The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 55. Gillian Keegan: The future of British schools, union 'barons', and Sunak's Rwanda battle

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

What's it like to be the Secretary of State for Education who left school at 17? How much power do unions really have in British politics? What's it like to become a Tory MP when your family hails from the Labour Party? Gillian Keegan joins Rory and Alastair on today's episode of Leading to answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolitics.com. Welcome to the restis politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And today is a first for the rest of politics leading because we have a serving cabinet minister. We've done better, I'm afraid, on our balance show on getting the Labour shadow cabinet. we have getting the current Conservative Cabinet in Britain.

Why do you think that might be, Rory? I don't know. I think it's because people see you as a sort of amazingly tribal rot fighter. However, there is one cabinet minister, brave enough to come on the show and trust our general... I think the other thing, right, I think the other thing is that I work harder at getting people on. And let's just admit, it was I who asked Gillian to come on some time ago and to my astonishment. We're not going to get into that argument because I... She can resolve this question later.

However, it is Jillian Keegan. Gillian Keegan is the Secretary of State for Education. So she's the cabinet. She's in charge of all the schools in England. And she is somebody I like very much. She was elected first to Parliament in 2017, unusually having had a very full professional career before she came into Parliament

at very senior levels in different businesses, which we'll be able to talk a bit about. She grew up in Liverpool, left school, I think initially at 16, although she went back to school later. And again, unusual track for a conservative politician, not from a kind of conventional, posh, privately educated background. She was the chief marketing officer for TravelPort,

which we can talk a little bit more about. But for me, I think she's particularly interesting because, just to explain to listeners, she was very much from my side of the party, which was more, I guess, the center, or perhaps some people might say the more left of the party. We worked very closely together on my leadership campaign, where she very kindly supported me.

And then she went on to do a number of different jobs in government pretty quickly, given she was just elected in 2017. So from beginning of 2020 onwards, she got jobs under Boris Johnson. She was a minister of state, for example, health and social care. She then, to my delight, briefly became the Africa minister, but in the way that modern politics work, I think that lasted about 40 days. And then she found herself back in the cabinet as the secretary of state for education. So a lot to get into from her own life, politics,

and State of Education in Britain. Over to you, Alastair. So if we go right back to the beginning, as Rory says, very, very unusual journey, very different journey, say to Rory's journey through politics and the political process, I actually am very well acquainted with two people who went to your school.

Ah, okay. Mr. Joey Barton and Mr. Peter Reed. Oh, yeah, I know them both. Well, I know their names. Yeah. So that tells me this was a pretty working-class area. So just give us a sense of your childhood, your mum, your dad,

and how you got to be, A bloody Tory. Right. Well, I mean, that is a question I get asked a lot, obviously, growing up in Noseley. So my dad is one of 13, 11 survived till adulthood. So he's from a big family. My mum was just her and her sister. They both grew up in Highton, which is one half of Noseley.

Highton and Kirby are make Noseley. For listeners, internationally, Noseley is... Noseley is just outside Liverpool, about five miles, five, six miles away from Liverpool. Catholic heritage? We're Catholics, yeah. And, yeah, I guess it's a very working-class area. I think it's been on the deprivation list probably all the time. And one of the things I actually found interesting when I first went into education, actually,

is the Apprenticeships and Skills Minister, was it was pretty much at the bottom of all the educational attainment lists as well. Not that you know that when you're growing up. I mean, you just are where you are and you only sort of look around you and you compare yourself to everyone around you and everyone around me was pretty much the same. And you were born in without putting your age too much? You were born in... 1968.

1968. Yes. Right. So you're growing up through the 70s. Yeah, growing up through the 70s. We actually moved around a bit because my dad worked as a office manager for McAlpines, so motorway construction. So we moved, as we were building the M62, actually, we kind of moved along it. And my mom was a secretary.

So in my early childhood, we did spend some time in Lancashire and in Yorkshire. And then we came back full time when I was about 10 to go to secondary school in Noseley. And were they political? Not at all. Not at all. Although in my office today, I have my great grandmothers on my mother's side, lifelong membership to the Labour Party, the certificate, signed personally to her, thanking her for a service, by Eric Ogden.

Okay. Yeah, so I've got that on my office wall. And I've also got my granddad's minors lamp because one of my granddad's was a minor. But so what was your sense growing up of politics? What did politics mean to you when you were into your teens say? Well, the first inkling I had a politics was probably the first minor strike. My granddad was a miner. We lived at that point in a mining village in Yorkshire.

And the village, even though I was really young, I was four or five at the time, the village absolutely divided because some people had gone back to work, some people hadn't. And there was a pit in the next village to us, Kellingly Collier, we live near there. And I went to school with, you know, basically people whose parents, dads largely were minors. So I was very aware of that and quite scared about it because it seemed, you know, it just seemed to blow families. families apart, you know, brothers weren't speaking, nephews and uncles weren't speaking. Because some were striking, some were not? Yes, yes. And it was a very difficult time. And was it easy to understand as a child what was going on?

I mean, presumably it just felt like an extraordinary act of cruelty that a government would want to close a mind that was employing lots of people. Well, at that point, I didn't really know what was causing it. I could just see the impacts of it because I was so young. Probably I had more of an idea in the next minor strike, which, you know, my granddad was a minor. So he gave me his views on that as well. And where was he politically? Well, all of my grandparents were Labour. And most of my family and friends are Labour.

So I definitely grew up. Let's just say the whole sort of essence of this show is disagree agreeably. Well, that's in my DNA because if not, nobody, I wouldn't have any friends or family members left. So I very much understand, you know, other people's viewpoints. But I did come to my own viewpoint. I didn't just follow what everybody else does. basically came to my own viewpoint. And I suppose where I first started to become political, and I wouldn't describe myself as political, you know, or from a political family at all,

was when I started work. And I started work, as you said, age 16. Everybody pretty much left our school. 92% left without the four or five GCSEs or O levels you're supposed to get to get on in life. Now, I did get more than that. But I got 10, yeah, which was a bit of a miracle because, well, I only got that because the teachers stayed behind after school to help me with engineering, technical drawing and things that I wasn't able to do in this school time. But I left at 16. I was really lucky. And it's funny because people sometimes look at you, you know, you left school at 16, you started apprenticeship almost with pity. I was the lucky one. I felt I'd got the golden ticket. An apprenticeship in, it was a Gemmell Motors car factory, it was a sub-assembly plant. And it was a

three-year apprenticeship. They took you around all of the bits of the business. And they also sponsored you to go to college. And they said to me, we'll take your studies as far as you can go. We'll take it up to degree level if you want to go to that level. And you were being apprenticed to become an engineer, to become a car mechanic? Well, that's what I wanted to do engineering. And it wouldn't be car mechanics. It would be more design, car design or process design, that kind of stuff. And your father was sort of involved in engineering, I guess, if he was building roads.

No, not really. He was the office manager. So what he would do is if he were going to build a road, he'd be the guy who'd go. He'd get the land sorted out, get the caravans. They all lived in caravans. get the labour sorted out, get the planned machinery equipment sorted out, manage the budgets.

