A Tale of Spaddery

Recollections of COVID, Brexit, Free Speech and more

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was a dream job, it was a world-wide pandemic.

It was a time of camaraderie, it was a time of isolation.

Between 2019 and 2022 I worked as a Special Adviser, or SpAd, in the Department of Education. I worked for four different ministers, including three Secretaries of States, and alongside many other interesting people - ministers, SpAds and civil servants. I was there for some of the most dramatic moments of recent political history, including the last part of the march to Brexit and the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was a wonderful, inspiring, traumatic, challenging, fulfilling, emotional roller-coaster - the job of a lifetime in so many ways. More than two years and three Prime Ministrs on, with a new party in Government, and various bits of information now in the public domain¹, it’s time to say something about it.

I was a SpAd for essentially the whole of the Boris Johnson premiership, with a small break in December 2019 - January 2020. I began working for Jo Johnson (Minister for Universities and Science) in August 2019, only for this to go pear-shaped a few weeks later when he unexpectedly resigned². I then worked briefly for Kwasi Kwarteng and then moved out to find a new job, thinking my brief SpAdding adventure was over.

Fortunately for me, Gavin Williamson (Education Secretary) found himself in need of SpAds after the 2019 General Election³ and was kind enough to interview me, and then take me, for the role⁴. I worked for him until he left the role in September 2021, whereupon I transitioned to a new role working for Michelle Donelan (as Universities Minister) and Nadhim Zahawi (Education Secretary) until the downfall of Boris and a 36 hour stint working solely for Michelle as Education Secretary. At this point I decided not to try to hustle to get reappointed by her successor on the grounds that (a) three years was enough; and (b) Liz Truss looked like she was going to win the leadership election and I wasn’t particularly enamoured about the concept of working in a Truss premiership, a forecast that came true even sooner than I’d anticipated.

For most of this time I was working primarily on post-16 policy - colleges, universities and apprenticeships - but for about a year in the middle I covered the whole brief, including schools and early years. I was fortunate in that every Minister I worked for was one that I liked, trusted and respected - and who treated me well.

In this piece I’ll be talking about what it’s really like being a SpAd, why some of the wilder myths aren’t true, but why it’s still the best job in the world. I’ll write about my personal experiences, some of the highlights and disasters, including the debacle of 2020 A-Level results day, and the time we opened schools and shut them again on the same day. While this isn’t a policy piece, I’ve been unable to avoid sharing some views about COVID and lockdown policy, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act and various other things.

I’ll write about the heady days of the road to Brexit, and what it was like to walk down the centre of Victoria Street at the height of the pandemic, with no cars in sight, to enter an 8-story office block with just 12 people in it. I’ll have the odd moan and gripe about terms and conditions, and more positively talk about my experience of working with the civil service from the other side. I’ll write about the time I thought about resigning - and why I didn’t. And I’ll answer the two questions I’m asked most often: what it was like to work with Dominic Cummings⁵ and with Gavin Williamson.

It’s a long read, so buckle up.

But before we go on, a reminder that last month I published my second novel, Visions in Exile.

Visions in Exile and the previous novel, Visions in Exile, are fantasy novels set in a c. 18th century world, featuring two main characters: Thomas, an Imperial diplomat who discovers he has the power to see the future, and Rianda, a young queen of a nation squeezed between the expansionist powers to its north, and a greater enemy, allied with dark powers, to the south.

For more details see here.

And to buy a copy from Amazon, for as little as £1.99:

• Buy Visions in Exile - for Kindle - and in paperback - and in illustrated hardback.

• Buy Imperial Visions - for Kindle - and in paperback

Now back to SpAdding!

Contents

1. Being a SpAd

2. Working with the Civil Service

   1. ‘Why does no-one in this department care about righting wrongs?’

   2. ‘Why does every new idea in this building come from the 7th floor?’

3. The road to Brexit

4. COVID and Lockdown

   1. Working through COVID

   2. COVID: Policies and Issues

   3. Results Day 2020

   4. Opening and shutting schools the same day.

   5. On the brink of resigning

5. Dramatis Personae

   1. Dominic Cummings

   2. Gavin Williamson

6. It’s not about the money, money, money…

7. What I’m proud of

   1. But but but…

8. And finally

Being a SpAd

Being a SpAd is an amazing job. You get to be in the room when the big decisions are taken. You’re listened to and taken seriously. You spend hours a day with the Secretary of State - and see and comment on every document that goes to them. When you realise, outside, how much people - industry bosses, public sector leaders, NGOs - value just one hour with the Secretary of State - it brings home just what an amazing privilege it is.

Of course, there are some downsides. Job insecurity, knowing it can end immediately if your Minister resigns or is fired, which can be nothing to do with your job or performance⁶ can be draining⁷. You work very long hours - around 60-65 hours a week is typical⁸ - but though this is draining after a while, it tends to draw one in at the time, as the work is so engaging and feels so important⁹.

The flip side is that, if you care about policy and changing things in the country¹⁰, there really is no job like it. There’s the West Wing¹¹ quote, “We have the ability to affect more change in a day at the White House than we'll have in a lifetime once we walk out those doors,” which encapsulates it: slightly exaggerated, for sure, but it captures the essence.

You have direct access to policy as it is made, the ability to shape it, suggest things, stop bad things going ahead. Your actions can directly impact whether a critical piece of action moves forward instead of getting stuck in limbo for months. Of course, you’re not alone: you’re working with civil servants, Ministers and other SpAds, all (hopefully!) pulling together. But overall, the ratio of ‘impactful activities : non-impactful activities’ is higher than anywhere else I’ve worked - particularly if you want to change things.

A lot of nonsense is sometimes spoken about SpAds. People think we have far more influence than we do, or that we’re secret Svengalis who manipulate everything that happens. This is nearly always complete claptrap¹² - and, in general, people get the causality the wrong way round. SpAds do not manipulate Ministers; rather, Ministers hire in their own image. To give a specific example, one reason Gavin Williamson hired me was because he was passionate about supporting further education and skills: something I also cared about and had written about. We talked about it in the interview he thought I could be useful in helping him drive this agenda. Of course, SpAds suggest things, and give those ideas to Ministers, just as civil servants do, but it is almost always in domains that the Minister (either themselves, or based on e.g. a manifesto) has previously identified as priorities¹³.

Another misapprehension which I encounter, especially from some civil servants is that we SpAds believe in everything we’re working on. Of course, because we’re party political and hired by a specific Minister, we’re less likely to personally disagree with policies than a civil servant, who will work for Ministers and Governments of all stripes and colours. But not all Tories agree on everything and SpAds and Ministers are no different.

To give a specific example, I worked diligently for one boss for six months trying to bring in post-qualification admissions, before working for three months for the next boss to kill it off. You can safely assume my own personal opinions¹⁴ about the matter did not also do a u-turn overnight! Excluding some of the COVID measures (of which more below), the issue I personally disagreed with the most was the plan to lengthen the school day¹⁵: I thought it was a further negative encroachment of the state on parental time, and excruciatingly expensive to boot. But my Secretary of State supported it, so it was my job to push it forward, which I did - though I must say I was very happy¹⁶ when the then Chancellor vetoed it at the 11th hour on cost grounds. Just as with civil servants, advisers advise, Ministers decide - and once a decision is made, you loyally implement.

The reality is both more far more prosaic than the myths - but still pretty surreal. You are part adviser, part generator of ideas, party driver of priorities¹⁷. You can ask to speak to almost anyone - a senior businessperson, a university vice-chancellor, an academic - and they’ll speak to you. You can ask the civil servants for a briefing on something - and they’ll give it to you. You get to give your thoughts and opinions on almost everything that the department does.

Being a SpAd is a unique position in that you have incredible access and influence, combined with, paradoxically, almost no formal power. You manage no-one - indeed, you are forbidden from doing so. You control no budgets - again, you are forbidden from doing so. You have no security of tenure. Your entire influence and position comes from the Secretary of State you are working for: specifically, the extent to which you speak,and are seen to be speaking for him or her, and the extent to which they listen to and trust your advice. A good Special Adviser is both trusted by their principal and is trusted by the department to be speaking in their name¹⁸.

It is all too easy to get sucked into ‘doing your box’ - the tremendous pile of submissions, papers, Parliamentary Questions and other documents that you’re given every evening to look at and comment on before they go to the Secretary of State. A good private office will help guide you as to which you need to spend time on - and one’s own experience and instincts can help even more. But even at the best of times it would be easy to spend all of your time either in meetings with your principal, or going through the papers one is given.

But while processing these papers is obviously essential parts of the role, in order to be really effective, one has to carve out additional time to be proactive. You have to read things that you’re not given - ideas from outside, books, papers. You have to speak to people who can give you ideas - or who can help you triangulate the truth of what is really happening. You have to make the time to actively drive your principal’s priorities: whether that’s by working proactively with the civil service to shape them as they are developed, liaising with opposite numbers in No. 10, Treasury or other departments to smooth the way, or working with MPs and others in the wider political ecosystem to build support. And hardest of all, you have to carve out time to think ahead, plan, and strategise - even if that time is only in the shower, riding your bike, or on a job.

Some elements of the role are just about being there to do what matters - whatever that is. A significant amount of time will often be spent prepping your Secretary of State for Select Committees, debates and media appearances. But if your Secretary of State is anxious before a major TV interview or Parliamentary appearance and simply wants an hour to talk to you and unwind in a safe space - well, that’s your job too, to sit and listen, and anything else you had planned goes out the window. Helping them to be in the right frame of a mind is more important than anything else you could do.

You may be working on a keynote speech one moment and helping to sort out diary arrangements for a political meeting the next. It’s a role in which you can both summon directors on a whim¹⁹ - and a role in which your time is never your own, for you are, at any moment, at the beck and call of your boss. You are THEIR adviser: one of two or three people - out of the thousands or tens of thousands of civil servants, arm’s-length body staff and public service workforces they oversee - who is unequivocally theirs, who sits outside any other hierarchy, who has a loyalty only to them, are there to serve them, and can be dismissed at their will. It ends up making for a very close relationship²⁰.

