This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
“What does impartiality mean and how should it look in practice?” were questions I had to constantly ask during my seven years in charge of Ofsted, a non-ministerial government department staffed by civil servants. I had to do so because of the civil service’s preference for adopting its own favoured agendas at the expense of impartiality.
The first time I took a position on Ofsted’s own impartiality came early, when I was asked to continue Ofsted’s membership of Step Up to Serve, a thoroughly worthy campaign sponsored by Prince Charles (as he then was) to promote volunteering. Despite the campaign’s obvious merits, I felt it could undermine Ofsted’s perceived impartiality, for example when inspecting a school that was also active in the campaign. I therefore ended our participation, and with it the connections and invitations it might have brought.
Reasserting the principle of impartiality in this way proved immensely valuable. It enabled me to turn down all future invitations to ally Ofsted with any cause or campaign whatever, and to be seen to do this as a matter of principle, not of favouring one campaign over another.
For instance, I did not approve the purchase of Ofsted T-shirts for a Pride march: staff were free to take part as individuals in their own clothes, but we could not give the corporate endorsement that Ofsted-branded T-shirts would have implied. For the rest of my tenure, every request to link Ofsted to an external cause was turned down.
We can all be blind to partiality if it happens to align with our own values. I recall hearing that our inspectors found one independent school using a highly politicised curriculum in humanities subjects. The school’s senior team strongly defended it on the basis that the moral rightness of the curriculum justified ignoring the legal requirement for schools to be politically impartial. Teachers who are passionate about particular issues, such as environmental causes, do often find it hard to recognise the dividing line between legitimate education and political activism.
Many of the deepest and most persistent challenges to impartiality concerned the set of protected characteristics embedded in the Equality Act 2010. Very early in my tenure, I realised just how contentious some parts of education had become when rights asserted about religious belief sat at odds with rights relating to sex and sexuality.
Many believe that Ofsted was biased against the protected characteristic it was asserting or was overreaching in its judgements. These contentions had to be negotiated not just once but continually: 250,000 Ofsted inspectors’ visits to schools and children’s services were made on my watch, each requiring multiple judgements.
The potential clashes of rights between different protected characteristics must surely have been obvious to those who framed the Equality Act. What did they expect to happen in these cases? It is hard to believe they really thought that faith schools serving the most segregated religious groups would willingly start to teach sex education lessons that included homosexuality and gender reassignment.
I have never learned whether they thought such tensions could be resolved. But it was necessary to review all our HR policies to identify and remove all instances of overreach where well-intentioned elements had been inserted that nonetheless went beyond the Equality Act.
Why? As Professor Tom Simpson of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government puts it, civil servants sit “downstream of Parliament”: in other words, departments and other public bodies should not exceed or “gold-plate” what is intended by lawmakers.
Likewise, Paul Tucker argues in his book Unelected Power that as regulators are not subject to democratic accountability, they have a particular responsibility to exercise their powers sparingly and only in the way that Parliament intended them to be used, even if those powers as drafted could be used more widely.
Since 2010, the difficulties in applying the Equality Act proportionately and fairly have swelled, increasing the impartiality challenge for Ofsted and for all other civil servants. The definition of many of the protected characteristics has been broadened to include a wider group of people.
Disability, faith or belief, sexuality and gender reassignment status have all widened in scope: to take faith and belief, for instance, environmental beliefs and ethical veganism were probably not in anyone’s mind back in 2010. Until the recent Supreme Court judgment, sex was heading the same way. At the same time, lobbyists and campaigners for individual characteristics became more active and sometimes aggressive in their demands for their characteristic to be prioritised.
This may be why so many civil service leaders felt it necessary to be seen to respond to the death of George Floyd. There was a tide of concerned statements from permanent secretaries and the Cabinet Secretary himself, metaphorically “taking the knee” and making wide-ranging commitments, even though nothing had actually changed in their own jurisdiction. With hindsight, such expressions can be read as a collective failure of impartiality by the senior civil service.
A belief that they were morally justified in doing so may have made these permanent secretaries blind to their loss of objectivity and impartiality. I was told by my own staff that I — a permanent secretary equivalent — was the only one not to make an internal statement referencing Floyd.
This was the civil service moving “upstream” of Parliament, in effect making itself a political actor. It might have been hoped that this failure would be temporary. Yet the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2022 advertises and makes a virtue of moving upstream of Parliament. The first paragraph that sets out the purpose states:
We will continue to build a more inclusive Civil Service going further than the current Equality Act provisions by building on and expanding a previous focus on Protected Characteristics to deliver for all of our people.
First, this strategy exceeds the public sector equality duty (to promote equality of opportunity) with this commitment:
We will use positive action where needed in relation to training, support, recruitment and promotion to ensure the broadest range of diversity is achieved …
Second, there is a commitment to develop “innovative tools to ensure consistent recruitment outcomes regardless of background”.
The Civil Service Diversity Strategy implies the abandonment of appointing staff on merit
There is of course a highly political and contested debate about different conceptions of equality, with arguments for and against each. But the kinds of “positive action” described in relation to recruitment and promotion (where appointing or promoting one person is often to the immediate detriment of another person) clearly go well beyond promoting “equality of opportunity” towards forced equality of outcomes. These two commitments also necessarily imply abandoning the principle of appointing and promoting on merit, where this will give the “wrong” outcome. None of this can reasonably be seen as politically uncontroversial.
I have also often heard civil servants justify controversial policies, such as gender identity policies that amount to unquestioned self-ID on the basis that — as Stonewall advised — “it is good practice to go beyond the law”.
I rejected this argument and removed such a policy at Ofsted, on the basis that it was unacceptable for a government department to adopt self-ID as it had twice been debated and rejected by Parliament.
It is even more concerning, therefore, to read this language in the current Civil Service Code, in the section on impartiality:
You must carry out your responsibilities in a way that is fair, just and equitable and reflects the Civil Service commitment to equality and diversity.
This can be read as not just permitting but actually requiring individual civil servants to go upstream of Parliament — a startling idea. It cannot be right that a scrupulous approach to working within the law and one’s remit, such as I took at Ofsted, could be deemed to be in breach of the Civil Service Code.
Furthermore, the words “in a way that is fair, just and equitable” obscure the fact that the difference between political parties is sometimes about end goals, but perhaps more often about different conceptions of what is “fair, just and equitable”. In this light, this sentence can be read as an invitation to individual civil servants to substitute their own preferences for those of the government of the day. This is clearly a recipe for tensions and conflicts between the civil service and governments.
All this leaves me concerned that the current civil service conception of impartiality is a long way from the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms and the Armstrong Memorandum, and far removed from what the average citizen believes it should be.
This clearly needs urgent attention from the Cabinet Secretary, and close scrutiny by ministers, irrespective of how sympathetic they are to the specific policies that the civil service is making for itself. A rigorous review of all centrally-promulgated civil service policies to identify and remove all instances where the requirements and expectations of the law are exceeded would be a good first step, followed by a mandate to all departments and public bodies to review and revise their own policies in the same way. The BBC would benefit from the same exercise.
I can only hope that with the ebbing of heat from some of the agendas that were all-pervasive a few years ago, it will become easier for those in charge to recognise the problems and to bring the civil service back to where it should be.
