End Of Term Report: Bridget Phillipson. Grade: F. Must Do Better Is No Longer Sufficient.
As children across England sit their exams this week, some of them are doing so in schools they did not choose, having been displaced from schools their families stretched to afford, by a policy that promised 6,500 new teachers and cannot confirm a single one was hired. That is Bridget Phillipson's record. Here is the full assessment.
Private school VAT. The government promised the levy would displace around 14,000 pupils into the state sector and fund 6,500 new teachers. The original internal estimate was 3,000 pupils. The actual figure is over 43,000, three times the revised estimate and fourteen times the original one. Over 100 private schools have closed, including schools that explicitly named the VAT policy as the cause of their collapse. Fees have risen on average 14 percent, substantially above Treasury forecasts, hitting middle income families hardest, the people Labour claimed it was protecting. Smaller, more affordable independent schools have been destroyed. The country's most prestigious and expensive institutions have barely noticed.
On the 6,500 new teachers: when asked in Parliament how many had actually been recruited using the VAT revenue, a government minister declined to answer. The question was put directly and left unanswered. The government does not know, or will not say, how many teachers its flagship policy created. What is known is that more teachers have left the profession than joined it in the last recorded period. The state sector is absorbing tens of thousands of additional pupils while the teaching workforce shrinks.
Kemi Badenoch called Phillipson a spiteful class warrior. The evidence supports the description. The policy was not designed around evidence. The government's own estimate was out by a factor of fourteen. It was designed around ideology, the belief that private education is an offence against equality and that taxing it is its own reward regardless of consequences. The consequences landed not on Eton but on families who stretched to afford smaller schools that no longer exist.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that sex under the Equality Act means biological sex. That was one year ago. The Equality and Human Rights Commission drafted its code of practice. Phillipson received it and sat on it. Baroness Falkner, who oversaw the drafting, said publicly that the guidance is ready and that the delay is political. The charge has gone unanswered. The minister holds the title Secretary of State for Women and Equalities while withholding the legal protections the law requires her to implement.
Schools are being nudged toward identity-based decision-making in areas that demand caution, maturity and parental involvement. Teachers are placed in an impossible position, told to affirm identity claims before maturity, before medical certainty, often before parents are informed. The Cass Review explicitly warned against premature affirmation. The guidance ignores that warning. When things go wrong it will not be ministers who face the consequences. It will be teachers.
The Eton-backed free sixth form in Middlesbrough, a free school for deprived pupils in one of England's poorest areas, was cancelled not because it failed but because it threatened to succeed in a way the government could not control.
The curriculum is being diluted. The EBacc is under pressure. Knowledge is being replaced with flexibility, which means lower academic floors for the children least able to absorb that cost.
While children sit their exams, the record speaks. Over 43,000 pupils displaced. Over 100 schools closed. Zero confirmed new teachers from a policy that promised 6,500. Legal guidance withheld. Safeguarding inverted. Excellence cancelled. Not fit for purpose. Should not be allowed to continue in post.
End Of Term Report: Bridget Phillipson. Grade: F. Must Do Better Is No Longer Sufficient.
The Taliban Got ยฃ171 Million. Al-Jolani Got ยฃ95 Million. The Boats Keep Coming. Someone Is Happy With This Arrangement.
In October 2025, Britain removed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham from its list of proscribed terrorist organisations. Months earlier, Foreign Secretary David Lammy had flown to Damascus and handed its former leader, Ahmed al-Jolani, ยฃ95 million in aid. On 31 March 2026, al-Jolani arrived at Downing Street for talks with Keir Starmer, the first visit by a Syrian head of state to London since Assad's fall. He also met the Attorney General and the Home Secretary. Al-Jolani led HTS from its founding. Before the rebranding, his organisation was designated by the British government itself as a terrorist group. The designation was lifted. The cheque was written. The visit was photographed. According to Downing Street's own readout, Starmer used the meeting to urge "closer work together on returns of illegal migrants, on border security, and on tackling people smuggling networks." The former leader of a proscribed terrorist organisation was being asked to help stop the boats.
Britain sends ยฃ171 million a year to Afghanistan. The Taliban has banned women from working for the NGOs that previously delivered it. The government's own parliamentary documents acknowledge the aid cannot be effectively delivered. Ninety-four percent of NGOs fully or partially ceased operations after the ban. The money goes anyway.
In January 2026, al-Hol camp in northeast Syria, which held around 9,000 male ISIS suspects from an estimated 60 countries alongside tens of thousands of family members, collapsed amid fighting between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters. A hundred and twenty ISIS members escaped from Shaddadi prison. The Kurdish forces that had guarded the facilities for years withdrew. Syria confirmed a mass escape of ISIS-linked individuals following that withdrawal. Their whereabouts are unknown. Over 70% of those crossing the Channel are undocumented young men from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan. They carry no papers. Their histories cannot be verified. Britain has no biometric screening mechanism capable of checking arrivals against Syrian detention escape lists, because Syria has no functioning civil registry against which to check them. So the question that nobody in government is prepared to answer is this: how many of the men arriving on British beaches since January 2026 were in those camps? The honest answer is that nobody knows. The more troubling answer is that the government has built no mechanism to find out.
Jonathan Hall, the government's own Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, said in the aftermath of the Belfast stabbing that asylum seekers from conflict zones present elevated risk profiles, that trauma from witnessed or perpetrated violence compounds that risk, and that his questions about the national security implications of mass migration had been met by the government with silence. The security services' own assessment framework treats exposure to serious violence as a material risk factor. Hall is not speculating. He is describing the government's own methodology.
In the year to June 2025, asylum applications rose 17% and small boat arrivals rose 14%. Twelve new asylum centres were opened this week without informing the MPs in whose constituencies they sit. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle called it totally unacceptable from the chair. Hotel accommodation contracts run until 2039.
A government trying to stop the boats does not pay the regimes the arrivals are fleeing. It does not hand ยฃ95 million to a former proscribed terrorist and ask him to tackle people smuggling. It does not build hotel infrastructure contracted until 2039. And it does not open twelve new asylum centres without telling the MPs whose constituents will live next to them.
David Lammy meets Ahmed al-Jolani. Al-Hol camp, northeast Syria.