Sir Nick Gibb

Highlights from The Exam Man podcast, Series 3 Episode 2

In this episode we were joined by Sir Nick Gibb to chat about his views on assessment and education: he has been one of the key figures in education policy over the past two decades, and has served in government under four prime ministers.

We’ve just noticed that you've been in India recently, Nick, and wondered what you'd heard about the English system and how it's viewed abroad?

People are looking at England in the way that in the early 2000s people looked at Finland, in a mistaken way as it happens because there's a huge time lag in these issues. So they're looking at us, not in a mistaken way. I think they're right to look at England because we have been rising in the league tables, whereas we were falling. That's why I get invited to speak at conferences, not just in India but in America, around the world, because they want to know what we did. And I spoke at a conference in Delhi and they were very, very interested and from that more conversations have happened. So it's an exciting country, 8% growth a year. As a minister, I used to absolutely love meeting ministers from other countries. Whenever they were in London, no matter how small the country or how big the country, if they wanted a meeting with an education minister, I was the first to volunteer. But what depressed me at some of those meetings was that particularly low-income, middle-income countries, they were all saying the same things - we're going to go for 21st century skills, getting rid of our curriculum, we're bringing in competence based curriculum. And some of them even used the same words that the minister the previous day from another country used. So they're getting this advice from the OECD, the World Bank. And our experience is that that advice is wrong, we've been through all that. So I try and convey that, but it depresses me sometimes that a low income country who have enough problems of their own, frankly, without these people advising them in a way that the evidence doesn't support.

And who suffers? Literally the poorest children in the world suffer. And that breaks my heart. And so I'm determined now to spend time in the international world, talking about these things to prevent that from happening, because we care about children wherever they are. It must be incredibly fulfilling to be able to do that now, to be able to travel and be able to do this in a different way. It is, absolutely. It's hugely enjoyable, meeting people from completely different cultures and nations. And one thing about not being an MP, people don't realise how restricting being an MP is. I've done 27 years of being in the House of Commons, and you can't really leave the building because there are votes. Certainly not when the parliamentary day starts. And the day is meant to end at 10 p.m on Mondays, 7 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but votes can go on beyond that sometimes. You can't plan ahead because you don't know when votes are going to come. And if you do want to go abroad, you have to get permission from the Whips and things. So it's liberating to feel, that I can just say yes to something and then next thing I know I'm on a plane going to some conference somewhere. It's great fun.

My career - I studied law at Durham, trained to be a chartered accountant with KPMG. I was there for 13 years, and then I stood for parliament in 1997 and became an MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, a Conservative MP. And I've been an MP for 27 years until July 2024 when I stood down after over a quarter of a century. That was enough for me, and probably enough for the people of Bognor Regis! I was also a minister during that period. I was the school's minister for 10 years, from 2010 to 2024. The mathematicians amongst you will know that that's 14 years, not 10! I had a couple of stints out due to various coalition issues and changes of leader of the party. But I've served under David Cameron, and then Theresa May, and then Boris, and I served under Rishi Sunak as well. So I've served under four prime ministers, and I think about six secretaries of state. I stood down in November 2023, having done 10 years again. That was really part of the process of my leaving parliament. I told the whips I wasn't standing again in July, and that made sense then to ease out of ministerial office as well in November at the reshuffle.

I was also shadow schools minister for five years in opposition between 2005 and 2010. That was an important period, because that's really where we did a lot of the work preparing for government. So I spent every Monday visiting schools up and down the country. I wanted to try and understand why our schools, why our education system, was declining in PISA and TIMSS, these international surveys, and I think PIRLS as well.

