Department for Education
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Decides what England's children learn, who pays for it, and which exam reform we're definitely committing to this time.
The Department for Education is not short of money, responsibility or reform. It has a budget of around £101 billion, employs more than 13,000 staff across the department group, and reaches almost every family in England. It oversees nurseries, schools, colleges, universities, apprenticeships, special needs provision, teacher training and the buildings children sit in every day.
Yet the same failures keep returning.
Schools are told funding is rising while many heads still cannot balance the books. Councils are legally required to support children with special educational needs while the SEND system drifts toward multibillion-pound deficits with no legal mechanism to actually pay them. Adult education has been hollowed out. Employers still cannot find the skilled workers they need. Teacher shortages persist in core subjects. School buildings have become a national embarrassment, with concrete crumbling out of ceilings.
Activity keeps getting mistaken for progress. Every Secretary of State arrives with a plan. Every plan is announced as reform. The system absorbs the slogan, changes the paperwork, and carries on producing the same failures.
Eleven secretaries, no ownership
Since 2010, education has had eleven different Secretaries of State. Michael Gove tore up the curriculum and forced academisation through. Gavin Williamson presided over the exam grading algorithm collapse during Covid and was sacked within a year. Nadhim Zahawi lasted seven months before being moved to the Treasury. Gillian Keegan was caught on a hot mic over school RAAC, complaining that no one ever says "you've done a fucking good job" while "everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing." Bridget Phillipson is the latest to inherit a department nobody stays in long enough to be blamed for.
Eleven secretaries is not stability interrupted by the occasional reshuffle. It is a revolving door dressed up as continuity. Nobody owns the failures long enough to be held to them, because by the time the consequences of a policy land, the minister who signed it off has moved to a different brief.
SEND: a legal promise the money cannot keep
This is the sharpest failure and it deserves to be treated as one. Councils have a legal duty to provide support for children with special educational needs. That duty does not bend to what the council can actually afford. The National Audit Office has said the SEND system is financially unsustainable and warned that cumulative deficits among councils could reach £9.1 billion by 2028/29. A statutory override currently keeps those deficits off councils' main balance sheets. It was due to end in March 2026, but has now been extended to March 2028. When it does end, councils holding these deficits will have to recognise them as real, immediate debt, on top of everything else already pushing local authorities toward bankruptcy.
This is not a funding gap that will close itself. It is a legal obligation the state has written into law without writing in the money to pay for it, and when the override lifts in 2028 the bill will become visible on around 150 upper-tier councils' balance sheets at once.
Adult education: the quiet collapse
While schools and SEND dominate the headlines, adult education and further education funding has been eroded for over a decade. Apprenticeship starts have fallen. Colleges have had real-terms funding cuts stacked on real-terms funding cuts. The result is an economy that cannot train the workers it needs, at the exact moment employers say skills shortages are constraining growth. Nobody resigns over this failure because it produces no single dramatic headline. It just produces a slow, compounding shortfall that nobody in government is required to answer for.
Teachers and buildings: the basics are failing
Teacher shortages persist in physics, maths, computing and modern languages, subjects the country says it desperately needs more graduates in. Recruitment targets have been missed year after year. School buildings, meanwhile, became a national scandal in 2023 when RAAC concrete, a material known to have a limited structural lifespan, was found in over 200 schools, forcing emergency closures and props holding up ceilings. That is not a funding subtlety. That is the physical fabric of the school estate failing while the department that owns the buildings knew about the risk for years before it became a crisis.
The verdict
The schools budget is rising by £4.7 billion in cash terms by 2028/29, with average real-terms growth of around 1.1 percent per pupil. That is real money. It is not producing a system that visibly works better for the people inside it. The money is going in. The question is why so many of the same problems keep coming out.
The honest answer is that reform has become a substitute for delivery. Every Secretary of State inherits the same four failures: SEND, adult education, teacher supply and buildings. Every one announces a plan to fix at least one of them. None stays long enough to be judged on whether it worked. The department changes its paperwork more often than it changes its outcomes, and the eleven people who have run it since 2010 have mostly moved on before the consequences of their tenure became visible.