We dont Need No Education Just Reach with Gemma Collins

I have a personal stake in education, by which I mean I pay taxes, and I retain the quaint, almost pre-industrial belief that schools should teach children things rather than train them to applaud whoever has the largest Instagram following. I want schools to produce readers, thinkers, electricians, nurses, coders, plumbers, historians, engineers and adults capable of filling in a form without requiring emotional support from a ring light. So when I saw Bridget Phillipson, Secretary of State for Education, sitting down with Gemma Collins to promote post-16 options, I did not think: how wonderfully modern. I thought: here we go. Another minister has discovered that if you cannot improve a system, you can always film yourself pretending to care about it.

Let us dispense with the tedious defence at once. This is not about Essex. It is not about reality television. It is not about class. Gemma Collins is not the principal villain here. She is the glitter cannon through which the Department for Education chose to fire its latest pellet of idiocy. The real question is not why Gemma Collins said yes. The question is why Bridget Phillipson, a woman theoretically entrusted with the intellectual formation of the young, looked at the wreckage of British schooling and thought: “What this needs is celebrity reach.” Reach. That vile little word. So does norovirus. So does a gas leak. So does a man in a shopping centre shouting about lizard people. Reach is not seriousness. Reach is not credibility. Reach is merely the distance an unserious thing can travel before anyone in authority remembers to be embarrassed.

Phillipson says some of the criticism is snobbery. No. Snobbery is looking down on a child because he wants to be a mechanic rather than a barrister. Standards are expecting the Education Secretary not to market vocational education like a limited-edition lip gloss. Snobbery says technical education is second-rate. Standards say technical education is too important to be launched as a content stunt.

Vocational education should be one of the great national missions. Britain desperately needs people who can build, wire, mend, code, weld, nurse, cook, measure, repair and turn up on time. It needs practical intelligence to be honoured, not patronised. But Phillipson’s Department for Education has managed to make a serious subject look like backstage filler from a daytime celebrity programme. This is the problem with Labour’s new educational tone. It doesn’t elevate. It flatters. It does not say to young people, “Come up here.” It says, “Don’t worry, we’ll come down there, wearing trainers, talking nonsense and pretending this is empowerment.”

And this, I fear, is the signature of Phillipsonism: the slow replacement of education with managed uplift. Less knowledge, more reassurance. Less rigour, more relatability. Less “learn this because it is difficult and worth knowing”, more “here is a famous person who found maths stressful, and that’s valid too”. Valid. Always valid. Everything is valid except excellence, discipline and the teacher who dares to say that a sentence needs a verb.

The same instinct runs through the breakfast-club crusade. Of course hungry children should be fed. Only a brute would want a child trying to learn phonics while his stomach is growling. But under Labour, feeding children has become the sacred substitute for educating them. The Government has promised free breakfast clubs in every state-funded primary school with primary-aged pupils, with 2,000 more schools joining from April 2026. This is presented as national renewal, as though civilisation itself begins with a school-administered bowl of cereal.

But Britain’s problem is not simply that children are unfed. It is also that too many are unhealthy, sedentary, poorly disciplined, badly taught, glued to screens and spiritually marinated in junk — junk food, junk culture, junk politics, junk aspiration. Official 2024-25 figures show obesity among reception children in England at 10.5 per cent, and among Year 6 pupils at 22.2 per cent. So perhaps an education policy that increasingly resembles a welfare canteen with worksheets attached is not quite the act of genius Labour imagines.

Again, this is not an attack on children. Children are the victims of adult cowardice. They are fed rubbish, taught rubbish, sold rubbish, entertained by rubbish and then measured by a state that looks shocked to discover rubbish has consequences. But Phillipson’s answer is always institutional softness. Feed them. Affirm them. Reach them. Platform them. Protect them from difficulty. Then wonder why adulthood arrives like a bailiff.

And while the DfE is staging influencer tea parties, SEND parents are still trapped in the administrative catacombs, fighting for help from councils and systems that appear to have been designed by Kafka after a bad Ofsted. These parents do not need Bridget Phillipson to “raise awareness”. They are aware at 3am. They are aware during tribunal paperwork. They are aware when their child has not been in school for months and the state replies with a PDF, a helpline and the emotional warmth of a dead printer. That is why the Gemma Collins stunt is so revealing. Not because it is the worst thing Phillipson has done, but because it is the purest expression of the philosophy: education as performance, policy as content, seriousness as something to be avoided in case it frightens the algorithm. Labour is now playing to what it imagines is the uneducated, gullible gallery. That is the unforgivable insult. It assumes ordinary people do not want standards. It assumes working-class children need sparkle rather than substance. It assumes aspiration means seeing a celebrity in Whitehall rather than mastering a skill that can make you free.

I don’t want an Education Secretary who has “reach”. I want one with judgment. I don’t want classrooms turned into community breakfast lounges with mindfulness posters and vocational vibes. I want children taught to read, write, count, argue, build, question and work. I want them to know that confidence without competence is just karaoke authority. I want them to understand that being loud is not the same as being right.

If this is Phillipson’s flagship, then the flagship has hit the pier, reversed over the lifeboats and is now posting about resilience. Detention for everyone. Starting with the minister.