At a recent heads’ conference in London, Geoff Barton opened his speech on school leadership by sharing his worries about his school toilets. Toilets, he said, reflect the values of a school. More wise words followed as he reflected on leadership and management, decision-making in schools, and making explicit the implicit value-driven messages that pupils need to hear. He talked about the shortage of applicants for headship and the need for existing heads to puncture the myths that create fear among those who have decided not to apply for what Geoff believes to be a hugely satisfying job with the potential to change the lives of thousands of young people.

ASCL has never had an election campaign before. Its general secretaries and presidents have always been appointed by its council, with the members ratifying the decision. With so many ASCL members on twitter and Facebook, social media played a big part in Geoff’s victory this year. There were some great blogs setting out why the writers would be voting for Geoff and why they considered that he is what ASCL needs as its general secretary at the present time.

Former headteacher Tom Sherrington encapsulated the views of many when he wrote:

This election has huge significance for me as a member of ASCL - but it is also incredibly important for the future of education policy in this country.  Now more than ever, as we continue down the rapids of turbulent change with no end in sight, we need ASCL to be a force to be reckoned with; powerful, principled and purposeful; a campaigning voice heard loud and clear amid the noisy machinations of politics and policy-making.  To achieve that goal, ASCL needs a true leader; someone with the authenticity and experience to truly understand members’ perspectives; someone actively engaged with schools and academies of all kinds; someone with the skills to negotiate and persuade, but also the courage to challenge the status quo. Perhaps above all we need someone with an inspiring optimistic vision for what might be possible if ministers make the right decisions. … Principled, passionate, persuasive; articulate, courageous, gritty: this is the kind of voice ASCL needs right now.

Many ASCL members have shared this view and put their cross against Geoff Barton’s name as a result, seeing him as a proven school leader, who understands the joys and challenges of the job, but will articulate powerfully the concerns and problems they are experiencing daily. They remembered the way in which he put his head above the parapet in 2012 and led the way in challenging Ofqual on its changes to English GCSE.

Geoff Barton is no ordinary successful headteacher: he is also a recognised national leader in both the teaching of English and the leadership of schools, on both of which he has written and spoken extensively. So he comes to the job of ASCL general secretary with a strong reputation and, to that extent, he is a known quantity.

As general secretary, he will use all the skills he has demonstrated already as a head and leading advocate for good English teaching. He will have a flying start through his existing media contacts and profile.

The part of the job where he will spend most of his time, and for which his astute political antennae will serve him particularly well, is in Westminster, persuading the government what policies it should implement in order to improve the education system in this country and support the work of the school leaders.

This is the hardest part of the job. Governments are elected to run the education system and create new policies; school leaders are appointed to run schools as they think best. These two are often in conflict. As a union general secretary with a strong track record as a successful head, Geoff will be in a unique position among the unions to say to the government: ‘If you want this policy to be effective, I can tell you how you can best work with school leaders so that they can implement the change effectively and make maximum impact.’ Or, if the government is on completely the wrong track: ‘From my experience of school leadership, I can tell you, minister, that this policy will have a detrimental effect on the education of children in our schools.’  

This experience of headship will serve him well in his dealings with ministers and officials in the DfE, some of whom will have been doing their GCSEs or A levels in 2002 when Geoff became a head.

But he won’t always be successful in persuading the government to do the things that ASCL members want. Other groups - parents, business, thinktanks such as Policy Exchange and other unions - may be putting a different view and the government may decide to do what they want instead.

Some of his successes as general secretary will go unheralded, because they happen behind the closed doors of committees in Westminster, where Geoff’s voice will be listened to, not least because he is likely to be the only person in the room with recent experience of school leadership and teaching. I recall the 2007 ASCL annual conference - the year when acting general secretary Malcolm Trobe served as association president - when secretary of state Alan Johnson started his speech by saying to the assembled school leaders: ‘You may not like some government policies, but you should see the ones that John and Malcolm have stopped us doing.’

Geoff is a natural team-worker, so we can expect to see increased co-operation between ASCL and other unions, creating a powerful alliance with NAHT and an increasingly influential cross-union voice with the soon-to-be-merged NUT and ATL. This can only be a positive development.

Early morning twitter users will be familiar with Geoff’s aphorisms, apt quotations, re-tweets of Matt cartoons and pictures of the Suffolk countryside shimmering in the mist, as well as his succinctly expressed views on the education issues of the day.

In his speaking and writing, Geoff Barton comes across as a principled, authentic head, whose outward-facing approach and clear focus on the centrality of learning has served his school well.

Few school leaders can have had such a breadth of experience as Geoff has had. His CV includes a remarkable number of organisations with whom he has worked. Through all this varied work, he has remained a hugely committed teacher.

He has enjoyed more than 30 years as a successful English teacher and writer of textbooks and nearly 20 years as a school leader. Knowing him as well as I do, I am absolutely confident that he will be a great general secretary of ASCL, representing the members effectively, bringing good sense to the public education debate and becoming highly respected in Westminster and beyond.   

John Dunford was general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders from 1998 to 2010. He tweets as @johndunford

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