Take responsibility for the face of the world

I wrote this blog piece at the request of the Black Leadership Group and it was published in their series entitled "Affirming Humanity, Decency & Belonging During Polarised Times" in February 2026.

A line in the sand

I haven’t blogged for over a year. This is predominantly due to the fact that my wife very nearly died in September 2023 and her life-saving surgery revealed stage 4 bowel cancer. She was given between 6-18 months to live.

Thanks to the incredible treatment she has received at the Royal Marsden we have just celebrated a Christmas we did not think we would see together…. And we hope for more of them.

That explains the lack of introspection.

I decided over the Christmas period that I would leave Twitter. It had become too toxic. I drafted a farewell note to Elon Musk but on reflection decided not to publish it as what would be the point? I merely withdrew.

But with the events of today I changed my mind, posted and deleted the app.

It won’t make a difference but in not voicing my opposition, I had tacitly accepted the march of totalitarianism. 

I reproduce it here as I want to show that I spoke up, without driving any additional traffic to the mess that Twitter has become.

British devaluation

I have always tended to agree with Samuel Johnson that, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" and I get itchy when we rush for our banners and flags. But I was depressed yesterday when in a conversation with one of my colleagues about Ofsted and British Values I recalled a short satirical email I wrote almost 10 years ago,

"We are committed to promoting the core values of Britishness which are clearly demonstrated by our current government

• Arrogance - everything good has happened because we made it happen and everything bad was someone else's fault (either foreigners or Marxists who are everywhere)
• Narcissism - we are brilliant and the best and if only everyone else was more like us the world would be a better place
• Xenophobia - there is no problem big or small that cannot be blamed upon bloody foreigners (see above arrogance)
• Self interest - we will pontificate about others not following our example whilst shamelessly filling our pockets when we think no one is looking
• Laziness - never do anything positive or productive when you could spend the time moaning and blaming someone else for the problem"

I wrote that before Brexit before Boris Johnson and Liz Truss...

It now looks prophetic. How sad that satire plus time becomes tragedy.

Keyboard warriors

Last week I was invited to comment on the rise of parental complaints by SchoolsWeek in an article published under the title “Trust hopes code of conduct will end abuse”

This is the entirety of my response which bears release given the limited quote included in the article.

“Dear xxx

Further to your text, I can confirm that we have seen a significant rise in parental complaints since the pandemic.  My Legal Director feels that we are running at about two to three times the 2019 volumes of complaints made direct to the Trust. 

In light of this, the first two hypotheses should be (1) that our schools are somehow worse than they were before the pandemic and/or (2) that parents are less happy with them. But neither stack up. Ofsted judgements maintain their upward trajectory with 86% good or better and SATs scores show a good recovery of the learning lost to Covid. Likewise, I have been running stakeholder satisfaction surveys since early 2021 and parental positivity has not declined significantly over the whole period (average of 81% positive or strongly positive)

So what is behind it?

I postulate three things. 

First, disadvantaged communities feel very disenfranchised. There is a lingering resentment towards the state about lockdown, about Brexit, about inflation and the cost of living crisis. They don't feel listened to or represented. This anger needs to come out somewhere and schools are the closest lightening conductor.

Second, as a society we have become more used to doing things online than we were before. Previously where a parent had a concern or was upset, they would have had a conversation with their child's teacher or headteacher. Now, because they are angry, they skip this step and send a strongly worded email to the Trust, to Ofsted, to their MP often all three at the same time. 

Third, we have become professional complainers. Where previously a parent might have been upset about another child's behaviour towards their child, now they have 'safeguarding concerns' or allege 'racist' or 'sexual abuse' in the deliberate knowledge that these are words which trigger processes (as they should). Often this verbal escalation comes from social media groups that share short-cuts on how to complain effectively.

Put all of this together and you have a pressure cooker that needs a serious release of steam. Because behind all this heat and noise will be genuine safeguarding issues that risk being missed. The only solution I see is for schools to do even more, to lean into their communities and make them feel more valued and heard. But this is exceptionally difficult when the school leaders we are asking more of are the ones who feel the most under direct attack from this army of keyboard warriors.

