The DfE and Sir Michael's Cocoa

As ever, when I get a reply from the DfE, it gets posted here in the interests of balance. Followers of this blog may now recognised what looks a bit like a standard reply. Draw your own conclusions about that. However, here goes:

Sir Michael Wilshaw was appointed to the position of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector as a result of his track record as an outstanding head teacher who has demonstrated that he can achieve excellent outcomes for pupils in deprived areas.
Successive Chief Inspectors have spoken without fear or favour about aspects of education and schools and it would be inappropriate for Ministers to appear to censure the Chief Inspector for doing so.

The Chief Inspector is accountable to Parliament, through the Education Select Committee, for his actions and for the performance of Ofsted.

The press and media can be selective in what they use from interviews and in the way that they present things.  What is important in considering Sir Michael’s comments is the underlying message he was making, which was that strong school leaders do not shy away from the difficult decisions that need to be made to bring about improvement in poor performing schools.

Well, that may all be true, but it doesn't solve the question of the untended geraniums!

Time for your cocoa, Sir Michael

What does Sir Michael Wilshaw think he's doing? At a time when his political boss is making slightly conciliatory noises and is apparently rowing back on no-notice inspection, this foolish old man is whipping up yet more vitriol against the teaching profession.

The trouble is that, rather than tending geraniums on his allotment,  Michael Wilshaw has been diverted from a well-earned retirement to become head of Ofsted, a position that requires both professional integrity and great emotional intelligence, neither of which he would seem to have in great measure. To alienate the profession he claims to espouse is a blunder of considerable magnitude. But not necessarily if you are an elderly old boy locked in your own little world.

As we become elderly, three things tend to happen: our world view narrows somewhat around our own perspective, we get more irascible and willing to say things that previously we would keep private, and we tend to relate things more and more to ourselves. The Chief Inspector's performance to date suggests an early onset of just these things. When he was first in post, Michael Wilshaw spoke glowingly about the 'hero head' as if this was the pinnacle of leadership. Why did he take this view? Because he was a hero head, riding out of the sun to rescue a failing school. There is no denying that he did a magnificent job as head of Mossbourne and is rightly regarded as its saviour. However, being a hero head is not the only way; there have been equally highly regarded and successful heads whose management style has been collective and collegiate.

I remember an elderly aunt saying to me, 'you can get away with saying a lot more when you're ninety than when you're forty' and Wilshaw seems to have discovered the veracity of this quite early. Why else would he tell an assembly of headteachers that teachers don't know what stress is? The profession is already sick and tired of the way this man rubbishes it but he doesn't seem to learn. Instead, characteristic of his way of thinking, he turned the topic to himself, saying that stress was what his father felt,  searching for a job and what he felt, as a new headteacher in a time of industrial action.

What arrogance! Of course the unemployed are stressed, we all recognise it. Of course Wilshaw would have felt the stress of headship at that time, as were so many of his colleagues. The stress of the job is relative to the times. But to criticise headteachers for complaining while being well paid is disingenuous in the extreme. Teachers are feeling stressed, headteachers are worried about the way their profession is being judged by Ofsted. It is a characteristic of modern society that there are so many stressors, for the unemployed, of course, but for the employed too. People want to know they are  doing a good job - few teachers are the work-shy slackers Wilshaw would portray them.

Teaching is not the only job where there are high stress levels but, as Mary Bousted of ATL has pointed out, the HSE reports that it is the occupation with the third highest amount of work-related stress. The Chief Inspector is perfectly aware of this but perhaps chooses to be selectively deaf to it because he knows that his policies are a contributory factor. Somehow it all seems to fit in with the intractability of age and self-obsession. 

What shall we do about the problem called Sir Michael? Well, it might be time to move his chair into the sun, give him his cocoa and let him have an early night. The geraniums might need attention in the morning.

Right of Reply

In a recent blog I referred to the new HMCI's reported (and pretty well substantiated) comments. Interpret these how you will.

In the interests of equity readers might be intersted in the DfE's response to the blog. It is repeated verbatim here:-

You refer to comments that Sir Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector has made about school leadership. The press and media can be selective in what they use from interviews and in the way that they present things. I believe that Sir Michael was referring to the proportion of schools inspected in which leadership and management was judged less than good, rather than specifically referring to headteachers. What is important in considering Sir Michael’s comments is the underlying message he was making, which was that strong school leaders do not shy away from the difficult decisions that need to be made to bring about improvement in poor performing schools. I would, however, recommend that you seek clarification from Sir Michael on the comments that you attribute to him.

