If there is a single golden thread running through Nick Brook’s very varied career, it can be encapsulated by two glimpses he had of one troubled child, more than a decade apart.

Brook - now deputy general secretary of the NAHT headteachers’ union - first encountered the boy as a two-year-old cycling around the playground of an Eastbourne primary school, shouting obscenities at the teachers trying to catch him.

“At this point, you know that this kid is going to be coming to your school in a couple of years’ time, and you can already see the challenging behaviour from the outset,” he recalls.

Fast forward several years, and Brook was a senior Home Office civil servant, rolling out New Labour’s £100 million Youth Crime Action Plan. On a visit to Sussex Police, he saw the same boy’s name “at the very top” of the list of priority prolific offenders.

“It just brought home to me the fact there seemed to be an awful inevitability of this young lad’s life,” he says, “from the very moments after he was born, through to this point where he was, almost on a weekly basis, in trouble with the police.

“There cannot be an inevitability that a child of two ends up where this child ended up. I think that’s driven a lot of what I’ve done in recent years, trying to think what things we can do to make a difference.”

One-to-one support

One of the “simple truths” Brook has learned over the course of his career is that the earlier you invest in a young person’s life, the more impact it will have.

At the Home Office, he found that some of the things that had the greatest effect were also, inevitably, the most expensive.

“It was that one-to-one, intensive support in the very earliest years that did actually help to turn lives around, and give parents the support they needed in order to set the youngest children off on the right path.”

But, for Brook, the trouble with such initiatives is not just their upfront cost - especially given tightened budgets during a time of austerity - but also the years it takes for them to bear fruit.

By the time the benefits of any one initiative have become clear, the minister originally responsible for its implementation will have long gone. As a result, for politicians, the temptation is always to choose short-term fixes that will hand them a quick win.

“The close relationship between education and the political cycle in terms of policy formation does get in the way, at times, of doing the right thing,” Brook laments.

At the NAHT, he says assessment and accountability has been “absolutely at forefront” of his work.

The association published its alternative approach to these two key areas in January, and found the government included many of its recommendations in its consultation on primary assessment, launched in March.

Now, Brook wants a discussion on the way data used for assessment is also used for high-stakes accountability.

For him, “when you load on accountability requirements on any assessment system, it has the potential to twist and skew what’s going on in schools, and that is exactly what we have seen”. It is now time, he says, to put statutory assessment data “back in its box”.

Brook started his professional life in the classroom, teaching in an infant school and then an all-through primary in Eastbourne.

His rise to the national arena was swift, if unplanned. He was seconded to a role at East Sussex Council helping to recruit more men into primary schools, and set up one of the first local authority schools-based teacher training programmes.

Finding it hard to attract teachers to Hastings - which “had some very challenging schools, very challenging communities” - his approach was “let’s grow our own, let’s look at the people who are already living there and find a way of getting them to become teachers”.

The strategy attracted attention from elsewhere, so “almost by accident I ended up moving out of school and working on the national stage”.

He had stints at the Training and Development Agency for Schools, the Home Office, and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, before making a move to an organisation not traditionally known as a favourite of teachers and school leaders: Ofsted.

He describes himself as a “passionate believer” in the need for inspection, but calls for a different approach to the current system.

“I do believe that inspection can be a powerful force for good, but we can’t let it rule our lives,” he says.

“It’s been through the fear of inspection and its consequences that many schools appear to be in this permanent state of alert, preparing for when the inspector’s call may come to say the inspectors are coming in the following day, which just seems to me to be driving all of the wrong behaviours.”

He points to NAHT’s alternative peer review programme, “Instead”, which he says removes the high-stakes nature of the inspections, and is “an honest and open appraisal of the strengths and vulnerabilities within a school”, focused on what it should do going forward, rather than ticking boxes.

“If we can get to system where peer review is the norm, and headteachers and schools are taking back ownership and taking back control of their own destiny by saying ‘Look, I’m not interested in what the Ofsted framework says, I’m interested in: am I running a great school, and what do I need to do to make it even better?’ Then, when Ofsted come, we can have the courage of our convictions to say, ‘I’m doing this because it is the right thing, and here is the evidence to prove it’. I think that is where we will see the unleashing of creativity and innovation.”

Brook says his thinking is “very much” informed by his time in Ofsted, where he worked on curriculum surveys and thematic inspections - “very low stakes” compared to the whole-school inspections that can trigger government intervention.

‘Buzz’ of school environments

“It enabled a very different conversation between inspectors and school leaders on what those inspectors were finding, and when I accompanied inspectors on those visits, the number of times I heard the phrase ‘this feels like the best free consultancy I’ve ever had’ was amazing. You could see how the body language and the engagement just changed through the day.”

Although he has spent a relatively small amount of time actually teaching, it is a role he clearly misses. Indeed, he did “play with the idea” of going back to the classroom after leaving Ofsted, and spent some time helping out at his daughter’s school to see what it was like at the chalk face.

“I love it when I’m invited to visit schools, particularly representing NAHT as opposed to Ofsted,” he says. “I love being in the school environment. It gives me such a buzz and reminds me why I’m doing this in the first place.”

Of his future, he says he hopes to be at NAHT “for a long time”.

“I want to create that future where schools have taken back control, where you do control your own destiny. I do think that NAHT can do that, and I do think I can do that within NAHT, so I don’t have any plans to be moving on any time soon.”

@geomr