So he was that part of it. I mean, he started work himself when he was 15, I think, and he kind of worked his way up for that. He worked for Macalpine's most of his life, and that was where he got in. And just on the trade unions, because we'll come on to your time in your current job, but I get the feeling you've got,

you know, and we hate the sort of pro-ante thing, but I have a sense of being quite anti-trade union. No, what happened was started work at 16, in 84 in the car industry. And you'll remember at the time there was a lot of changes in manufacturing during that period. And this is the height of Mrs Thatcher. Yes. And what was happening with change in manufacturing?

So people losing jobs. So what was happening actually globally was there was a change in the car industry just in time was being brought in to help make the whole process more efficient. There's a lot of money tied up, a lot of working capital tied up in parts that weren't always the right part. So they were changing the way that you basically produce cars to make us more efficient. to be able to compete with other places around the world. But when I started, there was a lot of things that needed to change to be competitive for us to remain competitive in the industry to keep the jobs here. And that required changes in the working practices.

And what I saw was the unions just refused to engage effectively. They would not change the working practices. They were going out on strike. And because what mostly mattered to them was preserving jobs and they were worried that these changes would lead to job losses. Well, actually, the changes they refused to me. make led to job losses. So they didn't really get that. But I think what they were worried about is some of the working practices that they'd negotiated over the years, they'd negotiated sort of

extra money for this or something else for that. So they wanted to preserve terms and conditions. Preserve some terms and conditions. I mean, you see this now, right? We've seen it with some of the other, particularly maybe the rail strikes where there's, you know, a shift in things. Technologies change. The way you do things change. When you try to change working practices, it's difficult because people, they get used to the working practices they've got. And the The trade unions feel they fought hard to get those protections, get those terms in place. New management comes in. And I guess you're talking on behalf of your members and you feel very worried that your members are going to be worse off.

Well, the management hadn't changed. The environment had changed. The economic factors had changed. The industry operating model had changed. The management was the same. But if you want to keep the jobs, if you want to keep in business, you have to change. That is something that, I mean, I've done nearly 30 years in business. You mentioned that I'd worked for a long time.

that is something that is a constant. If you want to keep competitive and you want to grow and you want to keep the business and the jobs here and you want to grow the businesses here, change is a factor. But the point about the minor strike in a way

is that it went deeper than that because you had a sense of that union and there were lots of problems within the union and divisions and so forth. But at heart, what they felt was because of the pace of change that Margaret Thatcher wanted to drive, there was this ideological conviction

that the trade unions themselves had to be weakened, undermined and frankly crushed. And you could argue, if you look at the unfairness and inequality that's right across our economic and social lives now, that they had a very, very good point. The balance has tilted way too far in favour of, if you like, capital against labour. If we can go back to that. I think what you're probably ignoring is actually what it was like before. I was quite astonished.

I was watching some old election programmes, you know, in the 70s and even in the 60s. What recently? Yeah. As a hobby? Well, when you're not that political, you feel you need to catch up. Because everybody around me, actually, most people on the Labour side and the conservative side, they remember it? No, their politics has come all the way back from student unions.

You know, we're talking about unions because I worked in a car factory. Their politics were shaped by student unions. So there's a whole piece of me that, you know, I didn't have the same experience. So I do go back. So you're sitting at home. You're the education sector. You say, I don't that we'll do or watch the 1970s election companies. What did you learn?

I learned that actually the people who were common. commenting on behalf of the country of what was going to happen and were commenting on the election and who they were going to work with and who they weren't were all the union barons. It was quite astonishing. They were all the commentators. They didn't have politicians. They didn't have the leaders of parties. They had the union barons sat there saying, oh, you know, well, if this one comes on, this is what I'll be doing. The country almost seemed at that point like it was being run and held to ransom by the union. So the union power had gone way too far too. Well, you cannot have unions running countries because they're not elected, right? You need to have the people who are elected. That's what everyone gets a vote for should be running the country. But my point is not about unions. I think even to define them as barons, they are elected leaders in the main. Of their members, but not of the country.

Okay, but my point is that the balance now, businesses aren't elected, corporations aren't elected, and yet people now feel that the power in the land, And we're going to be interviewing Bill Gates this week. Is Bill Gates more or less powerful than most elected politicians around the world? Has the balance just gone too far? Well, what you've got, I mean, Bill Gates in particular, I mean, technology has consolidated a lot of power into a few hands, right? That's true. And often, you know, you will get these trends where you have, you know, sort of big things that change everything, disrupt industries, change the way we do everything.

And consolidation can happen. have to make sure, and that's one of the things that we probably haven't gone far enough, but that's why we have discussions now about online harms bill and those kind of things, you do have to make sure that you get those power balances right. But I'm not sure that the unions would be the right route to correct that. One thing to continue on this theme, I guess people would say that one of the other striking things since, really since the beginning of your working life, has been the massive increase in the gap between the salaries that CEOs get.

and that a normal worker gets. I think back in the 1970s, the CO was maybe paid 12 times as much as the worker. And now in the US and the UK, you get COs being paid, you know, 250 times more. So one of the things I think maybe driving a certain kind of public discontent, the sense about inequality is the sense that these gaps have become much, yeah, inequality.

Yeah, and I think there is, you know, you can see that. And a lot of the, when you look at the way people are paid, A lot of that salary, you know, the massive increases, are due to the massive growth in their companies. So they've benefited from being a shareholder, owning equity, you know, owning a piece of the pie. And there have been some absolutely runaway success stories. I mean, you know, Apple's the biggest company in the world. It didn't exist when I was a kid. So, you know, so you've had these companies that are relatively new that have disrupted a lot of other companies and they've grown massively.

If you were a shareholder, if you've been part of that journey, then you will earn, you know, fortunes. And we've seen that. So what do we do as conservatives in a society that's becoming more and more aware of inequality, a sense that medium incomes are stagnated? Productivity hasn't really taken off. A story about economic growth isn't really experienced by many normal people, not just in Britain, but Europe, United States. How do we find a vision that really works for the kind of people you grew up with? on the edge of Liverpool. Well, the thing that I really, really believe in, and it is in my DNA, is, and people will say this, but I truly believe it because I've lived it, which is

that there is talent everywhere in our country, but the opportunity doesn't always match that. And the number one thing that I think governments can do is to make sure that that opportunity matches the talent. And I was in Liverpool, actually, this week in a school to focus on attendance and the problems that every country has with attendance post-pandemic has got worse in schools. And it just took me back. I was talking to 9, 10, 11-year-olds, bright as anything, enthusiastic, optimistic about their future. And it really, really made me think very deeply that taking that young person with all of their hopes and all of those aspirations and all of that confidence and, you know, just exuberance, and taking them through their teenage years to their

adult life and making sure that they have a really great chance at the start and to get on is what I see is my, that's why I'm in politics. Right, but it's, I would argue it's not happening. I know you go to loads of schools. I go to lots of schools. And I've not been in a school recently where the head teacher and teachers haven't said things are going backwards. Things are getting worse. We are spending all our time, basically, in some cases, almost as substitute parents, as substitute social workers. These are massive problems which I don't feel the teachers feel are being properly fundamentally addressed. And I think there's such a gap between the Britain that Rishi Sunat keeps describing to us, where everything seems to be going well, and the

Britain where so many, many people are now living. So I think it's great to give the vision, but I just don't feel it's happening at the moment. I often wonder, where you lot go. Because honestly, when I go into loads of schools all over the country. And I always have, because I've always gone into schools in Chitcess. I always go into schools in Noseley because a lot of my cousins teach, actually. And so I've always done that. Generally, I just don't see the same picture.

