Foreign secretaries come and go, but there was only one Nick Gibb

The former minister for school standards was fired in the recent cabinet reshuffle, but he has a legacy that most politicians could only dream of, writes Ed Dorrell

‘Nick Gibb was the rarest of rare things: he had a genuinely transformative career’ (Getty)

In all the noise and drama of the cabinet reshuffle, many people will have missed the most important manoeuvre made by Downing Street: the firing of a junior minister you’ve probably not heard of.

For all the machinations about who was in and who was out, the decision to end the government career of Nick Gibb, minister of state for school standards, brought to a close one of the great frontbench tenures of our time.

Gibb, who was first appointed to the shadow education team in 2005, has served as shadow schools minister or actual schools minister for almost all of the decade-and-a-half since (apart from a couple of years during the coalition when he was fired from, and then reappointed to, the same role).

This is pretty much unprecedented. To put it in perspective, the students who graduated from university this summer were starting primary school when the then Tory leader Michael Howard first asked Gibb to work with David Cameron in the shadow education team.

But longevity is only part of the story. While never making it to the cabinet, Gibb has had, through determination and mastery of his brief, the most extraordinary impact on the lives of literally millions of young people and teachers.

With singlemindedness, he has driven forward an agenda that has transformed all schools (but most radically primaries). A great deal has been written about the revolutionary reforming zeal of Michael Gove’s tumultuous time at the Department for Education, but, truly, Gibb’s legacy is probably deeper and longer-lasting.

Without Gibb, there probably wouldn’t be the tougher teaching and learning culture that has seen testing and rote-learning widely adopted in primaries. Sats tests probably wouldn’t have become much harder. There probably wouldn’t be a baseline test for children when they start primary and there probably wouldn’t be a times-table test at seven. Also, there probably wouldn’t be the phonics check at the end of year 1. There probably wouldn’t be the relentless attention to grammar, literacy and numeracy we see in primaries everywhere.

At secondary level, not only did Gibb’s drive ensure the introduction of Gove’s new national curriculum and his harder GCSEs and A-levels (with coursework abolished); he also ensured that the hugely controversial English Baccalaureate (with its focus on traditional subjects) was widely taken up.

I’ve probably forgotten a few things in this catalogue of policy interventions, but even so, that is the kind of legacy most politicians could only dream of.

That’s not to say that these accomplishments have all had a positive impact – I will leave that debate for others who are better qualified. But I do want to point out that Gibb’s was the rarest of rare things: a genuinely transformative ministerial career.

It is no exaggeration to say that if you went to primary school before Gibb’s reign began (you would need to be at least in your twenties now), and returned to visit your school today, much of what you would see going on in classrooms would be unrecognisable, as would much of what was being taught.

Ask a thirty-something adult in the street about how to use a “fronted adverbial” and they will likely stare back at you blankly. Ask a 10-year-old in a random year-6 classroom and there is every chance, not only that they will explain how fronted adverbials are used in sentence structure, but that they will give you examples, too. For what it’s worth, their recall of spellings and times tables will almost certainly be better than yours, to boot.

Gove may have been the “glamour” of the Tory schools revolution, but Gibb was the grit, and – for better or worse – schools will never be the same again as a result.

Ed Dorrell is director of Public First