Before I was shadow schools minister, I was on the education select committee for two years. So in that period, and covering my ministerial time, I probably visited over 1,000 schools up and down the country. And why that's important is you really learn about the problems facing schools. You can see how and what is being taught in schools. And that really helped me to understand why we were declining. And it helped me formulate, together with Michael Gove, the shadow secretary of state and then secretary of state, what we saw as the solutions to this problem. And then the other one key thing to mention is the people I met. So I didn't just visit schools. I talked to people that had views that I thought were in tune with the way I was thinking, such as Ruth Miskin, who was the sort of phonics guru. And I read around the subjects. So I read E. D. Hirsch, Dan Willingham and others, which really gave me an understanding of what progressivist education was all about, and why it was failing our education system, and particularly the most disadvantaged. That really helped us formulate what we saw as the answers. And, of course, in the most recent league tables, PISA, we've gone up from 27th in 2009, when we were still on the decline. That was the lowest point. We're now 11th, in England. And in PIRLS, we've gone from 10th to 4th in the world in the reading ability of nine-year-olds. So that really shows that the analysis of the problem that we developed in opposition and the solutions to dealing with that problem, so far as the international objective league tables are concerned, was the right answer. Not everybody will agree with us, but at least now we are rising in those league tables, not declining.

So Nick, would you say that that, out of everything, was your proudest achievement in government?

I think yes. Having gone up 2017-18 both in maths and reading. But more than that, I think I helped, together with Michael and the Academies programme, unleash a renaissance of thinking by teachers themselves. If you talk to educationists in other countries, they say that there's something unique about England, where the teachers are blogging and writing, they're attending research-ed conferences organised by Tom Bennett. So they have taken control of their own profession, issues of pedagogy and content of the curriculum and the philosophical approaches to education. Now teachers are talking about those. Jim Callaghan in 1976 spoke about the fact that the education professors felt it was their fiefdom. How dare Jim Callaghan, Prime Minister, talk about education? How dare even teachers enter this secret garden that was education policy? And I think we've opened the gates, I think we've taken away the fences to the secret garden so that teachers are now in charge of their own profession. I think that is my proudest contribution. It wasn't solely me or solely Michael. It was also the fact that there was social media. But of course, they have social media in other countries. And they don't have this same liberated teaching profession who are discussing these things in those countries.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you specifically ended up in an education role? What was it that made you want to move into that particular sphere of politics?

I came into politics because of ideas. It was ideas that drove me. It wasn't becoming famous or the power, or whatever it is. I just was driven by ideas as a teenager, as a young man at university. And those ideas were not education, actually. They were about the economy because I was an accountant and did law at university. And so I was driven by the ideas of Friedrich Hayek, Friedman. I believed strongly in monetarism. I came to the view that that was the way to control demand and inflation. And I believed in the free markets as a way of creating wealth and opportunities for people. That was what drove me because in the 1970s, before you two were born, we were the sick man of Europe so far as our economy was concerned. I thought Mrs. Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, they had the right ideas. So it was that that drove me into politics. When I got into parliament in 1997, I started my career as a shadow treasury minister in opposition, and I became a shadow trade and industry minister. But then I felt the arguments about the free markets and monetarism, I felt they had been won. I was wrong, actually. We saw the resurgence of Jeremy Corbyn and the hard left in British politics. But at that time, I felt the argument had been won. And so I turned my mind to the other issue that I felt was very pressing.

I had been to school between 1965 and 78. And I knew about progressive education. I fought a by-election in Rotherham in 1994, and on my school visits there, during that campaign, teachers I met were saying some very odd things. And so I thought, this is another area where ideas, and bad ideas in fact, are contributing to damage to British society, to our education system. So I decided I would engage in those issues. And I'm very glad I did because there's a huge ideological debate about how you conduct an education system. And I was very engaged in that.

And obviously, in government, Nick, you were able to implement some of those ideas. I was wondering if we could turn to specifically talk about the reforms that were made to the GCSE and A-level qualifications of around 2015, 2016. Could you tell us a little bit about what your thinking was behind those reforms? What was driving them? And what were the particular kind of priorities that you had when you were redesigning qualifications?

