's going to roll it out. That is not evidence, that's an opinion. So, we wanted proper randomized control trials of interventions or methods of teaching or curriculum.  

And that's why we gave this body this money to do this, 137 million pounds, which, in the context of the austerity in 2010 when we were dealing with the aftermath of the banking crash, was a huge sum to spend over 10 years, with the interest as well, on evidence. So randomized control trials, and they've proven very effective. They've had real credibility with the teaching profession, very well-run organization. We have renewed their 10-year thing with another 120 million to take for another 10 years.   

And it's a very successful What Works center as part of the global What Works centers and it's, you know, one of the most successful things that we have achieved. So, as well as saying what does work, one of the really good things about it is it says what does not work. So, a lot of the sort of snake oil that there is too much of it around in education was, you know, there are no such things as learning styles. I can't tell you, these things have real currency in the school system, and the EEF just debunks them. So there just, there's just no evidence for this approach, so don't use it.  

And we have a, they have a thing called the toolkit, and that is very well used not just by teachers in England, but, but internationally, people are using this toolkit.  

[00:50:09] Anna Stokke: Any teacher can look it up, this is online, right?  

[00:50:12] Nick Gibb: Yes, it’s all online, there's a whole lot of resources online that anybody from around the world, all open source. UK government stuff tends to be open source globally.  

[00:50:21] Anna Stokke: Okay, so our Canadian listeners and our American listeners can go to the Education Endowment Foundation to find out what works.  

[00:50:29] Nick Gibb: No, exactly. So I would be very pleased to help.  

[00:50:31] Anna Stokke: Are there any other changes that you made that you want to mention?  

[00:50:35] Nick Gibb: We changed our behaviour policy that I mean, I think behaviour in schools is an ongoing challenge. I wouldn't say we have cracked it, but it is so important. If children are misbehaving or they're not focused, they're not learning. As we gave teachers more powers, we clarified what the regulations said they could and could not do, whether they could confiscate.   

We used to have a rule that for a child to go into detention, you had to give parents a written 24 hour’s notice. You know, this just is absurd. Now, they don't have to do that. They just go into detention the same day after school for half an hour, an hour, whatever it takes.  

And the school I went to visit last week, two hours in some cases, if they receive multiple detention, you know, notices during the day. It really is important. We changed the rules about expulsions and suspensions. We had cases where children would be expelled for a really serious, like knife crime or something in school, and then they'd appeal to an independent appeals panel, the appeal would award the appeal and this kid would go flouncing back into school again.   

And we said, no, you know, if the head teacher, even after the appeal is won by the child, the school doesn't want them back, they don't have to take them back. And this just gave more confidence to schools and to heads to, you know, to do what they have to do to maintain good behaviour in the school. And this school I went to, I think a couple weeks ago, called Dixon's Trinity in Bradford, I mean, the behaviour there, it's exemplary.   

This is, this is a school that serves very disadvantaged parts of northern England. And the children there are focused and studious and serious and happy because the behaviour is such that they can just work and they want to work, they want to get on.  

I'm not saying we've achieved that across the schools. We absolutely haven't. And COVID has created some new problems, but we certainly took some good, you know, proper steps forward in improving schools and to enable schools to implement behaviour strategies that really do work.  

[00:52:31] Anna Stokke: Any other changes you wanna mention?  

[00:52:33] Nick Gibb: We also changed our curriculum, our qualifications. We've just brought in the GCSEs at 16 and A-levels at 18. We made them more knowledge-rich and more rigorous, put them on par with international standards of the best-performing countries. The other thing we've not touched on is the whole structural changes that we introduced.  

So, all our schools until 2010 were really run for decades, centuries, have been run by the local authorities, which are 150 around England. And we learned from the charter movement in the States from the free school movement in Sweden as well, and we basically wanted to give schools independence like a charter school.  

We gave the power to any governing body of an academy, of a school to leave the local authority and become a, what we call an academy, which is essentially a charter school. And now we're in a position where 80% of high schools are now academies and 40% of primaries or academies.  

