Education & Skills 
Last month, Andy Burnham began his premiership by appointing his new cabinet. This saw a change at the top of the Department for Education (DfE), replacing Bridget Phillipson with his long-term ally Lucy Powell. Phillipson’s departure from the DfE provides a good opportunity to look back at what she achieved during her time as Secretary of State for Education and where she may have fallen short.
Where Phillipson Delivered
Phillipson’s two years at the DfE were marked by major educational reform, spanning special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), a curriculum review, child protection and poverty, and skills reform.
She launched the largest reform to SEND provision in a decade, committing £7 billion in additional funding compared with 2025-26 and introducing a four-tier system of support to Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs). Our Skills Commission’s recent Earning or Learning inquiry found that 45% of NEET young people aged 16 to 24 are disabled or living with a long-term illness, up from 24% a decade ago, which makes SEND provision central to the wider skills and employment picture, not just to schools.
She helped deliver the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act (2026). The Act established multi-agency child protection teams, restricted the use of agency social workers, and capped profits for care placement providers. It also introduced a compulsory register for children not in school and required qualified teacher status in academies. Our own research highlighted the challenges of tracking and supporting “hidden NEETs” who fall outside job and benefit records. Milburn’s recent Young People and Work interim report estimated this figure to be 314,000 18-24-year-olds.
Phillipson also took measures to reform school inspections, teacher pay, and reduce child poverty:
- Free school meals were extended to all children in households receiving Universal Credit from September 2026, expected to lift around 100,000 children out of poverty
- Free breakfast clubs to be rolled out to every primary school
- 30 funded childcare hours a week were provided for working parents from when a child turns nine months old
- Hundreds of new school-based nursery places opened
- Single-word Ofsted grades were replaced with a more detailed report card system that names inclusion as a distinct judgement area for the first time
- Teacher pay rose by 5.5% in 2024-25, followed by further multi-year awards that will take average pay above £54,400 and starting salaries above £35,000 by September 2027, a cumulative increase of around 17% since Labour took office
- The pay awards came with a pledge to recruit 6,500 additional expert teachers
Phillipson commissioned the Curriculum and Assessment Review, led by Professor Becky Francis, which published its final report and the Government’s response in November 2025. It confirmed that the English Baccalaureate will be scrapped, GCSEs will be updated from 2029, a new national curriculum will apply from 2028, and new V-level qualifications will roll out from 2027.
On skills, Phillipson replaced the apprenticeship levy with the Growth and Skills Levy, (worth over £3 billion), introduced foundation apprenticeships, and established Skills England – targeting 120,000 additional training places this parliament. The Levy now fully funds apprenticeship training for under-25s in non-levy-paying employers. At the same time, Skills England has set itself an ambitious marker of success: two-thirds of young people participating in higher-level learning by age 25.
Our research also points to the scale of the challenge these reforms face. Between 2019 and 2022, £3.3 billion was returned unspent to the Treasury under the previous apprenticeship levy, with employers citing administrative complexity as the main reason opportunities were not taken. Earning or Learning recommends a single “Youth Opportunities for Employers” service, combining one digital front door with standardised paperwork and local brokerage support for SMEs, to address this. Whether the Growth and Skills Levy resolves that barrier will be one of the clearer tests of Phillipson’s reform.
Where Phillipson Fell Short
Several elements of Phillipson’s programme attracted criticism and have been characterised as overly cautious, slow-paced, or underfunded.
Removing the VAT exemption on private school fees helped fund breakfast clubs and teacher recruitment, but it led to more private school closures than the Government had forecast and remains subject to ongoing legal challenges.
Teacher pay rises were only partially funded by central government, leaving schools to cover part of the cost from their own budgets. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act drew criticism from academy leaders, who argued it curtailed core operational freedoms. The pledge to recruit 6,500 additional teachers was also questioned after the Government revised the definition of a new teacher and changed how progress against the target was tracked. In April 2026, the National Education Union, the largest teaching union, said the DfE was not delivering and described schools as “running on empty.”
Technical and vocational reforms were also criticised as too slow. Part of this can be attributed to Progress 8, the main school performance measure, which counts academic subjects for around 70% of a school’s score and technical subjects for only 30%. Because schools are judged mainly on this measure, they have less incentive to enter pupils for technical qualifications, and GCSE entries now outnumber technical award entries by 16 to 1. This matters because the pupils who do take Technical Awards benefit from it: DfE research showing a 23% reduction in unauthorised absences and a 62% reduction in permanent exclusions among this group, a benefit far fewer pupils get the chance to experience under the current system. The Curriculum and Assessment Review’s response commits to overhauling Progress 8, though the change will not take effect until GCSEs are updated from 2029.
Furthermore, Progress 8 scores pupils on their eight best qualifications, with two of those slots protected for a “breadth” requirement, covering subjects like humanities, arts or languages, and two more left as open “choice” slots where any subject competes for a place. The Government’s plans only let technical and vocational qualifications into the open “choice” slots, so they are not guaranteed the same standing as academic subjects. In practice, this forces schools to run two separate curriculum streams if they want to offer a genuine technical pathway. Earning or Learning recommends the DfE amend the guidance so qualifications tied to a coherent 14-16 technical pathway can count in those protected slots on the same basis as any other subject, alongside a requirement that every secondary school offer at least one clearly signposted applied learning route.
The same underinvestment shows up in support for 16- to 19-year-olds. The 16-19 Bursary Fund has stayed at around £160 million a year since 2011, with no increase to account for inflation. Its predecessor, the Education Maintenance Allowance, would be worth closer to £900 million a year today once inflation is considered. That means real-terms support has fallen by more than 80%, and it hits hardest the young people most likely to drop out after 16. Earning or Learning sets out what a fix would look like: increasing the Bursary Fund to £400 million a year, enough for an average £1,000 discretionary bursary for learners on free school meals, in care, or from households earning under £25,000. This would raise the vulnerable student bursary from £1,200 to £2,000 and index it to inflation.
This underinvestment is not limited to direct financial support. Further education colleges say they need far more staff than the 6,500 teacher recruitment pledge accounts for, just to fill vacancies within their own workforce.
Several of Phillipson’s reforms are still in their early stages of roll-out, so their ultimate success is not yet measurable. But a pattern runs through where she fell short: ambitious framing that was not always matched by funding follow-through or by measures strong enough to shift entrenched patterns. These gaps will be the biggest test of whether Lucy Powell’s DfE goes further than her predecessor. Policy Connect will set out what her appointment could mean for the education and skills agenda over the coming weeks, as we continue to prepare for our next Skills Commission inquiry into apprenticeships.
For more information on this, please contact max.bishop@policyconnect.org.uk.
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