In short, it is a wonderful, tumultuous, chaotic, ever-changing, whirlwind delight of a job. Every SpAd role is different, and every SpAd does the job in a slightly different way. But for most it is a privilege, an opportunity of a lifetime, and a memory to treasure.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Working with the civil service

As someone who ‘crossed the fence’ from the civil service to the political side it was fascinating to see the civil service from the other side. As I’d only left around 18 months before - after a career of almost 12 years - I knew a lot of people in the department, at a whole variety of grades. It was always quite funny bumping into someone I knew from a previous role in the canteen, or being in a meeting where I knew one Grade 6 very well, but not the Director nor, indeed, anyone else.

Relations between SpAds and civil servants have improved a lot since the days of Yes Minister. No-one tried to banish me to an office in Finchley. On the contrary, SpAds have a regular position in the heart of the department, supported by a private office and with a well established part of the submissions process. The best civil servants know that SpAds are a core part of the team, and most I worked with were helpful, constructive and friendly. At worst they’ll try to sideline or go round with you, but the most they’ll do openly against you is try to bury you in paperwork.

And while it’s a cliche, I did find most of the civil servants I worked with to be extremely good - just as I had when I was amongst them. My own private office was incredibly supportive, and the Secretary of State’s private secretaries were also outstanding, particularly during the COVID years. These were people I worked incredibly closely with, grew to respect tremendously and built up a strong camaraderie with, borne of many hours of working together. There were many positive times - not to mention a few lighter moments²¹.

The civil servants in the core department were also, on the main, bright, helpful, committed and passionate about their work. But to go beyond the cliches, here are some observations:

1. Both as a civil servant, and as a SpAd, when compared to my time in the private sector, I would say that the individual calibre of civil servants, particularly at the more senior level, was typically higher than what I saw elsewhere - but that the collective fruits of their endeavour was usually worse. The Whitehall system incentivises process, bureacracy, indecisiveness and delayed decion-making. Accountability and responsility is too diffuse; even those who passionately want to achieve things often can’t. The correct interpretation is not that lazy, incompetent or biased civil servants deliberately sabotage Government policy - that is simply wrong - but that even highly capable and motivated civil servants struggle to achieve things in a system which prioritises seeking consensus and avoiding blame rather than delivering for the country.

2. As a SpAd (or as a Minister) you tend to see the best of the civil service. These are those put on the most nationally critical projects, or those that are the Secretary of State’s priorities. As many others have observed (including civil servants in the every staff survey) - and as I saw as a senior civil servant - the civil service has a serious problem with performance management and with removing those who underperform²². These people exist, in unnecessarily large numbers, and drag down the overall performance of the civil service as a whole.

One particular ongoing challenge was in matters of procurement and delivery. COVID aside (where some very impressive things were done on delivering laptops, setting up testing and more), there seemed to be no sense of urgency for programmes - such as the National Tutoring Fund, T-Levels or the Turing scheme - to hit their targets. Procurement contracts routinely seemed to be set up poorly, with no incentives for contractors to deliver and with it being extremely difficult to terminate these for poor performance.

When programmes were behind schedule, civil servants would typically just present this as a state of nature, sometimes proposing ineffectual actions that had not worked before (e.g. ‘we will communicate more with group X’) to improve them. Furthermore, there appeared to be no consequences for failure, as senior civil servants who led delivery programmes which had massively underperformed regularly got promoted.

Outside COVID, there was only one delivery team I worked with which would systematically and proactively come to us with specific and impactful ideas of how to rejig the programme to hit delivery targets, and that was the Skills Bootcamp team (unsurprisingly, they were one of the few teams to actually hit these targets).

This approach to delivery, it should be said, stands in stark contrast to the approach to handling policy or Parliamentary matters, which was typically considered far more consequential.

‘Why does no-one in this department care about righting wrongs?’

I’ve written extensively in the past about civil service impartiality - but the short summary is that the civil service tries very hard to be impartial and what bias exists is far more often about group-think than malice. It’s certainly true that the civil service will respond more readily to ‘What can we do to improve things for disabled people in situation X?’ than ‘What can we do to curb union power?’ - but they’d also likely be sceptical of ‘What can we do to nationalise the steel industry?’ And in every case, if they’re genuinely convinced that a Secretary of State really wants to do something - or if it’s in the manifesto - they will act.

Rather than being biased to left or right²³, the biggest bias is towards inertia and the status quo. The typical response to an idea or initiative will be to say the issue is not such that it demands that we do something, or to say that doing something would have unfortunate side-effects or not be appropriate, or (as a last resort) to propose something that will not make the blindest bit of difference, such as suggesting that the Minister convene a round-table on the issue.

This led to one Minister of my acquaintaince memorably venting, ‘Why does no-one in this department care about righting wrongs?’ when they felt they were being fobbed off on an issue that they wanted to make progress on.

What’s important to understand is that, in many cases, this response from the civil service is both understandable - and may even be reasonable. Ministers (and SpAds) throw off lots of ideas, often after meeting a stakeholder or seeing something in the news. Many of these ideas are indeed stupid or impractical. And others, even if they are broadly sensible, may not be something the Minister will care about in a week or a month - or, even if they will, not something that they’d get backing for from the Treasury, No. 10 or elsewhere. Or simply less important than other current priorities.

If civil servants said ‘how high?’ every time a Minister said ‘jump’ they’d spend their entire time hopping randomly and never get anything done. A bit of checking if the Minister really cares about this is just common sense (and is also why the best and most effective Ministers are - and keep their departments - ruthlessly focused on their priorities).

On the other hand, this does sometimes become the default course of action - and can be taken too far. I personally found it frustrating that options which would make very little difference²⁴ were presented as reasonable options. I do think the civil service could do better at this, and making things more explicit, rather than presenting ‘actions’ as ‘solutions’.²⁵ The other big frustration is the sheer amount of time that things take (advice is almost always for caution, or for delay).

I recognise there is a question of taste and personality here. Even if an organisation needs both those driving things forward and those urging delay, on a personal level, I would rather be the person who was pushing for things, and driving them forward, rather than the person who is urging caution, delay and risk-aversion²⁶. But even having said that, the civil service could, and should, have a greater bias towards action and speed.

As a SpAd, one develops a spider-sense to know on which topics the civil service will leap to with aplomb²⁷ and what things will require an extra push²⁸. There would typically be a point - which as a SpAd you could almost feel - when a team suddenly ‘clicked’ and got behind an initiative. At this point they would be committed to driving it forward, and wanting it to happen because they are working on it and care about, not just because a Minister has asked for it²⁹ - and when you know you will no longer have to push and drive, but that the civil servants will now be coming to you or the Minsiter, actively raising issues and trying to overcome them. I saw it happen (at different stages) with HGV bootcamps, with the Free Speech Act, with banning non-disclosure agreements for sexual harassment cases, for the Jubilee Book and for a host of other things - and it’s a wonderful moment.

Another core ‘spider-sense’ one needs to develop - which I’d tell new SpAds when they asked me for tips - is to learn to recognise when you need to listen to the objections. Because almost every initiative is met with reasons not to do it - and to get almost anything done a Minister (or their SpAd) has to drive and push past these - an easy trap to fall into is to assume that all objections are spurious, and just to push past them.

But sometimes, the objections are very serious and valid! How can one tell? As a SpAd, that’s part of your job; to say to your principal, ‘I know this team is always saying we can’t do things, but this time they’re actually right: you’re going to land in massive political hot water / end up spending a lot of taxpayer’s money if we press on as we are’. The extra time that you, as a SpAd, are able to spend really digging into things - and cultivating relationships with civil servants whose judgement you trust and who you can count on to ‘tell it how it is’³⁰ is invaluable to this.

Why does every new idea in this building come from the 7th floor?

As well as working with other civil servants, I worked with some great SpAd colleagues, ranging from experienced journalists to canny political operators. I was also fortunate enough to work with some outstanding policy advisers as part of an informal ‘extended ministerial office’.

Policy advisers are a bit like SpAds, in that they don’t typically manage people and work to provide advice to a Minister or the Secretary of State, but they are not political. They are, formally speaking, civil servants, and cannot do political stuff, such as writing opposition attack lines or going to Party Conferences. Often they serve for a fixed period on a very specific policy area. They are a great way to bring people into the department who have specialist knowledge and align with a Minister’s position in that policy area, even if they may not share overall party alignment: of the PADs I worked with, at least three were Tories, but at least one was a Labour voter (of the Blairite/Starmerite, rather than Corbynite persuasion) and another a Lib Dem - but that never made any difference to how we worked together.

It was one of these that said the quote above: ‘Why does every new idea in this building come from the 7th floor?’ [The 7th floor being the Ministerial floor at the time]. While not entirely true, there is a real truth at the heart of it: most genuinely new ideas in Government don’t come from the civil service, despite there being an awful lot of them working on policy. They come from Party HQs and from MPs; they come from think-tanks; they come from charities, they come from independent reviews; or they come from the Ministers, SpAds and Policy Advisers in Government.

The civil service is brilliant at turning a high-level idea into a deliverable policy; at operationalising ideas and making them happen; and at doing the vast amount of work needed to transform a policy into legislation, guidance, regulations or whatever else is needed to make it have real world policies. They can increment or tweak policies that are already in place. But they very rarely - in my experience - develop major new ideas that take policy in a different direction.

I’m not totally sure why this is. Certainly it seems like something the civil service should be able to do: they have the talent, they have the numbers and they should be able to create the space. Possibly, one reason is that most Ministers don’t actually want the civil service doing this, they want them getting on with delivering the manifesto or other priorities. Possibly civil servicants don’t feel empowered to do this - or that doing so isn’t rewarded. But given that new ideas are needed more often than every five years, the ‘extended ministerial office’ (staffed by a mixture of civil servants and external appointments) is the best ways I’ve seen of both enabling them and then seeing them through - and is a model that I would recommend being adopted more widely.

Despite these gripes, I very much enjoyed working with civil servants. They are for the most part committed, bright and passionate people, interested in their jobs and wanting to make a difference. If they are no longer precisely ‘my’ tribe, they are at least an adjacent one. I like to think that at least some of them liked working with me (which the relationships and interactions I’ve maintained since leaving would bear out), and that most of the ones who didn’t like me at least respected me. I’m sure a few did neither, but them’s the breaks.

