Nick Gibb, the long-serving schools minister of a series of Conservative administrations between 2010 to 2024, and headteacher Robert Peal, explores the key principles behind the reforms and reveals the impact they had on school leadership, accountability, teaching methods, curriculum design and pupil behaviour. Addressing the long legacy of “progressive” approaches to teaching in English schools, and the development of evidence-led alternatives, the book demonstrates the approaches to education such as “warm-strict”, “teacher-led instruction”, and knowledge-rich curriculum have been simultaneously both controversial and hugely successful.

Tories put rocket boosters under the academies and free schools programme and how, those new schools defeated “progressivist” educational ideology and led to the success of England’s schools according to Gibbs.

Reforming Lessons, highlights the importance of “trad” teaching methods along the way anyone reading Gibb and Peal’s book will pick up plenty of useful general principles for how to drive reform within government departments.

Reforming Lessons covers reforms to the primary curriculum – phonics and mathematical mastery, the return of rigour in the secondary curriculum, school structures- academies and free schools, Academic standards, grassroot reforms, changes to teacher training and the introduction of the Early Career Framework. These major reforms that have shaped England’s school system and the drivers behind them, and is an essential reading for anyone working in education sector, policy-makers, and those interested in education reform.

Reforming Lessons by Nick Gibb, Robert Peal, Routledge £18.99.