With his penchant for old-fashioned discipline in schools – complete with strict uniform policies and rules that pupils should stand when teachers enter the classroom – it was never likely to be long before Nick Gibb provoked the ire of the profession.

But even the new schools minister's harshest critics didn't expect him to manage it within just three days in the job.

Gibb is reported to have told officials in the Department for Education on Friday, the day after his appointment: "I would rather have a physics graduate from Oxbridge without a PGCE teaching in a school than a physics graduate from one of the rubbish universities with a PGCE."

The remark, which has already attracted a flurry of posts on Twitter, accusing the Tory MP of elitism and a failing to understand what makes a good teacher, will doubtless have rubbed a few people in higher education up the wrong way too.

In January, the Conservatives unveiled plans to deny graduates with a third-class degree funding to train as teachers, effectively barring anyone with less than a 2:2 from the profession. It didn't go down well in the classrooms.

The objections put forward then ran along the lines that getting a first in biochemistry from Oxford didn't necessarily mean you'd be any good at relating to children – and having a third was no bar to being able to inspire young minds.

Commentators were delighted to note that the rules would bar the Tories' own maths tsar, former Countdown numbers whizz Carol Vorderman, from teacher training: she has a third in engineering from Cambridge.

Gibb, the son of a civil engineer and a teacher, attended a grammar school in Kent, as well as a school in Leeds that had just turned comprehensive. He studied law at Durham – presumably he did better than a third.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said it did not comment on leaks.