And you say, “Well, why does this matter?” Because, well, they have in, they have autonomy over many of the decisions that they want to take, and it means that they can be free to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies that had, until we came into power, really dominated the local authorities. And it was very difficult.  

I remember going to a school in my own constituency in Sussex where the, I said, “Are you doing multiplication tables checking?” And she said, “No, I'll ask the local authority whether I should.” That filled me with horror. You know, you should decide not some person, advisor in the local authority who presumably would say no because they were dominated by that very progressivist ideology.  

So we did that and now what's happening to those charters, with those academies is then amalgamating into multi-academy trusts. Sometimes just three or four schools, sometimes 40, and they're using the back office to, you know, promote really high-quality training and curricula in those schools. And it's one of the reasons why we are improving internationally in the league tables, it's that autonomy.   

We have liberated, if you like, the teaching profession in England to debate these issues, to discuss them, to innovate, to bring in more evidence-based approaches to math teaching or reading or the curriculum or behaviour policies that wasn't possible until we gave these schools that level of independence.  

[00:55:07] Anna Stokke: So let's talk about some of the results. So when you started making reforms, you didn't have concrete evidence showing that they'd work. You took a risk, you stood firm, you made the changes, but now you do have some evidence, I think, that your reforms actually worked. So can you talk about that?  

[00:55:27] Nick Gibb: Yeah. So we are going up in those international league tables. We are now fourth in the world in PIRLS, performance in reading literacy, and that, and when we were eighth five years earlier, and we were 10th five years before that, and they attribute that, and if you read the report, they attribute it to the fo the focus on phonics.  

And the reason we've gone up, reason why our scores are high is because of the low-attaining pupils improving. And that really fills me with joy. We haven't got there because our ablest children became even more able, although they have, that hasn't pushed up our position.  

It's the least able who have become competent readers that's pushed up our score. That is everything we dreamed of when we set about this reform program. In maths, we've gone from 27th in 2009 in PISA to 11th in the world and I’m delighted by that result as well. And there are similar figures in TIMMS as well, particularly at grade five in the sort elementary school as well.  

So, you are right. What this has enabled us to say and demonstrate is that all the theories that we had about knowledge-rich curriculum, you know, east Asian approaches to math, teaching phonics in the teaching of reading, that was all based on what we'd read and theory and studies, like Clackmannanshire, the US Reading Panel and so on.  

But now we've got concrete evidence based on international surveys that show us going up. Now people say, “Well, you know, your actual score has gone down 'cause of COVID.” Or they say, “Oh well, you know, it's all relative,” but we're not going down, you know, we're going up. That's the point. And yeah, and you do see it in, you do see this change in schools.   

You see better discipline, you see more sophisticated maths being taught, you see children knowing their tables, you see them being able to read and fewer children struggling. I'm always open to challenge. If you can say, “Well, you're not delivering on this metric or that metric.” Let's have a look, but every metric that I encounter points to the success of this approach to policy.  

[00:57:42] Anna Stokke: And you kind of have a comparison group because unlike England, Scotland and Wales didn't implement the same reforms. So, tell me a bit about that. What was going on in Scotland and Wales and how have their student outcomes compared?  

[00:57:59] Nick Gibb: Although I was the UK Education Minister, I only had jurisdiction over schools in England. And there's an education minister in Scotland, there's one in Wales and there's one in Northern Ireland. So all the education policies that devolve matter, and they were very critical of our approach to education reform.   

And they went, not only did they not implement our reforms, they went further and went more progressive. So, Scotland introduced a curriculum for excellence, a competence-based curriculum, and then subsequently, so did Wales. And we are able to break down the UK's PISA score between the Four Nations. You look at England's maths score, as I said, we went from 27th in 2009, we went up to 11th. In 2022, Scotland in maths went from 21st in 2009 to 30th, down to 30th in 2022.  

