A former top civil servant at the Department for Education has questioned whether former education minister Nick Gibb had too much power over teaching in schools.

Jonathan Slater, who was the department’s permanent secretary until 2020, asked today if it made sense “to give one person quite so much power”.

As a longstanding minister in the DfE, Mr Gibb (pictured) was a prominent champion of the use of phonics in primary schools and the English Baccalaureate suite of traditional academic subjects at GCSE.

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Speaking at an Institute for Government event today, Mr Slater also said that the government’s academisation programme concentrated political power “in the hands of a very small number of people in Westminster” and said he thought the system was too centralised.

Mr Slater highlighted how the DfE had been transformed by the academies programme and was now responsible for taking decisions nationally that would have previously have been taken locally.

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He said this meant that decisions about school resourcing during his time at the DfE were taken by two unelected ministers - Lord Nash and Lord Agnew, who were academies ministers.

Mr Slater questioned the level of influence that Mr Gibb - who was schools minister between 2010 and 2012, and again from 2015 to 2021 - had on teaching in schools.

He said: “There was, of course, a politician who had been elected in the department, Nick Gibb, an extremely influential minister for 10 years.

“Whatever you think about Nick’s views about the best way to teach reading or what subjects should best be taught at 16, there does seem to be a question in my mind, in this balance between national and local, as to really whether it makes sense to give one person quite so much power over what children learn.”

Mr Slater told the event that he thought decision-making had to become too centralised as a result of academisation.

“The consequence of academisation is that it does concentrate political power very much in the hands of a very small number of people in Westminster, supported by an increasing number of civil servants and for that, myself, I think it’s more centralised than it should be,” he added.

Mr Slater said that when he was a director of children’s services at Islington Council, he thought he had a difficult job because he was responsible for overseeing around 100 schools.

But he said that this was easy compared with his role at the DfE, where he became responsible for “overseeing thousands and thousands of schools operating individually or in small groups”.

Mr Slater was sacked from his post as permanent secretary in 2020 following the fallout from the GCSE and A-level grading row.

Mr Gibb was schools minister for much of the past decade but lost his job in the last ministerial reshuffle, which also involved Gavin Williamson being replaced as education secretary by Nadhim Zahawi.