As I mentioned earlier, I was very influenced by the ideas of Hirsch. He's still alive, he's in his 90s, and he's an American academic. And he believes that a lack of knowledge in the curriculum in America contributed to the widening gap between disadvantage and advantage. Advantaged kids at home have a lot of knowledge that they just get naturally - going to the theatre, talking about books and so on. And if you come from a disadvantaged family, you don't have those. And he says knowledge builds on knowledge. So the more you know, the more you can know. His example is, if you say, electrons orbit an atom in the way that planets orbit the sun, if you don't know that planets orbit the sun, that similarity doesn't really work for you. So it just leads to a widening gap. And then the other book I read at that time was Daniel Willingham, who wrote a book called Why Don't Students Like School? And he makes the point that if you want to be a critical thinker or a problem solver or be creative, you're using your working memory, and that can only handle six or seven, or even fewer, pieces of new information. So if I gave you three phone numbers, you could probably remember them.

If I gave you 25 phone numbers, there's no chance that you'd be able to remember them. But if you want to do critical thinking, you'll need access to masses of information. You can't just critically think about six things. You need to know a whole bunch of things in order to make that critical thinking meaningful. So, how do you get instant access to that information? By having to Google everything every two seconds. If you were to Google six things, on the seventh, you'll have forgotten the first. So, you've got to have this stuff in your long-term memory, which is what Daniel Willingham says.

I was worried from all my discussions with curriculum experts and other people that we had a competence based curriculum introduced in 2007, and that much of the GCSE content was competence-based. It was about teaching the skills of a historian, the skills of a scientist. There was some knowledge, of course, in all GCSEs at that time but the knowledge was geared towards these skills. We wanted to restore the centrality of knowledge to the GCSEs. And we wanted to also put them on a par with the qualifications that were being used at that age group in the best performing countries of the world. So we asked Ofqual to rank our qualifications against other countries in the world. And as part of the reform process, they were making sure that the assessments were on a par with those other countries and jurisdictions.

So, I'm guessing from what you're saying that you reject the dichotomy, if you like, between knowledge and skills. That you don't see them as separate things where we need to pursue one or the other, that they are interlinked in that respect?

You cannot teach the skills in isolation of the knowledge. So people think these are transferable skills - that you can teach problem solving, that you can teach critical thinking. All the evidence from cognitive science in recent years is that you cannot, that they are all domain specific. So that's the issue. If you want children to be problem solvers and to be critical thinkers, they need to have deep knowledge. And from that deep knowledge, they will become a critical thinker and a problem solver.

But if you downgrade the knowledge and specifically teach those skills, you will not get those skills. And that's what Hirsch explicitly says in The Schools We Need. He says, paradoxically, the school system in America at that time, in teaching those skills, was ending up with students who did not have those skills. Whereas if you taught a knowledge-rich curriculum, you would have children, and young people, who leave the education system with those high-level skills, which is what all modern economies need. So they come as a consequence of knowledge. They are not a prerequisite to knowledge. That's a huge intellectually important issue that we had not stumbled across, but had researched. And if you read Daisy Christodoulou's book, Seven Myths About Education, she says you cannot teach a novice the skills of an expert. You can't teach an eight-year-old or a twelve-year-old how to be an expert historian, because those expert historians and scientists have spent 20, 30 years acquiring the knowledge that made them into experts, from which they get those skills.

So if you want to get our young people anywhere near the level of skills that you want, you've just got to teach knowledge. And knowledge isn't just facts. Knowledge isn't, you know, a cat has four legs, a quadruped is a four-legged creature. That isn't knowledge, that's facts, which are important. But knowledge is complex. And what happened with our history curriculum, even before the 2007 competence based curriculum was introduced by the QCA, was that, because there was such an obsession with the skills, the knowledge became very simplistic. So you might be teaching the Tudors, or the causes of the Second World War, but the facts became very simplistic because you were trying to inculcate these skills, whereas it's far better to teach the complexity of knowledge, the complexity of history, the different views about different players. Why was there a civil war in the 17th century?