Of the different types of SpAds, policy SpAds - of whom I was one - probably spend most time working with the civil service, and my own background as a civil servant likely pre-disposed me to doing this more than most. It’s amazing how much simply setting up a fortnightly meeting with a team can send a signal to them (and their superiors) that this is a project that the Secretary of State cares about and wants to make happen. Or how being in regular touch with teams can help to know when they are getting stuck on something and could do with talking to a Minister, or need some support in an interdepartmental tiff. I was far more often working in partnership with the civil service than at odds with them.

All of which is to say that the civil service is a great organisation staffed with fantastic people - and that, for the most part, it was a pleasure working with them. At times, the structures and processes of the civil service, as well as perennial problems such as ‘churn’, means that it achieves less than it should for the calibre of the people it has working for it: there are certainly ways in which reform could help. But it is still a great organisation, and one I very much enjoyed working with as a SpAd.

Now, on to the juicy stuff!

The road to Brexit

Cast your mind back to August 2019. The wrangling about Brexit had gone on for three long years. There’d been a general election, ‘meaningful votes’, endless debates and arguments that seemed to settle nothing. The country was sick of it. It was so sick of it that in the election later that year the Conservatives ran a highly effective advert that was literally ‘Vote for us to stop the arguing’.

This isn’t a section about the pros and cons of Brexit. If you want to know what I think about Brexit now, you can read it here. This section is about what it was like to work in Government during this period.

I know some of my readers didn’t support Brexit. But I did - and while I’d never thought it likely we’d win the Referendum, I’d never dreamed that, if we did, Parliament would refuse to implement it.³¹ To see Parliament dither and delay for years, with increasing talk of delays, was agonising.

Boris becoming leader felt like the last throw of the dice. I’d voted for him as leader, not because I wasn’t aware of his flaws, but because I thought he was the only one who could take us out - and that this was existential for us as a nation. Joining Government as a SpAd that August, it was inspiring to be a small part of that team. Particularly as I’d had to sit out the Referendum itself due to being a civil servant at the time³², it was exciting to be part of this final push.

We all knew the only way out would - almost certainly - be via a General Election. Everything was focused on that, though other policies and the ongoing business of Government did continue. Every Friday all SpAds would gather in No. 10 (exciting in and of itself) to have our meeting with Dominic Cummings - a combination of a lecture, strategy session, celebrating success and pep talk. You could feel the buzz: everyone there was working to the same goal.

As the weeks went on, the political turmoil only increased. The expulsion of the rebels, prorogation, the Benn Act. It felt like racing down a tunnel where the walls are closing in, hoping that, like Indiana Jones, we’d dive through the door just before it closed - with our hat. I was the smallest of small fry, but I was part of it.

Ultimately, of course, we know what happened. Parliament voted to dissolve itself, the General Election took place, and Boris won a stonking majority. We left the EU, and the people deemed that political turmoil was ended forever.

But it was not so.

COVID and Lockdown³³

We all had different pandemics.

I had one of the more fortunate ones: I had fulfilling, meaningful work, I lived in a detached house with a garden and a wood behind³⁴ and it didn’t interfere with any significant life-events such as exams, university or a wedding. I obviously wish it hadn’t happened, but I was luckier than most.

My abiding memories of the first lockdown will always be travelling in on an empty train, a carriage to myself, to walk down an empty Victoria Street with almost all the shops closed and no cars or other people in sight. I could have walked in the middle of the road, had I wished to - it was like something out of Day of the Triffids³⁵.

Then I’d arrive at Sanctuary Buildings, where no more than a dozen of us were working - the Secretary of State, my fellow SpAds, and a handful of dedicated private secretaries³⁶ - to put in a twelve hour day, working on policies and programmes - closing schools! opening schools! buying a million laptops! - that everyone would have said was impossible just a few months before.

It was an incredibly intense period. The bonds formed amongst the dozen of us who were in regularly were strong. There were long hours, days after days in which we were being relentlessly criticised (sometimes deservedly, sometimes because there were just no good options), intense stress and massive decisions being made on compressed timescales.

For all that it felt bad for us, those on the front line - in schools, colleges and universities - had it far worse. Hundreds of pages of guidance were pumped out, with minimal notice for those who had to implement it. Universities shifted to online teaching overnight. Schools had to adjust to a completely different way of working. The Student Loans Company moved something like 2,000 people from in-office working to working at home - including creating new secure interfaces given the personal and financial data involved - in two weeks, with no noticeable catastrophes.³⁷

This cannot be a post about all of COVID, of the Government’s response, or about whether lockdowns were right or wrong. But for context in understanding the below, let me put some cards on the table.

I believe that the Government was right to take some action on COVID, but that many of the actions taken were too severe, poorly targeted and went on far too long. Public health considerations were prioritised to the exclusion of other considerations - economic, educational, social mobility, mental health, simply ‘living’ - and the structures of how Government set itself up to respond contributed to this. Children and young people - who were not themselves at risk - in particular were asked to pay far too high a price.

Furlough was good, but overall we spent too much money on too many things, which contributed to the subsequent inflation and cost-of-living crisis, and to our current economic troubles.

To the extent that lock-downs were necessary, they should have been very short - weeks, not months - and only to the extent necessary to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed. Even in the most extreme lockdowns, preventing close family members from being present with those on their death-bed, or with women giving birth, should never have been implemented. Closing schools was probably unavoidable in that very first onrush, but they should have reopened much sooner and not closed again. More broadly, other than short bursts of lockdown where necessary to stop the NHS being overwhelmed, a level of normal life should have continued as much as possible until the vaccine was rolled out, with curtailment on ‘super-spreader’ events such as sports matches, and on international travel. Essentially, we should have done something much closer to The Hammer and the Dance, or to Sweden’s approach.

Finally, I am unequivocally pro-vaccine and think the UK’s approach to contributing to its research, its procurement and its roll-out that prioritised the most vulnerable groups was exemplary. Post-vaccine roll-out, COVID should be treated like any other endemic respiratory disease, such as ‘flu, and we should not be considering it or testing for it in any way³⁸, other than to provide regular vaccines for the vulnerable.

My personal views were pretty irrelevant during most of COVID, as decisions were taken at a level far higher than me (every major decision on matters such as school closures were taken by the Prime Minister, working with a small group of Cabinet Ministers and scientific advisers - and SAGE and COVID-O pored over even the minutest of decisions). But it’s probably helpful to know where I’m coming from when reading the next sections.

Working through COVID

My first meeting about COVID was innocuous. A week or two after rejoining Government I was called to a meeting in No. 10 to discuss this new disease - I think in relation to the cases that had arisen in a small number of university students returning from Asia. I can remember vividly how I conscientiously created a new folder in my inbox called ‘crises’, following by a subfolder called ‘COVID’. Little did I know how that subfolder would soon expand to encompass almost everything else.

A light-hearted incident - one of the few I had for a long while after - is that after rejoining, I’d spent some time persuading my private office to move to the ‘virtual box’ system that I’d had in BEIS, rather than printing things off for me³⁹. A couple of weeks later the whole office switched to working from home and I looked incredibly prescient.⁴⁰

That first week or two after the pandemic hit in earnest was chaotic, full-on and more than a little frightening. As I’m sure most of us can remember, the pandemic went from this thing that looked like it might be moderately serious to full-on lock-down in about two weeks. We closed schools. Policies that’d normally take two years and multiple consultations - like defining who was a ‘key worker’ - were decided in days. Teams of civil servants performed wonders, turning a staff reward voucher system into a large-scale welfare system providing free school lunch vouchers to a million people, and starting to buy and deliver hundreds of thousands of laptops⁴¹.

I moved out of my house to a friend’s empty apartment going home only on Saturday morning. I was travelling in three days a week (not - usually - Thursday or Friday) so there’d be a couple of days to see whether I had COVID before infecting the rest of my family⁴². After a few weeks the global evidence was clearer that young children basically weren’t affected, so I moved back in.

As the pandemic went on I was fortunate enough to also be working on other policies - in particular on skills reform, which was the key policy area Gavin Williamson had said he wanted to keep making progress on. But COVID work never stopped being intenese, from the abortive effort to impose voluntary number limits⁴³, and broader preparation for results day. There was a lot of prepping for media or Parliamentary appearances. And of course at some periods such as when schools went back, or the Rashford Free School Meals campaigns, all of us were pulled in.

The utter debacle of Results Day 2020 I’ll talk about more below.

After September things became both better and worse. The Department got a new Permanent Secretary, who put things on a much more organised footing, including redeploying resources and appointing a new Director-General for COVID. On the other hand, my fellow policy SpAd departed, kicking off a year in which I covered the whole brief: schools, universities, COVID and non-COVID - the lot. I found the next 2-3 months incredibly challenging. I was stretched beyond what I’ve faced before, and I could feel my work quality and personal resilience suffering - before I managed to find a new equilibrium. It didn’t help that as autumn wore on it became gradually clearer that far from being out of the woods we were heading back into them, and deeper.

November and December were an increasing battle to keep schools open. And then the hammer blow of January, when we opened schools only to close them later that same day - of which more below. But after that, finally, we were on the long road to freedom, with schools, colleges and universities reopening. Other policies began to see the light of day, too, including the Skills for Jobs White Paper and the Free Speech White Paper. We got two Bills in the Queen’s Speech.

It still wasn’t a smooth road - ‘pingageddon’ stands out as a lowlight - but we made it to August and the end of most COVID measures. Exams 2021 went far better than 2020.⁴⁴ Then a final fillip of anxiety around Omicron⁴⁵ and the pandemic was over.

COVID: Policies and Issues

Everything written anywhere on this blog is entirely personal. But it’s worth re-emphasising here: all views expressed are entirely my own, not those of any minister I worked for, or of anyone else.

We did a lot of things in the pandemic. Most of them harmed children in one way or another. Both the Conservatives and Labour have now acknowledged that schools were closed for too long - but at the time, the Tories were the ones who did it, and Labour also called for it, and even refused to say whether they supported them reopening. The voices in favour of schools staying open were few and far between - and should be commended.

