John Rentoul is chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday.

Nick Gibb knows about schools. After all, he went to seven of them, because his father was a civil engineer working on projects all over the country. He has even done a bit of international comparative analysis – he was at primary school in Canada for two years before the family returned to Britain because his mother was homesick.

The Minister of State for Schools is that oxymoron: a Conservative moderniser. He thinks his party has to align itself with public opinion, which in the field of education means reversing many of the changes made in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. In other words, to go forwards, schools must go back. But his beliefs about education, and politics, are more complicated than that. He does not want to go back to grammar schools, as so many in his party do, and he admires much of what the Labour government did, saying, “We are all Blairites now.”

Gibb’s own education served as an experimental study: he was at school as mixed-ability teaching came in and, as he saw it, academic rigour was eroded and discipline declined. He went to all kinds of schools – private (Bedford Modern), grammar (“the best school I went to”) and comprehensive, including the sixth form at Thornes House School in Wakefield, a 1,200-pupil comprehensive that had once been a grammar school but which was now declining. “Bad behaviour was creeping in at the edges,” he says. “Discipline was poor in the lower part of the school.”

By then, he was a keen Conservative. His mother was an active Tory and, although his father never said how he voted, he was “opinionated” in a similar vein. After the elections of 1974, when Nick was 13 and 14, he felt “drawn to Margaret Thatcher”, who became Tory leader the following year. He was active in student politics at Durham University, and then, when he joined the accountancy firm KPMG, he looked for a seat. He fought the safe Labour seat of Stoke-on-Trent Central, held by Mark Fisher (one of two socialist Old Etonian MPs) at the 1992 election. Two years later, there was a by-election in another safe Labour seat, Rotherham: he offered himself as the ritual sacrifice and came third, while Denis MacShane won. Finally, though, he was selected for the safe Conservative seat created by the boundary review, and was elected MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton in 1997, just as the Conservatives went into 13 years of opposition.

Gibb was involved in the faction-fight between supporters of William Hague and Michael Portillo, the shadow chancellor. He and his brother Robbie were admirers of Portillo, now reborn as a Tory moderniser. Robbie, four years younger, had been inspired by his elder brother’s obsession with politics, and was now Chief of Staff to another moderniser, Francis Maude. The brothers attracted some hostility from Hague’s supporters: “The Gibb brothers in the Bee Gees know more about economics than that pair,” an anonymous former Tory Treasury minister was quoted as saying.

Gibb sat out the Iain Duncan Smith period, resigning from the front bench after a few weeks, “knowing that we weren’t going to win”, and serving on select committees instead. That gave him the freedom to set out his views on education, and he came back to the front bench as a junior education spokesman after the 2005 election. He initially backed his friend and early moderniser David Willetts for the leadership, but was an admirer of David Cameron. As Shadow Education Secretary, Cameron made the astute switch to supporting Tony Blair’s school reforms against the Old Labour backbenches. For Gibb, it was a matter of “what works” – another Blairite phrase – and the right thing to do. For him, strong leadership, school autonomy, discipline and proven teaching methods were what mattered, and he thought that Blair was trying to push them through against opposition from his own side. The most important reform, regarded with deep suspicion by Labour traditionalists, was the replacement of poorly performing schools in deprived areas with new academy schools, independent of local councils.

With the formation of the coalition last year and his appointment as Schools Minister under Michael Gove, an even more ardent Blairite, Gibb now has the chance to put his modernising Conservatism into practice. Although much of the media attention is on Free Schools, set up by groups of parents, the real revolution is the sudden acceleration of the academies programme. There were 203 when Gibb took over. He recently announced that there are now 704, with a further 1,200 applications. By 2015, he expects academy status to be the norm for the 3,100 state secondary schools in England and Wales. For him, this revolution is the way to break the domination of fashionable ideas by freeing schools from the control of local education authorities. “There should not be an ideology about education,” he says. He sensed over the years of his own schooling the rise of the “child-centred” approach, which he describes as “romantic Rousseauism”. It began, for the best of motives, because people wanted to protect children from authoritarian and excessively competitive models of the past, but it became what he calls an ideology – one that excused failure and set expectations low.

Now, Gibb’s task is to find his ideal Blairite path, focus on “what works” and go back to rigour and discipline, to improve education for children across the UK.