Jonny Uttley is the chief executive of the Education Alliance Trust, which runs schools in Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire. During the pandemic, he has helped to bring academy trusts together to question exam boards and Ofqual over the handling of this year’s exams. He has also highlighted the plight of Hull schools attempting to work in one of the country’s Covid hotspots.

He talks to Tes about his own school experience and how he hopes the education sector can improve its accountability system and move away from “tiresome” binary debates.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

My most memorable and most inspirational teacher was about as old school as you could get. He was a guy called John Tarbett when I was at Prince Henry’s School in Otley, West Yorkshire.

He was like something out of The History Boys, driving people to get out of Yorkshire to get to [the University of] Oxford. He was just the funniest, most hilarious - but also the most academically challenging - teacher you could possibly have.

None of what he did could you get away with in the system now. He once wrote on the bottom of one of my essays: “Uttley, do not ever again trouble me with your quasi-Marxist bullshit.” And that was his comment. And in fairness, I never did because I learned my lesson.

Yes, he was old school, but truly, truly inspirational, and while it would be wrong to say he is why I got into teaching, he is certainly why I ended up loving history, which then led to my becoming a history teacher down the line.

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

Sixth form was my best time in school, studying three subjects that I loved, thinking about going off to university and everything else that came with it.

The worst thing, and this has influenced my thinking about schools, was streaming.

I was in a top-stream form group; it was top stream for everything. Socially, although I had a nice time, you effectively just mixed with the clever kids and nobody else. Although I was great at history, languages and English, I really struggled in maths and science when I shouldn’t have been in the top set, and found it really hard. So streaming was the worst.

3. Why do you work in education?

I’m an accidental teacher. I had no intention of doing it. I was one of those typical boys who left university and didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

I went out to America to do a PhD [and] changed my mind on that. I decided that I was always going to work in education but I saw myself in universities.

I got into teaching because I needed a reason to explain to my mum why I was coming back from America after she’d spent two years trying to get me out there.

So I said: “I’ll do a PGCE.” But, you know, once I got into it, I absolutely loved it and I think, ultimately, I’ve always been quite passionate that whatever I ended up doing, it was always going to be about trying to help people to improve their lives and improve their lot.

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

Probably what I’m proudest of is what we’re doing right now at TEAL (The Education Alliance Trust), because we really set our stall out three years ago about … the values that we stand for and being genuinely ethical. Putting staff first … and just trying to be decent, reasonable employers.

There are too many schools that still have ridiculous systems that negatively impact their staff and they try to justify it by saying, “Oh, we’re doing it for the young people”, as though it’s a binary choice - and it’s not: you can look after the staff and do the best for young people.

The thing I probably regret, although I couldn’t have known then, is I’d love to have been a teacher now rather than 20 years ago. What I know now about what works, and about teaching and learning, I wish I had known then when I was teaching 20 lessons a week.

It is only now I realise how clueless I was as a teacher because we just didn’t understand the theory and the research and the evidence in the way that we do now.

5. If you could choose your perfect staffroom, who would be in it?

I’m going to bottle it and say my trust team now, who are just fab.

I’ll probably throw in a few people off Twitter who I’ve met over the past 18 months, so people like Abby Bayford [director of the Academy Transformation Trust Institute] and Cassie Young [head of school and special educational needs and disability coordinator at Brenzett Primary School].

I’d have [former Tes deputy editor] Ed Dorrell in there, just for going for a pint afterwards, and, if I wasn’t in charge, I’d like to have worked for [former national schools commissioner] Sir David Carter - I’d like him to have been my head.

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

I think the best is just the level of collaboration that goes on now. The way that so many people work together. I think there’s a really strong sense of that moral purpose. And, you know, we’ve seen it during the pandemic: all the great things that schools did, they didn’t do because the government was telling them they have to do it, they did it just because it was the right thing to do.

We are seeing loads more collaboration, and a desire to improve the system through working together rather than competing.

All of that gives me a lot of hope for the future.

The worst, I guess, is the flip side of that, where people still choose to get into competition, where being able to claim that you’re in the top 1 per cent and putting some big banner up is the be-all and end-all. I think we have still got a really unintelligent accountability system, effectively boiling the quality of school down to a single Progress 8 measure.

I guess the other one is just the binary debate and the labels, you know: “I’m traditional” or “I’m progressive” or “warm strict” or “ban the booths”.

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

The two headteachers I worked with when I was a senior leader, so John Tomsett - when he was at Huntington School in York and I was on his team - and Chris Abbott, who was my predecessor here at South Hunsley School and then TEAL. Both quite different but both absolutely superb leaders, and I just learned so much from them.

I’ve been really lucky to have worked for those two, because it just taught me a huge amount about school leadership but also about treating people well and doing the right thing.

And one who isn’t a former head of mine would be Sam Twiselton at Sheffield Hallam University. I think Sam is one of, if not the, wisest person in the system. She is just a thoroughly decent, kind, highly intelligent person and seeing her being able to influence the system for the better again is something that gives me a lot of hope.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what would you change?

I am too outspoken, I think, to be education secretary.

I would have said accountability, but I’m going to go for something a bit different. I’d say: broaden out the group of people that you listen to.

Education secretaries have a little group of people - schools, trusts - and it becomes a real echo chamber, and they don’t get out across the system. Don’t just visit academies, go to maintained schools as well. Don’t just talk to the big academy trusts, talk to the medium and small ones as well.

And then the other thing is, I would find a way of stopping incentivising and rewarding poor behaviour, which is what the accountability system does. We had great hopes for what Ofsted were going to do around off-rolling but, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the case.

I would love to find a way where, if school leaders choose to behave poorly to others, they’re not then rewarded for that.

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

I have absolutely no idea. It’s hard to know whether they’ll change really significantly and or whether they’ll look quite like they do now. I think, probably, I would err towards the latter.

I had heard 10 or 15 years ago that technology was going to transform everything, that the teacher was going to become a facilitator. And then, after that, there’d be no teachers at all because everybody would learn everything from Google. And it was nonsense.

So, I actually think that maybe schools won’t look that different from the way they do now.

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools over the past year?

It has got to be [former education secretary] Gavin Williamson, but not in a good way.

Maybe because I’m a Manchester United fan, but I am also going to say Marcus Rashford. The moral pressure that he brought on the government made a big difference to young people and families that impacts in schools but, also, he has shown us all the power of making a strong moral argument.

Jonny Uttley was talking to John Roberts, senior reporter at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 24 September 2021 issue