Rishi Sunak’s government does not merit a top performance rating, in the view of a senior cabinet minister.
Asked during an LBC phone-in to rate her own administration’s performance in the style of a schools inspection report, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, rated the government as “good”.
That is the second-best rating on the four-point scale used by the education inspectorate Ofsted behind “outstanding”, and ahead of “requires improvement” and “inadequate”.
Earlier, when asked to describe the overall performance of the Conservative government in a word, she said: “Delivering,” adding: “Usually, if I get more than one word, they’re not very kind words.”
The phone-in host Nick Ferrari said: “Others might have another word for it, but there we are.”
Keegan’s claim came on the same day the prime minister admitted he had failed to deliver his promise to cut healthcare waiting lists.
Keegan was asked for the ratings in a segment of the show where she faced questions on the fairness of rating schools and other institutions with single-word judgments. Ofsted delivers the ratings as headlines, backed up by more detailed reports on performance in various areas, in its reports.
Last month, an influential committee of MPs said the use of such judgments in Ofsted’s reports on schools in England should end. Members of the education committee said relations between the inspector and teachers had become “extremely strained”, with trust “worryingly low” after headteacher Ruth Perry killed herself last year following a traumatic inspection.
Ofsted had downgraded Perry’s school in Reading from outstanding to inadequate, and a coroner called for changes to be made by the Department for Education (DfE) and Ofsted in how schools are inspected.
