By Anna Mikhailova For The Mail On Sunday
00:03 04 Feb 2024, updated 12:06 04 Feb 2024
Gillian Keegan has a stock comeback for Oxbridge-educated politicians and civil servants who dare talk down to her: ‘You know, I have been patronised by much better people than you.’
‘It takes them a while normally to figure that out,’ she says with a wry smile, sitting in her Chichester constituency.
As the only Cabinet Minister with a degree apprenticeship, Mrs Keegan has had to fight her corner to get her ideas heard – even in her current job as Education Secretary.
Today she is opening up the routes in which people can become teachers and allowing them to work and be paid from day one, while studying.
She is launching a new teaching degree apprenticeship, in which trainees will spend about 40 per cent of their time learning with an accredited provider, with their tuition paid for. It is first aimed at maths teachers but will then be opened up to other subjects.
Mrs Keegan battled to get the policy through – facing down Whitehall officials who didn’t understand why including the ‘degree’ element made a difference.
It illustrates the danger of having just Oxbridge graduates around the table, she says. ‘You need diversity. Nobody else would have been able to say ‘no, no, it’s not sensible to get to take the degree out of degree apprenticeships’. I knew instinctively because I’d done one.’
Having grown up in Knowsley, Merseyside, Mrs Keegan left her state school at 16 to work in a car factory – while also studying for a three-year degree apprenticeship.
‘I feel really proud of being an apprentice. You can get to exactly the same place in life via a different route.’
As a woman who had not gone to university, working in business in the 1980s and 1990s was no easy feat.
She describes facing ‘incredible’ levels of sexism while leading a project for NatWest in Japan. ‘They wouldn’t even look at me’ during meetings, she says – and spoke only to her male junior colleagues.
Mrs Keegan then learned all the numbers in Japanese so she could follow what her counterparts were saying to each other during negotiations – while they thought she couldn’t understand them.
To emphasise the point, she rolls out a few Japanese phrases during our interview. ‘It took me about a year and a lot of karaoke before they would accept me in the role,’ she says, adding: ‘I’ve always preferred to be underestimated than overestimated.
‘Coming from Liverpool, you don’t tend to grow up being praised for everything, you get on with it. There’s no way that people should be defined in terms of their education,’ Mrs Keegan says, perhaps counterintuitively for someone running the Department for Education – but she sees degree apprenticeships as a way to unlock opportunities for people who may not have had them early on.
She is known for her plain-speaking approach. She hit headlines last year after being recorded at the end of an interview saying: ‘Does anyone ever say, ‘you know what, you’ve done a f****** good job because everyone else has sat on their a*** and done nothing’?’
She and her husband Michael have been in the spotlight recently following the Post Office scandal – he was Fujitsu’s UK chief executive between May 2014 and June 2015.
Last month he stepped down from his part-time Cabinet Office role. Mrs Keegan said he will ‘absolutely 100 per cent’ give evidence to the inquiry if it asks him to.
For now, her focus is to ‘broaden the pipeline of people who go into teaching’.
As for those pesky Oxbridge graduates who dare talk down to her, Mrs Keegan points out that many of them have ended up working for her – not the other way round.
William Turner is a seasoned U.K. correspondent with a deep understanding of domestic affairs. With a passion for British politics and culture, he provides insightful analysis and comprehensive coverage of events within the United Kingdom.
