I’ve been trying hard to think more deeply than is traditional about the challenges schools and teachers face. If you need a long spoon to sup with the devil, then you need one hell of a tall ladder to think resolutely about educational policy and reform.

The Budget announcement about wholescale academisation triggered the traditional responses, so here’s a ladder-top perspective.

I was always amused by the specialist-schools programme. I wondered - once the politicians had decided that all schools should be specialist schools - what a special school would look like when 100 per cent of schools were special. I won’t patronise the quick ones among you by spelling out where that thinking leads us.

Rebranding exercise

Knowing how marketing professionals think and work, I knew that the specialist school was in essence a simple rebranding exercise. And, indeed, when more than 95 per cent of schools had rebranded themselves, in return for the £100,000 and £129 per pupil over four years they were offered by the politicians, different politicians called time on the exercise and dissolved the cash in the dedicated schools grant.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that two of the objectives schools were to meet in return for becoming specialist schools were:

• to raise standards of achievement for all their pupils of all abilities;
• to raise standards of teaching and learning in the specialist subjects.

I’m not going to dwell on whether or not anyone thought to measure them on these, because it’s that ladder-top view I’m interested in. From there, you can see that no skilled, experienced or professional teacher would ever design such objectives, because they would understand fully how challenging they are to achieve and how fraught any discussion about measuring them would quickly become. I honestly don’t know who was responsible for drafting these two objectives, but I do know that they reveal a worrying naivety about what schools do and how teachers work. They owe more to the copywriter than the serious academic.

Putting aside any of the disputed benefits of either, the specialist schools and academisation programmes present the same problem for schools and teachers. How quickly and successfully can they adapt to politically motivated change?

Blame it on the profession

Looked at from the ladder-top, both of these initiatives illustrate what has bedevilled educational reform in the UK for decades now. Politicians have the authority and the mandate to manage and, if necessary, to reform state education. But they fail repeatedly to translate that into educationally credible strategies - in simple terms, into changes that teachers can eagerly buy into.

Why should they? They are politicians after all. I wouldn’t deign to tell them how to win an election or to run a surgery in their own constituencies. And, when their strategy doesn’t work or is met with resistance, they blame it on the profession. Sadly, there is no shortage of agitators quick to confirm that view.

So why do they persist in failing so dramatically to grasp how difficult it is to counter failed or absent parenting, how much skill is needed to be a genuinely great teacher, and ultimately, how complex schools really are?

Fetishisation of leadership

They persist because those people they do talk to - that layer upon layer of organisation employed between schools and central government - are also politically, not educationally motivated. The fetishisation of leadership has become rampant in recent years.

Leadership is a very seductive marketing pitch. I saw that first-hand tutoring for Teach First, where it remains one of their most effective recruitment strategies. What youngster doesn’t want to be told they are a potential leader?

But leadership in education is totally unlike leadership in other fields, where performance and efficacy are so much more easily measured. I have worked in the no man’s land between schools, RSCs, Ofsted and the department, and there is the world of difference between leading a failing or weak school to a point of competence, and taking a competent school to a place where it can genuinely perform on an international stage, permanently. Unlike in industry and business, there is no performance-management template for either - just opinion bolstered by doubtful data generated by struggling teachers under pressure.

I argued in a recent article that headteachers tend to be politically, not educationally motivated. So, when politicians talk to educational leaders - instead of establishing a widespread dialogue with skilled teachers - they trigger a symbiotic relationship where mutual benefit is assured and skilled teachers are marginalised. The politicians hear what they want to hear and the leaders lead on.

Last week, someone I’ve never met wrote to me to say, “I agree with your views on the need to depoliticise education.” I sincerely hope there are more like that, because this cycle of imposition - repeated and frequently damaging efforts by politicians of various shades to translate their will into educational outcomes via a class of self-determined educational leaders - is looking pretty piddling indeed from up here.

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author

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