I lost what respect I had left for the teaching unions during that time. In stark contrast to the nurses and doctors in the NHS - who were at much greater personal risk - most of the unions both steadfastly resisted schools reopening, and simultaneously opposed measures to make schools carry out remote learning. The campaign for teachers to be vaccinated first (when schools weren’t even open!) was thankfully ignored⁴⁶ in favour of the risk-based approach adopted by the Government that maximised lives saves. I am aware that many individual teachers and school leaders did not share the views of their unions and worked incredibly hard.

Many of the awful things we did were done by us with the aim of keeping schools open. In a lot of ways it felt like collaborating with an oppressor, where you accede to demands on the grounds that not doing so would make things worse.

The edict would come out that if we did something horrible and unjustified to millions of children - like making them wear masks, or isolating them, or making them undergo daily testing - then we could keep schools open, or partially open them, or reopen them. Because that would make it worth it, wouldn’t it? Sometimes it worked, and other times they’d tell us to close the schools anyway.

To collaborate, or not? What else could we do? The public massively supported lockdowns, as did every major party, and most of the media. For better or worse, I chose the path of collaboration⁴⁷ - and it makes me much for sympathetic to those who’ve chosen that path in the past. But I don’t blame those who condemn us for it. And I have little doubt that what we did was wrong.⁴⁸

There were lots of other things we did along the way. Some of what we were criticised for were essentially stupid political errors, which no doubt we could have done better on - but which fortunately didn’t make much difference to anything other than us, and our reputation. No. 10’s habit of repeatedly u-turning was particularly unhelpful. The quintessential example is with regards to Marcus Rashford’s campaign to provide free school meals in the holiday. As a Department, we’d have been happy to hold the line and say ‘no’, or to agree at the beginning to provide them.⁴⁹ But to be ordered to keep saying we wouldn’t, only to be told at the 11th hour to u-turn and provide them, was a more than a little galling - especially when we ended up repeating the entire playbook, line for line, a second time around.

But aside from the political errors, there were plenty of issues that really mattered where we didn’t do well enough. Of course, some of what we did worked - quite a lot of it, by the numbers.⁵⁰ But even when things did work, the guidance was often too late, too complex and added burden for those at the coal face. Despite the enormous sums of money we spent, it wasn’t nearly enough to compensate everyone for the losses they were facing or expenses incurred. The policy environment was slightly crazy, often frenetic. And often there were no good outcomes - just a choice of evils.

All of it though - except exams - pales beside the overriding harm of closing schools for so many for so long. We can see the results clearly today: from the stubborn problem of persistent absense, the reversal of gains in social mobility and the damaged mental health of children and young people. Many of these young people will be paying a price for this decision for years - maybe their whole lives.

Results Day 2020

So, we screwed up. We screwed up big time.

This was one of the biggest mistakes of the pandemic - and it was on us. Not No. 10, for once, but on us. It was a colossal catastrophe that affected over a million young people at what should have been a joyous and celebratory time.

So how did we screw up? I wrote a memo for seniors a couple of months afterwards, which basically consisted of six pages listing all the different ways we screwed up.⁵¹ But essentially, there were three major clusterings of mistakes:

• A strategic error, where we thought it would be better to adjust grades using an algorithm rather than letting teachers assign them, or using some form of limited exams.

• A technical error, where Ofqual made a terrible, terrible, algorithm that did things like awarding some people a D in Maths and an A in Further Maths, or making it so that people from some schools couldn’t get more than a B, just because no-one from that school had done it before.

• A political error, where we should have either overruled Ofqual much earlier or reversed course sooner - or, at the least, u-turned after we saw it go totally pear-shaped in Scotland, rather than carrying on shoving our hand into the mangle.

There are lots of sub-errors in each of these categories - but at the topline, that’s them. Any one of them could have sunk us - and we did all three.

I’m not qualified to talk about the middle category. And the last category is the least interesting: politicians never like to u-turn, and often do so too late. But the third is the most important, because it’s the most fundamental. I firmly believe that even if Ofqual had made the best possible algorithm, the approach we decided on wouldn’t have worked - and my evidence is what happened in (SNP run) Scotland, (Labour run) Wales and (Northern Irish party run) Northern Ireland, where they all tried something similar, and all of them failed terribly and had to revert to teacher assessed grades.

The one crumb of professional consolation is that we didn’t uniquely screw up. This wasn’t some crazy political idea Ministers and SpAds had dreamed up and pushed through against advce. Officials recommended it, we thought it sounded good, we put it out to consultation and got stakeholder support. Social mobility charities wrote back and told us we had to use some sort of adjustment, or else private schools / affluent kids would do better. Ofqual thought the plan sounded good. And as we can see, all four nations in the UK - despite having Governments of very different political persuasions - thought the same thing.

Not that that makes up for it to the young people involved.

The crucial thing, the thing we failed to realise, is that when the chips were down, everyone - and I mean basically everyone - felt that the grades their teachers had given them were the ‘real’ grades, and any adjustments by the algorithm were unfair. And of course teachers over-predicted⁵², so nearly all the adjustments were down, not up, and children weren’t getting into their chosen university because of this - and blaming the algorithm and us. Of course, the terrible algorithm made the anger burn faster and hotter - but it was exploding up at us regardless.

The worst of it is that, when I look back, I can imagine myself spotting this. This wasn’t something completely outside my zone of expertise. I’ve read books and papers about how people don’t trust algorithms: how they’ll reject a mortgage algorithm that shows even the smallest sign of racism, even if it’s provably less racist than the humans who were doing it. How they’ll demand much, much, higher safety standards for self-driving cars, and so on. Because the machines make mistakes in unusual ways, which seem more arbitrary and unfair - and because with a human judging things, people feel they have a chance, where an algorithm is cold and inhuman.

So I could have said something, but I didn’t. I didn’t even think of it - until it was too late, until we were well into the crisis. Now, it’s not like it was specifically my job to be an algorithm expert, or that no-one else couldn’t have raised it. Maybe if I had thought of it and raised it, I’d have been ignored and shut down. But I was in the room, and I could have thought of it, and I didn’t. So absolutely, part of the blame for that debacle is on me.

So what should we have done?

Well, with 20:20 hindsight, what we should have done is got the kids back to school much earlier, say in mid May - exam classes at a minimum - and just made them sit the exams. Then we’d have adjusted the grade boundaries so the same proportion of kids got As, Bs, etc. (or 9s, 8s, etc) as in 2019 and had done with it. It wouldn’t have been perfectly fair - some children had more support than others during the pandemic - but it would have been much better than the alternative.

Failing that, and given where SAGE was on getting schools back, we should have done what we did in 2021 (and what ended up happening in 2020, much more chaotically): teacher assessed grades, with a few checks and balances. And, as happened in 2021, basically everyone would have got on average a grade higher per subject, and people would have accepted it⁵³. There would have been real difficulties for universities who would have had to accept more people than they had places for, but they had to do that anyway after the Results Day debacle, and it would have been much easier to do that over two months rather than two weeks. With what we did, we really ended up with the worst of all worlds, plus chaos.

Basically, keep kids in school, keep exams. But failing that, trust teachers, not algorithms.

Opening and shutting schools the same day

This was the other big disaster that’s always cited about the DfE’s performance during the pandemic. And yes, it was hugely embarassing and made us look totally incompetent. But I’m going to argue that this one was fundamentally different to the exams debacle.

As the autumn turm progressed⁵⁴ it became clear we were going to have to fight to keep schools open. We managed to keep them open during the November mini-lockdown - though some were closing in some tiers - but crunch time was coming. In December we threatened to take one local authority to court when they planned to close schools without authorisation.⁵⁵

As the Christmas holidays grew near - and particularly after the new strain was discovered on Decemer 14th - we knew we’d be in for the fight of our life to keep them open. Gavin threw every bit of political influence he had into it. The civil servants rose to the occasion magnificently, marshalling documents full of evidence and arguing the case in Whitehall committees.

The battle continued right over Christmas and New Year. Every time we thought we’d got agreement, SAGE or the Health Secretary would throw something else in and reopen the decision.⁵⁶ In desperation, we asked SAGE⁵⁷ to model the option of keeping just primary schools open, not secondary, to see if at least we could keep the younger children in⁵⁸, but were told it couldn’t be done in the time available.

The decision was made that if - IF - we could set up a comprehensive, nationwide, testing regime, then we’d be allowed to open schools. It didn’t seem possible. But the new COVID DG, Julia Kinniburgh, led a team of officials in an absolutely prodigious feat, working throughout the holidays, to get it set up on time. And meanwhile schools themselves were performing heroic efforts to understand the new guidance, and get their buildings and processes set up to be ready.

All the way through the holiday the debates continued, right up until after New Year. On 30 December there was a partial u-turn, with primary schools in some areas, mainly London, to stay closed, and the opening of secondary schools pushed back two weeks. But as late as the morning of 4 January I understand that the Prime Minister was saying to people, ‘You’re going to get the schools open, aren’t you?’ And we did. Despite staunch opposition from the teaching unions, that morning over 70% of primary schools in non-hotspot areas had opened - and we knew more were expected to over the course of the week.

Then, at about lunchtime, we were told we’d be closing them all the next day. They’d end up staying closed for over two months.

So yes, we looked like complete morons. And yes, I don’t blame the teachers who gave up their holidays for nothing for hating us, or for those who say the Government as a whole was shambolic - it was.

But for us, in DfE - by which I mean all of the Ministers, SpAds and civil servants there - it was right to fight to keep them open. In the first lockdown, the evidence was unclear as to whether or not it was right to close schools. But by January 2021, it was absolutely clear how much harm extended periods of school closures did to children - and there was also growing international evidence that lockdowns didn’t need to be as harsh or as long as in England to stop the health system from becoming overwhelmed. A vaccine had been found and was being rolled out. The harm we did to children with that second lockdown is still with us - and the only regret I have for fighting to keep schools open is that we didn’t fight well enough to win.

On the brink of resigning

That Monday was the worst day of my career as a SpAd. Worse than Results Day 2020, because then the wave of disaster had been building over a week or so. In this case, we thought we’d achieved our goal - only to have it snatched away, and return to begin writing new guidance, new Parliamentary speeches, new media briefing.

