Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: Wilshaw is Right, but Nothing Has Changed in 20 Years
To survive as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, you need various strengths. A good political nose helps, as does a determination to cut through the swirl of the education debate. Fortitude is essential. But, more important than any of the above, is a highly developed sense of the ridiculous or, alternatively, a magnificent capacity to delude oneself.
How else can a Chief Inspector stand up, year after year, repeating commonsense truths that have been articulated by himself or his predecessors countless times in the past?
Last week, Sir Michael Wilshaw told the world that what mattered in a school was strong leadership and excellent teaching. He observed that a school which moves from local authority control to academy status is not necessarily going to become a better school. He noted, correctly, that the needs of able pupils are often neglected and that poor discipline makes it very difficult for teachers to teach and pupils to learn in all too many schools.
None of this is new. I was saying much the same thing twenty years ago. Perhaps I should add a further personality trait to the requirements of the job: a masochistic enthusiasm for banging your head against the proverbial brick wall.
Wilshaw’s report raises the question of whether Ofsted any longer has any purpose. If Chief Inspector after Chief Inspector tells Secretary of State after Secretary of State what is wrong and standards in secondary schools at least remain unsatisfactory, what is the point?
It is a question I asked myself with increasing frequency when I did the job. The problem is that no politician in the current political climate is prepared to do what is needed in response to the Ofsted commentary on school performance. The fact that David Cameron removed Michael Gove from his post and appointed Nicky Morgan as his successor with an explicit brief to calm things down and make friends with the teaching profession says it all. The Liberal Democrats and Labour have always been part of the Blob. No political party, with the possible exception of UKIP, is willing to challenge the ideological status quo.
Without that challenge, nothing will ever happen. Does anybody really think that an education commission chaired by the ex Secretary of State, Estelle Morris, is going to solve the problems of Oldham schools? Or that a further commission with Sir Mike Tomlinson at the helm will sort out Birmingham’s educational difficulties? At best, the deckchairs will be moved. But who cares? The politicians, local and national, will be able to say that they are taking robust action, and with luck some new disaster will ensure that the media agenda moves on.
England’s secondary schools need radical change. The consensus at present is that competition between schools is bad, collaboration good. Selection is bad, comprehensive education good. Privatisation is bad, state monopoly control good. Each of these deeply cherished, but profoundly misguided, beliefs needs to be turned on its head.
Every good headteacher I have ever known wants his or her school to be the best school. Why wouldn’t they? Competition drives the pursuit of educational excellence and recruitment in the independent sector. Did you watch the BBC documentary on The Tatler, with its Russian oligarchs scrutinising the attractions of the leading UK public schools? Such schools compete in a world market and the need to maintain numbers ensures that their focus is on what potential parents are looking for. So it should be, within their local catchment, with state schools. It would be, too, if any government had the courage to introduce a system of educational vouchers in which parents were given the funds that the state provides to secondary schools and allowed to shop around. Such a system would attract new provision into the private sector and increase, therefore, competition.
A government that was serious about social mobility would recognise the immense contribution grammar schools made to that goal. In fact, we have right wing think-tanks doing their very best to undermine any enthusiasm for the creation of new grammar schools through their selective use of evidence. Such is the spirit of the times in which we live.
As for privatisation, I suspect that in the near future the very word will be banned from polite discourse. The truth, though, is that the academy chains that are working best are those which are led by businessmen. There is no guarantee that business can run education well. Indeed, if there is not a strong educational voice at the heart of the business then things can go badly. But, given the right combination of skills, the evidence suggests that this is a very positive way forward. At present, politicians rely on charity and goodwill. This is fine if we are talking a handful of schools. The size of the problem means that it is not. The private sector will only make the impact it needs to make when politicians accept that a profit, or if you prefer it, management fee, is not an unacceptable price to pay.
What chance is there of any of these arguments being accepted come the election next May? None whatsoever, and I shall be scrawling ‘none of the above’ on my ballot paper.
Professor Sir Chris Woodhead was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 until 2000. He is author of Class Wars and A Desolation of Learning. His areas of expertise are education and leadership, accountability and the drive to raise standards; his research interest currently is the involvement of the private sector in raising educational standards. He retired at the end of 2013 from the chairmanship of Cognita, the international schools company he established in 2004.