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.
🔥 Kemi Badenoch:
“Bridget Phillipson represents everything that is wrong with the Labour Party, she is incompetent, and can dish it but can’t take it. She was extremely rude to my shadow Justice Secretary yesterday…calling him a racist, why doesn’t she apologise for that”.
@boreddeleuzian@ukvillafan@avispartan1@bailuschsaurus This is beyond ludicrous. Specious twaddle
Sex in humans is binary & immutable. The body is genetically programmed to develop specific organs for specific purposes. Some organs develop only in one sex class.
Are you aware that cross-sex steroid abuse impairs cognitive function?
The parent in this case who tried to stop his daughter getting a potentially fatal dose of testosterone from Helen Webberley's Gender GP would be guilty of a conversion offence under Labour's Section 28 announced today.
Well done Labour MPs, you must really hate us.
It’s interesting what the BBC thinks is important enough to cover and what it does not…
Just flicked through the website, nothing on conversion therapy, puberty blockers or the 60k+ migrants the Home Office has lost.
But Kemi not apologising for an accurate description of a terrible minister - not only merits a story but gets tweeted by BBC as well.
Odd priorities.
Scrap the licence fee.
Bridget Phillipson's record as education secretary:
1) Over 100 private schools have closed, needlessly disrupting the education of thousands of children.
2) Universities are on the brink of a funding crisis.
3) So is the early years sector, after the Government expanded "free" childcare with no clue how to pay for it.
4) The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act undermines freedoms that have been pivotal to many schools' success. Academies must now adhere to the national curriculum. New free schools discouraged.
5) Latin funding was cut halfway through the academic year.
6) £300m of taxpayer money has been committed, annually, towards "free" universal breakfast clubs instead of targeted support for pupils who need it most.
7) She once backed teachers working from home.
8) She tried to dump free speech protections for universities.
9) Claimed the government is recruiting more teachers when the total number fell by nearly 2,000 year on year.
10) Cried "sexism" when it was suggested that, because of her abysmal performance, she might lose her portfolio in a reshuffle.
Just before PMQs, at the despatch box, she called one of my MPs a racist. She’s just said it again on Radio 4.
The hordes of Labour MPs rushing to twitter to whine about me calling her “spiteful” are just exposing their own hypocrisy.
They love to dish it but they can’t take it.
The bill provides some (limited, certainly not failsafe) protection for health professionals from criminalisation, but not for parents. The question now facing a parent who challenges a child who's been taught the quasi-religious belief it's possible to be born in the wrong body, and who comes home saying they think they're a boy when they're actually a girl: am I putting myself at risk of criminal charges if I challenge that belief, and ideologically-captured professionals report me to the police for 'abuse' they allege amounts to criminal 'conversion therapy'?
The campaign for a 'conversion therapy' ban - a govt bill on this was published today - was dreamt up by lobbyists seeking to criminalise exploratory therapy with gender-questioning children. We published this Observer editorial in 2023 on why a criminal ban is so dangerous.
The party that called Tories "scum", leavers "Nazis", moderate Muslims "Uncle Toms", Kwasi Kwarteng "not really black", Liz Truss "a lettuce", Covid "The Johnson Variant" & Kemi Badenoch "blackface for white supremacy" is hurt because Badenoch called Phillipson "spiteful". Bless.
Planetary temperatures have been similar or higher in several past geological periods including the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, or much earlier epochs. None of these were caused by fossil fuels.
Single-day or single-month records in one small country, moreover, do not equate to a global “ever” or prove immediate catastrophic attribution solely to fossil fuels.
Your grasp of ‘climate science’ is about as solid as your understanding of female anatomy. The only tit you have ‘ever‘ grown is yourself.
Another woman-hater who taunted us for fighting to preserve our rights in the face of the failed policy of self ID turns out to be a sex offender & domestic abuser. No more sneering at feminists from Iain while compèring SNP award ceremonies unless they’re happening behind bars…
I agree. I also don’t remember this squeamishness about calling out incompetence when Starmer was leading the opposition when he was pretty relentless in his criticisms (and rightly too as leader of the opposition)