It was the only time I seriously thought about resigning. So why didn’t I? Why did I stay on to do something that I fervently believed was wrong?

I could give a load of waffle about democratic principles, and the decision to close schools not being my decision to make, but the truth is I didn’t resign for all the same, bad, reasons, that people usually don’t resign.

I didn’t want to lose my job and be unemployed in the middle of a pandemic. I was worried about paying my mortgage. I didn’t want to leave colleagues in the lurch. I told myself that if I stayed, I’d be able to help get schools open again quicker. I felt I had work in areas outside COVID, important work, that I believed in and was contributing to, that might not get done if I left. I told myself that it wouldn’t make any difference anyway, because no-one would care.⁵⁹

Was it the right or wrong decision? Selfishly, I’m glad I didn’t. But from an objective perspective, the right and moral thing to do would have been to go. Still, the one consolation, from a COVID perspective, is that at least it meant I was a small part of the team when the Omicron strain hit in December 2021, when we had to fight the battle to keep schools open all over again - but this time we won.⁶⁰

Dramatis Personae

I worked with great bosses, lots of other Ministers, mainly fantastic civil servants, and some great SpAd colleagues - both in the Department for Education and in the wider network across Government. But the two questions I’m asked most often are (a) What was it like working with Dominic Cummings?; and (b) What was it like to work for Gavin Williamson?

Dominic Cummings

The first thing to say is that I didn’t work that closely with Dominic Cummings. He was in No. 10 while I was in the Department for Education. But I attended the notorious Friday SpAd sessions at No. 10 and had a few meetings with him for other things, so I guess that still means I know him better than 99.9% of the population.

The honest answer is that I think Benedict Cumberbatch did a great job of capturing his personality in Brexit: The Uncivil War - at least so far as he came across from my, slightly distant, perspective. He is obviously incredibly intelligent, passionate and goal focused. He is also somewhat eccentric, not just in personality, but in actions: to give just one example, I had a virtual meeting with him (and other people) on science policy just hours before his infamous ‘Rose Garden’ broadcast. Very few people would have scheduled such a meeting then. His personal priorities - Brexit, civil service reform and ARIA - are an eclectic mix that wouldn’t normally be found together.

He’s obviously arrogant, but I also found him fair. One time a colleague and I were hauled in to see him after an unexpected negative Daily Mail front-page splash had affected our department. He questioned us in depth, expecting us to be on top of our brief, but listened to our side and - once he’d realised we’d done everything we should - didn’t hold a grudge and moved straight on to how to fix it. I should, in fairness, say that this experience was not universal, and I know others who would tell a very different story.

He could be genuinely inspiring in his commitment and passion to get things done. The Friday afternoon SpAd meetings - though we may have groaned about the time they were held - were massively motivating. He knew exactly what to say in the highs and lows of that final road to Brexit. I can understand why he evoked such devotion in the Vote Leave team.

At the same time, those leadership skills didn’t always translate to a wider canvas. Leading a small group of committed individuals, all dedicated to a goal - like Vote Leave, or the cross-Government SpAd team before Brexit - he could be utterly inspiring. But you can’t expect that level of commitment from a massive organisation. In his blog he rails about mid-level civil servants knocking off at 5pm - well, in every organisation there will be people for whom it’s just a job. Us SpAds might have been willing to work every hour God sends, but you can’t expect everyone in government to do that all the time.

In the same way, he’s an absolutely brilliant campaigner - the route from July to December 2019 was a masterclass in strategy - but less good as a governor. He seemed to know much less what to do with the chief of staff role after the election than before - and of course he ultimately blew it all up by feuding with other senior SpAds and his boss’s wife. I could imagine him being one of those brilliant entrepreneurs, who starts an incredible spin-out, builds it against the odds to massive success - but then starts floundering when the organisation gets to a few hundred, or a few thousand people.

I don’t know what it would be like to work with him closely long-term: difficult, I imagine, though one might get a lot done. Love him or loathe him, one can’t deny he’s an incredibly brilliant man - one of the few people who’s been able to shape history by the sheer power of his mind. Like a lot of brilliant people, he has his flaws too. But I’m glad I met him.

Gavin Williamson

I really enjoyed working for Gavin.

At a human level, he was a great boss to work for: personable, treated people well, conscientious, knew what he wanted to achieve, and able to make decisions and prioritise. He was incredibly decent to me: giving me a chance when he didn’t have to, always willing to listen, supporting me, and generous with his time and advice. The couple of times he chewed me out for making a mistake I deserved it - and each time he was clear about what I’d done wrong, and what he expected next time.

It wasn’t just SpAds he treated well. I believe most of the civil servants he worked with liked him too - sometimes surprising themselves, as I heard from more than one who joined the department partway through the pandemic, and had known him only by reputation. Whatever he’d done to gain the reputation with the tarantula⁶¹, or as a Chief Whip, it never showed with staff.

Don’t believe me? Here’s Geoff Barton, former General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders:

“People would assume Gavin Williamson was the hardest to work with, but I think he was dealt a very difficult card by Number 10.

“And, at the very least, he was incredibly human and personable – and funny, actually.”

Geoff Barton, 2024 - from interview with Schoolsweek

I’m not going to claim he was the perfect Education Secretary for the pandemic. Despite his great ability to win people over in small groups, he was never at his best on mass broadcast media - and unfortunately that was very much required during COVID. That’s one reason why Matt Hancock came out of the pandemic with a much better reputation - despite the Department for Health making a huge number of unpopular decisions and u-turns.

He made mistakes - as did everyone involved in the pandemic. But he never stopped fighting to do what was best for children. And despite the crisis, he had a clear vision of what he wanted to get done and achieve, particularly in skills and further education. He didn’t just go with the flow. Many of the things that came to fruition later - such as the Higher Education reforms - had their gestation under his leadership.

At the end of the day, there are two instances which really sum him up for me.

• The first was shortly after the pandemic hit, just after we’d closed schools. Gavin was in his office with me and my fellow SpAds, a couple of other advisers, and I think his Principal Private Secretary. I remember clearly him saying words to the effect of, ‘We’re not going to be able to get done everything we’d hoped for any more. The one thing, other than dealing with this, that I really don’t want to give up on is skills reform. So I want you all to go out and make sure we can do that; that we have one directorate that’s able to take that forward, and that we get that done.’

• The second was that, in December 2020, when it was very clear that the politically expedient thing to do was to go along with SAGE and DHSC and agree to close schools in January, he refused to do so - even though every political instinct he had must have told him what a risk he was taking. He chose instead to do what he thought was right: to try to keep schools open. He threw every bit of political influence, capital, and any dirty tricks he may or may not have possessed into the fight, not because there was any possibility of gain from it, but because he believed it was the right thing for children.

I liked working for him, I was proud to work for him and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

It’s not about the money, money, money…

I have very little to complain about my time as SpAd. In fact, I have so little to complain about that after titling this section ‘moans and gripes’ I realised I had only one serious moan, and went back and retitled it.

It’s true the job insecurity can be psycologically wearing, particularly in the tumultuous political times I was in⁶² - but there is no way round it given the nature of the role, and the fact that these are personal appointments of the Minister concerned. There is a generous financial payoff⁶³, equivalent to three months’ notice⁶⁴ and, in addition, I was looked after well by the No. 10 SpAd team, who in one case helped to find me a bridging position, and in another recommended me to a succeeding Secretary of State.

Similarly, the long hours are part of the deal and are worked willingly by most of us: the return in terms of interest, impact and fulfilment more than make up for it. SpAdding is typically a time-limited role for a few years at most - one knows what one is getting in to.

My only serious gripe is on pay. I was only in my mid 30s, but still took a significant (> 20%) paycut to take up the role. So what, you might say. Lots of people take pay cuts to move into the public sector. And that’s true. But the issue is that SpAd roles are even worse paid than civil servant roles⁶⁵ - and this matters if you want to want to recruit good, experienced people into these roles, not solely bright young 20-something-year-olds fresh from CCHQ and Labour HQ⁶⁶.

The pay scale for a Level 2 SpAd (which I was, and most departmental SpAds are) lags well below that of a Deputy Director - which I’d been in 2015, and is the most junior rung of the senior civil service (SCS Pay Band 1). When I joined, the SpAd band started in the fifty thousands and capped out at £75k. By contrast, the SCS Pay Band 1 scale started at £70k, and capped out at over £110k. SpAds are not eligible for performance related pay,⁶⁷ which can be an additional 3-5% of salary, making the comparison even worse.

To add insult to injury, I received a total pay rise of 1% (yes, 1% total, not 1% annually) over the three years I was there. Pay rises for civil servants during that period were not exactly lavish, but they were better than that.

Again, I do fully recognise that these salaries are very good by the standards of the country as a whole, and for many people will seem high - and certainly for my part I don’t regret my choice. But if we are thinking about how to get the best talent in to advise Ministers - which we absolutely should be - and of how to consistently incentivise experienced professionals in their 30s, 40s or 50s to take up these long-hours, highly demanding, insecure roles, then we should take a hard-headed look at the reward offered. One simply cannot look at the extraordinary young age profile of SpAds (regardless of party) and think that pay has nothing to do with it.

Taking a pay cut also matters not just while you’re doing the job, but afterwards. When I left, and was speaking to headhunters, recruitment agencies and large employers, the question they always asked was my current salary - it baselines future remuneration as well. Very few people are interested in what salary you were on 3-4 years ago, even if that were considerably higher.

My own solution, which I pushed on various occasions to no avail, is that SpAd bands for pay purposes should be aligned to civil service bands, and that SpAds should then automatically receive the same pay rises that that civil service band did each year. The equivalency would be:

• Level 4 SpAd (PM and Chancellor’s Chief of Staff; No. 10 Comms Director, a few other very senior staff in No. 10) = Director General equivalent (SCS Pay Band 3).

• Level 3 SpAd (Other senior roles in No. 10 and HMT, occasional departmental SpAds such as the most senior SpAd to the Foreign Secretary) = Director equivalent (SCS Pay Band 2).