So our schools, we've really, really focused on improving the standards in our schools. I mean, in Noseley, all of the schools would have been seen as failing comprehensive schools. In fact, the Labour government at the time knocked all of the schools down. and rebuilt them, completely started from scratch, the secondary schools. And they didn't build them. In fact, they built them without classrooms. We were some kind of experiment. You're not going to tell me that building new schools was a bad thing.

These schools, they built, we called them the wacky warehouses. They didn't have a classroom wall in them. So kids were sort of in different parts of the building with like cloth between them. They were terrible. So actually, they had to spend a fortune putting the walls in. But that wasn't the point. The point is, investment in the standards of education, It's meant that now 89% of our schools are good or outstanding.

Just this last year, nearly 120,000 kids have gone from going to poor schools, inadequate schools, to go into good or outstanding schools. So that is the focus. We will have a big discussion on Austin. In a second. But just again to explain to listeners. So we've got this offstead system and they go and do inspections and you can become an outstanding school. You can become a good school. What are the other categories that you?

Requires improvement and inadequate. Right. And going back in time, there were more requires improvements in inadequate than there are today. Yes. When we took office in 2010, there were 68% good or outstanding. So 32% were requires improvement or inadequate. Now we're 89% good or outstanding, so 11%. Are you confident that?

Can I just say that is if we get there's been challenged by the Policy Institute. So the reason why this podcast... I think it's... But the reason why I think people listen to this podcast and like this podcast is because we don't just bat around... Numbers, yeah. Stats and numbers, we try and talk about bigger themes. But I'm taken aback that you don't want to admit there are massive educational challenges that relate to things like housing, things like poverty.

You know, you turn on the radio today. We're talking about there was West Streeting, the Health Secretary, Shadow Health Secretary, we interviewed about brushing kids' teeth, tooth decay now being such a problem. We've got regional inequalities now in the attainment gap that I just, This thing you got your head in your sand if you're not saying, these are massive problems and we have to address them. Instead of what we get is everything's going fine. No, not at all, but you've also got to recognise the work that's been done to improve our school standards, which have actually meant that now our kids are fourth in the world for reading.

And in the international tables, which, you know, are the best judgment we have, really. So would you acknowledge, for example, that a lot of that comes from, and this isn't me saying Labor did be. better than you're saying, but that was a focus on literacy strategy, which is you've continued, fine, some of it, and that has helped. There's two things which I could pinpoint. One is phonics and the rollout of phonics all across the country. And the second is maths mastery. The third is probably actually big investment in continuous professional development

of teachers. So we have more qualifications in, you know, being able to teach maths at primary, etc. So, you know, the focus on standards, I think. and curriculum and educational standards. So before we get on to it, so obviously there's a really big conversation to you and Aster on the deeper social context. Kids not brushing their teeth, housing, all the sense that teachers are having to deal with much bigger social problems. But what you're saying is that the thing that you would be most proud about is this improvement in literacy and maths.

And that was something that was associated with what, Michael Gove, Nick Gibb? Yes, Michael Gove and Nick Gibb in particular, yes. Trying to say we're going to, and that was controversial at the time because I guess the sort of of education then is people were saying that that was coming at the expense of other music, art, creative activities that these schools were being driven to focus much more on math skills. We do still have music and music hubs and focus on those things. And actually, we increased the focus back on foreign languages because that had been taken out of the sort of performance tables. We put it back in to try and recover that position. But it has been something that most countries around the world. And I obviously speak around the world a lot to OECD countries. Pretty much all of them recognise the transformation in our educational standards in the last 10 years. And in fact, I was in Singapore when we got the news about being fourth in the world at reading.

And the education minister said to me there, you'll be there in math soon. And the reason they said that is because actually maths mastery, the new methods we put in are actually based on the Singaporean and Shanghai methods. So, you know, we've been around and sort of looked at what works and tried to introduce them into our schools just to make sure. Because these kids, you know, our kids will be competing globally for jobs. I mean, the whole climate has kind of changed in terms of, you know, the type of jobs that they'll be looking to get. You know, it's going to be highly digitized world by the time they get into the workplace. And so these things are really important. But if you ask me, you know, you asked me about, you know, what would I say we were proudest of?

I'd probably actually say more on the revolutionising of our skills and tech. technical education with apprenticeships and the systems we put in place. I would probably say, yes, the school standards, it's a great story. But actually, I think even Labour would probably admit, and I work with Michael Barber a lot, and I think he would probably admit that not as much was done on skills as they would have liked in the last Labour government. Well, I'm not going to relitigate the Labour government, but you ask what sort of schools I go to. I'll tell you one school I went to recently, which you may have been to because it's run by

the head teacher of the year, guy called Andrew O'Neill. and that's all saints catholic school which is in the shadow of Grenfell Tower. And he wrote a piece recently called The State We're In. This is the head teacher of the year at a school in a very tough area of London. Inequality more pronounced than it's ever been. Pisa, the much-heralded results that you're talking about, says are not the result of a few meagre years of educational policy and the personal triumph that Nick Gibbs seems to be taking,

but the result of long-term policy since the 90s. attendance, a disaster. He says the government provides a strong talk about attendance, but very little substance. Behavior, despite claiming to be the party of high standards, the government has chosen to ignore this issue. The ruination of austerity. The decimation of the kinds of out-of-school activities that brought communities together. He goes on and on and on. Ostead, and you know, I'd love to talk to you about Austin, because we've just had recently this terrible suicide,

the whole one-word judgment that I think is misleading. The curriculum, we're still basically living in Michael Gove's world, and you've got a recruitment and retention crisis. Yes. So that's why that's a head teacher. Yeah. The head teacher of the year, the guy recognizes being the best head teacher in the country, pretty much saying they're doing it despite, rather than be Kossov. Well, let's be fair. I mean, the people who are delivering the educational standards and the massive improvement in them are our teachers and head teachers.

But you said it's been going on since the 90s. in 1997 we were seventh and eighth in the world for maths and English and science. By the time in 97 to 2010, in 2010 we were 27th and 28th in the world. So at the beginning of, you know, the 97... Honestly, I'm just not buying the idea. Education went backwards. No, but I'm just not buying it. I'm just saying that the head teacher there has talked about Pisa and he said, you know,

it's been going on since the 90s. It has and we were very high in 90s. then by 2010 we were 27th and 28th in the world for maths and English, we're now 11th and 13th. This really matters because if you look at Scotland, which used to have a fantastic education system, and it is no longer, they are now 27th and 28th and Wales are 33rd and 34th in the world. Now these things matter because what you're doing is saying, you know, how are our children being set up to compete in the future for those jobs? So I look at these and I'd be horrified if I was 27, 28, but if it is, you just have to deal with the situation and do something.

There's been differences in the curriculum and the approaches to the curriculum. And I think personally, I mean, I'm not an educational expert or an academic, but listening to the academics and listening to and looking at the results and listening to what other countries say about us, I think you can be confident that we are improving our educational standards and that matters. So that's what I'd say. But I don't say that there aren't challenges in schools. One of the biggest ones, actually, that many, many head teachers mentioned to me. And I don't think that head teacher, Mr. O'Neill, mentioned it, but is special educational needs. He does actually. He actually says that if we fully address the special educational needs as it exists, we'd probably put most councils out of business.

