Like all her friends growing up in her Liverpool suburb, Gillian Keegan left school at 16 to start work.
But she was the only one of her peers for whom the experience of working in a car factory in Kirkby ignited an interest in politics that would eventually lead to a top seat in government.
The education secretary, now 54, began work in the mid-1980s as factories were experiencing the impact of globalisation and remembers the unions beginning to flex their muscles.
In her first interview since joining Rishi Sunak’s cabinet, she recalls: “The unions at the time were against any modernisation and they were trying to keep old restrictive working practices and because there was that debate to be had and that change to be made, their answer was going out on strike.”
Keegan warned that if they stopped making car parts it would not take long for the manufacturers to find another supplier. “And that’s exactly what happened in many of the industries,” she says. “And I saw it and I thought, this is so short-sighted . . . it really blighted Kirkby and a lot of families’ lives for a long time.”
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Keegan, who will meet the teaching unions tomorrow to discuss their threat of strikes, is now concerned about the impact of industrial action on a generation of children whose schooling has already been disrupted by Covid.
Three of the education unions will close ballots this week in a dispute over pay. If they reach the threshold required for industrial action, teachers will be the next big public sector group to walk out.
“It’s not often that teachers have to strike, but it has happened in the past,” Keegan, the MP for Chichester in West Sussex, says. “But what we’ve never had in the past is what’s happened to our children over the pandemic. We’ve never had our children out of school for a period of time, isolated from their friends, isolated from their teachers. We have never had that massive impact that it’s had on their education and in some cases their social skills, their confidence and their mental health. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”
Teachers have rejected a 5 per cent pay rise, far below the 12 per cent demanded by unions to meet rising inflation and the cost of living. Keegan is urging patience, signalling that the government may be prepared to be more generous once inflation starts to fall.
Last week the prime minister vowed to cut inflation by half this year. The rate of consumer price inflation was 10.7 per cent in the year to November, which means he has 12 months to get it close to 5 per cent.
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Keegan is keen to keep negotiating and does not want the government’s proposed anti-strike legislation to enforce “minimum service levels” in key public sectors, including the NHS and schools, to be seen as a “hostile act”. The law, which could be published as early as this week, will allow bosses in health, education, fire, ambulance, rail and nuclear commissioning to sue unions and sack employees if minimum services are not met.
“We are definitely not trying to be antagonistic,” Keegan says. “I actually hope it’s not applied to schools.”
She secured a £2 billion top-up in education funding in the autumn statement within weeks of taking up her role and says she is on the side of teachers.
Keegan was studying for an apprenticeship while working at Delco Electronics in Kirkby, a General Motors factory. She went on day release to Kirkby College then Liverpool John Moores University, where she gained a bachelor’s degree in business studies.
She was only the second member of her family to attend university. She says her life was transformed by Mr Ashcroft — a teacher at St Augustine of Canterbury School in Huyton, Merseyside — who believed in her. “He stayed behind after school to teach me and another girl,” she recalls. “I’m pretty sure he never got paid anything extra for it.”
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Born in Leigh, Lancashire, Keegan moved with her family along the M62 motorway, connecting Liverpool to Hull via Manchester and Leeds, which her father was helping to build while her mother had secretarial work. She went to primary school in Yorkshire before returning to Merseyside where she witnessed first-hand the devastation caused by Derek Hatton’s Militant movement, which took control of Liverpool city council.
Keegan, a gregarious character with an infectious giggle and soft Scouse accent, claims to have grown in confidence as a result of the move.
She recalls: “I turned up with a Yorkshire accent and two plaits and the only person who had a Girl Guide uniform that was the proper one. I was desperate to fit in so the first thing I did was to get my hair cut and get rid of some aspects of my accent.”
Even now she continues to suffer from impostor syndrome, she says: “My mother used to say that I needed a written invitation to join a skipping game. I was always the one who sort of held myself back . . . I like to feel my surroundings before I go forward a bit. I’ve built my confidence slowly over nearly 30 years in business.”
After her apprenticeship, she moved to London to become a senior buyer for NatWest. Her job took her abroad, including to Japan, where she became renowned for her karaoke rendition of Neil Sedaka’s Oh Carol.
