Former Secretary of State for Defence, Gavin Williamson has been designated as the United Kingdom’s new Secretary of State for Education.
Williamson replaces Damian Hinds, the earlier education secretary, who confirmed the news on Twitter and also stated that he’s returning back to backbench members of the Parliament.
Williamson has served as the Member of Parliament for the South Staffordshire from the year 2010. He has been the chief whip of Theresa May since July 2016. Later, he was promoted to the post of defence secretary from November 2017.
About 2 months ago, he was sacked as defense secretary due to allegations over National Security Council leak. However, Williamson has denied all these allegations.
Within hours of being appointment as education secretary, Williamson has already begun experiencing calls to deal with teacher retention and recruitment crisis as well as school funding problems.
The government till now has ducked these issues and such negligence has caused serious damage to the education system.
According to National Education Union’s joint general secretary Kevin Courtney, Williamson should make some serious progress on such issues as his predecessors have failed miserably to do so.
There is a need to recruit around 15,000 teachers in the following 3 years, however; teacher retention and recruitment issues are pretty serious and are getting worse, Courtney said.
We’ll have to wait and see how the new education secretary addresses these issues.