Right. Because the costs, the necessary costs are so high. and they don't have the funds to deal with the property. So there's a massive increase in special educational needs and probably there's a massive increase because we just know more. We know more how to diagnose. We know more how to put strategies in place to help children overcome.

And we know how important speech and language training is. So we know a lot more and we care a lot more as well about special education needs. So more people are categorised as having special educational needs than would have been the case 40 years ago. Yes, definitely. And we know more about special educational needs. I mean, you know, some of the things that people would have just said, oh, you know, somebody's not able to keep up or whatever.

But now we say, why? What is it? And we try and diagnose and then help the child. There is no doubt that we need to improve our special educational needs offer. And there's a couple of things. We've got a send and alternative provision improvement plan. So we recognize that we definitely need to improve it. One of the things that I think we probably did wrong is we didn't invest enough in special educational needs schools that had some specialist sort of approaches for various special educational needs. And many, many more children went into mainstream schools. Some of them wanted to, and they did perform very well. Some of them not. So we now have special educational needs schools where we have lots of people waiting

for places. So that's why, you know, we've announced another 15 special educational needs schools all across the country. And that's on top of 90 odd we've already done. You must get pressure from MPs. There won't be an MP in the country who doesn't have people with special educational needs kids who are really struggling to get into the system at all. To get diagnosed, yeah. Well, but also, once they are diagnosed, really to get in, the system feels very, very tough from their perspective. Yes, and, you know, I have a nephew with special educational needs and, you know,

I feel very strongly about it because I've seen my brother and sister-in-law, you know, they almost, parents almost feel like they're battling the system. Well, they are. And I don't want them to feel like they're battling the system. I want them to feel like the system is there to support them. So there's a number of things that were put in in place. Lots of training as well. We're training more educational psychologists.

We're training 7,000 more Senco's so that we've got enough people with the specialist skills. When you get a big increase, and it's the same with mental health. You know, we had a quadrupling of demand in children's mental health. So when you get that, you know, it sometimes takes a system of time to catch up because the workforce is very important. So this is something you're both profoundly passionate about. and we could continue for a very long time. But it's also interesting. I mean, it's interesting to get a government minister defending and taking the line

rather than what we tend to do, which is just say the whole world's gone to nonsense and grumble. Can I take you back, though, just before we come back to politics, back to your working life? Because you spent nearly 30 years not being a politician. And give us a sense first and what the difference is between not being a politician, what's the difference in having a normal job, which most people listening to this show have? and the strangeness of being a member of parliament, how would you describe that difference? Because very few people have ever come into Parliament recently

with that degree of professional experience. Most people are coming in, as you say, having been professional politicians since they were almost in their teens. Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that we need to change, actually. There's very few people from business going to politics or politics go into business,

and there does need to be more crossover. But there is a fundamental difference. So, I mean, obviously I started as an apprentice. I'm the only degree apprentice in the House of Commons. So you get that kind of experience, which you can bring to the role, because the vast majority of people probably have done the traditional university routes. So, you know, they don't understand the power of an apprenticeship or degree apprenticeship.

That's something that I definitely bring. But one of the things that is really different is once you get up the managerial ladder, and I got into a senior executive position, I worked in technology, I worked in banking, I worked in manufacturing. You are accountable, you're responsible, but you do get to set the strategy. You do get to hire the people. You do get to fire the people if they're not performing. in, you're fully accountable for the results and you yourself will have to bear that accountability, you know, if you don't grow the business, if you lose business or whatever. So it's very highly accountable. One of the things that's very different as a minister and as a cabinet minister is because you're working through an organisation, which is a civil service, you're kind of pulling levers. And I think you've described this sometimes, you're pulling levers and actually the levers aren't attached. So how do you get the attachment between what you want to do and how to get this massive organisation, civil service, to be able to,

deliver and that is the key thing. Develop that a little bit more just for a go to answer. What's the difference between, I don't know, being the head, the chief executive of a big schools group and being the education section in terms of what happens when you come into the office and say this is our plan, this is our vision? You've been doing the job now for, I guess, how long? A year and a half.

Yeah, just coming up to a year and a half, yeah. There's a veteran in Tory ministerial. Give us the sense of what the difference is compared to when you were a senior person in business and the way in which it works managing civil service. Why is managing a self-service department different? Well, because they have, there are a different organisation. And what motivates people in an organisation is, you know, their job, their manager, their leader, what's going to get them promoted, what's going to get them on, their work colleagues. You're none of them.

Right. You're not a colleague, really. You're none of them. So what you need to do is you're in this extraordinary position where you have the power, as it were, to make the decisions. But the implementation has to be through a completely separate. organization that works with its own organizational dynamics. So what you have to do is work out how you can get them to want what you want. And that's the key important skill. And in your case, getting teachers and head teachers to want what you want. Yes. And I want what they want.

You know, one of the things that, you know, obviously we've had some difficulty since, I mean, I took the job and, you know, the first time, you know, when I got the job, I got a letter from the unions actually. It was saying, you know, we need two billion pounds. And two billion pounds for the inflationary pressures, some of the cost pressures, plus also the higher than they'd anticipated pay rise from the previous year. Two billion pounds and I thought, my goodness, it was just after the mini budget.

The quating? Yes, yes. So very difficult economic times. I thought, I'm going to get two billion pounds. And I worked with the unions. I understood the case. I had spoken to many headteachers and I put the case for the two billion.

And we got the two billion. And so I was delighted. I thought, it's great. You know, everybody's going to think this is, you know, a good achievement. And, you know, it didn't really last long because, you know, a couple of months later, they decided to take strike action. So I then had to deal with that. And so, you know, you don't have all of the levers, you know, I need to work with many, many different stakeholders. I need to work with many different, and they've got their own organizational

dynamics. So I need to understand where they're coming from. And then I need to try and sort of figure out how we can get to a position where we can agree. And, you know, getting the 30,000 starting salary for teachers was really, really important. You mentioned recruitment and retention. The whole world's got recruitment and retention difficulty in almost every sector post the pandemic. There's been a dislocative impact on the labour market and that's impacted everything from nursing to teaching to tech to pretty much everywhere. That's why we've got nearly a million vacancies in the country. And it's not just our country. It's all over the world. Just on that specifically, so back to my friend Andrew O'Neill, head teacher of the year,

he talks about recruitment and retention crisis. It says it hasn't come out the blue. Latest figures show 13% of teachers are leaving after one year, 30% are leaving the profession after five years. And these are people who join the profession believing that this is the vocation. How do we crush these dreams so quickly, he says, the government has missed its recruitment targets year after year after year. And that's exactly why in 2019 we put a recruitment and retention strategy in place,

which included getting to the starting salary of 30. 30,000 pounds, which was in our manifesto, which included focusing on shortage subjects as well, which included on looking at more routes into the profession. So I've, one of the first things I did when I was the apprenticeships and a skills minister, which is my first ministerial job, was I wanted to put apprenticeships on the map and I wanted to have an apprenticeship. I wanted people to accept them as an equally valid route. And I knew that that was a bit of an uphill struggle because I tried it all my life. But I thought I'll get an accountant's, doctors, a lawyer's apprenticeship, and I'll get Morgan Stanley, and I'll get Goldman Sachs, and I'll get financial

analysts and that will do the work for me. So that's one of the first things I did as apprenticeships and skills minister. And I tried to get a teaching apprenticeship. So you can go into teaching. You can learn on the job as well as doing your degree alongside it, because then you get more used to, you know, the sort of lead in. Because what you did find is, you know, teachers were leaving in the first two years. And that was when they went from the classroom to the real full time. And obviously, they do, you know, placements in schools. But they weren't getting the support. Actually, they needed to cope with what is, you know, a new environment every day within a school. So we've put mentorship places, a system in place. And actually, it's starting to improve.