And then in science as well, Scotland went from 16th in 2009 to 30th, whereas we in science went from 16th to 13th. The same in Wales. Wales, their reading went from 35th in 2009 to 33rd, so they're just languishing in the thirties. Same with maths. They went from 37th in 2009 down to 40th. They're down, they're now at 33rd and science again, 27th to 2000 down to 34th.  

So they've basically languished either gone down or they just haven't improved, and they're down there in the thirties. The one exception is reading in Scotland where they're the same position that we are in England. They don't take part in PIRLS, so it's hard to know precisely what, why it is that they're, in PISA, they're at the same level we are which is 13th, different from PIRLS where we're fourth, this is 15-year-olds.   

And the only explanation I can work out Scotland is a small country compared to England in terms of population, but they, two of the most important phonic studies took place in Scotland. One was in Clackmannanshire and one was in West Dunbartonshire. The only conjecture I can come up with, it's not evidence-based, because we don't have the evidence, is that because they've had all this phonics attention in Scotland that it's, it has fed through to their reading.  

But in terms of the curriculum for excellence, which is absolutely a competence-based type curriculum we see that, we see the effect on science and we see the effect on, on maths. It's been a disaster. And I think they're in something of a crisis in both countries, both Scotland and Wales over these PISA results.  

[01:00:38] Anna Stokke: I mean the government has changed in the UK, right? So, what impact will that have on the reforms?  

[01:00:44] Nick Gibb: Well, I obviously worry about these things. I mean, we live in a democracy. I don't if people want to change policy, that's, you know, that's the way it is. The two things that worried me, one is a bill introduced called the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and that tries to undermine some of the autonomy that the academies have.  

And I think that's a very dangerous move because that autonomy is part and parcel of the success. It's giving those professionals the freedom to do the things that they were prohibited from doing, either directly or through self-power, through the tyranny of the majority view, that's prevented them from doing things.  

So I worry about that. They want to make the national curriculum apply to all academies and so on, all kinds of different things that I'm not sure are necessarily wise if you want to free up the profession to do what they think is right. And they've also conducted a curriculum review, and I was worried about that because I saw the people on the panel, I didn't think many of them were necessarily, some were, but not all of them were in tune with the thinking that lay behind our successful reforms.   

The politics came to the rescue, though, because the narrative in the press over the bill I talked about, the legislation, it was so damning on the government because they said it was, this is a government not wedded to high standards, that the Prime Minister's office was very worried about that narrative. And I think they intervened to make sure that the curriculum review didn't change things as dramatically as it might have.   

So, the interim report came out a couple weeks ago, and I was relatively sanguine about what I saw in that review that I don't think it will undermine, what we've achieved in terms of improving the curriculum. What's interesting though, and I think I might have touched on this earlier in your podcast, is that the teachers in this country now really are engaged in the debates about curriculum teaching methods. In a way, I don't think they are in the, to the same extent in other countries. They blog and they write, we have this thing called researchED, which I know has come to Canada and come to other parts of the world, but it started here. Tom Bennett, a teacher in London started this. And all the bloggers, and there are many of them, and I'd like to plug my book on your podcast.  

[01:03:02] Anna Stokke: Yeah.  

[01:03:03] Nick Gibb: Coming out in late August/September called Reforming Lessons, and it's about our reforms. And in that I talk about the importance of the blogger teachers, teacher bloggers, and there are scores of them, if not hundreds. And there's some really good ones, and they debate in a really extensive way and in a very high-calibre way. That's really important and you can't put that genie back in the bottle.   

So whatever government comes in, the debates about the importance of knowledge, the importance of Direct Instruction by teachers, the importance of phonics and traditional approaches to the algorithms in mathematics and so on, that won't go.  

Those ideas are out there now, and they have achieved, I think, a critical mass amongst the thought leaders in the teaching profession. So I'm confident that these reforms will, the fundamentals of the reforms will stick even if bits of it are chipped away at by future governments.   

And I'm hoping it will spread globally. I've spent some time in Australia and they're now beginning to debate these issues. As I said, they've got the phonic screening check in a few of their states, but they're talking about now the importance of knowledge. And there’s a very impressive minister in the state of Victoria, the labour minister.   

