The Education Department Vanishes: What Trump’s Latest Pledge Might Mean for the UK

Finito World

When Donald Trump declared he would close the U.S. Department of Education if re-elected, it was widely seen as a dramatic escalation in a long-standing conservative campaign to reduce federal influence in schools. “We’re going to end the Department of Education,” he told supporters at a rally in Richmond, Virginia, adding that he believed the U.S. should “abolish” the federal role in favour of local control.

The statement, while extreme, taps into a decades-old Republican belief that education should be controlled at state level — not in Washington. In Trump’s rhetoric, the Department is portrayed as a bloated bureaucracy, ineffective and ideological, far removed from the classrooms it is meant to support.

This move — if realised — would mark the most radical restructuring of U.S. federal education policy since the Department’s creation in 1979. Though some critics call it political theatre, others warn it could signal a broader dismantling of public institutions in the name of deregulation.

But across the Atlantic, there’s a quieter echo.

In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is not threatening to shutter the Department for Education. Yet there are parallels worth examining. In both cases, central government is looking to reassert control over how education is administered — not through abolition, but through reform, consolidation, and, crucially, budgetary restraint.

Earlier this year, Starmer’s administration unveiled a civil service reform agenda that includes reductions in headcount, new digital automation strategies, and a rethinking of the role of arm’s-length bodies. Cabinet Office Minister John Reynolds announced that the government aims to “do more with less,” a phrase that has become shorthand for service reductions in many policy areas.

According to Civil Service World, ministers are looking to “streamline government”, with particular focus on digital systems and artificial intelligence. Education — a sector highly dependent on central guidance and funding — is unlikely to escape such scrutiny.

Meanwhile, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, introduced by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, has drawn fire from critics who see in it a centralising impulse at odds with the school autonomy movement of the past two decades. While the bill includes measures to support student welfare and mental health, it also proposes new oversight powers over academies — schools that had previously enjoyed significant independence from local authority or Whitehall control.

Katharine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela Community School in London and a prominent advocate for school autonomy, has been outspoken in her opposition. “We built something extraordinary by being free from bureaucratic interference,” she wrote in *The Spectator*. “If this bill passes, schools like mine will be told what to do from the centre. The excellence we’ve created will be destroyed.”

Her critique sits within a broader debate about what role the state should play in education. The academies programme — expanded under Michael Gove during the coalition years — was designed to empower schools to make their own decisions about curriculum, staffing, and discipline. Proponents credit it with raising standards in disadvantaged areas. Critics argue it has created a fragmented system, with little accountability and uneven performance.

If Trump were to succeed in closing the Department of Education, it would mark an end-point of one vision: the fully decentralised school system, locally run, ideologically unencumbered, and market-responsive. There are elements of this vision already in place in England, particularly among academy trusts and free schools.

But there are risks too. As U.S. education historian Diane Ravitch notes, “Without a federal role, you have 50 education systems, all with different standards and resources. The poorest states fall behind. Equity disappears.”

The concern for the UK is not that a department will be abolished overnight, but that the same logic — cost-cutting, decentralisation, and suspicion of bureaucracy — may gradually erode the coherence of the education system. With Labour now backing further cuts to the civil service and opening up to private capital investment in public services, the ideological lines between left and right on education are blurring.

The question, then, is not whether the Department for Education survives in name. It’s whether it survives in substance — as a guarantor of minimum standards, a distributor of resources, and a steward of national educational equity.

Trump’s pronouncements may be extreme, but they illuminate a global trend: a political class increasingly willing to reduce the size and role of government, often without acknowledging what will be lost. In this light, the UK debate about academies, funding, and centralisation becomes part of a broader reckoning. Education policy, once a domestic and largely consensual field, is now a battleground for radically different visions of the state.

And in the end, it’s not departments or headlines that matter most — it’s what happens in the classroom.