• Level 2 SpAd (Most departmental SpAds including me; some SpAds in No. 10 and Treasury - numerically the largest band) = Deputy Director equivalent (SCS Pay Band 1)

• Level 1 SpAd (A few very junior SpAds): Grade 7 and Grade 6 equivalent (Grade 6 and 7 pay band for the relevant department).

This would reasonable reflect the position and responsibilities involve and - crucially - would be transparent, easy to administer and to defend, as well as reducing ongoing bureaucracy.

I am not going to be a SpAd for many years⁶⁸, so this is no skin off my nose either way. But implementing this would help the new Labour Government attract, appoint and retain the best talent in these roles. As citizens of the country, we should all want Ministers to be advised by the best people possible.

In the unlikely event that Sue Gray or someone else in the centre is reading this, maybe they can make this happen.

What I’m proud of

I said near the beginning that the opportunities to make a difference as a SpAd were tremendous. And despite the frustrations and challenges, there are many things I’m proud of having worked on and achieved.

It’s all too easy to count ‘blocking things’ as achievements. But while I look back with fondness at the time I managed to stop a civil servant submission that gleefully recommended that ‘we ban all cakes in school, including birthday cakes’ and ‘restrict traditional English puddings to no more than once a week’, the reality is that if I hadn’t spotted this, the Minister, the Secretary of State or a No. 10 SpAd would have done well before it made contact with the real world. With a few small exceptions, what you got done is what counts, not what you stopped getting done.

The list below is a non-exclusive list of some of the things I’m proud of having been part of.⁶⁹ For some, I was a major part of the process, integral to driving it forward; for others, I played a moderate role, but no more than any SpAd in my position would; and in still more I merely passed the papers and conveyed the messages. In all cases, none of them would have happened without the hard work of dedicated civil servants who did the hard grind - and to those I didn’t say it enough to at the time, thank you all.

So here goes:

• The Skills for Jobs White Paper.

• The Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022.

• Skills Bootcamp rollout, especially the HGV Skills Bootcamps⁷⁰

• New behaviour guidance for schools published.

• Rebooting the Access and Participation process for universities, to focus more on working with schools to improve standards.

• The growth in degree apprenticeships, with starts more than doubling from c. 10,000 to nearly 25,000.

• The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act⁷¹.

• New impartiality guidance in schools⁷².

• The Platinum Jubilee Book for Children⁷³.

• Getting the Duke of Edinburgh award into 200 of the most disadvantaged schools.

• Expanding the cadet programme to more schools.

• Saving and rebooting the Teaching Excellence Framework⁷⁴ - something particularly dear to heart as I’d led the development of the original iteration as a civil servant.

• Introduction and growth of T Levels.⁷⁵

• Agreeing a new admissions compact with Universities UK, which has seen unconditional offers fall by over 75%, to just 37,000.⁷⁶

• Agreeing a grade inflation compact with Universities UK, which has seen the proportion of firsts, and firsts and 2:1s, return (almost) to prepandemic levels - the first significant fall in university grades in this country ever.⁷⁷

• Getting some great people into public roles.⁷⁸

• Starting the process of getting universities to pledge not to use NDAs to silence victims of sexual harassment - about 60 had signed the pledge when I left Government.

• Reforming the student loan system to abolish real interest rates, meaning no-one who now takes out a loan will ever pay back more than they borrow⁷⁹.

• Holding tuition fees flat.

• Not closing schools in Omicron.

• Implementing one of the first baby steps in the push-back against gender ideology in schools.⁸⁰

• Getting schools open again in summer 2020 and March 2021.⁸¹

• The plan, in Autumn 2021, to restore grades to prepandemic levels.⁸²

• Helping Oak National Academy get established

• Further funding of Institutes of Technology.⁸³

• Rollout of Teacher Training Reforms and the Early Careers Framework.

• Introducing International Qualified Teacher Status to help train teachers abroad to UK standards.⁸⁴

• Establishing first 75 family hubs.

• Rejigging how the Strategic Priorities Grant (aka university teaching grant) is allocated⁸⁵.

• First above inflation funding uplift for adult vocational education in two decades⁸⁶.

But but but…

It’s a long list, but the sharp-eyed amongst you will note that it’s largely incremental, not transformative. There’s nothing here to match the Gove school reforms, or the Willetts removal of number caps and introduction of £9,000 fees⁸⁷ - or various things in the New Labour years. I’m still proud of what we did - but I also know it wasn’t nearly enough.

One thing I learned is that the unity and clarity of purpose of the Government as a whole makes a tremendous difference to what can done. We came in on a manifesto that was great for campaigning but poor for governing on, with few tangible commitments beyond ‘Get Brexit Done’. We had a PM and Chancellor who hadn’t spent years forging a partnership in Opposition, feuds within No. 10, and a Cabinet with very diverse views. And, of course, we had COVID - the ultimate distraction.

Every new idea had to have consensus painstakingly built across-Whitehall, via repeated discussions between officials, SpAds and Ministers before it could even begin to get off the ground. And even on policies that in theory had top-level Cabinet agreement - including from the PM and Chancellor - such as increasing the number of apprenticeships, there was never the willingness to make the hard choices to bring them about. Being both pro-having and pro-eating cake only goes so far.

A few of the things that we actively tried to do, but didn’t manage to achieve, are below. This is not my personal wishlist - clearly there are plenty of things that I might personally think are great but were simply not remotely on the political agenda at the time⁸⁸. The list below includes only those things that we genuinely attempted, that a non-trivial amount of official, SpAd or Ministerial time was spent on, but that ultimately did not succeed in coming to fruition:

• Reintoducing number controls for higher education.

• Introducing minimum entry requirements for access to higher education.

• Bringing in an effective quality regime in HE⁸⁹.

• Abolishing the National Student Survey.

• Introduce a National Scholarship Programme for high ability 18-year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds.

• Creating a Lifelong Learning Entitlement⁹⁰.

• Remove the cap on faith school places.

• Move student unions from an opt-out to an opt-in basis, and force them to rely on member subscriptions rather than block grants.⁹¹

• End trade union monopoly on supporting teachers in grievances.

• Increase the number of apprenticeships and reform the Apprenticeship Levy.⁹²

Ultimately, I was part of gettting a lot of small and good things done, but failed to achieve the biggest and most transformational things. Maybe that failure is partly on me; perhaps if I were a Dominic Cummings we’d have achieved more. I certainly see these as a lost opportunity. But one cannot achieve everything one sets out to do, only give it one’s best shot. And I know that I did that.

And finally

Being a SpAd was an experience of a lifetime. To be so close to the centre, to be part of what was happening, and to have the opportunity - in a small way - to make a difference was unforgettable. Despite everything - despite COVID - it was all I hoped it would be and more.

The pace, the variety and the sheer magnitude of the decisions I took part in every single day made it a job like no other. The people I was able to work with are also part of what I treasure: the Ministers I worked for, my fellow SpAds, the private office staff and other civil servants. The camaraderie and closeness of working in such intense circumstances was an experience beyond any other I’ve had at work.

If you care at all about public policy or politics, and are ever given the chance to be a SpAd - take it. You won’t regret it: it’s a job like no other.

This is the third in a series of slightly more personal posts, to mark turning forty. The first two in the series are, Strong Ambitions Loosely Held; or, Why I'm No Longer Seeking to be an MP, and Whatever happened to my Fast Stream cohort.

1. For example, via the Hancock files, or the COVID inquiry.

2. 'Don’t worry,’ I’d told my wife. ‘The Prime Minister isn’t going to fire his brother; SpAdding is never fully secure, but this is about as secure as it can be.’ Little did I know! Humour aside, I should say I’ll be forever grateful to Jo for giving me my break into this world - I’d worked for him as a civil servant, and had few contacts in classic ‘Tory circles’ - and he was incredibly decent to me both on the day he resigned and ever since.

3. Due to his prior ones, for example, carelessly allowing themselves to get elected to Parliament.

4. My greatest memory of this interview was the fire alarm going off literally as he was concluding the interview with the ‘thank you, I’ll be in touch’ part. We thus had a long, slow journey together down eight floors of the crowded emergency staircase, making awkward conversation until I could actually leave.

5. Distantly.

6. I have a friend who worked as a SpAd for Chris Huhne who lost his job when Huhne had to resign in the speeding fine incident.

7. I am aware that in other jobs your company can go bust, or you can be made redundant. In terms of job risk, being a SpAd feels much more comparable to working for a start-up than for a big company like Tesco or Google.

8. Due to COVID, I ended up working at home two days a week and in the office for three. I typically worked 8.15am- 8pm/8.30pm on the days in; on the days at home I worked 8 - 5 and then stopped for family dinner and to put the kids to bed, before usually doing an hour or two after that. I also did some work most (all?) weekends.

9. I essentially stopped all of my other creative hobbies (e.g. writing, game design) while I was a SpAd: if I had the creative energy to do something beyond read/play a game/watch TV, why spend it in a hobby, when I could instead write a memo about something important that I could send, and have read, by a senior adviser in No. 10, or the Secretary of State?

10. And if you don’t, why are you even doing this job?

11. Sorry!

12. There is perhaps the occasional No. 10 SpAd, and the even more occasional SpAd elsewhere, for whom this is true.

13. I’m not saying nothing happened that was more my own idea, but it tended to be of the level of ‘let’s ban essay mills’ rather than ‘let’s rebalance HE and FE’. And even in those cases, the idea still had to be passed up to a Minister, have them agree with it, and then run the gauntlet of civil service chewing over and cross-Whitehall clearance.

14. And I hope the civil servants with which I work are unsure what I genuinely think about this policy.

15. I remember I found this particularly difficult, as various SpAd colleagues, some senior, who I knew, respected and normally agreed with were strongly in favour of it.

16. As was at least one Minister in the department. No, I’m not saying which one.

17. For those interested in reading more about the reality of being a SpAd, Peter Cardwell’s book, The Secret Life of Special Advisers is a good read, as is Nick Hillman’s In Defence of Special Advisers.

18. Every time I began working for a new Secretary of State or Minister there were a couple of times, typically 6-8 weeks in, when I had been pushing the civil service hard on something, when they - rightly - tested me, to see if I was really speaking for the Minister on this issue. Fortunately, on each occasion I was. Getting through this process successfully is tremendously important for your standing with the civil servants you are working with.