 [01:04:21] Anna Stokke: Ben Carroll?  

[01:04:23] Nick Gibb: Ben Caroll. He's very impressive. And again, it's an, it is an example where this is not right, left this stuff. It really isn't. He cares about the education of his constituents, of his, in his state, and this is where the evidence points. Why wouldn't you implement this? I think the, I think this movement is spreading.  

We have a very wonderful education secretary in New Zealand, Erica Stanford, who's, who's implementing the phonics check, but also she's implementing a knowledge-rich curriculum and she's reforming maths. It's hard work, but it's worth the effort because, you know, you're affecting the lives of millions of children. And there's all the evidence that if you're well educated, you, you're more likely to be in a job, you are more likely to have good health, you're more likely to have good mental health.  

So, there's a lot to play for in guessing education policy right. What we're short of in England is educated people. We need more graduates, we need more math graduates, more physics graduates, more graduates in the arts and so on. More people educated to the best that their ability will bring them. Whether it's not a degree through apprenticeships, whatever it is, whatever level we're talking about, whatever skill you need, you need children to be well-educated to go into —so for an economy that's crying out for these skills and this knowledge, your education system is the only lever that will deliver that.  

And if you have a failing education system, you ultimately will have a failing economy.  

[01:05:46] Anna Stokke: And we've been sounding the alarm bell at the university level for years about this. We know that students are coming out of high schools not really prepared as well as they should be in math, and there are fewer and fewer of them every year. It is a serious situation.   

[01:06:03] Nick Gibb: And it doesn't need to be because you know the things you are talking about on this podcast, the series, all the evidence is there about how to teach maths in the most effective way, and we've just got to make sure the evidence trumps ideology in the delivery of our education system.  

[01:06:24] Anna Stokke: I want to ask you some questions about advice, if you can give some advice on a few things, because obviously you were in a unique position and I think you have a lot of insights and perhaps some good advice that you could give. Let's start with this.  

So suppose a politician or a policymaker is listening and they want to become more informed about education. So what books would you recommend they read?  

[01:06:50] Nick Gibb: I would certainly read E.D. Hirsch, I would say that's the starting book. That's E.D Hirsch, H-I-R-S-C-H, and it's The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them. I read it on the beach in South Carolina on holiday in 2006 and it basically answered all the questions that I was struggling with. Very helpful, indeed.   

And then there's Daniel Willingham, and I mentioned earlier that Why Don't Students Like School? That explains the importance of knowledge in terms of cognitive load on the working memory where all the high-level, sophisticated thinking takes place. That was again, eye-opening.  

There's other books as well. A slim volume, but has swept this country, England, in terms of teachers reading it, and that's Daisy Christodoulou's book Seven Myths About Education. There's my book, of course, you must, that's absolutely essential, Reforming Lessons, published by Routledge in the autumn, and there's other books like Progressively Worse: The Burden of Bad Ideas in British Schools, I don’t know whether it's still available, written by my coauthor some years ago, 2014 called, called Progressively Worse, published by Civitas.  

Again, this explains the history of our education system in England. If you can only read one of those books, I would read Hirsch.  

[01:07:58] Anna Stokke: So if a member of the government party, a government minister, say, wants to implement reforms like you did, what advice would you give them?  

[01:08:06] Nick Gibb: Well, you have to decide the policy. You cannot rely on the civil service for policy. I have a huge respect for our civil servant in Britain, civil service in Britain. They're very good at implementation. They are absolute past masters of implementing things, they are not good at policy development. And why would they be?   

They don't take part in debates, they don't have constituents, they don't attend the kind of, you know, political events that I have attended all my life because that's not what they do and not what they should do. They're not meant to be going to those things and having those debates, but that's where policy is made.   

It's the thinking and the honing of ideas where policy emerges. It does not emerge from a civil servant who's good at implementing, sitting down a piece of paper saying, “Well, how do we solve this problem?” And the other thing that civil servants tend to do is that they think they represent the sector.  

