I have sat through eleven education secretaries. I know that because someone once made me count. Fifty years of running a school teaches you not to get too attached to any one minister, because they are, on average, gone before your Year 7s reach Year 9, and the next one will usually spend their first six months undoing whatever the last one thought was permanent. So I did not expect to feel much when Bridget Phillipson’s two years came to an end last week. I was wrong. I felt something closer to relief mixed with a low, familiar anger, the kind you get when someone has broken something that was not obviously theirs to break.

Start with the VAT on fees, because everyone else will, and because it is where the theory met the school gate. My brother Hugh and I were two of the nineteen pupils in the school our parents set up in 1960. We went off, got our degrees, learned the trades we needed, and came back to carry it forward together for more than forty years, Hugh as Administrative Principal, me as Academic Principal, until it became the largest school of its kind in the country. I watched that run brought to a juddering close by a policy dreamed up by Phillipson’s friend Rachel Reeves at the Treasury. You might think, at the very least, the mechanics would have been ready on day one. The rules for reclaiming that VAT. Oh, no, nothing so simple. The paperwork explaining how a school was actually supposed to claim it back only surfaced months after the tax itself had started being charged, and eighteen months on it is still stuck in a squabble between every VAT expert I have met, none of whom agree with each other.

It was never really spite against schools alone, when I think about it. It was spite against the whole idea of the independent, family-run business, the sort my parents started with nineteen children and a mortgage, the sort Phillipson and Reeves seem constitutionally unable to see as anything other than a tax anomaly to be closed. Nearly two thousand teachers left the state system in the year it landed, which nobody predicted in the press releases, because nobody in Whitehall had ever had to explain to a family why the fee they budgeted for in September was a different number by January. Phillipson never seemed to grasp that independent and state schools are not opposing armies fighting over a fixed pot of academic excellence. They are neighbours who borrow each other’s coaches for the cricket, share the swimming pool on a Tuesday, send staff across for CPD. Tax one hard enough and you do not redistribute quality, you just remove capacity from the whole ecosystem.

The Latin funding and the IB withdrawal made the same mistake in miniature. I have always thought the honest test of an education secretary is not what they say about ambition but what they are willing to fund when nobody is watching, and on that test she failed twice in a row, quietly, in ways that will only show up in ten years’ time when someone asks why so few state school leavers read Virgil or sit an internationally benchmarked diploma. That is not levelling up. That is deciding certain kinds of excellence belong only to families who can pay for them, which is precisely the outcome she claimed to be fighting.

What frustrated me more, though, is a vantage point I suspect almost nobody else in this argument actually has. I have spent a working lifetime on the academic side, marking essays, setting curricula, worrying about Latin and IB and what a rounded education is actually for. And I have spent recent years, unexpectedly, becoming something like a recognised voice on the digital and AI side too, sitting on the sort of panels where people debate what “digital skills standards” should even mean. Most of the people arguing about the DfE’s response to AI have only ever stood on one side of that divide. I have stood on both, and from there the department’s nervousness about genuine innovation looked even more indefensible than it would from either side alone. I sat in enough rooms this year listening to DfE officials talk about “digital skills standards” to know the ambition was there on paper. But the delivery vehicle was always something like Oak National Academy: centrally produced, safely bland, built to survive an FOI request rather than to excite a fifteen-year-old. A national education system run by people who have mistaken uniformity for equity will always end up building the educational equivalent of a service station sandwich. Edible. Nutritionally accounted for. Nobody’s idea of a good afternoon.

I do not think Phillipson lacked conviction. If anything she had too much of the wrong kind, the sort that curdles into performance once you start describing yourself, approvingly, as a class warrior. Real leadership in education, the kind I tried to practise across five decades and a great many arguments with parents and friends who cared enough to disagree with me, means playing forward when you find an advantage rather than retreating into caution and central control. We built the whole of Claires Court on four words we asked every pupil to actually live by: responsibility for yourself, respect for others, loyalty to school and family, integrity above all. They are not bad words for a secretary of state either. Phillipson had the respect, or said she did, but responsibility for the consequences of her own department’s decisions was harder to find, and when the choice came between loyalty to the people who had built something and integrity about what her policies were actually doing to them, she retreated. Compliance toolkits, top-down reviews, breakfast clubs rolled out without the workforce to staff them properly. Good intentions, administered badly enough to become their own argument against good intentions.

So here is Lucy Powell, the eleventh, walking into a department that has quietly outlasted every one of her predecessors. I should be honest about one thing before I go further: the DfE itself would never have imposed a twenty per cent tax on school fees. That was Reeves’s doing, and Phillipson’s department spent two years absorbing the consequences of a decision made somewhere else entirely, which is its own kind of lesson about where power actually sits in this government. And seeing her go is not, whatever the relief, any victory for education. It has mostly just added turmoil on top of turmoil, and handed the machine another excuse to centralise a little further while everyone is busy learning a new secretary of state’s name. That is really the point I keep coming back to. It is tempting to make this simply a story about one minister’s choices, but I think Phillipson was, in the end, mostly a symptom. The Department for Education has become one of the most effective obstacles to school improvement in the country, not through malice but through sheer institutional self-preservation, hijacking every reform agenda since Blair’s “education, education, education” and turning it into paperwork that justifies its own existence. Powell’s only real chance is to work out, fairly quickly, that her opponent is not the independent sector, not the academies, not the multi-academy trusts jostling for control. It is the building she now works in. If she cannot see that, she will be the twelfth in another two years, and someone else will be sitting where I am, watching the reclaim forms pile up all over again.

Hugh and I have lived our whole working lives within a few miles of that first schoolroom. Neither of us, unlike so many who did rather less with rather more, ever bought a place abroad, any more than our parents did. Maidenhead was always the ambition, not an escape from it. It has been our campus for sixty-odd years and, we hope, fingers rather firmly crossed, it will go on being so. And here is a small consolation I did not expect to find. The school is now owned by a charity founded in 1793, back when licensees were the ones collecting the tax that helped pay for the war against Napoleon, and which has spent the two centuries since quietly looking after people in a trade that government has never much liked leaving alone. That trade is being squeezed again now, harder than most people realise. Something close to two pubs a day were closing in England, Scotland and Wales in the first months of this year, taking thousands of jobs with them, and the industry’s own case is that a business rates concession here and there does not amount to the wider tax overhaul the sector actually needs. A charity with two hundred years of watching that particular fight up close is not a bad custodian for a family school that has just learned the same lesson the hard way. Whatever Whitehall decides a family business is worth taxing into, that is not something a Chancellor or an Education Secretary gets to take away.