Ministers and civil servants need to stop telling teachers how to do their jobs, former Department for Education permanent secretary Jonathan Slater has said.
Appearing in a panel at Tuesday’s Britain Renewed Conference, run by the Future Governance Forum and UCL Policy Lab think tanks, Slater said reform of the education system is needed to address the fact that less than one in three children who receive free school meals get a minimum pass in their English and maths GCSEs.
Expanding on some of the ideas he set out in a recent UCL Policy Lab report, Slater said reform “should start with the government, by which I mean ministers and civil servants”.
“They’ve got to stop telling teachers, schools, communities, how to do their jobs, “ he said. “They don't know how to do it right.
"Ministers I’ve worked for would sit in front of an audience like this and tell you, if you were teachers, that the right percentage of your time to spend in front of children was 78%, not 77 or 79 but 78. They would get in rooms like this, and they would say, your children need to learn how to spell the word ‘eighth’, presumably because they were fans of Tudor England. And I’m not joking. That starts with ministers, but quite soon, civil servants start getting a bit of a power complex. ‘Wow. You mean, we're in charge. We can do that stuff.’"
Slater, who was DfE perm sec from 2016 to 2020, said one of the ways the government can help drive change is by providing a platform to share the success stories of the schools and communities around the country who are bucking trends, and a space for more to innovate.
He said school leaders in Plymouth had managed to double the success rate for children on free school meals leaving with passes in English and maths “by working together, by working with the council, by working with others, by focusing on the kids who need us the most. Not because they've got the best teachers in their country – they've got the same teachers everybody else has – but, because they care, they're putting the best teachers across the kids who need them the most. Those of you who are not educationists may be surprised to hear that the norm is literally the opposite.”
Slater said the other thing that is needed to tackle the problem is the desire to want to make a difference “because if you don't want it, it won't happen, as is evidenced from the last 10 years, where the government didn't want to do anything about it, and so nothing happened”.
Explaining, Slater added: “By which I mean the previous ministers are very proud of the school reform agenda. You can read it in their speeches. You can read it in their books. But what was the percentage improvement in the pass mark in English and maths for children on free school meals in the 10 years since their reform agenda came forward? Zero. Success seems not to involve success for the two million kids who need it most.”
Asked by a member of the audience how radical the government needs to be in reforming the education system, in reference to comments from Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons earlier in the day, Slater said there has been "a total transformation of the education system".
"But for kids on free school meals, nothing has changed," he said. "They're still being failed. So the transformation that I think is required is to turn the English school system from a telling place – that is the thing that's unique about England's public services, how centralised they are – into a learning place."
The government has set "breaking down barriers to opportunity" as one of its five missions, and said it wants to do this "by reforming our childcare and education systems, to make sure there is no class ceiling on the ambitions of young people in Britain".
The government's key milestone for the mission is: a record proportion of children starting school ready to learn. Its target is 75% of five-year-olds reaching a good level of development in the Early Years Foundation Stage assessment – which looks at children’s development across areas like language, personal, social and emotional development, and maths and literacy – by 2028.
This would be an increase on the current 67.7% achieving this, and would mean an additional 40,000 to 45,000 children a year hitting developmental goals.
Its plans to achieve this include launching Best Start Hubs in every local authority next year.
It has also extended free school meals to 500,000 extra children and expanded the offering of free breakfast clubs in schools, with 2,000 new schools set to join the government scheme from April 2026. And this week the government launched its child poverty strategy, which it says will take 550,000 children out of poverty by 2030.
To address poor outcomes in schools, the government launched a review of the curriculum, assessment and qualifications system in England last year, which published its findings last month. One of the recommendations is to introduce a diagnostic assessment for key components of maths and English to be taken during Year 8 to support teachers to address students’ needs and ensure that they are well prepared to progress into Key Stage 4 (years 10 and 11).
In response, the DfE said it will ask all schools to assess pupil progress in writing and maths in Year 8 and will support them to draw on a range of high-quality products to do so. The department added that weaknesses in reading are "the most critical" to be resolved in the first years of secondary school, and so it will also introduce a new statutory reading test for all children to be taken in Year 8, designed to check both fluency and comprehension.