Former UK schools minister: Reforms needed to change ‘hearts and minds’ of teachers

One of the UK’s longest-serving education ministers, who introduced phonics into the English school system, says the extensive decade-long reforms that rejected ‘progressivist’ ideologies requires more than just change to the curriculum.

Former British education minister Nick Gibb.

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One of Britain’s longest-serving education ministers, who introduced phonics into the English school system, said the extensive decade-long reforms that rejected “progressivist” ideologies required not just a change to the curriculum but also changes to “the hearts and minds of a whole profession”.

Ex-Tory minister Nick Gibb said the “movement of teachers” since the reforms began in 2010 was a “work in progress”, and that teaching phonics – helping children learn to read by sounding out the letters of words – was only the baseline.

“The evidence is so overwhelming that phonics in the teaching of reading is the most ­effective way. And this debate has gone to Australia, it’s gone to America, it’s gone to New Zealand, they’re all now moving step by step towards phonics,” the minister of state for schools and education from 2014 to 2023 said ahead of the Australian School Improvement Summit in Melbourne on Thursday.

“Although we have introduced phonics, and every school is teaching phonics to children, that’s the starting point for reading. It’s a necessary condition for reading; you have to be able to decode words but you also need to develop a love of reading for pleasure as well … so there’s more work to do there.”

England was ranked fourth in the 2022 international literacy rankings. In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment, Australia sco­red higher than the UK in reading but on par in maths.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has made an extra $16bn in funding for public schools in each state and territory over the next decade conditional upon the introduction of evidence-based teaching reforms, such as phonics-based reading methods, and explicit instruction techniques. Western Australia, Tasmania and the NT have signed on. Public schools in South Australia, NSW and WA have already adopted phonics and explicit instruction.

Progressive ideology, inquiry-based learning that sets tasks for students to discover facts and skills using their own initiative, failed the most vulnerable in ­society, Mr Gibb said, warning that it still persisted today.

“What we had to do wasn’t just put more money here, or close this, or open that. We had to change the whole Zeitgeist, the whole philosophy of education that had dominated our education system in England for decades,” he said.

“And that was the challenge. We set out to change the whole way the education sector – 450,000 teachers – thought about education, and the teacher training that goes into that as well.

“But we had evidence on our side … the evidence was so compelling that progressivist education was damaging the life chances of the most disadvantaged … (they) really did suffer from this ideological approach.”

Mr Gibb said while it was “not finished”, the conservative government reforms had started a movement. “There is a big movement of teachers in England who strongly believe in what we believe in … We’ve unleashed the profession to take control of their own thinking, their own pedagogy and curriculum.”

Mr Gibb said his government also changed the curriculum to be much more “knowledge based”.

“There are people whose whole careers are based on the idea that you don’t need to teach knowledge because they can look it up … and this view still prevails particularly with Google and AI.”