But the teaching apprenticeship is another route to get more and more people. I want TAs to want to be teachers. There's many fantastic TAs. We have 56,000 more TAs than we had in 2010, 27,000 more teachers. Yeah, teacher assistants. You know, many of them will be able to go on to become great teachers. I want the roots to enable them to do that. So that's all the vision stuff. Well, no, we're doing it. No, okay. But yes, so yesterday in the House of Commons, we soon talked about everybody having a, you know, I think world-class education, he said, or something. and your big slogan back at the last election, leveling up, which, you know, I don't know what it meant, and I don't feel that it's happened. But in relation to education, Brody and I talk about

this a lot. So I don't want to make this personal about Rishi Sunak, but his older daughter, her education costs $48,000 a year. So that's what the value of the education that she gets is put at. Most of the kids, of most of the parents listening to this podcast, we're talking about 6,000. So how can we ever really get genuine equality of opportunity and genuine leveling up with that massive gap? Well, that's not what matters. What matters is whether they come out with the qualifications at the end of it. And that's why... What is the likelihood if you're talking about a factor of six between the value, the cost of your education? That's the real attainment gap in this country. Well, we're actually investing more in our state schools than we ever have in our history,

60 billion pounds a year. And actually, to be honest, growing up in Nosley, the one thing I learned about education is money doesn't solve everything. They spent a fortune on Nosley education, but it actually didn't improve the outcomes. The outcomes are improving now, but there's still nowhere near where we want them to be. But the most important thing is that children get a good education to enable them to get, you know, the GCSEs, then the, you know, level three, whether it's A levels, or they go, onto an apprenticeship or BTX or whatever, T levels.

That is the most important thing. And you see now the outcomes are improving for children. That's why we're going up the lead tables internationally. That's the hard work of teachers is really delivering on that. And Gin, can I just sort of maybe transition now off. I mean, I think this has been very interesting on education. But at the same time, one of the problems, I think, in politics today is the way in which we have these conversations.

Because, you know, there's always this sort of gap between somebody listening to the show who's having a very tough time in school or who worried about their local school. And then the minister comes on and they talk about statistics or how much more money is going in. And of course, in an odd way, it's, I mean, of course it's what you have to do and it's what everybody's always done. Do you feel there is a communications challenge in politics? I mean, I guess, you know, it would have been true when Alistair was running Coms for Labor. You know, people say, well, it's rubbish. And you say, yeah, but, you know, we're spending X billion on this and we've got a new strategy on that.

done this, that and the other, and everyone's like, oh my goodness, here's a politician just talking nonsense again. That's why, in the end, it's all about delivery. Tell me, tell me about how we inspire people, what you've learned about, what doesn't work, what does work, why people are losing trust and politicians. Yeah, so I think the number of the problem is, when you're dealing, you know, as a cabinet minister responsible for a whole department, what you're dealing with is you're always looking at the average across the country.

You're looking at the averages everywhere. I do go into the detail to look at where those averages are different in different places or, you know, where the contrasts are. But of course, when you're dealing with the average and showing that on average school standards have gone up, on average, more people are getting access to technical education and apprenticeships on average. There will always be someone who sat there that says that's not my lived experience at all. And the whole thing that you need to do when you're trying to define policy, for example, is make sure that you don't just look at the averages, but you get people who actually got that lived experience. So one of the good examples we've done recently is care leavers. Now, I know you talk about prisoners a lot and that they get a really rough deal.

Carelevers get a really rough deal. So if you look at care leavers and the outcomes for care leavers, for homelessness, for employment, all things which massively affect their life chances. Care leavers is a... Just to explain to listen to... again outside the United Kingdom. These are people who for challenges within their families have been taken away from their families and put in care often with a foster parent or with some other kind of institution. And that, of course, is very, very difficult than that. Yeah. So they've already

had a lot of challenges to overcome and their parents often have as well. But yeah, they're people who grow up either with foster parents or within care homes and systems within the government and local authorities usually look after them. But you look at the outcome. and they're really, really awful. So when you're designing, what should you do? The first thing we've done is go and work with a whole load of people who are in care and who have left care and understand what is it that has got in the way. And there's loads of things.

And what can we do to make sure we take those barriers away? So we've just not long ago had a new strategy, which we worked with Josh McAllister, actually, he's now a Labour candidate. But we worked with him because, you know, I'm not actually tribal at all. I work with anybody who's got some experience and a good idea. You're a bit trying. Actually, I'm not. My best friends voted Labor and voted Leave.

And, you know, I voted Remain and I'm a conservative. She'd been my best friend for 45 years. So I'm definitely not. But, you know, we worked with people. And actually, I met a care leaver this week who's doing a level two, Angelina, who's fantastic. He was doing a level two business admin apprenticeship. And, you know, our life's being turned round.

So we have to get to those. areas, you have to work with people who are living the experience. And they can help you most in terms of defining policy. And one of the things that we're trying to do is to make sure that we, you know, look at, there's only 85,000 people in this situation. And I just believe that that we should really focus on trying to make sure that we remove all the barriers in their life. We help them. And we recognize that none of us would be where we are today without our parents. Can you imagine trying to get on in life without your parents? And that is, you know, I take that very seriously, and that's how you try and get from trying to do it across the whole country,

looking at data that's averages. And at that level, it is definitely all the things we say are true. But, of course, if you're not living that experience, there's no way that any of that makes a difference to you. So that is why you need to get both sides and when you're developing policy. Okay, Rory, Gillian, let's take a break. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Samaruk here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Restis Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels,

like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues, and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on The Rest is History, we're looking at these and other We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political

life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistaira will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said, the time to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for

the rest is history wherever you get your podcasts. Now, we've always raised the issue of communication. I think the communication, the single piece of communication, for which you we're probably best known, Gillian. Ah. And we don't normally swear on this program, but it's when you said, does anyone ever say you've done a fucking good job because everyone else has sat on their ass and done nothing?

So you're talking to Daddy Who of ITV, you've got the whole rack thing, schools falling down going on around you. Talk me through it. Talk me through it. Actually, my best friend looked at that and she said, I know exactly what happened. She said, you'd finish the interview.

You went to take the mic off. And then someone has asked you for a photo because I saw you do this with your hair and start messing with your hair, and that's exactly what happened. So they said, can we take a shot? And so I thought, I put that, and actually, I didn't take a mic up. But what was the mindset? Did you think we should have been thanking you? No, it wasn't me. So what happened with that incident was, and I'll call her out, actually, the Lord's Minister, Baroness Barron, way before I got there, had set about, and actually, I think it started under Nadine Sir Harvey, but she had continued making sure that we tried to get these questionnaires.