So if the sector says “You don't need multiplication tables,” then that will be the view of the civil servants. You don't need multiplication tables because that's what the sector says. So you mustn't rely on them. Therefore, you must have your own, your own analysis of what the problem is you're trying to solve and how to solve it.  

So you need to do the work. And those years in opposition, if you're in opposition, you're not in government, you've got to use that time to do this work. It's quite hard to do it if you're suddenly thrust in to become an education minister from defence or something. But if you are, then you've gotta do the work.  

As a minister, you can't, if you wanna be successful in that role, you've really got to form your own analysis using your, the fact that you, as a politician, have come up through the political system. It's not a bad thing. The, you know, the media is so disparaging about politics in a democracy that sometimes politicians think that they agree with it.  

Journalists, “Oh, I must be bad. I must be sleazy if I'm in politics.” No, it's a worthwhile, absolutely proper thing to want to do to use your ability to serve the public in a democratically elected thing. So have confidence and do the job seriously by engaging in the debates and immersing yourself into the education sector to find out what it is you're trying to solve.  

Then, the other bit of advice is to find your allies. So one of the great things about visiting schools every Monday for five years is I met people, and I met people who I felt in tune with and who shared my analysis of what was going wrong. Then you grapple those people to your hearts with iron bonds because they are the people that you want to help.  

And I've, there's lots of examples now of where I've done that, taken head teachers, I've met, ask 'em to head up panels, whether it's the teacher standards panel or the curriculum review or whatever it is, and they've done a brilliant job. So I think you need to find your fellow travellers for people that share your analysis and how to solve a problem and then they will help you.  

You can't do this all by yourself because especially if you're an accountant, you know, what do I know? So I had expert friends in every field. I had Tom Bennett who set up research there, but he was also, our behaviours tsar. I had Ruth Miskin who helped me with all the stuff on reading. I had a lady we haven't mentioned called Debbie Morgan who worked for an education company, but who was brilliant in bringing that Shanghai maths approach to English schools.   

Had Ian Bauckham who headed our teacher training reforms, but before that, he's a linguist, he headed our review of how to teach foreign languages in our school, which was a terrible mess and he tried to put that right for me. So, in every field you get your experts who will help you and you, and you've, and you identify who they are, not because the civil servants tell you, they'll tell you the wrong people.   

You've got to, you've got to find your own by being out there in the schools, year in, year out, meeting people. So that's, that's the other strong advice I would give. And then finally, one bit, one bit more. And that is about compromise because if you want an easy life as a politician, as a minister, compromising will make your life much easier. However, if you compromise on what you know to be the right way to improve things, every compromise you make chips away at the success of those reforms.  

Every single one will. Even if it's by a tiny percentage. So, so the initial view is do not compromise, but then you will have to compromise where you absolutely have to. So, I've compromised on a number of things. Sometimes I regret the fact that I compromised, but for example, the phonics screening check. It would've been lovely to have published the results of those on a school-by-school basis and the way we do our end-of-primary school tests in reading, writing, and maths.  

If I had done that, I think we would've had a boycott of the test by the unions and it wouldn't have succeeded. So I said, we won't publish it at a school level, it will be available to the inspectors to see, it will be available to the government to see, and the local authority to see, but we won't publish it.  

As a consequence, we've had that test in place now since 2012, and it stood the test of time. So you do have to make compromises, but only when necessary and not where it's just for an easy life.  

[01:13:30] Anna Stokke: Let's say you're an advocate for education reforms. So like a parent advocacy group, or someone like me, I'm a math education advocate. I have been for many years. You want to persuade a politician to implement real reforms. What do you think is an effective approach for doing that?  

[01:13:46] Nick Gibb: There's a case for trying to get to know a politician before they take office if possible. Because they then have the time to really get into the weeds if they're that type of politician. I mean, I would say meet as many politicians as you can in government and out of government.  

