She is a graduate of the Coventry College of Education,[3] where she gained a BEd degree in 1974. Morris remembered the long-serving principal, Joan Dillon Browne (1912–2009), as "a pioneer in showing what women could achieve, long before it was fashionable to do so."[4] Morris was a PE and humanities teacher at the inner-city Sidney Stringer School in Coventry from 1974 to 1992, becoming head of sixth form studies, and was a member of Warwick District Council from 1979 to 1991.
Parliamentary career
Morris was elected to Parliament in 1992 for Birmingham Yardley, gaining the seat from the Conservatives with a majority of only 162. She became a minister in the Department for Education and Employment in 1997 and was promoted to Secretary of State for Education and Skills in 2001. She was the first former comprehensive school teacher to have the position. She suddenly resigned her post in October 2002, explaining that she did not feel up to the job. She had made a commitment to the then Conservative Shadow Education Secretary, David Willetts to resign if the literacy and numeracy targets were not met.[5] In interviews following her resignation she stated that she had felt happier and more effective as a junior education minister.
On 13 May 2005 it was announced that she would be created a life peer,[6] and she was conferred as Baroness Morris of Yardley, of Yardley in the County of West Midlands, on 14 June 2005.[7]