Ofsted and the ESFA must also get much better at redirecting parents back to the first step of the school's complaints policy when they have skipped to Level 3 ALL-CAPS OUTRAGE!”

Ofsted is not the bogeyman... we are

Social media continues to debate Ofsted’s role in the recent death of a headteacher with much sound and fury. It is not for me to intrude upon the grief of her family, friends and school community, nor to speculate on the reasons. But after almost 60 inspections over the last 11 years, I think I am entitled to comment about Ofsted.

I did not want to write this piece. I had hoped that sense and compassion would prevail in the wake of a private tragedy. As ever with social media, the argument polarised almost instantly as people made this about themselves and projected their own sense of injustice into the space. But this has very little to do with Ofsted.

Ofsted is not a regulator. Ofsted is not the employer. Ofsted does not end people’s careers. Ofsted is merely the inspector, no more no less. The trouble with Ofsted is the rest of us and what we do with its inspection ‘judgements’ and how our often gross overreactions and over-simplifications affect school leaders’ lives.

Let me state this simply. The responsibility for the broken and dysfunctional psychological contract between school leaders and society lies with us, the employers. 

I am not saying that many school leaders do not live in semi-permanent fear of an unfair or unreasonable Ofsted judgement. I am not saying that headteachers do not fear for their livelihoods and even their sanity. They clearly do. But the reason that they fear a rigged accountability system is because we have not done our job. We have not told them regularly that Ofsted is merely an audit, an input amongst many others about the effectiveness of the education system. We have not reassured them through our actions that an unfavourable judgement leads to support and reinforcement not exile and shame. 

Unfortunately, because we have fragmented our education system so completely over the last 13 years, all that is left is accountability. If I were to be cynical, I might observe that it is much simpler and cheaper for the government to blame someone else for failure than to engage in the complex, messy and expensive process of improving public services.

This sword of Damocles looms so menacingly above headteachers because the idea of accountability is so reductive and so pervasive. Having found the person to blame for a school not being good enough, why would we look any further or deeper into the root causes? A school has been found to be underperforming its children and its leader has been held to account. All is well in the world…

But if we want a fairer society, we must accept cost and nuance. If we are to stand shoulder to shoulder with school leaders whose schools could do better, then we need to genuinely know our schools. To be able to look the world in the eye and say, yes this Ofsted report highlights some areas of concern that must be addressed but this school is getting better as quickly as it can and it would be ill served by a change of leadership. This headteacher needs our trust and support not our judgement.

This is the problem of leading system change. If you want to improve a system (as opposed to merely giving the appearance of caring) you only have two inputs. You pick the team and you set the direction. And one of the core elements of setting the direction is making a judgement call about how much change the people in your team can cope with. An organisation cannot get better faster than its people can cope with change. Poor leaders either underestimate tolerance for change and accept underperformance or they overestimate it and break the whole organisation. Keeping the organisation in the sweet spot between complacency and recklessness can only be done with detailed knowledge of the components of the system. If you only know how well a school is performing through an Ofsted report every five years, then you do not know the system you are running.

Ofsted is not perfect, far from it. However, unlike most instruments of government, it knows this and does not pretend to be. It is probably the least broken bit of our education system and is respected internationally. In the main, Ofsted is staffed by people who are both knowledgeable and passionate about education and who want to improve our education system as a whole. 

Of the 59 school inspections and one Ofsted MAT review, in which I have been on the receiving end, only one was genuinely inaccurate and even then we didn’t dispute the grade, just the tone of the report. We made it clear to the senior leadership concerned that we saw the judgement in the broader context of all the progress that was being made and that they should not worry. That probably equates to an error rate of 1.5% or less.

The rest of us need to step up. It is a failure of governance in both maintained schools and academies if we continue knee jerk responses to single inspections. We need to place ourselves between headteachers and an unthinking bureaucracy. We need to create the psychological security for school leaders and teachers to be able to take the risks necessary to improve education.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves”- Julius Caesar

Should we be worried about a national scheme of work?