As you suggest the majority of our school leaders are doing a good or outstanding job. That is why at the heart of the Department's approach is a determination to free up head teachers to get on with what really matters and for the best to foster improvements in schools that may be struggling or want to improve aspects of their provision.

We are doing this in a number of ways; through the opportunity to become an academy, the removal of unnecessary bureaucracy and reductions to the amount of guidance that lands on head teachers’ desks. We want good head teachers to focus on what brought them into the profession in the first place and concentrate on leading the teaching and development of their pupils. 

All parents want to be able to send their child to a good or outstanding school and schools themselves aspire to be good or outstanding. Ofsted’s evidence shows that around a third of schools did not achieve good or outstanding at their last inspection. And some 3,000 schools have been just ‘satisfactory’ for their last two inspections. That is not good enough and that is why we strongly welcome Sir Michael Wilshaw’s plans to look again at Ofsted’s approach to awarding judgements and its proposals for early targeting of schools that require improvement.

We are determined to tackle those schools that should be doing better whether it’s those that fall below the floor standards or are coasting. We are aware that such a focus can, unfortunately, obscure the fact which we readily acknowledge, that the majority of schools and school leaders are doing a good or outstanding job, often in demanding circumstances. But that should not outweigh the need to tackle under performance and to foster improvement where it is needed for the benefit of the country and, above all, for our children and young people.

It is up to schools' governing bodies to manage the performance of head teachers. In the case of maintained schools, the performance of head teachers, like that of other teachers, is managed according to the provisions of the relevant regulations. New regulations are due to come into force in September 2012. Governing bodies will, as now, have a duty to appoint an external adviser for the purposes of providing them with advice and support in relation to the appraisal of the head teacher and must consult the external adviser when setting the head teacher’s objectives and assessing their performance. Maintained schools are also required to have procedures for dealing with lack of capability on the part of staff at the school, including the head teacher.
 





Have a suitably informed day.

When headship palls

I do know what it's like to lead a failing school out of special measures, and I understand completely that those staff who do not 'get it' may not have a place in the school's future. But I am appalled and saddened at HM Chief Inspector's latest charge, that 5000 headteachers are no good. A non-teaching friend said to me this morning, 'people don't want to be heads, do they?'  Is it any wonder, with leadership like this?

Of course, there are some headteachers who probably need to move on. I was recently part of a team of colleagues supporting a school where we identified all manner of improvements that were needed urgently. We made suggestions, wrote reports but were met by a blank silence and we are very aware of the price being paid by the children at that school for the headteacher's blind recalcitrance.  Is this a perversion of the 'hero head' that HMCI proclaims as the answer to school's woes. Leadership is a team business and the trouble with hero heads (or whatever the perverted opposite may be) is that they can lead without opening their ears and minds to their colleagues.  But this is the exception, not a 5000 strong rule.


In the most recently published 'Primary Headship eBulletin' (Optimus Education), I wrote about sensitive leadership, not one where low morale meant 'you are doing something right'. as HMCI had suggested in his last harangue. To my surprise I was deluged with emails from headteachers, some from outstanding schools, who did not believe in management by belligerence but by compassion. Compassionate leadership does not mean weakness and it is high time Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools recognised that there is room for a range of leadership styles, not just his.

Frank Knowles HMI once told me, 'behaviour can be sorted out quite quickly; standards take a lot longer'. One presumes that is still true. Some of our heads are truly heroes; and many of them are turning the educational equivalent of a super-tanker. They are, for the most part, good, successful leaders and they deserve to be treated with greater respect.

A little light relief

Heaven knows, there's not much to laugh at in education at the moment so I wanted to share a thought that came up in a conversation with a colleague yesterday. I am working with a Free School in Birmingham and we were writing some of the quality assurance measures that we will need, particularly in respect of the school's religious character. Thoughts turned to self-evaluation, for which several schools are using my style of SEF.

We were reminded that the instruction to inspection teams is to accept a summary of the school's self-evaluation in whatever form the school chooses to present it.  In what form might that be, we wondered?  Could a choir school present it as a cantata?  Would The Brits School perform a musical? Could a school with a media specialism show the team a documentary? How would a language specialist school do it? Could they perhaps offer achievement in Russian, Behaviour in Italian, Teaching in French and Leadership in German?

Imagine the team rocking up at a specialist sports college to be presented with a summary of the school's self-evaluation in their own unique way? How might they do it? A Mars Bar for the least sensible answer.

