Book review: “Reforming lessons”

The British state has not had many obvious policy success stories over the past 15 years. From ever lengthier NHS waiting lists to backlogs in the criminal justice system, the story can often seem one of uniform decline. But in Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved (2026, Routledge), former Conservative Schools Minister Sir Nick Gibb and Headteacher Robert Peal present a spirited case for an exception to this general trend, and the educational reforms they claim are to thank for it.

The evidence for that success is laid out comprehensively in Gibb and Peal’s introduction. England’s performance in PISA league tables during the last decade showed a marked improvement - ranked 27th for Mathematics in 2009, the country has since leapt up to 11th - while the devolved nations’ rankings have either flatlined or declined.

Behind these successes, Gibb and Peal claim, are a series of pedagogical reforms: mandatory phonics teaching, knowledge-rich curricula, encouraging direct teacher instruction rather than group work – which, they say, raised standards across the board. More controversially, Gibb and Peal see structural reforms such as academisation as integral to the positive changes of the last decade. And more polemically still, Reforming Lessons launches numerous broadsides against the orthodoxy which purportedly held schools back - namely, a ‘progressivist ideology’ whose main tenets include the euphemistically named ‘child-centred teaching’, a preference for teaching skills over knowledge, and an aversion to strong rules and sanctions.

If the antagonist is ‘progressivist’, then, is Reforming Lessons just an ‘evidence-based’ trojan horse for fusty traditionalism? Gibb is at pains to stress that neither his book nor his reforms are the work of a swivel-eyed reactionary. Indeed, at one point he bemoans how “sober-minded critiques of misguided teaching methods were all too easily conflated with nostalgic attacks on everything, from the spread of sex education to the end of corporal punishment” - and as Reforming Lessons makes clear, there is a degree of justification for those critiques. Gibb and Peal present evidence that previous guidance encouraging students to be ‘active participants’ in learning and discouraging ‘rote-learning’ simply wasn’t working for students – and when it comes to pedagogical reform, his conclusions can largely be accepted by those of any ideological persuasion.

Conversely, it is when Gibb leans most heavily into partisanship that his thesis is least convincing. At times, the familiar bugbears - recalcitrant teaching unions, bloated quangos - are reduced to pantomime villains standing in the way of sensible reform, in a narrative which may feel slightly too neat for more sceptical readers. Moreover, the book’s titular aim - to show ‘Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010’ - leaves little room for discussion of the areas in which they may not have improved. Among the omissions are the increasing use of internal exclusions, the rise of Emotionally Based School Avoidance and – most strikingly for the reader practising in education law – any discussion of the consequences of the 2014 reforms to the SEN system.

Overall, Reforming Lessons does present a well-argued case for the educational reforms of the 2010s. When it comes to explaining the rationale for crucial policy choices like the promotion of systematic, synthetic phonics teaching in primary schools, Gibb has an impressive command of the evidence. With hindsight, the grade inflation under the pre-2015 qualification system now appears somewhat darkly comical, and the experience of COVID has surely vindicated Gibb and Peal’s wariness of teacher-led assessments. But critics will find much to disagree with, especially when it comes to the book’s more controversial treatment of structural reforms like academisation. Readers interested in education law or policy will therefore hope that Gibb and Peal’s book prompts critics to produce their own retrospective assessments of the previous government’s reforms.

Geordie Cheetham is a Paralegal and Satnam Virdi is Principal Solicitor of SV Law, London.

SV Law with expert barristers will be providing SEN training to councils at their offices on 19 March 2026, further information is available at SEN legal training day for councils - SV Law-Education.

Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved (2026) by Nick Gibb and Robert Peal is published by Routledge.