Who is Gillian Keegan? The education secretary who left school at 16

Gillian Keegan was little known outside Westminster until the government was engulfed by the crumbling concrete crisis. So who is she?

As education secretary, Ms Keegan made the decision to close or partially close more than 100 educational establishments in England, and to publish a list of 147 schools and colleges identified as having collapse-prone reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) on site.

She has also been forced to make a public apology after being caught swearing on camera after an interview.

• Sorry for concrete call at worst time - Keegan

• When did we know about unsafe concrete in schools?

On Monday, she said her comments were not aimed at anyone in particular, and that muttering expletives after a tough interview just shows "I'm human", Ms Keegan has argued.

To her supporters, Gillian Keegan say she is exactly the sort of person the Conservative Party should be trying to put in front of camera.

In a world of public school educated Oxbridge graduates, she is a woman raised in Labour's heartlands who left school at 16 to work in a factory, and can boast of 30 years of business experience, before she became an MP.

But this is not the first time her forthright approach has got her into trouble. As a junior education minister she was criticised for telling school leavers not to worry about A-level grades because "no one would be interested in their results in 10 years' time".

Since joining the government in 2018 she has repeatedly hit the headlines - attending a meeting as a health minister after testing positive for Covid-19, or wearing a £10,000 Rolex to negotiate a below-inflation pay deal with teachers.

Born Gillian Gibson in 1968 in Leigh, Lancashire, she had an itinerant childhood, as the family moved to follow her her father's job as an office manager for road builder McAlpine.

They eventually settled in Knowsley, on Merseyside, a Labour Party stronghold, at a time when Derek Hatton's hard left Militant movement was dominating Liverpool City Council.

She told BBC's Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast, Mr Hatton marked the start of her political awakening. "He really made everyone's lives much worse," she said.

Nevertheless, she said "she really had to think about" becoming a Conservative as she was not a political person and it was "different" to the views of most people around her.

She left school at 16 to begin an apprenticeship at Delco Electronics in Kirkby in the mid-1980s.

The apprenticeship cycled her through different jobs across the factory, where she learned to "make people laugh" and find "the one thing we all agree on" - skills she says she has put to use in her political career.

She says she was repelled by attempts to "strongarm" her into joining the union, with the experience putting her on the path to Conservativism.

She began studying for a bachelor's degree in Business Studies from Liverpool John Moores University during her apprenticeship, and eventually joined NatWest Bank as a senior technology buyer, a job which took her to London and then Tokyo.

Move to politics

She rose to be a director at Mastercard before joining Amadeus IT Group in Madrid, where she met and married Michael Keegan, son of former Conservative MP Denis Keegan.

Mr Keegan now works in the Cabinet Office managing the government's relationship with engineering and arms manufacturer BAE Systems.

In 2014, Ms Keegan got on the first rung of the political ladder, when she was elected to Chichester District Council - but it was a series of chance meetings that led to Parliament.

She had studied for a masters at London Business School and ran into the then international development secretary Justine Greening at a reunion.

"She explained how she got into parliament and what I needed to know to take the same journey," Ms Keegan says.

Then a few months later, at the theatre, Ms Keegan was introduced to Baroness Jenkin, the co-founder of Women2Win, a campaign for more female Tory MPs, co-founded by Theresa May.

In time honoured fashion, she stood for the Conservatives in the no-hope seat of St Helens South and Whiston, her home constituency, at the 2015 general election.

The next month Ms Keegan was appointed director of Women2Win and ahead of the 2017 election she was selected for the Tory safe seat of Chichester - the constituency's first female candidate.

She was duly elected to the House of Commons with a 20,000 vote majority, gaining her first junior government role, at the Treasury, a year later.

She backed Rory Stewart in the 2019 Tory leadership contest but eventual winner Boris Johnson didn't appear to hold this against her.

He appointed Ms Keegan as apprenticeship and skills minister in the Department for Education, making her the first former apprentice to hold the office.

She stayed in this role throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, as all schools were forced to close and all secondary education examinations were cancelled.

Ms Keegan again backed the losing candidate in the 2022 Tory leadership election, coming out for Rishi Sunak. Liz Truss, the successful candidate, gave her a job as Africa minister.

When Mr Sunak was eventually selected as prime minister, he made Ms Keegan his education secretary - the fifth person to hold this role in four months.

Education Secretary

She began her tenure by offending teaching unions with claims teachers are "probably in the top 10% of earners in some parts of the country".

Over the coming month, these same unions called seven national teaching strikes as they called for above inflation pay increases for their members.

After intense negotiations, all four unions agreeing to Ms Keegan's new pay deal - which including a 6.5% pay rise in July.

Rishi Sunak appointed Gillian Keegan as Education Secretary in his first cabinet after becoming prime minister

Any hopes this would mean a quite start to the academic year evaporated when the concrete crisis unfolded.

"I had to make a decision right at the end of August which was the worst time," she told Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2.

"I am very sorry about the timings but I 100% think it was the right decision."

Faced with the prospect of hundreds of schools requiring emergency repairs, Ms Keegan a Catholic who represented the British government at the Vatican for the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI, may well be praying for divine intervention.