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She said: “If someone had said to me that in my fifties I would be a cabinet minister having to do interviews like this, giving speeches, or going on broadcast interviews defending the policy of the day, I would have thought: no way.”
In one interview on teachers’ pay, she was photographed wearing a £10,000 Rolex watch — a gift from her family for her 50th birthday. The unions were riled but she defends her jewellery: “The inference was that I don’t understand anything about money because I’ve got this watch. It was a 50th birthday present from my husband, other members of the family chipped in as well. But it [was] mostly from him . . . I mean between us we have worked in the corporate world for 63 years. And this is what I get.” She points out that no one mentioned the other wrist, where she wears bracelets made by one of her constituents, a 23-year-old start-up entrepreneur.
Keegan is speaking in her constituency home in the heart of the South Downs National Park, surrounded by photos of loved ones, including her sister Geraldine, 11 months younger. The pair, who used to be confused for one another, shared a room, where there were two padlocked wardrobes because they could never agree which outfit belonged to whom. Not that their mother would buy them fashionable or expensive clothes.
“She had this very simple value structure which was if you want to buy something save up for it and buy it yourself,” Keegan says. It is a lesson both sisters took to heart and began Saturday jobs from the age of 13, Keegan working in a clothes and shoe shop. She still found time to enjoy Liverpool nightlife, where her tipple of choice was half a lager and lime. “It’s still my favourite night out,” she says. “I was forever being told off for dancing on tables.”
Keegan became a Conservative Party councillor for the Rogate ward on Chichester district council in 2014 and a director of Women2Win — an organisation founded by Theresa May and Baroness Jenkin in 2015 to help elect more female MPs to parliament. In 2017 she became one of the beneficiaries as Chichester’s first female MP.
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While she believes huge progress has been made in countering sexism and misogyny, she is concerned that there is a risk that influencers like Andrew Tate, who has described himself as the “king of toxic masculinity”, could reverse some of this.
She backs schools countering some of those messages by teaching boys about equality. She says: “Healthy relationships don’t just happen. They are based on role models that you see around you, based on content that you may or may not be subjected to, and based on education as well, and we take very seriously our part of that, which is to make sure that that those discussions are held in schools and that appropriate behaviour is always discussed and challenged.”
She is also preparing to publish fresh guidance on supporting transgender pupils in schools. Last summer Suella Braverman, in her role as attorney-general, claimed it would be legal for schools to refuse to use transgender children’s preferred pronouns and ban them from using the toilets or uniform of their stated gender.
The education secretary appears to support a more nuanced approach. “It’s our job to accommodate children, to support them through their life, to educate them to help them become fully rounded human beings,” she says.
Keegan supports the idea of “safe spaces” for biological women but says the guidance does not need to legally “define what a girl is”. Rather it should set out how individuals can be supported.
“I’m very clear what a woman is . . . and that includes me . . . but it doesn’t include anybody that has a penis,” she says. “But I think the most important thing that we need to do is to make sure that we sensitively support children and families and that we accommodate them in the best way we can.”
Keegan has just spent Christmas with her husband Michael and her two stepsons Max, 26, and Charlie, 28, who she met when they were two and four. Having been involved in their young lives, Keegan understands that the government needs to do more to help with childcare.
Sunak has ditched plans for a major overhaul of the childcare system aimed at saving parents money and helping them back into work. His predecessor Liz Truss had been looking at increasing free childcare by 20 hours a week and ending mandated staff-child ratios.
While Keegan signalled that she will not be pursuing changes to the ratios, which she claims are “unpopular” among childcare providers and parents, she says the government is still committed to reform. “When it comes to the childcare, what is needed is better outcomes for children and more flexibility and more affordability for parents,” she says. “So I 100 per cent acknowledge that we need to go further on both of those . . . so that’s what we will be considering.”
However, top of Keegan’s in-tray will be averting potential strikes by teachers.
Faced with the prospect of schools forced to close from next month, Keegan, who is Catholic and last week represented the British government at the Vatican for the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI, will no doubt be praying for divine intervention.
