We are offered a “leadership development framework” which will “ensure” (hah! ) ongoing training and development throughout a head’s career. So if any of you lot are skulking in your offices muttering “Psha, I finished developing 10 years ago, bog off”, you can forget it.

I am particularly intrigued by the idea of the “five stages of leadership” and have prepared some helpful worksheets which go something like this: Stage 1: say boo! to goose.

Stage 2 (still easy): deny day off to Bambi-eyed blonde NQT who might cry.

Stage 3: (tougher) tell hulking, crew-cut, ex-territorial head of D amp; T department that no, there is absolutely no question of replacing the lathe before 2004.

Stage 4: inform mass meeting of parents that 200 completed GCSE papers got inadvertently posted into the wheelie-bin by a member of staff who cannot now be traced. Stage 5: Tell Miss Mountshaft (estd. 1963 in the music department) that no, this is not a very tactful year to put on her cherished production of The Desert Song.

See? Who says you can’t learn leadership by numbers? Look, I don’t know. There may be fabulous, inspired, original, life-enhancing stuff in these guidelines. I suppose my instinctive nervousness comes from having watched the world change through my own working life, from temp typist at IBM to lurking freelance on the fringes of various media.

It is apparent to the idlest eye that the notion of “management training” has somehow crept out of its natural home in the jampot of industry, dripped off the spoon and spread like a sweet viscous stain across the national tablecloth. This managerialist ethic says that if you can run a ginger-biscuit factory then you can run the BBC; and that a school or college presents challenges no different from a chain of theme pubs.

The result is a generation of bright-eyed, well-groomed, energetically smiling clones with a penchant for going on about “the three Cs” or “the two big Hs”. They love flip-charts and consultants and stupid gimmicks such as having no desk, or writing the days of the week on the doormat. They refer to people as “human resources” and draw complicated diagrams about responsibility on the tablecloth. They are quite seductive, actually, flickering with a sort of chilly, blue electricity. Unfortunately, they often have little grasp of what the organisation actually does, and after a while flounce back to the biscuit factory muttering about defeat at the hands of an “entrenched culture”.

This is a risk in every profession, but particularly in schools. I once went to a conference of middle-school headteachers, and discovered that they had spent the morning schmoozing around local factories. “Oh,” I said, “to see what sort of employers are waiting for your kids? Good idea.”

“No,” said the organisers, scandalised, “to learn about line-management techniques.”

Whereon I got stroppy and harangued them with my heartfelt belief that schools have little to learn from commerce and industry. This is not least because the first thing a management guru would say on contemplating some of our schools would be: “Sack your suppliers, they’re giving you rubbish kids to work with, you’re wasting resources on remedial work before you even start, take out a bank loan and order in some better ones.” This would not, even today, go down terribly well with the clientele. So let us hope that the leadership college accepts the uniqueness of schools and the batty diversity of good heads. I have known jolly ones, jokey ones and painfully shy ones who can’t handle parents but are adored by children. I have known meeters-and-greeters, smarmballs and ascetics, remote, scholarly figures who impress from afar and hearty ones who gallop onto the football pitch. All have their good points; including the former head of my children’s school who, when asked by the school newspaper reporter: “Sir, what do you do all day?” replied grandly: “I sit in my office, and I care.”

The chief thing, the “unteachable thing, is to lead from the front and be fearless. Think of Mayor Giuliani amid the rubble, scolding and encouraging and keeping the show on the road. Opening his own post in the anthrax panic, he reminds me of my first BBC boss, a sweetly vague old boy who, during the IRA letter-bomb campaign, trundled in early every morning to defuse the post so the receptionist wouldn’t have to do it. Lead from the front, do what’s right, keep your nerve, care. Maybe a college and five key stages will help. But I’m not sure. Not yet.