We've got 22,000 schools in the country, 60,000. 000 buildings so we could so we knew where rack was and she had against the odds just to explain so know where this sort of dodgy form of concrete reinforced air yeah and the problem with that is that been going into schools and we didn't know where it was and buildings it's been going on i mean this is from buildings from the 50s 60s 70s right up to 94 when we stopped using it so it's been going on for years no one's not let's not re but no no one's kept kept so so basically this minister said we we have to find out where all this is. So she was, she went through this from March 2020, getting all these questionnaires back. The only reason I could make the decision, which is probably one of the

most difficult decisions I've made, but I will never regret it. But the, the only reason I could make the decision was because of all the work she'd done. And the decision was to not reopen some schools that she thought were unsafe. So what had happened is they'd gone around, they'd been identifying RAC. RAC had been either called critical or non-critical. All the critical schools, which there was 52 at the time. All of them were closed straight away. All of the kids were put into face-to-face via, you know, porter cabins or via using other space in the schools. We had done that for 52 without a single media inquiry. What happened was there was 104 that were judged as non-critical. Over the summer, in other settings, there were panels that failed. And we were so concerned

about this that any panel that failed anywhere, we were sending engineers to go and look at it. And the reason that's a problem is if a concrete panel on a ceiling fails that can drop on someone's head, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, horrendous. So what happened is some of the panels that failed had previously been judged as non-critical. So I had all the engineers, the institution of structural engineers. So what's the difference between the non-critical here and the non-critical there? I wasn't willing to take any risk at all that a panel could fall on children's head. So it was very cautious. But I said, okay, I don't want to. to open the schools, I want to get where all this rack is, and I want to get those those ceilings made safe immediately. And we kept most children in face-to-face education. The teachers did a brilliant job and the head teachers did a brilliant job. And, you know, that's great. We've talked on the podcast loads about Rack at the time. So it was a moment. It was a moment.

It was a moment. Let's move up. I regret, obviously. We've got a few minutes later. You regret it? Well, I regret swearing on telly. Yeah, my mum wasn't very happy. But I don't regret the decision, at all. No, the decision, I just felt, when I said, you know, I actually did feel grateful that I could make the decision,

that the work that had gone before me quite recently, they had the information. So I could say, this is where we're going to take action. Let's just bring this all about your party. So you voted for Rory Stewart to be leader of the Conservative Party. I did. It's probably the reason why in an earlier podcast

he said he thought you ought to be prime minister. Well, I thought he ought to, obviously. Gillian's wonderful. So you can stay out of this mutual backscratching. But how different is the Conservative Party today than you think it might have been if actually Rory had become leader of the Conservative Party? And can you live with both? Yeah.

I mean, I voted for Rory. I didn't vote for Boris. I didn't vote for Liz. And I voted for Rishi. And I think Rishi is great, actually. I do. I've worked with lots of people in many, many different parts of the world, in many different guysers.

He is great. He's great. He did also defend Liz Truss and Boris Johnson when they're of prime ministers. I know that's part of your job. You have to. But that's what people hear. So I want to get a genuine sense of where you are on that spectrum between Rory Stewart and, you know, Suella Braverman, the radical right, as it were. Where are you on that spectrum? And where's the Tory party heading? I'm what the Conservative Party is, which is pragmatic, right? So, I mean, one of the things that always strikes me, because, you know, I know that you go on about Boris quite a bit,

But it always strikes me that... Johnson, yeah. Well, it always strikes me, though, you know, first of all, you go with the majority vote, right? That's the whole system that we have, whether it's on leadership, whether it's who governs the country. The choice that the country had in 2019 was Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corby. I think they made the right decision because I am pretty certain that Jeremy Corbyn would not have presided over the fastest vaccine rollout in Europe. I'm pretty certain that he would not have stood up immediately when you, Ukraine were invaded by Russia. I'm not even sure we know which side he'd be on. And I'm pretty

certain that when Israel was invaded on the 7th of October, he would not have defended Israel, supported them and said they have the right to defend themselves. That was the choice at the last election. The country, I think, made the right choice. So that's the way I look at it. And once the country's made a choice, I do what I can. We all talk about and worry talks about a lot. You know, what a privilege it is to be able to serve your country in government. But your party, which has been in government for so much of its history, you know, it is, I think, incumbent on all politicians, to be honest with the public, about where the politics of that party lie. Yeah. I can't imagine even Margaret Thatcher's party doing some of the stuff

that's been going on recently. In terms of what? Well, I think Rwanda. I think that's a policy that would have probably been rejected back then. Well, I think it's been... Let's talk. Let's talk about Rwanda, because I think, you know, there's something which I know is seen as something that you think is defining the party. Well, Rishi Sunak is, you know, he deliberately made this one of his five defining priorities. Yes, because what he... That's why it's become such a big thing. Well, no, it's become such a big thing because of two things. One is the migratory pressures all around the world are increasing and will continue to increase. The second is that there are organised criminals who have now moved into this space and created a business model,

which is actually going to just continue to fuel it. So it is a big issue. It's a big issue in our country. It's a big issue in Europe. You're seeing it impact politics in Europe. It has to be dealt with. So when you say and go back to try and imagine what Margaret Thatcher would do, she would do, I think, what we're doing now,

which is in the face of that, almost impossible to imagine how you can stop it. What more can we do? And obviously there's lots of things within the policy, working with the NCS, trying to smash the gangs. What about coming out of the European Convention of Human Rights? We've said very clearly that, you know, we've obviously got to go as far as we can. And this, you know, this is probably the toughest legislation that we've ever introduced on immigration because we're facing the toughest circumstances we've ever faced on immigration.

So those two things need to go together. But, you know, of course that needs to be within, you know, the respectable legal arguments and be able to, you know, defend itself in the law. And of course that needs to, you know, we need to be as tight as possible, but we also need to make sure that it's, you know, there's a respect to legal argument. But no one's had to deal with this before. No, but we have to do with it. You wouldn't agree that Rishi Sunak is actually being driven to a place that he doesn't

necessarily feel politically comfortable. What do you think he is politically comfortable where he is? I think we're all being driven into a place we never expected to be by the size of the immigration problem and the fact that the organized criminals are not going to go away. Obviously, we take boats, we try to get to the source, the National Crime Agency are working with everybody to do as much as possible. But these people will always find, you know, they find a way. I was very struck, and this is kind of, you know, I was in Tanzania going to see a refugee camp,

actually with Lela Moran and Jess Phillips, because I am not tribal and I have lots of friends in other parties. But I was very struck because we were talking to people then. And they were talking about the successes they'd had in crushing the drugs roots and the drugs trades that were going through there. And they said to us, unfortunately, that has meant that the criminals have moved into people trafficking, human trafficking. And they are basically selling dreams and delivering nightmares. And that is what we're on the end of. Nobody's had to deal with it before.

But anyone who thinks that you can deal with this in either ways that we've done in the past, you know, you can't. We have to have new ways of dealing with it because we're dealing with a new phenomenon. You don't see it as a major political shift to the right? I see it as a major shift that we have to do to make sure that we control our borders and we do so fairly. The British public are so fair. We've lost control of our borders in part because of Brexit. The British public are so fair and they voted for Brexit. But they are so fair that you could never accuse the British public of not being fair.