Then you've gotta try and identify the ones who are listening to you. You can tell they're listening to you because they're sort of, they're looking at their watch after 10 minutes and you're wasting your time really with those ones. So find the ones who really interested in what you have to say and are concerned.  

Those are the ones you need to sort of spend time with then, whether they're in office or in opposition, but in some ways better if they're in opposition so you can, they've got time to really immerse themselves into all the complete—see, we, I mean, you know everything about maths, you're a maths professor, and you will assume all kinds of knowledge that a non-mathematician like me will have, and we just don't have it.   

And so you'll have to take us through what it is you're talking about, and particularly if they're new to the education world, but there's no point in doing it if they're not interested. If they just sort of “Look, I'm here because I want to be the prime minister.” “This is a stepping stone. I'm going to go from here.” “I'm going to go become the chancellor, the finance minister, and then then I'll be prime minister. So, you know, you can bore me for 10 minutes.” That's, you're wasting your 10 minutes of that person.  

I mean, I met yesterday online a lady called Maria Murray who runs The Reading League in the States, and so she's all in favour of phonics and so on in terms of reading. Her advocacy group has half a million supporters, and they aren't just any old supporter, they are teachers and people that actually can help.  

So I think forming those kind of groups can really be powerful because you then have the resources to lobby government. And also if you've got that kind of group, it can make a big difference and politicians will have to listen to them because they've got half a million people that will write in to members of parliament all over the country.  

So I think, I think those kind of groups are really important.  

[01:16:00] Anna Stokke: I mean, that's kind of, I think, how we ended up with these Right to Read inquiries in Canada. So, I had someone on that was talking about the Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read inquiry. And that was the result of, essentially, a grassroots parents’ organization.   

So, I'm going to end it off with this final question. What are you most proud of? You did so many things, it's extremely impressive. You've got to be unique in the world for having accomplished so many reforms and quickly too, that have had a great impact. So, what are you most proud of?  

[01:16:39] Nick Gibb: Well, obviously, I'm proud of the changes to reading. I just think children now are able to read and there'd be be hundreds of thousands of children who would be still struggling today who are not. So, but I'm also proud of something else, and that is liberating the profession.  

I think there is, there's a phrase that is in England it's called the secret garden of education policy, and there was a speech by James Callaghan in 1976, the Ruskin College speech. And he started that speech by saying he was criticized for daring, even as prime minister, to enter this world of education policy that politicians should not dare to go into.  

But teachers were banned from this garden as well. It was meant to be the preserve of education academics. And I think we have torn down, not just the gate, but the whole fence around this garden. And I'm most proud of that actually. Teachers now have taken control of their profession and there'll be lots of teachers who don't agree with a single word that either you or I have spoken, but fine.  

But at least the debate is happening now in the teaching profession. They're not being told by some advisor whether or not they can teach multiplication tables in their school. They can debate these issues themselves and take a view. I'm most proud of that, I think.  

[01:17:55] Anna Stokke: Yeah, you have a lot to be proud of and you can sleep well at night. You've done some amazing work and I hope you come visit us in Canada we could use someone like you over here.  

[01:18:04] Nick Gibb: Love to come again.  

[01:18:05] Anna Stokke: Well, it's been an absolute honour to have you on the podcast and I really appreciate you taking the time to come and talk to me and my listeners. It's just been phenomenal to listen to the things you've done and it's been a real pleasure.  

[01:18:19] Nick Gibb: Thank you for having me. It's been fun talking to you and more power to your elbow, Anna, for what you are doing. It's wonderful.  

[01:18:24] Anna Stokke: Thank you.  

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Chalk and Talk is produced by me, Anna Stokke. Transcript and resource page by Jazmin Boisclair, subscribe on your favourite podcast app to get new episodes delivered as they become available.  

You can follow me on X, Blue Sky or LinkedIn for notifications or check out my website annastokke.com for more information. This podcast received funding through a University of Winnipeg knowledge mobilization and Community Impact grant funded through the Anthony-Swaity Knowledge Impact Fund.