The country’s high turnover of education secretaries has been flagged as a concern in a major new global education report.
A Unesco report published today highlights that there have been 10 secretaries of state for education in the UK since 2015 - more than one a year - and none of whom had experience teaching at primary or secondary level.
The report warns that short tenures make education reform harder to achieve.
It highlights analysis of World Bank education projects between 2000 and 2017 in 114 countries, which found a substantive negative correlation between ministerial turnover and project performance.
Education dropping as financial priority
In 2022 alone the country had five different education secretaries during a period of political turmoil for the government.
These were Nadhim Zahawi who held the post for 10 months after having replaced Gavin Williamson in 2021, Michelle Donelan, who held the post for less than three days, James Cleverly, Kit Malthouse, who was in place for less than two months during the short-lived Liz Truss government, and Gillian Keegan.
The current education secretary Bridget Phillipson was appointed in July following Labour’s general election victory.
The new report highlights a series of findings and statistics about education policy in the UK.
It finds that education is dropping as a financial priority. This is based on the percentage of GDP allocated to education in the UK falling from 5.6 per cent to 5 per cent between 2015 and 2023, according to the report.
It adds that the percentage of total government spending allocated to education also fell from 12.3 per cent to 10.6 per cent over the same period.
The 2024-25 Unesco Global Education Monitoring Report, Leadership in education: Lead for learning, calls for better training of school leaders given their central role in delivering successful schools and achieving global educational development goals.
The report highlights how, in the UK, around one in five “principals” had never been trained in school administration before taking up their role, according Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures from 2019.
It also stresses the positive impact of good leaders on pupil performance. It quotes a study tracking over 20,000 headteachers in England from 2004 to 2019, which showed that replacing an ineffective headteacher (from the bottom 16 per cent) with an effective one (from the top 15 per cent) led to a two-grade improvement across all subjects or one grade in a single subject in secondary schools.
Unesco also calls on the UK to extend existing initiatives, such as the Leadership College for Government, which builds leadership skills in the civil service, into education.
It says that in Wales the National Academy for Educational Leadership, established in 2018, provides “a vision and strategy” for education leadership and professional development opportunities for current and aspiring leaders.
Teenagers’ interest in teaching declining
The report also warns that the number of teenagers interested in joining the profession in the UK is declining.
It finds that there is an “insufficient pool of qualified and interested candidates” and says, on average in middle and high-income countries, only about 4 per cent of 15-year-olds wanted to become teachers in 2015.
It says that low interest has translated into “low and sharply decreasing” numbers of entrants into teaching programmes.
The report cites OECD figures from 2024, which show the share of new tertiary qualified entrants into education in the UK fell from 8 per cent to 5 per cent of graduates.
Leadership in Education: Lead for learning makes a range of recommendations; significantly it calls on governments to give heads greater freedoms.
It says: “There can be no leadership when there is no opportunity to make decisions. Education leaders contribute to education improvement in all circumstances and contexts, but their influence is greater the more they are trusted to use their skills.
“Education systems therefore need to empower school principals with sufficient autonomy to manage financial and human resources and to make decisions related to teaching and learning.”
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