A journalist asked me yesterday about the Ofsted involvement with Oak National Academy. Before I returned her call, I tried to order my thoughts a little. This is a complex space and the following thoughts occured to me...

Le Courbusier said that a house was a, "Thing for living in". It is defined by its function not its attributes or contents. A school is a thing for learning in. A good school is one in which we all learn well. This depends on lots of things. But on nothing more than on good teaching.

Oak National Academy is a collection of schemes of work. Schools often use schemes to scaffold, when teacher quality or subject knowledge is less than desired. But, like any scheme of work, it is no substitute for or guarantee of good quality teaching.

Governments are often frustrated by the cost and time required to improve the quality of teaching. But a grail quest for the perfect text book helps no-one, because the perfect text book doesn't exist. There are no shortcuts to deep subject knowledge and acquired classroom craft. Neither of which is improved by a scheme of work, however good or well intentioned.

Oak National Academy is concerning only if it is the thin end of a wedge. It could be seen as the beginning of a national scheme of work. This might herald a new era of performative compliance. Whether you see it as such or not, probably depends on your existing political and professional bias.

Does Oak National Academy in and of itself improve the quality of teaching? I don't know. There is sometimes a danger that overly scaffolded schemes of work impair rather than improve teacher development. Becuase they do not, in and of themselves, enforce the reflection necessary to deepen teacher subject knowledge and craft. But I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

It is a tool and its success depends entirely on those who wield it, and the intent with which it is used.

Governance revisited...

I have complained before about the guff written about governance despite also being guitly of contributing to it [1]. But the debate is so clouded by the conflation of arguments that I feel compelled to revisit. Emma Knight's recent blog from the NGA is a prime example of an argument that purports to be about governance but is essentially an attack on academy trusts and ignores the only element of governance that matters. 

The function of governance is to ask one question, "Is it working?" This can be qualified by supplementary questions such as, "Is it getting better quickly enough?". But ultimately the first question is the one that matters. 

The trouble with the arguments presented in the NGA blog is one of framing. The blog seeks to question the effectiveness of academy governance by contrasting it with the governance of maintained schools and asserting that 'localness' is the thing that is missing.

First and foremost, the governance of local authority maintained schools is not the yardstick. Local does not equate to good and central does not automatically equate to bad. Whether you support or oppose academies [2], maintained school governance is average at best and in the main absent. Its weakness was why academy reforms were implemented in the first place. 

When a school is good, or even better, the source of its success is more often the school leader than the governing body. The DfE has known this for years but doesn't say it publicly. Because it doesn't want to piss off all the good people who volunteer to be school governors and because the DfE knows that it lacks the capacity to actually govern the schools itself. Indeed many schools are good despite their governing bodies; whilst most schools that are weak are so because of their governing bodies. 

For clarity I am not claiming that Academy Governance is any better, only that it tends to be more centralised. 

When a school is not working and is not getting better quickly enough it is often the governing body that is resisting the need to improve either by rejecting the need or by excusing the progress. Whilst academy 'freedoms' were largely bullshit peddled to get new and vigorous 'business people' involved in bringing efficient 'corporate governance' to schools, the one freedom that academy trusts do have is the freedom to dismiss ineffective local governors.

Emma's assertion that, "The evidence tells us local governance is here to stay" is perhaps the most dangerous in her blog. First she cites no evidence. She alludes only to opinion and preference. But the question to be asked by and of governance is, "Is it working?" not, "Is it local?". The things we should be examining are which models of governance work, not which ones we like or affiliate with politically.

Now before you think I am lobbying for centralised control, I should point out that I am a card carrying fan of subsidiarity. I firmly believe that decisions should be made as close to the people that they impact as the capacity of the people making the decision allows. But that does not mean that local is automatically best. I would not expect a Teaching Assistant to set the budget for a school any more than I should be allowed to design the curriculum for a school which I might visit no more than once as year. The decisions should be made where the knowledge of the people impacted is balanced by the professional expertise required to make the decision. 

And doing that does not automatically require local governing bodies. What it does require is better stakeholder engagement in all schools.

