Rishi Sunak’s government does not merit a top performance rating, in the view of a senior cabinet minister.
Asked during an LBC phone-in to rate her own administration’s performance in the style of a schools inspection report, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, rated the government as “good”.
That is the second-best rating on the four-point scale used by the education inspectorate Ofsted behind “outstanding”, and ahead of “requires improvement” and “inadequate”.
Earlier, when asked to describe the overall performance of the Conservative government in a word, she said: “Delivering,” adding: “Usually, if I get more than one word, they’re not very kind words.”
The phone-in host Nick Ferrari said: “Others might have another word for it, but there we are.”
Keegan’s claim came on the same day the prime minister admitted he had failed to deliver his promise to cut healthcare waiting lists.
Keegan was asked for the ratings in a segment of the show where she faced questions on the fairness of rating schools and other institutions with single-word judgments. Ofsted delivers the ratings as headlines, backed up by more detailed reports on performance in various areas, in its reports.
Last month, an influential committee of MPs said the use of such judgments in Ofsted’s reports on schools in England should end. Members of the education committee said relations between the inspector and teachers had become “extremely strained”, with trust “worryingly low” after headteacher Ruth Perry killed herself last year following a traumatic inspection.
Ofsted had downgraded Perry’s school in Reading from outstanding to inadequate, and a coroner called for changes to be made by the Department for Education (DfE) and Ofsted in how schools are inspected.
Asked to justify her own “good” rating of the government’s performance, Keegan said: “Often, a lot of the things that we’ve delivered nobody ever talks about … When you’ve gone from 68% to 89% ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ schools. When you’ve gone from no apprenticeship system to one that’s training 5.7 million people. I think you can look and say there’s a lot that has been achieved.”
During her LBC appearance on Monday, Keegan acknowledged some childcare providers still did not know how much funding they would receive to make good on the government’s promise of 15 free childcare hours a week for two-year-olds whose parents are in work.
Keegan said: “The vast majority of them have already but there’s a small number that haven’t and this is causing a bit of friction in the system. I am leaning on them very, very hard … I’m very confident in this programme. I’m very confident that your 15 hours for two-year-olds will be available in April.”
Keegan apologised in September last year after being caught swearing on camera while expressing frustration about the crumbling concrete crisis in schools, claiming that “everyone else has sat on their arse” while she tried to fix the problem.
In a seemingly unguarded moment after a TV interview, the education secretary was filmed lamenting that nobody had praised her for doing a “fucking good job”.
After a series of challenging questions from the ITV News reporter Daniel Hewitt, Keegan said exasperatedly: “Does anyone ever say: ‘You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing?’ No signs of that, no?”
