10 questions with...Matt Hood

The principal of Oak National Academy talks to Tes about his most memorable teacher, the difficulties he experienced as a gay student in an all-boys secondary and the organisational confusion he believes exists within the state school system
19th March 2021, 12:05am
Tes' 10 Questions: Matt Hood, Principal Of National Online Learning School Oak National Academy

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10 questions with...Matt Hood

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/10-questions-withmatt-hood

Matt Hood has been at the forefront of delivering remote education during the pandemic. As principal of government-funded online classroom Oak National Academy, he has overseen the creation of more than 10,000 free video lessons and resources to help schools keep children learning throughout the crisis.

Hood previously founded the Institute of Teaching (now Ambition Institute) - an organisation that offers training for teachers and leaders serving disadvantaged pupils.

He is an independent adviser at the Department for Education, chair of governors at a school in Morecambe and a former teacher and school leader.

So, what did he have to say when faced with Tes’ 10 questions, designed to draw back the curtain on the person behind the profession?

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

The teacher who had the biggest influence on me was one of my secondary school form tutors and also a geography teacher - a chap called Mr Buckland. I just didn’t settle in those early years of secondary school and he just, for some reason, with some magic that he had, managed to get me settled. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if it wasn’t for him.

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

I was just a sponge - I loved learning stuff, I loved being interested in all these wonderful things that we got taught.

The worst parts - and I think this is similar for lots of pupils - were those moments where you’re different. If I was to give my secondary school, in particular, a little bit of a hard time about anything, I think it could have handled those moments of difference for me a little better.

The first thing was that I was a pupil on free school meals in a selective grammar school, so there weren’t very many of us - and that was very obvious - and, occasionally, I had to put up my hand and declare myself as being a free school meals kid in order to make sure a process or system worked that meant I got the meal at the end of it.

The second one was a little later on. Being gay in an all-boys secondary school is not easy at the best of times; it certainly wasn’t easy when I was at school. Section 28 was still in force at that time. Again, there were points where the school didn’t really help me out. If you were to look in the yearbook for my graduating year, underneath my picture is my name and “aka: faggy bitch”, which was approved and published and distributed across the school. Not OK.

Certainly, I know the teachers and school leaders at that school now would not allow that to happen, but it did happen at the time.

3. Why do you work in education?

While I was really fortunate and got an incredible education, if you look at the data, that did - it is a fact - [come] at the expense of the education of all of the other people in my community, who went to those other schools and weren’t as fortunate as I was.

What better way to make a contribution to making sure every kid gets the same deal as every other kid, regardless of their background, than to work in our amazing, wonderful school system, which is doing that all day, every day?

4. What are you proudest of in your career and what do you regret?

The thing that I’m most proud of is, in three different organisations now that I have worked in and been involved with, I have been able to be part of, helped to build and led three really, really incredible teams.

The thing that I regret when I look back is that at the start of my career, I didn’t challenge hard enough the wisdom that was being passed on to me about teaching.

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

I’m going to replace individual names here for teams of people at schools that I think are really great.

I think that Dixons Trinity Academy, in Bradford, would be my principal. I would definitely be pulling colleagues out of our specialist sector in to be my special educational needs and disabilities coordinator; someone from St Giles [School] maybe, in Nottinghamshire, or Eden [Academy Trust].

On heading up the pastoral aspects of the school, I think Cockermouth School in Cumbria, not too far away from me, is really thoughtful about its approach to this, or Reach Academy in Feltham, if you’re trying to think about how the school sits within and interacts with its community.

I’m going to get Jane Austen College in Norwich to head up the curriculum. And then, working underneath [them], one of the little known things about Oak National Academy is that , actually, we’re basically a kind of federation - an alliance, a group of schools, school trusts and subject associations, each of whom takes a subject and key stage - I’m just going to pull in all of those.

6. What are the best and worst aspects of our schools system?

England is having the best conversation about education anywhere in the world. Grassroots movements of teachers talking about teaching, questioning things, challenging things, even if they don’t disagree … that is a great thing, and I think sometimes undervalued.

But the pandemic has exposed deeply unhelpful gaps and a lack of clarity about the different roles that different actors in our system have. We are running half the schools through one academy system; we’re running the other half through a maintained local authority system.

My interest in this particular topic started in 2010. I was a civil servant inside the DfE, working on the 2010 White Paper. We didn’t articulate clearly in that White Paper what the role of the local authority would be in the system. We weren’t champions for children - and sort of hoped no one would notice. That was a huge error. It was a huge, huge error. And we are still feeling the repercussions.

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

The thing that has influenced me most is just being in that conversation where lots of different people disagree with each other.

I love just hearing two people courteously and candidly going at it. You just learn loads by doing that. And it is listening to lots of those debates and discussions, overlaying it with the evidence, that I think has just influenced my outlook on those big questions.

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

I would pick a big multiple: I would quadruple, I would quintuple, I would - I don’t know what the one is after that - the amount we spend on professional development of teachers.

It is the single best bet that we have at our disposal, the thing that matters, both for normal times and, indeed, for this big conversation that is coming about catch-up.

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

I still hope we’ll be teaching - at least up to 16 - a broad, rigorous, academic curriculum that is the best of human civilisation: not just “thought” and “said”, but “sung”, “danced”, “painted”.

I also think - and this is partly pandemic related - that the role of schools is probably going to broaden out. This is one of the perils of being a huge success story, in my view, through the pandemic: that schools have demonstrated that they can do a whole load of things. And if you’re a policymaker, and you want something doing, I think that schools being the answer to that thing being done, whether we like it or not, is probably going to be a solution that people are reaching for.

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

I want to talk about Colette Roberts [head of Bay Leadership Academy in Morecambe, where Mr Hood is a governor].

If you go into our school today, [Colette and her team] have not only created a school in the building, they have created a remote school that educates pupils wherever they might be outside of our building. They have created a track-and-trace centre - she set that up from scratch. We are a testing centre, so not only can we tell you about how vaccines work in our science lessons, or how tests for viruses work - we can also demonstrate that to you live by testing a few hundred kids and teachers a week. And on top of that, we have put rocket boosters underneath that community work that we were doing.

Colette Roberts wins the award for “has had the most impact on education” as the banner carrier for 23,000 other headteacher colleagues across the country who have done exactly the same thing - and I think that’s astonishing.

Matt Hood was speaking to Tes reporter Amy Gibbons

This article originally appeared in the 19 March 2021 issue

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