There are two practical things we could do to encourage this change. 

First government could require that MATs consult children, parents and stakeholders regularly for their views and publish their responses in their annual reports.We poll our staff and parents every half term and publish their opinions twice a year.

Second, and I have been suggesting this for years, Ofsted could decouple its leadership judgement from its governance judgement. It would very quickly become apparent which schools have governing bodies and SLTs woking together in alignment and which have school leaders furiously coaching their governors the night before inspection.

[1] Here is one of my previous attempts to simplify the subject

[2] I am on the record as stating that the manner in which this government and its predecessors have implemented academy reforms is nothing short of cultural vandalism

Bloody grammar schools again

I have written before about the trouble with grammar schools. This post from six years ago still stands up. It is depressing that despite all the evidence, it is such a persistent idea in this country's politics. 

I was on a zoom call today where colleagues mused that given the recent ministerial appointments made to the DfE, which are as much a metaphorical middle finger to the profession as the actual middle finger given by Andrea Jenkyns to protestors outside Downing Street earlier this year, a policy adjustment to expand selection at age 11 is almost inevitable.

There were some rational people on the call, who reasoned that rather than ignore this policy as a distraction from our core purpose, we should at least engage with it to attempt to mitigate it with a least worst option.

But something inside me snapped.

This is as far as I can go...

You can have your expansion of grammar schools but only if you:

• Publicly drop the "levelling up" policy and admit that it was a lie
• Explain that the reason for expanding selection is that you want to spend less on state education whilst pretending to support a meritocracy and also state that it is your policy ambition for many schools in the areas affected to be worse than they are today
• Require all new grammar schools to accept only 50% by academic selection with the balance being allocated by lottery regardless of ability
• Force all MPs that support the policy to send their children to secondary modern schools regardless of ability

People who win rigged lotteries tend to support lotteries. They are also disinclined to examine the extent to which they were rigged.

Power is nothing without control

I first met Sam Freedman in the winter of 2011/12 at the DfE when Caroline Whalley and I and a small bunch of volunteers were setting up the Elliot Foundation. Over the years since I have sat opposite him at multiple think tanks and education events and occasionally exchanged tweets. But Twitter is not really my thing in the way that it is his. I have found him to be an interesting and deep thinker about education. I have been surprised by how often I have agreed with him and even when I don’t, how much I respect his approach. 

Last month he published a paper through the Institute for Government entitled, "Gove reforms a decade on: what worked. what didn't, what next?". I know there are much more important things going on but if we want to make the world a less stupid, selfish and dangerous place, then education policy is important. It is particularly important now as there is a government white paper about to be published and almost all eyes are looking elsewhere.

General background points

The founding idea of school trusts was to create organisations (charities), liberated from stifling bureaucracy and ineffective local government, with the single purpose of improving education for all. My concern about Sam's recommendations in their entirety is that they appear to recommend the reattachment of multiple levels of bureaucracy and the reconnection to local government, which is more ineffective now than when academies were originally conceived. 

If you want to improve the education system you have to rebuild capacity, coherence and clarity. Organisational groupings of schools (LAs and MATs) have to become legally equivalent and operationally compatible. To be more explicit 250-500 school operating organisations regulated by a single entity split into 10-15 regions would make the role of each regional regulator possible. I have long argued that LAs should be allowed to run MATs before they lose any more of their system knowledge and capacity.

But the difficulty of this proposed end state is that it would cost a significant amount to achieve. And we have spent most of our school improvement budget on the transaction costs of transferring 50% of schools to academy status. This is the equivalent of spending your entire system improvement budget on a new name for the project.

Premises on which we agree

The education sector is not in an ideal state. The impact of fragmentation was entirely predicted. I have written elsewhere on the challenges of incoherent, overlapping and occasionally contradictory regulation (Education System Design: Foundations, Policy Options and Consequences, Nov 2020). There has been marginal improvement in both the academy and LA maintained sector but nothing significant. There are good MATs and good LAs but equally there are poor MATs and poor LAs. However, the overall incidence of schools requiring improvement or worse has not moved outside the 13-15% bracket for the last decade.