And yet this is something that. happening. And, you know, look at what's happening in Europe, 80% up. You know, the small boat crossings are 30% down. I know you do like the numbers. But, you know, it's an incredibly difficult problem, but it has to be solved. My last question. Give us a bit of sense now that you've moved into this new world of politics, what you enjoy about the job, what keeps you cheerful in the morning? Is there anything that's funny and amusing and sort of invigorating about the job? I mean, you've been very serious at this. And I know you can be more lighthearted, and you've given us a very kind of serious policy account.

But give us a sense about the daily life and what you might hope you'd take away if you were talking to your children about your legacy or about what's been satisfying and what you do. Well, the first thing I say is I've had loads of jobs. I've actually always loved working. I love it. But I love this job. It is the best job I've ever had of all the jobs I've had. I mean, what makes it really fun?

I mean, mostly actually the constituency stuff. You know, you can really help people when they're at their kind of lower. step when they've tried everywhere else. They've tried to get things solved. They've tried to, you know, battle the system. And you can help them. There's so many ways that you can try and unblock things for people. That's a huge privilege to do. It's a very different organisation. Everybody in politics gets one vote. And therefore, it's very equal whilst being very hierarchical. And the hierarchy changes all the time. That's a very unusual dynamic. So you do find, you know, lots of things that happen that, you know, you don't always feel that you can control every aspect of it. But all you can

do is, you know, do your best to try and, you know, sort of push forward to improve things. Now, my final question is a little less softball than Rory's final question. So, families. And we're talking at the middle of this massive post office scandal, which has been going on for quite a few years. And now, on the one hand, you could say, well, my private life is my private life and I married a guy who happened at a certain point in his life to be very senior figure in Fujitsu. And that's fine. But on the other hand, going back to what we're talking about earlier about the balance of power

in this country and the feeling about, you know, and I'm by the way not equating your husband remotely with people like Michel Mohn. Well, thank you for saying that. But those sorts of stories where people feel that the connections within the political and economic systems are just too close. do you feel you have a bit of a special responsibility on something like this, in a sense, to keep a bit of a distance from... I mean, you always have a responsibility to be open and transparent about everything. And what happened, I mean, obviously there's a lot of talk about Horizon and the post office.

And what was just an unbelievably, truly awful miscarriage of justice. And, you know, I first learned of this. I met subpostmasters in my own constituency when I was very newly an MP. And their stories, they're unbelievable, heartbreaking. In fact, I mean, they did move me to tears. You know, village sub-postmasters, they've been there for decades. They were trusted pillars of the community. Suddenly, their livelihoods ripped away from them and their reputation.

And the political system hasn't really, the political system over decades has failed them. No, and thank goodness for Alan Bates and Joe Hamilton and the campaign group, right? And the TV program. It's taking a TV program. Well, yes, but to be honest, I think the inquiry has been set up over two years ago. And that, you know, the job of government now is to obviously speed this up because it has taken too long and make sure those are affected get paid compensation, fair compensation. That's what we're doing. But the judicial inquiry, which was set up two years ago and is very thorough. And Wynne Williams, I think, is doing a great job as well as Jason Beer as well, the KC. But they will bring everybody in. They will ask tough questions under oath. And everybody should fully cooperate with this. inquiry and everybody, they will get to the bottom of this and when they get to the bottom of it, people will be held responsible.

But so your husband, who is reasonably senior in fidgety at the time, would be giving evidence that inquiry? Well, that's up to the inquiry. So the inquiry can call whoever they want, and I am certain if they called him, he would obviously fully cooperate. And how do you, as apology, and feel when this kind of thing is going on? And I don't think you're being, you know, it's not as if you're being followed here by cameras, or any of that stuff, but it's kind of out there.

People are sort of, you know, think that this is relevant because you're a current member of the cabinet. How does that make you feel about being a politician? Is it fair? Is it unfair? Is it part of the job? And do you feel the responsibility is sort of, you know, to drill down maybe deeper than others in government,

it would seem over time of done? Probably the best example of that, which just to bring it to light to your listeners, was actually when I, I got into the papers because of the RAC decision, or more importantly, probably because of swearing on camera. And I got followed by cameras, but more importantly, they followed me on holiday where my family, my mum and dad were there.

And they were knocking on neighbours' doors. And all my neighbours were saying, because I'd have a house, I'd lived there for many, many years, were saying, we didn't even know she was an MP, you know. She's had her place here for, you know, 20-odd years. We didn't even know she was an MP. And can you just imagine my poor parents, you know, they still live in the same house. They've been in since I was 10 years old. They don't really know much about politics.

And, you know, they've got these, they're being doorstep by these journalists when they're on holiday. So it's quite astonishing. What I think has happened is the whole media landscape has changed. Media is obviously, with the acceptance of BBC, is largely funded by advertising revenue. That advertising revenue is now being shared with social media platforms, social media influencers, promoters, podcasts, everything. Right. The landscape has absolutely changed. And if you think of podcasts aside, actually, I think they're a good addition.

But if you think of some aspects of like influencers or promoters, you know, they need lots of clicks, right? That's what they're trying to do to get lots of clicks. And that is what is happening and it's changing the aspect, I think, some aspects of our media. Okay. I'm going to come in for a final question then. So I get a bit gloomy about politics. I know, I've heard. I don't know why.

You should have stayed, actually. You'd be having it. choice. He did. Give us the sense if you were talking to a young person about an honest, quick one minute on the bad side and the good side of being a politician. The bad side is you become a public figure. And when I was first thinking about politics, which somebody else suggested to me, I didn't even think about it, which sounds terrible. But I thought of lots of things. I thought about, you know, the difference in the jobs, the difference in the sort of lifestyle and how you live in two places and all of that stuff.

I thought about what you could do and how I'd have to get used to understand the word of politics. I didn't think about becoming a public figure. I didn't really think about that. And I didn't think that was going to happen. And then it does. Now, you can't do anything about that. So you have to be prepared for that. I wasn't really prepared, but now I'm pretty pragmatic.

So I'm, you know, I'll just go with it. And I recognize I am now. Therefore, that's why I come on. I'll answer anybody's questions. I'll try to be as detailed as possible, hopefully not too detailed. Maybe I have been for your podcast. But that's the downside. You're a public figure.

My mum probably put it the best when I said to my parents, I was going to go into politics. And they couldn't believe it. They were like, but you've got your way to these great successful jobs. Everybody loves you. You're really sort of popular. Why will you do that? Everyone's going to hate you. They were probably more right than I thought.

But that's the downside. That is what you see. But that's what you see when you look on Twitter, or if you look at some of the sort of negative media. You go into your constituency. You go into a school. When I go into a school, I genuinely get a fantastic experience. You smell the queen.

You smell the paint. Well, I go into schools. Sometimes they don't even know who I am. In fact, most times they don't even know who I am. But I go into schools. And what do you see? You know, you just see the energy of the kids in there. You see the enthusiasm and professionalism of the teacher.

