Michael Gove

Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Education 2010-2014, the first four years of the Coalition government.

There are two fundamentally important things to say about his work in this job:

1. The many reforms he introduced amounted to the most successful reforms made by any Minister in the period 2010-2024.  Tory governments during this period have been criticised for many things, but the reforms of Gove as Secretary of State for Education are rarely included in that list.  He greatly improved the quality of state schools in England – the education of millions of children.
2. Most of the reforms were introduced quickly, even immediately, and this was made possible by the planning done by Gove and Nick Gibb (Schools Minister) when in opposition before the 2010 election.  In that time they visited several of the most successful countries and many of our best schools, while reading widely about the evidence for successful teaching methods. The 2010 election was in May, the Academies Act was ready to be debated in Parliament just two weeks into the new government.

Gove was a successful journalist for many years until elected to Parliament as the MP for Surrey Heath in 2005.   In opposition he was often chosen as a spokesman for the Conservative Party because he was quick-witted, punchy and of course he knew what fellow journalists were after.  He was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families in 2007.

Education was his passion because he had been adopted as a child and, despite being brought up in a family that faced financial difficulties, he was sent to an independent school, Robert Gordon’s College, where he thrived.  Gove has always felt that without this start in life he would never have achieved much. Education was his path to success and self-fulfilment.

The November 2010 White Paper which followed the Academies Act emphasised two things which drove Gove to act fast:

• The fact that children from low-income homes in the UK do particularly badly at school.  School exam results correlate too closely with family income.
• The PISA test scores showed how the UK did poorly compared to many other countries, and our results were getting worse.  In a world where educational standards are often considered the basis of economic success, this was a disaster.

These are just some of the things Gove achieved, quite quickly:

• Opening up the opportunity for most state schools to become Academies, greatly accelerating the policy started in the Thatcher years and continued under Blair and Brown.  Before this all state schools were managed by local authorities.  Academisation has so far given 10,000 schools independence and autonomy and the majority have improved greatly.
• Establishing free schools, modelled on free schools in Sweden and the successful Charter Schools in America.  A free school is a normal state school – an Academy – but it is set up by parents or teachers, universities or even local businesses who believe they can provide something better than the current provision.  There are more than 700 free schools now, including outstanding schools like the London Academy of Excellence, the West London Free School, Michaela School in Wembley and the specialist King’s College London Maths School.
• Gove abolished several quangos – the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the Training and Development Agency and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust – because they promoted wrong-headed ideas about the nature of good teaching and limited the control he wanted over reform of teaching methods.  He attacked education bureaucracies with speed.
• Reform of the National Curriculum, 2013.  Tim Oates was appointed to restructure the National Curriculum – what is actually taught to children aged 5-16.  The aim here was to raise standards, not least in maths and English, to teach a full chronology of English history and to expose children to some of the best of English literature.

Gove was influenced by the work of the American academic E D Hirsch who demonstrated that ‘twenty-first century skills’ could not be taught in isolation but only on the basis of knowledge taught within established subjects. Critical thinking could not be taught as an isolated skill because you cannot think critically about something unless you know a lot about it.

This is why Gove insisted on beefing-up of subject-knowledge in his reformed National Curriculum.

• Reform of the syllabuses of every GCSE and A-level.  Groups of subject specialists were assembled to redefine all GCSE and A-level syllabuses, introducing higher standards and injecting more maths into the sciences.
• It was not only the syllabus content that was reformed but also the nature of assessment at GCSE and A-level.  Gove was able to show that much coursework was dull, limiting and the victim of cheating by teachers, parents and pupils.  Much coursework was scrapped. Before 2010 exams at the end of each course had been replaced by ‘modules’ – the syllabus divided into chunks, each of which was independently examined twice a year.  So a pupil taking an A-level might take one module in January of the first year and then resit that module two or three times over the rest of the course, racking up marks.  This created grade inflation and many students went up to university having forgotten the content of A-level modules they had taken in the lower sixth.

Gove scrapped modules and resits and moved assessment of most GCSEs and A-levels over to exams at the end of the course. Grade inflation was halted, the number of exams being sat was reduced, standards rose.

• He backed his Schools’ Minister in reforming the way children were taught to read and do maths. In opposition Gove and Gibb worked out that the phonics method of teaching early reading was far better than the alternatives.  In 2012 the Phonics Check was introduced for six year-olds. This one reform has greatly improved standards of reading in primary schools.
• Gove introduced the EBacc and Progress 8, both performance table measures.  The EBacc encouraged schools to ensure pupils took GCSEs in English, Maths, the sciences, history or geography and a foreign language.  Gove realised too many able pupils from disadvantaged homes were not taking these subjects and that made it much less likely they would get to university.  Progress 8 measured the progress of every pupil from age 11 to 16 and was a powerful way of assessing the impact of secondary schools.
• The 2011 Education Act successfully increased the powers of head teachers to control the behaviour of their pupils.
• He introduced the popular Pupil Premium to increase school-funding for pupils from disadvantaged homes.

Gove was sacked in 2014 for creating too much hostility within the teaching profession and replaced by a series of Secretaries of State who achieved much less.  Fortunately, Nick Gibb remained Schools Minister for much of the period 2014-2024 and was able to see the Gove reforms through.

In the succeeding years Gove had many jobs. He was Chief Whip, Secretary of State for Justice, Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Minister for the Cabinet Office, Secretary of State for Levelling-up, Housing and Communities.  He achieved much but is perhaps remembered for his leadership of the Vote Leave campaign and his unsuccessful attempts to become Prime Minister in 2016 and 2019.  He did not stand for election in 2024 and was elevated to the House of Lords.  In 2024 he became editor of the Spectator.

Given his prominence, Michael Gove shares some responsibility for the chaotic performance of the Tory party between the Brexit vote and crushing defeat in the 2024 general election.  But his legacy in terms of educational reforms remains as strong as that of any Secretary of State in the past fifty years.

By Professor Barnaby Lenon, Dean of the Faculty of Education at The University of Buckingham