Premises on which we disagree

Sam seems to feel that there is insufficient clarity around educational expectations, a lack of authority holding trusts to account and powers missing to intervene where necessary. On this we disagree. There is no shortage of authority. School Trusts are amongst the most regulated parts of the public sector. The problem is not the absence of power it is the absence of coherence and intelligence in the system to use its abundant powers with discretion.

The ESFA and RSCs between them have the power to take schools away from trusts and close trusts entirely in the event of contractual breach. If a school trust fails to improve outcomes across its schools as a whole, then it is failing to meet its core purpose. By definition this is a failure of governance. The statutory powers to intervene already exist they are just not being used very well. The reason for this is the gearing ratio between RSCs and the level below them. There are simply too many organisations, all of whom will plead special circumstances when challenged, for the RSCs or the ESFA to act confidently. RSCs have less than ½ a day per year for each organisation over which they have oversight.

In the 1990's Pirelli ran a print ad of American Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis in red high heels with the strap line, "Power is nothing without control". Legislators legislate and this is our danger. Adding more powers into a fragmented system will only cause more damage as they will be used without insight. You don't put a jet engine on a wonky bicycle and then act surprised when you're picking up teeth from the road.

Central recommendations from,"Gove reforms a decade on" with annotations

I have taken the 15 recommendations from the IFG paper and sorted them into three categories with rationales for each.

Support	Discuss further	Challenge
2. "Establish a single arm’s length regulator for academy trusts, merging the academies  responsibilities of regional schools commissioners and the Education and Skills  Funding Agency"  Completely agree! Create clarity and consistency. But separate out the Funding Agency from the Regulator to avoid perverse incentives and conflicts of interest. And most importantly ensure the regulator has the capacity to to perform its functions with discretion.	1. "Create a proper statutory basis for academies, MATs and academy regulation."   We don't need more statutory powers. We just need the clarity of structure and purpose for the powers that already exist to become useful.	4. "Publish a high-level framework setting expectations for MATs against which they  can be assessed by the regulator. All assessments should be transparent. " You don't need a new framework to exercise power with discretion. The success or failure of a school operating organisation is directly inferred from the performance of its schools in their contexts. An ‘angels on a pinhead’ league table would be a waste of time and money on which no one would agree. Why create independent organisations whose sole reason for existence is to improve outcomes for children and then tell them how to do it?
5. "Give local authorities the power to ask the regulator to direct academies to increase or reduce their published admissions number (PAN), if they can make a case that  they will not otherwise be able to meet their sufficiency duty effectively." Provided that this power was reciprocated and MATs could ask the regulator to adjust their own PANs up and down in the face of LA intransigence (which is as common as the MAT awkwardness implied by this recommendation)	3. "Give the new regulator powers to intervene to close or merge MATs for both  financial/compliance failures and failure to provide adequate educational support." I would argue this is not needed as it already exists. They already have the power to intervene on educational underperformance through their powers on failure of governance. They also have significant coercive powers. There is danger of creating an accountability revolving door here.	7. "Give local authorities control over all schools’ admissions policy to ensure fairness." I'm beginning to suspect that Sam has been captured by the LGA lobby. LA control does not necessarily equate to fairness. This would also set quite a lot of hares running with faith schools...
8.  "Give local authorities the right of access to MAT data, including attendance records."  I see no problem in this. We are public bodies funded by public money. We should be transparent and connected to local government.	6. "Give MATs a duty to set out their forward plans for expansion and to discuss these  with local authorities. "  MATs already have a duty in company and charity law to set out and publish their plans. Just make us write better annual reports	9. "Consider if further powers for local authorities are necessary in light of the ongoing  DfE review of SEND provision." Absolutely not! They don't need more power. They need more money. Otherwise they will simply transfer the problem to schools and blame them for failure in the same way that central government currently does to them. The challenge here is where in the overall education settlement we find this money for SEND as the treasury will not support otherwise. See earlier blog on SEND funding.
11.” Set a strong expectation that all schools will join a MAT. Use incentives and clear  messaging to encourage the shift to a single system rather than forcing schools  to comply. “ Yes absolutely.	10. "Create an additional package of legal powers for local authorities to be triggered  when all their schools are academies, including the right to hold public hearings  of MATs and a limited right to insist academies co-operate with integration of local  children’s services" I think this is dangerous. Yes, we need to incentivise a move towards a coherent system. But I suspect this would incentivise the wrong behaviours. Some LAs would kick all their schools out and then judge them in what looks like a kangaroo court. You would simply have a revolving door of suppliers overcharging and getting fired for not improving anything.	14. "Create a mechanism whereby an individual school can make a request to the regulator to move to a different MAT, if they can make a strong case that they would  benefit educationally. " This is the most dangerous idea of the lot. All you have to do is ask yourself how will people behave if this happens? First it allows schools to opt out of school improvement if they don't like their MAT. Second it requires legal contortions to apportion rights to a body that no longer exists. Third it will incentivise charities to act against their charitable purposes and give oil to squeaky wheels. And most importantly fourth it will create the situation where rather than act to improve outcomes for children, MATs will use public money to promote and market themselves to their school leaders, as it is much cheaper to get people to like you than to improve a system. All to address a problem which doesn't exist, to whit the false notion that regulators lack the power to take schools away from MATs that are failing them.
	12. "Inject significantly more capacity-building funding into high-performing small MATs  and provide funding to new strategic and high-potential MATs. This should include  organisations spun out of local authorities, many of which already exist to provide  support services." Maybe talk to some of the larger MATs who have done this already amongst the chaos of the last decade and could help. Giving money to small MATs who don't know about growth risk and organisational design is dangerous. And please don't ask the DfE about this as they do not know.	15. "This would require legislation to give a group of representatives associated with  each school a legal status independent of the MAT so that a body existed that could  make the request."  This is just an additional point which tacitly recognised the silliness of point 14 and creates a process so bureaucratic as to negate its own purpose.
	13. "Empower the new regulator to create regional MATs to take on schools that cannot find another MAT to work with. It may be necessary to create several of these with different functions (for example, to cover small rural schools). " This has already been partially done and isn't exactly flying as an idea. It also completely subverts the whole idea of school trusts. If the regulator you propose conceives, commissions, directs, manages and dissolves, then it is not a regulator. You have just subsumed the entire school system back into direct administration by the DfE, which I have already shown lacks the tacit knowledge or capacity to perform this role.