All these issues are complex. And from that complexity, you become a more sophisticated thinker. That was lost in a competence based curriculum. What was happening in our schools was that children were just learning the Tudors and the Second World War, they didn't teach the 17th century, they didn't teach children about the Bill of Rights or the battles between parliaments and the executive. None of that was being taught. And they are really important. They underpin everything about modern politics. And that was just not being taught. So we had a big job to do to try and rectify that.

Do you think that some of this focus on skills rather than knowledge is less to do with ideology and more just to do with technological development? So, particularly with the advent of the Internet and Google and this idea that because knowledge is so freely available and so accessible, it no longer has as much importance.?

Absolutely. That is still the principal argument by the OECD, the World Bank, the advice they're giving to countries around the world. It's all based on that notion. But that notion isn't new. They were saying this in the 1920s - you can always look it up in an encyclopaedia, in a book. You don't need the knowledge. But as I said earlier, if you want to think critically, you can't be busy looking up the capital of France. How many miles is it to America? What is the boiling point of water? Is iron a metal or a

halogen? What is a halogen? You've just got to know this stuff, because otherwise you basically overload your working memory with new information, and the ability to think critically with masses of new information is just zero. So that's why it's so important that children have knowledge. And the trouble is, it sounds so appealing and compelling to say children don't need to rote learn all this stuff. They can just use AI and Google. It’s very compelling, and it makes life much easier.

But it's not just me saying it. The trouble is, the facts are, the reality is, if you don't have a lot of knowledge in your long-term memory, you will not be able to perform high-level functions. There’s this idea that you can teach somebody to be a problem solver, and I've seen the maths curriculum that’s all geared to problem solving. Of course, you want to make sure children understand the maths they're being taught, and you can give them, as in the Singapore curriculum, they use the phrase “word problems”, just to make sure they are understanding the maths that they're being taught. But you can't teach somebody to be a problem solver in maths, say, and then say now you're a problem solver, can you go and fix my car? When you think these are transferrable skills across domains - that idea is just nonsense. You think you can solve problems in international relations because you studied some of that. Now go and deal with a nuclear power station, it's got a meltdown. It doesn't take more than 10 seconds of thought to realise that this notion is absurd. And yet, it is a dominant viewpoint amongst educationalists worldwide.

And this is already affected by the developments in AI, isn't it, Nick? It would be really interesting to hear what you think about AI and how you think it's going to affect exams and the education system more broadly in the future.

AI is very exciting. There's no question about that. It can be used to save teachers hundreds of hours. But you've got to be careful with it. So if you're creating a test, if you're creating some teaching materials, you've got to use very, very careful protocols, several thousand word protocols to make sure that they are only looking at high quality information. And you've got to ring fence what the engine is looking for. It can also do a lot of work in terms of back office stuff for teachers. And you hear there's a possibility that you can use AI potentially to teach if you could make the AI some kind of robotty thing that's the best teacher in the world in maths. But of course our children, they're not adults who can handle these things. They need the emotional involvement of a human being. Particularly as you get down to the younger age, they form a very close relationship with their teacher. So there will always be, no matter what AI is able to develop, an absolute need for teachers in the classroom, even if they're aided by expert ways of conveying complex concepts to children. But in terms of exams, they are a worry.

I think coursework type assessment is very dangerous now, because children are using AI all the time in their essays and things. And they need to know, when they get homework, to write an essay or do some work, there's just no point in using AI to do their work for them, because the teacher doesn't ask your child to do homework in order to sell the product that they're making, and that's the end of it. The purpose of asking a child to write an essay or to do homework is to help that child learn, and if all they're doing is asking AI to do it for them, they'll achieve nothing. So that is a worry that teachers have.

So do you think that coursework in qualifications is pretty much dead?

I think children need to know and to understand that they need to do coursework in order to develop their education. It's like doing a crossword. You can look it all up on the Internet. What's the point? You're not going to get a prize. You do a crossword for your own satisfaction. If you just look everything up, then you're just wasting your time. And children need to have that inculcated in them by their teachers. But it does mean, I think, that the idea of continual assessment and teacher-controlled assessment that we got rid of when we reformed the GCSEs and A-levels, there's absolutely no case for bringing that back now because it is absolutely open to cheating. And we got rid of it anyway, even without AI, because there was no correlation - in fact the correlation was just awful - between what children were achieving in controlled assessments and what they were getting in the exams. So that's why it went, really on the advice of Ofqual, the regulator, as much as anything.

