Vanessa Ward was appointed chief inspector of the Independent Schools’ Inspectorate (ISI) in February 2021 and also leads the organisation as chief executive officer. Previously, she was one of Her Majesty’s inspectors at Ofsted and was also headteacher at The Tiffin Girls’ School. She talks to Tes about her own schools days, her career path, who would teach in her ideal school and how Sir Tim Berners-Lee saved education in the pandemic.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

My most memorable teacher was Mrs Nash. She taught me French in the year before my O levels. She really turned it around for me - until then, French had been a random selection of rules and vocabulary that you just had to learn, whereas she stitched it all together.

She was really passionate and disciplined about her subject but she was quite relaxed. She spoke to us in a way that meant we really wanted to speak back and, particularly if you’re trying to speak in another language, creating that space where you can give it a go was really important.

Sometimes she paused French teaching and we’d have really good philosophical discussions in English about existentialism.

2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?

If I really come down to it, it’s about friendships. And I’ve got really good friends all the way from primary school up through university. The flip side of that - and I remember this as a former tutor - [is that]the times when it’s most distressing for young people can be when their friendships don’t work.

For me, the worst things I can remember are to do with feelings of public shame, and that’s an emotion I think we all are quite fearful of, whatever age we are.

At primary school, some maths test results were being given back and, for some reason, the teacher asked us all to stand on our chairs. She gave the results back in descending order and I was the last one standing.

When I got my test, I went back to my desk and pretended to drop my pencil so I could get under the desk to recover. And I remember looking at the floorboards and just thinking, “I really hope maths isn’t always like this”.

3. Why do you work in education?

It was a really big decision for me. I’d already spent quite a long time qualifying to be a solicitor and I’d done an English degree. As Steve Jobs once said, you join the dots up looking backwards, so it makes sense now. In other ways, it did feel a bit like I was coming home, in that all four of my grandparents and both my parents were teachers.

In terms of why I wanted to do it, I really love literature and English. I find it endlessly fascinating about human nature and I really wanted to explore that as I remembered my own teachers doing that with me.

In the second half of my career in education, I’ve been drawn to quality assurance. Quality assurance permeates education, whether you’re marking an essay, giving a young person some feedback or evaluating the quality of what the school is doing overall, which is obviously what we do at ISI and what I did at Ofsted.

4. What are you most proud of in your career and what’s your biggest regret?

I was head of English in a comprehensive school, and there was a group of Year 11 pupils who had quite low prior attainment, having come in with low confidence levels, not really thinking they could do it. So I really am proud of the way we all worked together - it was about making it relatable and for them to actually enjoy it, and see that English is about ideas, about human nature.

It was lovely, when they got their results, to see their faces just literally light up. And they’d say, “Miss Ward, I got my C!”

In terms of regrets, it’s that I can’t teach anymore. I once taught School for Scandal by Richard Sheridan to an A-level group and, to begin with, I could tell they felt it was a bit impenetrable. But we got to the point that this is really about money, about reputation, about gossip - and then they could see the parallels to the modern world. And actually, in School for Scandal in the end, being kind and being authentic is what carries people through, and the students really got that, too. That was something that I loved doing in the English classroom and would love to go back to.

5. Who would be your colleagues in your perfect staffroom?

I would have Greta Thunberg for environmental studies, Tracy Emin for arts, Malala Yousafzai for philosophy and ethics, and Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson for PE. And Sir David Attenborough for geography and earth science. [US computer scientist] Valerie Taylor would teach computer science and equalities, [biomedical engineer] Nina Tandon would teach science, and actor Nina Sosanya drama and performing arts. I would have rapper Akala for history and music. For wellbeing, I would have Mariella Frostrup. I’m going to take the English slot for myself, if that’s alright?

6. What are the best aspects of our school system today?

I think people are very committed. And I’m not just saying that lightly because I see it every day; I’ve seen it throughout my education career.

I do think it’s extraordinary, particularly over the past year, what schools and teachers have done; how everyone’s had to pivot into a new way of communicating with young people.

7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you most?

I heard [Nigerian author] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speak and it was a lightbulb moment. It was one of those moments where you think “my life was different before I heard her”. She spoke about the danger of the single story, and how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of stories, particularly as children.

She said we need to engage with all stories of people and places, not just the dominant story, which can be a stereotype.

Adults can have the danger of a single story - when we think about young people, we think, “oh, adolescents” or “the youth today”. And, conversely, young people can have a single story about adults.

So, you’ve got to always think: are we straying into certainty here when, actually, we have to embrace complexity? Once we start going for certainty, we start limiting our perspective.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d do?

I would launch the curriculum review to end all curriculum reviews. I think it’d be really important to get consensus and agreement about what we teach and how, and when we assess that.

We need content that gives parity of esteem to the academic and the technical, and also elements of community service.

When I talk to young people in schools and ask them what they would like in their curriculum, they say: “We want to know how money works. We want to know how to run a house. How do we get a mortgage?” It’d be really good to have an element of how the infrastructure of society works.

9. What will our schools be like in 30 years?

As a starting point, I’d go and ask young people today what they think. I’d like them to write letters to their future children.

But you’ve asked me, so I’d actually time travel back 30 years and then compare 30 years ago to now, and see what we can learn from that time span. If we do go back 30 years, to 1991, Kenneth Baker was education secretary and, actually, there were real similarities in the debates that were happening. He wanted a review into the primary school curriculum, and they were debating the amount of subject knowledge, and the role of teacher as expert rather than facilitator. It’s really interesting that it’s quite cyclical.

The other thing 30 years ago that was in the news and causing a lot of confusion was Clause 28, which prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality. That was 30 years ago, and that was only abolished in 2003. Now we have an independent school standard that says that schools must embed principles that actively promote respect for the protected characteristics. We’ve just seen a massive, massive change in terms of equality.

Looking forward, I would like us to have a second curriculum that can be updated flexibly, and that has parity of esteem for technical and academic qualifications; one that has an assessment system that is meaningful and manageable for schools, pupils and parents.

In terms of the physical environment, schools should always be a place where people gather, mingle and come together. I think we appreciate that after this past year, so that would be my school of the future.

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools in the past 12 months?

It has to be Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the [web]. I think that without the internet, it would have been a very different picture. He’s the person who’s had the most profound effect on education in the past 12 months, in terms of what he’s brought to the way that we can communicate, the way that we can engage. The impact of his invention, I think, has had a huge influence on the way that we’ve educated in the past year.

Vanessa Ward was speaking to Tes reporter Catherine Lough

This article originally appeared in the 7 May 2021 issue