Summary

We should not legislate on the basis that we haven't done so for a while. And before we do, we should ask the question, if we create these new rules, how would different agents in the system behave? 

A bang and a whimper

On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, it seems important to put down some contemporaneous thoughts. I am no expert and my opinions deserve no more attention than they merit. I am entirely prepared to listen to and even concede to other people's opinions, particulary when they are more informed than mine.

I am deeply saddened and not at all optimistic about how this will play out. To mangle a metaphor, these are chickens coming home to roost, whose antecedents stretch back many years in many directions. Yet we seem to have little regard for how we got here. The internet is full of people screaming certainties at each other with little regard for nuance or the contradictory and multiple truths. The first casualty of war is the truth but we’ve been killing the truth for some time now.

Before you assume that, given my time spent in Russia in the 1990s, this is an apology for Putin, it is not. Putin is a grubbly little narcissist [1]. But he is significantly more intelligent than Johnson or Macron. Like all narcissists, rather than confront his own shortcomings, he attempts to reshape the entire world to fit his view of himself. Unfortunately, he may be clever enough, his opponents naive and fickle enough, and his timing fortuitous enough to benefit significantly. I suspect much will depend on how far China sees this as an opportunity to advance its own position.

First to the idiots like UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who yesterday said, "we'll kick Putin's backside", like the Scots Guards did in the Crimea in 1853. It's charming that Ben was literate enough to read his regimental history when he served in the Scots Guards. But I suspect he struggles with any real history or his own departmental papers. The relative strengths of the British and Russian armed forces in 1853 bear no relation to today. You probably only need primary education to understand the differences. This is the empty bluster of English exceptionalism. We are not a first rank world military power anymore, we are barely a first rank economic power. Although it is an established principle of international law that might is not right, we should have had that argument when Russia invaded the Crimea much more recently in 2014. 

