Anyone can be a headteacher. It’s official. The Government has announced that heads do not have to be experienced teachers, they might come from business. Indeed, such novices would be welcome, it was said, presumably because their brains would be uncluttered by professional knowledge.
I try hard to be fair-minded on these occasions, not want-ing to be seen as an unimag-inative traditionalist. It is too easy to reject fresh proposals out of hand, simply because they are novel. Education, of all aspects of our society, must be prepared to move ahead, break new ground, push back the frontiers.
In order to keep an open mind about the novice head suggestion, therefore, I made trawl after trawl through my mammoth vocabulary on educational issues to find the best description of it. Try as I might, the same two technical terms surged to the top of my mental thesaurus every time. They were “utter” and “bollocks”.
It is demeaning to the whole profession to suggest that anyone can do the top job in a school, or that first-hand experience, working with children, understanding the dynamics of the classroom, count for nothing. This narrow, cynical view sees heads as pen-pushers, so who cares a jot about knowledge of the intricate processes of teaching and learning. It is the cult of the amateur taken to its extreme. Compliance becomes more important than competence.
What sticks in the craw about this latest wheeze is that the spinmeisters (they are alive and well: notices announcing the death of spinning were premature) present the idea as “modernisation”. This is quite a clever strategy. Object and you can be labelled a dinosaur, standing in the way of progress. If deprofessionalising headteachers constitutes “progress”, then bring back the longbow, the pony express and scurvy.
The only answer I can find is to become chief executive of the Government’s own official headhunting agency, the Dilettantes, Uninformed Meddlers and Bureaucrats Organisation. We at Dumbo will leave no stone unturned in our quest for the best of the rest. Our first step will be to add “has been a teacher” to the list of disqualifying offences when applicants for headships are vetted by the police.
If you think about what modern headship entails, it should not be too difficult for DUMBO to find suitable candidates from a variety of sources. I would have thought that the drivers of a muckspreader, for example, could be eminently suitable, since they must be well versed in the art of dealing with large amounts of fertiliser.
There are also numerous experts at handling paper who could be useful, such as dustcart drivers, waste disposal crews, paper-doll cutters, even newspaper deliverers. Indeed, a really radical solution would be for a school to hire one of its own pupils, who normally has to get up at the crack of dawn to shove daily papers through letter boxes. This neat initiative would, at a stroke, both improve the school- leaver employment profile and give a former pupil a better wage.
The “any fool can be a head” proposal is closely tied in with the equally barmy idea of superheads running five or six schools at once, another crackpot scheme devised by the rotating eyeballs faction deep inside the bowels of the Prime Minister’s own personal policy unit.
What scares me about this latest loonytunes idea is that business-type superheads are in reality enforcers, tweaking their half- dozen subheads to make sure underling schools follow government policy. That is why it hardly matters whether they can tell a pupil from a petrol pump. The school is a factory, teachers are operatives, children are output, so the chief executive may as well be a silicon chip.
In the Stalinist structure under which education now operates, with the Downing Street policy factory at its apex, superheads become what Stalin himself called the vintiki, Russian for “little screws”, the middle-ranking operatives who bind the great tall triangle together. Compliance and “efficiency” far outweigh imagination and insight as qualities for meeting the five-year tractor production targets.
So if you come across people who fancy earning a six-figure salary for their ignorance by becoming superheads, collect their details and send them to the DfES at Dunspinning, Upper Gumtree, Compleat, Berks, or email them to the Number 10 idea factory website at www.searchme.gov. Oh, and make sure none of them has ever been a teacher. There are some crimes that are unforgivable.