The mystery of school supply

As an education historian I am very intrigued by the current race to build schools - or at least, to set them up. Such a battle for market-share has not been seen since since the 1870 Act gave voluntary providers a last chance to set up their schools before the School Boards started to 'fill the gaps'. And these are similar times for another reason; the two thousand School Boards and the various voluntary bodies created a veritable blizzard of school providers, all in some way accountable to the Board of Education. Each week the TES includes advertisements for the leaders of a fresh batch of free schools. The parallel may or may not end there and there may or may not be lessons to learn from history - it would be good to explore this further in a future blog.

For the moment, let us return to the matter of academies. The last of these occasional blogs, entitled 'Academy Ally, a game with no winners', brought a fierce rebuff from the DfE. Alan Schneiderman, from the Academy policy team, denied that there were no winners. Academies, he wrote, have successfully raised standards. By working with other schools to provide support, encourage innovation and share expertise and resources that success can become even more widespread.  Of course, it would be foolish to disagree with this. We are seeing the fruits of success in many quarters and, while it can be argued that this would have happened regardless, with the proper injection of resources, advice and support these school have only received by virtue of their new status, we must accept that this has only happened because they have Academy status. However, I am often drawn to the words of Eric Bolton, HMCI at the time of the 1988 Education Reform Act, who used to speak of 'the stubborn statistic' or 25% under-achieving pupils. It is salutary to consider that, whenever government number monkeys wheel out figures of under-achievement, they are frequently around 25%!

I am no Luddite and recognise many of the great things that are happening in education at the moment, indeed, I sometimes find myself advising governors and leaders of free schools and frequently reflect on the exciting new opportunities they bring. However there are many aspects of this new school provision that worry me and these I will return to in a later blog. What I do get sick and tired of is the mantra trotted out time and again by every coalition politician and DfE civil servant, including Mr Schneiderman, that, we need to raise standards in all schools in order to create a world class education system. After all, it is hardly that we don't accept that we want to raise standards to give our children the best life chances. Few of us entered the profession for any other reason. This mantra has become the justification for all kinds of things, some of them good, some of them ambivalent and some of them downright daft.

If history has anything to teach us, it is that this massive burgeoning of school provision is going to have some negative impact and we may well find that there will be quite a lot of losers, many of them not deserving it.

Academy Ally - a game with no winners

There is, it seems, a cynical and Machiavellian game being played by the Department for Education. Its rules are secret and deniable but what is going on is far too organised to be mere serendipity. The game might be called Academy Ally.

As Smarden Primary School - a tiny Kent village school - celebrated becoming the 1000th converter academy, many were struck by the thought that, trumpet the success as loudly as you might, a thousand is a small proportion of the nation's schools. And we all know that this flagship, adorned with the bunting of freedom and flying the colours of independence, needs to gather a much bigger flotilla if it is to fulfil the dreams of its admiral.

And this is where the game comes in. It looks like this;  the DfE looks at the figures of those schools in challenging areas and leans very heavily on their local authority. The local authority, bowing to the pressure and threat to its independence, appears mob-handed on the school's doorstep, carries out a review and places the school in whatever is its equivalent to special measures, but with much shorter deadlines. Special Measures on steroids. It also breathes very heavily down the neck of the headteachers, with varying degrees of threat. This is not a nice place to be.  Enter the white knight - a minor DfE minion, a political spokesman, a passing peer - who then says, 'don't let the local authority bully you, break free of their pressure and become an academy.' 

This is exactly what happened at Smarden. Kent is an authority which, on the one hand is committed to supporting schools so they don't become academies but is using the other to beat up those schools who are struggling with meeting progress and attainment standards. Some officers have adopted a particularly bully-boy, intimidating approach. However, Smarden won a highly publicised visit from Lord Jonathan Hill, a junior education minister who promised heads that schools can stop officials 'breathing down their necks' by becoming academies.  And, from the bottom of an LA officer's boot, that suddenly looks very attractive.

It's not just Kent. My colleagues and I are working with schools in several authorities where the game is being played. There are a lot of scared heads out there and a lot of schools are feeling the pinch. They point the LA to satisfactory Ofsted reports, often reporting good leadership, to be told that 'the Secretary of State doesn't care about Ofsted reports!'

So, not by will but by fear, schools will slowly be added to the thousand to enjoy the new freedoms promised them. Does that freedom include not meeting floor targets, even in the most challenging areas? What do you think?