You see the dedication of everybody in that school and you see the outcomes improving. We haven't really talked about technical education, but every lawyer doing a lawyer's apprenticeship or accountancy apprenticeship or a nuclear science or a space engineering apprenticeship, none of that would be happening if we hadn't put that in place. That is the good side. You can do things and you can deliver things that change people's lives. And there's so many stories of people who have used the apprenticeship. system or used the technical education system, skills bootcams, they're a new addition,

to transform the outcomes of their lives. That is the good side and that's what you can do. Thank you very much, Gillian. Thank you. Now you can go back to the cabinet and tell them, there's not many of them that we'd have on, but there's a few that we might. So just tell them you've had a wonderful day, lovely experience and recommend, Ritchie, we'd have Ritchie, wouldn't we? We definitely. Definitely, that'd be a great, great honour. Well, it has been a lovely experience, but I just want to say that it was actually me that asked you on the stage, if I should come on.

Yep. And you were very reluctant because I said you only have Labour MPs on. So thank you for having a Conservative. It's really, really been a pleasure. Thank you. Yes, another one. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

So, first serving cabinet minister, what did you think of that? I have very mixed views, actually. I thought she was very likable, very warm. I know you don't understand football quite as deeply as I do, but if I was thinking of a football analogy, That's not an understatement, that thing. Okay, but I think it's like you're playing against the team that spends a lot of time knocking the ball around at the back and then hoops it forward and sort of moves into the corner flag a bit.

In other words, I felt she was sort of filling space quite a lot. I had a sense of a very good backstory, but I wasn't utterly persuaded of the forward story. And I really do think there's a disconate. Is that the part of the football now to do the back story? No. I've now moved into a different cliché. And I think that, I don't know, look, I came armed with all these stats and facts, and I was so determined for us not to go down that.

But I thought for her to sit there and essentially say Labor Government on education was terrible and we're doing well. I mean, speak to any head teacher. I also think, though, I was interested in him. It's not the way that I would do it. And I'd be interested in your view on political communication again. My instinct is usually to agree with the question. So if you say to me, you know, this head teacher says it's all awful.

Usually when I was a politician, I'd be like, yes, I mean, it is terrible. And, you know, I visited the school, which is even worse than I talk about it. Oh, you would do. Then I would try to say, however, you know, once I've really lent into that, however, there are some really interesting other things going on elsewhere. But I was quite sort of interested in, it was quite good for you, I thought. It's the first time we've had someone who's actually really been like doing the traditional political stuff. like actually we're really proud of what we've done, actually Labor didn't do that good. Do you know the only place where I found it really convincing was when she was defending Boris Johnson, bizarrely, as opposed to Jeremy Corbyn.

That's when I've actually felt there's something coming out that's real here. Because I'll be honest, what I hear from the head teachers that, you know, and Fiona kind of is immersed in this education world, but I speak to a lot of their teachers. What I hear from them is that they don't feel for a long time that they've had a government that really, gets education and really has education at the heart of the government strategy. So I just felt that she was a little bit trapped in that, you know, here are the points, here are the lines to take, here are the rebuttal points, as opposed to here's a vision for the role of education in the country. And I thought the other thing she did, which is kind of fine on one level, but this constantly taking it to, you know, well, I've, my best friend is a Labour, Brexiteer, I've got somebody

who's got special needs in my life. I've got, you know, sort of things. thinking that because you've got that personal connection, it gives you some sort of special place in the debate. I'd be interested because the guy, he's not a close friend in mind, but the guy mentioned Andrew O'Neill, the head teacher, who's, he runs his amazing school. I'd be very interested in his take on it because he's somebody who I think is really speaking from the heart. Now, she is somebody who, people will listen to that thing, she's speaking from the heart, but is she speaking from a really deep awareness of what's happening in schools and a deep conviction about the importance of education?

Or is she just somebody who's on a career ladder? It's difficult to know, isn't it? And it would have been interesting to interview Andrew Raina when she was Shadow Education Secretary. But I also thought Gillian was quite reflective and interesting about the reality of what a minister is. And of course they're not a head teacher. They don't have that kind of deep expertise.

They never can, right? And as you know, they're often popped into these positions without having been in the department before. I liked, though, the fact that she's somebody, who's gripping things. I like her, I liked her tone. I mean, as a kind of centre-left Tory, I like the fact that she's able to be likable and approachable, but also pretty proud of being a conservative. I often feel a lot of the time I'm pretty ashamed of being conservative. I spend a lot of time apologising. So it was, it was cheering up to me to feel

the tone of somebody who was prepared to say, actually, I think we've done a pretty good job. But you've often said that you've been more reluctant to interview serving politicians because you feel that they're constrained. Let's just say, for example, that you had stayed in Parliament. Let's just say that you were now somebody who worked under Johnson Trust and Sunak. It's kind of your job to do that. And that's what I couldn't quite work out. I wasn't any clearer at the end of it where she was on that Conservative Party spectrum.

But it's almost impossible, isn't it? I mean, I know you think that there are certain really brilliant political communicators who can be very, very honest and also. also be senior cabinet ministers. But the reason, obviously, I always think that politicians are pretty boring people to interview is that it's so difficult. Says the co-presenter of the rest is policy. It's leading. Because there's an Alistair Campbell sitting in the background listening to this, saying, why are you going on that show? What exactly you're trying to get out of going on that show? What risks are you taking? But you know when I made the point? She was coming out of me

with some statistics of this, that and the other. And I had all the rebuttal statistics here, and I thought, I can't be bothered. I just pushed them to one side. Because I do think that one of the reasons people listen to this podcast is because we don't just sort of dive down into detail and argue about, well, you say 3% and I say 5%, you say this apprenticeship, I say that apprenticeship. And I felt that she was a little bit. I thought she got better as it went on fun enough. The only time to be fair to her that she looked down at her notes and was clearly reading for them was in the last question when we talked about her husband and Fujitsu. Well, actually, I think I was pretty tame. I think lots of our listeners will say, why did I give her

a harder time? But I knew that she had the lines written there. So I think what we're going to get was a kind of a rehearsed line to take. And that's what we're trying to avoid on this, because that's what just, I think, drives people mad when they're listening to these. I've come out of that still with a huge amount of admiration for Gillian as a person. I think her backstory is extraordinary. I think it's amazing to have somebody from a working class background to left school at 16, had an incredible business career. I think she brings a lot of common sense and empathy. I think she's been in politics a very short time.

She was elects in 2017. So barely six years, five years, I think before she was in the cabinet. I think she could have a long way to go. I think she could improve a lot. Do you think she could be prime minister? You still think she could be. And I would definitely much prefer to have her as prime minister than almost any of the other potential candidates coming out of the conservative. I'd be deeply reassured by her because I think she's got a lovely combination of wisdom, common sense, empathy, practicality.

You're probably right that if we get back to her swearing in the studio or this kind of stuff, that the stuff she still has to learn about political communication, but she's very much at the beginning of her career. Okay. No, my up sum would be very warm, empathetic. I can see why people like her, but I didn't have that scent. I didn't really have a sense of her fully understanding the challenges that are being faced in the education sector and didn't have the ideas about how she might actually start to deliver.

on some of the very fine words that she said about what she believes in. Well, let's see then. When Labor comes into government, how they perform against those metrics. If, Rory, if. Stop saying when. It is an if. See you soon. See you soon. Bye-bye.