Autumnal Gloom
Autumnal Gloom
Autumnal Gloom
We were promised that education would be all about school leaders’ autonomy and freedom.
We were told that one day - just like for those shimmering independent school heads we are supposed to aspire to be, tottering on their shiny pedestals - we would be free to shape our own curriculum and ‘drive up standards’ unfettered by regulation and ‘red tape’.
We were reassured that it wasn’t for politicians to meddle in how schools are run.
How pitiful all that sounds today, the day of Michael Gove’s latest party piece and following another bleak tinkering with school accountability measures.
Over the past few days I’ve received messages from some of our most optimistic and transformational school leaders to say: ‘It really shouldn’t feel like this’.
Some of them are starting to give up hope.
The changes to performance tables, announced in this weekend’s compliant newspapers, were implicitly saying ‘you are all cheats’.
The suggestion seemed to be that early entry and resits are never undertaken in the interests of students, but always with the aim of clinging on to our schools’ league table positions.
We are out for ourselves, it seems, with the Education Secretary casting himself manfully and unconvincingly on the side of young people. (The Year 11 English group I taught today, incidentally, feel nothing but fury at the way their qualifications are being meddled with before they sit them).
It’s often those schools in the most challenging circumstances, most under threat of takeover, where early entry and resits have been a key part of the armoury in helping to get as many students their alluring grade C as possible.
These were the schools we thought the Education Secretary was most proud to see succeeding. We thought he was on their side.
Now some of the biggest beasts of the academy chains tell me that they are sick of being portrayed one minute as the cavalry and the next as the conniving pariahs of a corrupt system.
They have had enough of it.
I remember in my first few years of headship feeling that I was part of a collective mission to improve our schools. Partnership and collaboration and innovation would help us to make our education system world class. We were in this together.
Now, it seems, in an era of comparable outcomes, my school can only do better if yours does worse. We will prosper only if you lot fester.
Thus I see good colleagues losing heart, emailing me to say they wish they were no longer in school leadership.
I see newspapers endlessly sniping that those of us proud once to choose to work in the state sector are characterised now by mediocrity and low aspirations.
I see an Education Secretary too quick to quack crowd-pleasing soundbites rather than to support school leaders in the relentlessly tough job of improving our schools.
As I have said so many times before: ‘It’s as if we are run by people who have never run anything’.
A corrosive discourse of criticism has become the norm. And I suspect it comes at a huge cost.
Because I don’t see queues of fresh-faced young rookies lining up to take over the roles of school leaders.
Instead, the most common phrase I hear is ‘I wouldn’t want your job’.
Whether they like it or not, governments need people to lead schools and to lead the education system.
And I would suggest that ‘I wouldn’t want want your job’ isn’t a reassuring legacy for any Education Secretary, whether basking today in the slick triumph of another conference speech or heading back tomorrow to the real world of students and teachers and school leaders: the real people of education.
Geoff Barton
1 October 2013
20:30
Tuesday, 1 October 2013