Second to those on the left including the Corbyn and the Stop The War Coalition, who blame NATO and Western aggression for provoking Putin. If you oppose imperialism you need to be consistent in your opposition because Putin seeks nothing more or less than the restoration of a lost empire, as George Monbiot commendably pointed out earlier today.

Third to those on the right screaming 'imperialist aggression' at Putin, check your own recent history before proceding. The second Iraq war was almost certainly imperialist and economically, opportunistically aggressive. Likewise Putin has at least as much, if not more, claim to sovereignty over Ukraine as the UK has to the Falkland Islands or Gibraltar. Unless you want to stand on the principle of self-determination.

Fourth, to the libertarian little Englanders on twitter who claim we have no role in this crisis and that Putin is entitled to invade Ukraine; equating its relationship with Russia as being that of the Isle of Wight to the UK.  If the Isle of Wight or the Falkland Islands or Scotland, Wales or Northern Island for that matter wished to secede from the United Kingdon as independent states, then they can. 

It would appear that the majority of the 44 million Ukranians do not wish to be reattached to the Russian yoke. The Ukranian identity reaches back to the 9th century at least and its relationship with Russia and the Rus is fractious, complex and equally long. If you do not know what the Holodomor is, look it up. Surely there is a moral obligation to defend another sovereign country's right to self-determination? That is after all what most of the people holding this view used as their justification for supporting Brexit.

Fifth, to those who cry moral outrage, nothing can justify this aggression. What did you say when the World Bank and IMF made Russia grovel at the end of the Cold War? Russia was humiliated by the West. Instead of taking the farsighted nation building of the post WWII Marshall Plan (arguably one of America's greatest contributions to world peace) we effectively bankrupted Russia and destroyed its burgeoning and outward looking middle class twice. The parallels between the vindictiveness at the Paris Peace Conference and the subsequent rise of National Socialism are alarming. And I use the term National Socialism deliberately as Hitler's appeal was to nationalism, unreasonable poverty and unjustified shame.

Sixth, we have no place making moral arguments when we have been money launderers in chief to the Russian kleptocracy for the last 25 years. We have no place making moral arguments when our own Prime Minister is a moral vacuum.

But where does that leave us. If we are not strong enough to challenge the idea that might is right on behalf of the vulnerable. If we have no right to cast a stone against imperialist aggression when we are amonst the most aggresive imperialists of all. If we have no moral place to stand because we have no morals...

The only path is a multilateral one. However difficult or slow or painful. And to take it we must accept our share of blame for letting this happen. We must allow multiple conflicting and contradictory views to co-exist rather than rushing to oversimplify or blame.

As has been said many times in the Northern Ireland peace process, there is no hierarchy of suffering, there is no difference in a mother's tears.

______________________________________________

[1] Johnson and Macron are probably the ranking narcissists of the current UN Security Council after Putin but I breathe a huge sigh of relief that Trump is a former rather than current President of the USA. This relief is immediately tempered by the dread realisation that Johnson is perhaps the least suited or capable of British Prime Minsters of the last hundred years to deal with this crisis, with the possible exception of Anthony Eden.

SEND and moral decline

Populist politics undermines truth; preferring certainty over doubt and simplicity over complexity. This is visible in three word slogans like, “Get Brexit Done” or the many variations of “Build Back Better”. The oversimplification conceals dangerous trends that rarely get discussed. In particular the education provision to children with SEND, which is in crisis.

The complexity starts with a pincer movement of legal obligations. Although the education system has fragmented under successive governments, Local Authorities retain the statutory responsibility for pupil place planning. This means that LAs have to ensure there are enough school places of specific types to meet the needs of the population in their areas. 