19. One would never of course refer to it in those terms - one would politely ask for a meeting! But you would get the meeting.

20. I would half-joke in the pandemic that I spent more time with Gavin than I did with my wife. Half-joke because it was true.

21. Such as on April 1 2022, when a private secretary (with help from a No. 10 SpAd) managed to prank me with a proposal that we require schools to be ‘vegan by default’.

22. In most mainstream policy departments fewer than 1 in 1000 people are dismissed for poor performance each year. One does not have to support a brutal ‘cull the bottom 10% a year’ regime to recognise that this is an absurdly low level of tackling poor performance.

23. Though again, if you want to know about this in detail, read Five Elephants, or Thoughts on Civil Service Impartiality.

24. Aside from the entirely placebo options of round tables and writing op-eds on many ‘cultural’ issues that were often presented, one of the biggest culprits during my time were the variety of Potemkin schemes devised - and large amounts of work put in by officials - to increase apprenticeship numbers, such as flexi-job apprenticeships. I am ashamed to say (though in my defence I was distracted by COVID) that it took me more than a year to dig down enough to get a formal estimate from officials on how many new apprentices these schemes would deliver, to find out that even if all of them performed as planned, it would impact the total number of apprenticeship starts by about 1%. And meanwhile apprenticeship numbers continue to decline year on year.

25. Openly asking - in a meeting if not in writing (the latter would be subject to FOI, and so useless for frank conversations of this nature) - ‘Does the Minister actually care about effecting substantive change on the ground, or are you just looking for something you can say at Departmental questions / write an op ed about’ would be an idea. But maybe I am over-optimistic, and too many Ministers would always say the former, even if they really meant the latter. But I don’t think that would always be the case: certainly, most of the Ministers I worked for were self-aware enough to know what they really cared about.

26. Just as one can recognise that both defence lawyers and prosecutors are needed for a fair criminal justice system, one might personally feel more comfortable in one role or another, depending on one can sleep easier knowing that one may have helped to jail an innocent man, versus may have helped to cause a murderer or rapist to go free.

27. Anything clearly following what the department has been doing for years; things in the manifeso; anything about ‘closing gaps’, supporting vulnerable people; anything that both the Times and the Guardian would approve of.

28. Anything that might upset the unions; anything that could be considered a push-back against mainstream views in the progressive space on ‘culture’ (i.e. gender issues, free speech); somewhat less intuitively, anything about supporting ‘gifted and talented’ kids.

29. I’m not suggesting people’s personal views changed; I’m sure people on all these projects had a range of personal political views. But there’s a moment when the team is convinced that a Minister means it, that this is going ahead, and that they’ve been working on it long enough to care about its success, regardless of those personal views.

30. These people can be of any grade.

31. Yes, legally non-binding and all that, but both sides told us that the result would be implemented - and I’d believed them, more fool me.

32. Though I arguably struck a small blow for freedom back in 2014.

33. Since the publication of the Hancock WhatsApps, which revealed a large amount of previously confidential information, as well as evidence given to, and published by, the COVID inquiry, I feel able to speak more publicly about elements of this time than I would otherwise have done.

34. A public wood. I don’t own a wood.

35. Fortunately triffids were entirely absent from the pandemic. They would definitely have made things worse.

36. This is not intended to be a post where I complain about the civil service. But for the record, let me say now that the decision by the Department for Education’s then leadership, to leave a small group of private secretaries - mainly in their 20s - to be the only people coming into the building, week after week through the months of the first lock-down, working almost every waking hour under highly stressful circumstances, with the principal private secretary often the most senior person in the building for days on end, was a disgraceful decision.

I am aware that some will feel that only the world’s smallest violin could play for the Department for Education’s private office - and there were certainly others, such as nurses and doctors, or bus drivers, who had it worse. I also know that all or most of the private secretaries involved felt privileged to serve. But these were junior civil servants, not SpAds or politicians; they were not highly paid; and whatever you feel about the Government’s decisions during COVID, these people were indisputably not to blame. Yet they came in and did their duty while those more senior, who should have showed leadership, did not.

Though the civil service has its strengths and weaknesses, one thing I have always known it to pride itself on was its commitment to its duty of care and its compassion for its staff. This was one occasion where it fell woefully short of its own principles.

To end on a happier note, I am pleased to say that in the second lockdown, under the Department’s current leadership, both the Permanent Secretary and other senior staff (such as the DG for COVID, and Directors where relevant) were regularly in, working with the Secretary of State and - crucially - providing support to those more junior civil servants in private office.

37. The Student Loan Company, and its CEO at the time Paula Sussex, are amongst the unsung heroes of the pandemic. As anyone who dealt with the SLC during the noughties or teens, it could have been very different.

38. I believe this is the actively pro-social position: to encourage people to return to their normal lives without fear.

39. I believe the clinching argument that persuaded them was that they would no longer have to read my handwriting.

40. And my team were able to show all the other private offices how to set these up for their ministers!

41. Ministers would regularly get asked, ‘Why don’t you just give the schools the money and let them nip down to PC World’ - the journalist not realising we were buying more laptops than currently existed in the country.

42. In particular Youngest, who has breathing difficulties.

43. Which the sector asked us to do - but which then got canned after the Results Day debacle.

44. It could hardly have gone worse.

45. I am underestimating this.

46. The fact that Labour supported this campaign, while not campaigning to prioritise retail, transport and delivery workers who had been working the entire pandemic, tells you a lot about the current class-base of the modern Labour party.

47. The fact that I was always working for Secretaries of State who were steadfastly committing to keeping schools open helped a lot. As, probably, did the fact that the decisions were taken well above my paygrade (almost every decision was taken in No. 10, with advice from SAGE), and the fact that I had valuable non-COVID work to do.

48. For a non-histrionic comparison of how wrong - considered as a decision by a democratic Government - the Government’s treatment of children was through the pandemic, I’d put it on a level with invading Iraq - another action which was, of course, undertaken for the best of intentions, and which many Ministers, SpAds and civil servants who had their private doubts also went along with.

49. I can’t actually remember now which position we originally recommended.

50. Such as the various adjustments with the Home Office to ensure international students who weren’t allowed to travel to the country wouldn’t have their visas revoked, or the data collection we set up with schools, to know who was in and how many had COVID.

51. I may not have used the term ‘screwed up’ in the memo.

52. In a typical year, predicted grades are about a grade higher per subject than actual grades. This isn’t surprising, really: a teacher thinks, ‘What could this child do on a good day, if they perform at their best?’ And that’s right! It’s aspirational and will be more likely to encourage the child to do their best. But the reality is, in the exam, some kids have good days, plenty have average days and some have bad days. For everyone who gets lucky about what’s on the paper, someone gets unlucky. So if you use the predicted grades as real grades, everyone will be about a grade higher (which is exactly what happened in 2021).

53. ‘It’s been a tough year, so the kids deserve to get higher grades’ could be from a Mitchell and Webb sketch, and is utter nonsense if you think about the purpose of exams for more than a moment, but basically everyone said it in 2021, and accepted it.

54. Remember the ‘tiers’, the gradually worsening stats, the mini November lockdown?

55. I continue to completely stand by this. The best place for (most) children was in school, and a local authority had no business to harm them by closing schools without authorisation. We were right to use every means necessary to keep them open. But I admit it made us look utterly stupid when we closed them ourselves less than a month later.

(I’d note that I respect the right of parents who chose to keep children off. But that’s very different to a local authority removing the ability of parents to keep their children in school).

56. On 23rd December (possibly 24th) I remember Gavin driving in from his constituency for an emergency meeting with the Prime Minister. The Ministerial car that had been meant to pick him up couldn’t get through the snow, so he ended up driving himself down, taking the roads he knew would be clear to get there - because he knew if he was just dialling in the decision would go against him.

57. Or one of the other sub-committees.

58. Younger children were both less personally at risk and typically came from a much smaller area per school, thus contributing less to R.

59. This is probably true - literally no-one cares about SpAds resigning. But if I’d really believed that argument was the clincher, I could have tried to persuade my Secretary of State to resign - but I didn’t do that either. Because I didn’t want to be unemployed in the middle of the pandemic, etc. etc.

60. Though I don’t kid myself that my being there rather than someone else made the difference.

61. Yes, I did meet Cronus.

62. How I envied some of those who became SpAds at the beginning of the Coalition, where Ministers stayed in position for years.

63. There is an incredibly petty and spiteful clause, which fortunately didn't affect me, which says that if a SpAd loses their job because a general election is called, they get the payout - unless they are standing as a Parliamentary candidate, in which case they get nothing. There is no possible justification for this, particularly if one thinks - as most people claim to - that having a broader section of people, not only those with private means, standing for Parliament. One can always judge an organisation’s true commitment to ‘equality and diversity’ by looking at how it acts on those issues most within its control, staff terms and conditions.

64. Rising slightly for long-serving SpAds.

65. Which themselves have fallen significantly in real terms, particularly at senior levels.

66. Some of these bright young things are brilliant - but it’s good to have a mix, including more experienced hands with backgrounds in business, public sector leadership or journalism.

67. To be fair, there is no sensible way of making this happen.

68. At least five, perhaps many more, possibly never - it all depends on your optimism about the Tories in exile!

69. If something you think should be on here isn’t, please consider that the hypothesis 'he forgot it’ is at least as likely as ‘he is secretly sending a subtle message that he hated it’.

70. This was one of the first really new ideas to get implemented in skills policy (sadly, I can’t take credit for originating it) for a long while and they made a tremendous difference in training people currently unemployed or on minimum wage - over 2-4 months - for a guaranteed interview. I remember visiting one for HGV drivers and meeting a dozen people, most of whom had been unemployed a few months before, and thinking that, ‘In 6 months time, 3/4 of you are going to be earning £30k or more a year’. Truly life-changing.

71. This was one of the things I was proudest to work on, and spent considerable time on, protecting one of our most fundamental freedoms in universities after a string of high-profile cancellations, and other evidence of a wider chilling effect. See the White Paper for further details of why this was needed, or alternatively, the letter from 500 academics, or this piece by Akua Reindorf.

