Questions are being asked about the non-appearance of Chris Woodhead at the glittering gala to celebrate the nation’s classroom heroes and heroines. Idle speculation doing the rounds is that the chief inspector has an ideological aversion to Plato and the Greek philosopher’s attachment to spiritual relationships at the expense of the sexual.
As it happens, he missed the presentation of a teachers’ “Oscar” - an engraving of Plato’s head entombed in glass - to a doughty head who resigned her membership of the National Association of Head Teachers over the Woodhead affair and has set up a break-away association. Jean Heslop of Cliffe Hill junior and infants in Halifax, West Yorkshire, is one of the heads who accused the union’s general secretary, David Hart, of conducting a “witch-hunt” after his request for an investigation into the chief inspector’s less-than-platonic relationship with a former pupil.