We spoke to Amanda Spielman in a previous interview. She made quite an interesting point about coursework, which was one we'd not really considered. We thought the issue with coursework was that, if you come from a more privileged background, then you're going to get lots of help. But her argument was actually that what was happening in schools was that students who were of a lower ability were spending so much time in class with their teachers focusing on getting this coursework done and getting it right and getting a good grade for it that, in the end, they weren't getting a broad curriculum. They weren't getting broad learning. And that was having a really detrimental effect on their overall learning. It is interesting, as well as the fact that the proportion getting top grades was significantly higher than the proportion getting those grades in exams. So it just had no validity in terms of the regulator.

Just looking ahead now to the upcoming curriculum and assessment review. I'm guessing you're reasonably protective of your reforms. So what are you hoping/expecting to see from that review?

I hope Professor Francis is true to her word when she says evolution, not revolution. I'm not precious about what I did in office. I'm protective of our education system. There's history around the world. It's littered with examples of very effective reform that's undone, in Portugal, Spain, by subsequent ministers. You see the country go up in the league tables and then these reforms come in and then they start declining in the league tables. And it isn't just about league tables. Those league tables reflect reality in the classrooms and the quality of education of millions of young people. So I just think they've got to be very careful that everything they recommend has evidence to back it. And there's so much more knowledge now about cognitive science and evidence from around the world about other reform programs, that Becky Francis just needs to make sure that everything they recommend has that evidence base. And we have the Education Endowment Foundation that she ran after Kevan Collins. They have a massive library of evidence, randomised control trials, and so on. And they've analysed other research and defined this quality by a set of criteria so they can reach into all those resources to make sure everything they recommend is backed by that, rather than some sort of knee-jerk ideological reaction which is what you're seeing, I'm afraid, from the government in the Children's Well-being and Schools Bill. The schools parts of that bill are just terrible. I'm optimistic in one sense, though, that governments come and go, ministers come and go.

And as I said at the beginning, the thing I'm proud of is the unleashing of the intellectual renaissance of our teaching profession. I meet teachers now all the time, even after I've left Parliament. I was yesterday, meeting the CEO of the City of London Academies Trust, and they really do understand the evidence about the most effective way to run a school. And that's repeated up and down the country. There are tens of thousands of teachers who really do understand the importance of knowledge. They value the freedoms and autonomy that Academy status has, to enable them to implement these most effective methods.

And that won't change. The genie will not go back into the bottle just because a Labour government decides that they don't agree with all that stuff. So I remain optimistic because the teaching profession really does embrace evidence. A thousand teachers turn up on a cold Saturday in September to spend a day, the first weekend in the new academic year, attending a Research-Ed conference at some school somewhere. That's the profession we have today. So I'm optimistic about the future of our education system. I think we’ve managed to talk about everything we wanted to.

We also wanted to say on a personal level as parents, how amazing phonics is.

Super, how old are your children?

Our seven-year-old - and I remember thinking, oh no, I don't like this. But it's some sort of witchcraft. It is actually magic.

That's wonderful. And the thing about it is, it's not just the mechanics that they can sound out words, it's the confidence that it gives those children. Oh, they love it. I mean, they just absolutely love it. So it's been really fascinating to see it from that perspective. That’s wonderful to hear. People forget that it really was a battle, the phonics battle. There's still some holdouts who occasionally write to the newspapers. Talk about barking at print! But like everything Michael Gove and I did from 2010 onwards, it was an intellectual battle, and we had to marshal the arguments as well as we could. But now we have PIRLS and we have PISA and we have TIMSS and which actually makes the argument so much more compelling.

Thank you so much, Nick, for your time. It's been really enjoyable.

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