It is obviously extremely disappointing that Labour has chosen to ‘pause’ its commencement - and probably cancel it entirely. As we are seeing not just here, but in their proposals to begin recording once more ‘non-crime hate incidents’ and place further restrictions on social media, they are firmly on the side of ‘safetyism’ and ‘preventing offence’ by means of censorship by the relevant authorities (whether that is the Government, or a university). On the other hand, I believe - as many in history have - that such approaches, in which the authorities can define what is ‘offensive’ or ‘harmful’ have historically only served to strengthen those in power and to suppress progress, and that the best way of combating bad speech is by good speech - particularly in universities, which should be the home of debate.

The Conservatives must also take their share of blame, for the inexcusable - and inexplicable - decision not to commence the Act for over a year after it received Royal Assent (and taking an inordinately long time to get it through Parliament). Did they think they had all the time in the world? We published the White Paper in February 2021 and introduced the Bill to Parliament in May of that year - July 2024 should have had it done and dusted. In some ways that is even more frustrating than Labour’s decision. If a party disagrees with you and they win an election - well, that’s politics. If a party claims to support something, even to the extent of boasting about it in their manifesto (pg 70), but doesn’t actually do it, that is harder to take. Unfortunately, just as with stopping the boats, reducing public spending, or tackling ‘woke’, on this issue the last Government - with some honourable exceptions - was more focused on announcements and headlines than in actually changing things on the ground.

So was it all a waste of time? I don’t think so, for two main reasons.

• The struggle for free speech - and politics more broadly - is a continual ebb and flow. It’s rare one side delivers a ‘knock-out blow’ on the other. The process of getting the Bill through Parliament caused the university sector to change its ways, which improved the situation on campus considerably (most free speech issues one has seen recently are elsewhere - e.g. debanking, or gender critical individuals working for public bodies - rather than on campus).

• Some universities have permanently improved their policies on free speech - such as Cambridge, which recently announced it would continue to implement its new free speech code despite the Act being ‘paused’. I know a lot of vice-chancellors and while there are some who just wish the whole debate would go away, and a much smaller number of committed ‘progressive’ activists, there is a very significant contingent who actively value free speech and wanted to protect it. The Free Speech Act (and various court cases) acted as a nudge to encourage many to look more closely at what was happening and to put their house in order.

• The broader process of focus upon free speech has caused a variety of networks and groups defending free speech to spring up on and around campus. The fact that over 500 academics - including prominent names such as Richard Dawkins - recently wrote to the Government to call for the Act to be continued shows the depth of the networks that have sprung up. These individuals are also often involved in fighting for improvements to policies on the ground and in supporting individuals who fall foul of the censors.

None of which is to say it would not be much better if the Act were in place! It clearly would. The Free Speech Union is currently judicially reviewing the Government’s decision to ‘pause’ the Act (on the grounds that while a new Government could legitimately formally repeal it in Parliament, it should not just fail to implement, by Ministerial fiat, a law that Parliament has passed) and is currently seeking contributions to its legal costs, which is probably the best way that anyone who wishes to support the policy can do so. More broadly - and not just in universities - the FSU has a strong track record of defending its members - including winning six-figure settlements - who have suffered for lawful speech and functions as a traditional union in this matter; it is well worth considering joining for anyone who worries about this, or simply wants to support others who have been unfairly victimised.

72. Even if still wildly flouted, at least there is - for the first time since the duty was brought in in 1996 - a decent set of guidance that schools and parents can look to.

73. Working on this was such a privilege. Being involved in anything to commemorate the late Queen would be an honour, and to have been a part of creating such a tangible memorial - that went out to millions of children - was an honour. I know plenty of elderly people who still treasure their memorabilia from the Coronation, and - even if right now, many of them went on a shelf to be forgotten - I imagine that in 60 years’ time, many of those children will take similar pride in showing this to their grandchildren.

The process of creating it was quite a labour of love. My Secretary of State at the time had given the instruction that it should be ‘patriotic, inclusive but not woke’, and I can remember telling the team to ‘Channel the spirit of the 2012 Olympics’. Clearly the design itself was done by an actual external professional, and there was a long-suffering civil servant and his team who was responsible for agreeing the text with about 7 different stakeholders, from the Palace down - including the devolved administrations - all of whom had very specific requirements.

I read every page of that book at least five times (as did others) to try to make sure we didn’t have anything that could be seen as politically partisan or otherwise embarrassing - as this was for the Queen. It had to celebrate every part of the UK - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - and the UK as a whole - and do so without upsetting any of the others! To celebrate the Commonwealth without being divisive. There were genuinely difficult issues around word choices and content concerning Northern Ireland. But overall we ended up with a lovely product, which I will always hope that the Queen felt was worthy of her reign .

74. Rescued from the very jaws of the Wolf, as one might say.

75. T-Levels are a strong concept - but regrettably I doubt they are going to meet the vision that was intended for them. One of the greatest frustrations of my time was a failure to persuade Treasury to fund employer-based training: in the case of T-Levels, this means that employers are expected to provide 9 weeks of work experience gratis - which naturally places an upper limit on how many will do so. We wouldn’t expect a college or private training provider to train a 17 year old for 9 weeks free, so why should we expect an employer? Nor did we fund colleges (or require them!) to provide them in the numbers required, again relying on good will and ‘the market’. As it is, I think the best case scenario for T-Levels is that they stabilise at a few tens of thousands a year as an elite course for those particularly talented at vocational skills: there are worse things, and it’ll be great if something like that exists, but they could have been so much more. Will still chalk it up as a success though - something which makes a difference to > 10,000 people a year is not neglibile.

76. Though some outside saw the relationship between Government and the university sector as quite adversarial in this period, behind the scenes there was a lot of close collaboration - not least during COVID. In addition, both this, and the item immediately following, involved close collaboration and negotiation between Government and Universities UK; in both cases, I was heavily involved in the negotiations, working closely with the then Chief Executive, who I got on well with. These agreements - both of which have delivered real on-the-ground measurable results - are significant in that they achieved mutual aims without the need for costly regulation or legislation: I’d suggest that both are models for successful joint Government-sector working.

77. Chart below. This is the first ever significant fall in grade inflation in universities.

I personally believe we need to go much further - to go back to 2010 levels, if not 1997 levels. With Firsts no more than 15%, and 2:1s + Firsts no more than 60%. This shows if the will is there it could be done.

78. While it would be invidious to try to name them all, Dame Rachel de Souza as Children’s Commisioner, Jo Saxton as Chief Executive of Ofqual and Josh MacAlister to lead the care review were in my view particularly strong appointments.

79. As I’ve written on more than one occasion, I’m not keen on the current system of fees. But if we must have fees, the principle that ‘no-one should pay back, in real terms, more than they borrowed’ should be adhered to - that was one thing that New Labour got right. And if you want to be more progressive, I’ve written in more detail here about why you should use the core tax system to achieve that, rather than toxifying your student finance system.

80. I was able to do much less on this than I’d have liked to - and have actually been able to do more, more effectively, outside Government. But it was a start - see the section beginning ‘in late 2020’ for further details.

81. Much later than we should have done. But getting them open was still an achievement.

82. Ending grade inflation was one of the core achievements of Michael Gove. Many normally sensible commentators said that it would be impossible to get them back to pre-pandemic levels after the chaos of the pandemic - but my Secretary of State at the time held his nerve and agreed the plan to do so, which was then ably implemented by his successors and - in particular - Ofqual. We’ve now had two years at stable grades, which are very close to those that existed pre-pandemic.

83. I’m never entirely sure whether these were effective. Certainly the original Nick Timothy 2017 election manifesto concept, of strong, stand-alone, well-funded institutes would have been - but does the current ‘partnership’ model (which means it largely exists on paperwork between the Department and the colleges/universities, rather than in the minds of students, or as a legal entity) really deliver any additionality? It doesn’t show up on the headline statistics. Still, at worst, we delivered funding for some much needed capital equipment for Level 4 and 5 technical education to colleges (I went out and saw some of it), which is still a good thing.

84. Both as an educational export and to help attract teachers to the UK.

85. This was really only tinkering at the margins - but it has still reallocated about £200m - 300m a year of a £1.6bn pot to better uses, which is nothing to be sneezed at.

86. This is a damning chart. But note the - small! - uptick post-2020 in the top 3 lines

.

87. I disagree with these HE policies, but I cannot deny they were transformative.

88. For example, creating more grammar schools, or abolishing tuition fees.

89. All of these first three are about curbing the explosion of Higher Education courses - which successive Governments have allowed to grow massively, with minimal quality oversight and with dubious outcomes, at the expense of further and vocational equivalents. Unfortunately, despite many speeches about ‘crack-downs’ and ‘Mickey-Mouse degrees’ the Government was unwilling to take any tangible action that would make a difference. We did at least publish consultations on number controls and minimum entry requirements before I left, but these were not taken forward. Some of the quality measures implemented by the Office for Students - such as the ‘B3’ measure that looks at drop-out rates and progression to graduate employment - I thought would make a difference, but don’t appear to have so far.

90. Maybe this will still happen, at least in part? What is being taken forward is far less ambitious than the initial ambition - to be effective, it should be as easy to borrow money to do an HGV course, a coding course or a heat-pump installation as to go to university - but the legislation passed may still provide a framework on which to build. This was a classic example of No. 10 announcing something that Treasury was not on board with - with predictable consequences.

91. Why successive Conservative Governments have permitted this state of affairs to continue baffles me.

92. My biggest regret - and we tried hard to do this multiple times, but it never got off the ground. The fact that Levy policy is owned by the Treasury (as opposed to, say, student loan policy, which is owned by DfE) is a real blocker to reform. As is the fundamental unwillingness to take the steps needed to increase apprenticeship numbers, particularly for the young. Like any form of training, if you want it at scale, you must pay for it - and it was deeply frustrating that all the rhetoric from the Government - right up to the very top - said they wanted more apprenticeships and were sceptical about further HE expansion, but when it came down to it, they were unwilling to put any curbs on the latter, or to provide funding for the former.