Former headteacher Mark Lehain has been confirmed as education secretary Nadhim Zahawi’s special adviser at the Department for Education as part of a shake-up at Sanctuary Buildings.

Mr Lehain, currently director of the Campaign for Common Sense, previously stood as the Conservative candidate for Newcastle North in 2019 but lost out to Labour’s Catherine McKinnell.

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Prior to that, he was director of Parents and Teachers for Excellence, and principal of Bedford Free School.

Free school founder Mark Lehain joins Nadhim Zahawi’s team at the DfE

Mr Lehain joins Will Bickford-Smith at the department, a former policy adviser to Nick Gibb who will now advise Mr Zahawi on schools policy, as well as Iain Mansfield, a former Gavin Williamson aide who will advise FE and HE minister Michelle Donelan.

Mr Lehain was one of the leading voices of the free school movement and one of the first heads to take the helm at a free school - Bedford Free School, which opened in 2012.

More recently he led the New Schools Network.

With Mr Lehain having always been a champion of free schools, it was former schools minister Nick Gibb who brought him around to knowledge-rich learning - in a Tes profile in 2019, Mr Lehain recalled that when Mr Gibb was shown around Bedford Free School, he encountered pupils performing a rap about fairtrade coffee.

“It was the least Nick Gibb thing ever,” Mr Lehain recalled.

“Afterwards in the corridor, he put his hand on my elbow and said, ‘Mark, that was really nice but if I had asked them what the capital of Sudan was, could they have told me?”

At the time, Mr Lehain was also cautious of jumping on the “off-rolling bandwagon”.

“While there may be some stuff [off-rolling] there, a lot of it is hearsay and even now when we have got a definition which Ofsted have come up with and are inspecting in schools, I still think it is very difficult to prove,” he said.