For mainstream schools, this is simple. You need to ensure that, across a region, you have sufficient primary, secondary and FE classrooms to accommodate the needs of the population. For efficiency, you want your schools to be as full as possible.  Below an average of 24 children per class, it gets more difficult to provide ‘good’ education.

When you start to think about children with SEND, the other arm of the legal pincer is revealed.  The Equality Act (2010) says that you cannot discriminate against anyone with a protected characteristic. This includes disability and the penalties for non-compliance are significant.

Most educators are inclusionists. They believe that if a child can be in mainstream schooling then they should be. Those who support grammar schools or talk about selection are not talking about improving education. They are describing ways to limit opportunity for some. Because it is too expensive to give the same chances to all. This selection process is dressed up as something else, otherwise it falls foul of the Equality Act.

In an ideal world public education would be tailored to the needs of each child. But any rational person can see that the costs of this are prohibitive. The minimum funding guarantee for English primary schools in 2021-22 is £22 per child per day (or £4,180 per year). But for  young people with profound and complex needs, the cost of special schools can reach 20-30 times as much.  If there isn’t enough money in the system to give everyone their entitlements, all you can do is:

• Keep people in the dark about their entitlements
• Delay people’s access to their entitlements
• Add barriers to people obtaining their entitlements
• Shift responsibility onto someone else and blame them
• Illegally redefine people's entitelments and
• Hope that the number of times you are found guilty in court of any of the above costs less than doing what the law requires

...this is exactly what many Local Authorities are being forced to do.

The government’s own data shows that the incidence of Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) has risen from 2.8% in 2015-16 to 3.7% in 2020-21. Despite the fact that over the same period the threshold of needs (the fifth bullet point on the list above) has also risen. At least one LA no longer issues EHCPs for Down’s syndrome; many LAs make families wait over two years for EHCPs; and most issue significant numbers of EHCPs without any additional funding for schools. 

Before you start getting angry at LAs, the blame is not theirs to shoulder alone. Over the last decade, LA funding from central government has halved.  High Needs Funding is based on historic levels and has not adjusted to increased demand. Moreover, LAs  are not allowed to use funding for other purposes to meet this rise in SEND needs. The DfE restricts them to a maximum of 0.5% of virement (to be taken from the schools funding block) in any given year. If they break these rules they are required to sit on the financial 'naughty step' and submit regular budget refinancing plans. And remember this is to meet their legal obligations not spending on 'nice to haves'.

Despite next year's increase of 8%, central government funding is still inadequate to address the scale of debt run up by most LAs. Equally, the £2.6bn announced in the Chancellor's autumn spending review, to create additional places for SEND children, sounds like a lot. But it is only capital funding to build the new schools or extra classrooms. There is no commitment to pay for the  education that the children taking up these places will need. Some LAs have between 50-100 children with EHCPs requiring specialist provision but with no named special school. These same LAs are being shamed for overspending their High Needs allocations. They are being encouraged to cut other services such as refuse collection, social care or early years provision.

The government has created a situation that encourages LAs to sweep the problem under the carpet. LAs are being forced to ignore or misdiagnose need. But they retain the risk if they are caught doing so in the courts. And an increasing number of them are being cuaght. In 2019-20 SEND Tribunals were up 13% on the previous year and LAs lost 95% of the claims brought against them. Indeed LAs have lost 91% of all actions brought against them since SEND reforms became law. This strongly suggests that the claims which come to tribunal are likely to be the tip of the iceberg with many thousands more children and families being deliberately kept in the dark and denied their entitlements.

This is further evidence of a nation in moral decline.

Prisoners of our past

We are all prisoners of our past. We view events through the lens of our previous experiences and often project onto others opinions and motivations they simply do not have. These imperfections in our understanding of the world around us are exacerbated rather than mitigated by social media and the internet. Evolution has favoured pattern recognition skills over complex analysis.  Consequently, we are vulnerable to seeing things as we think they are rather than in their complex, messy and contradictory reality.

Mark Twain said, "I've lived through some terrible things, some of which actually happened", succinctly highlighting the unreality and unreliability of both anticipation and memory.

There was an interesting example of this last week when HMCI Amanda Spielman attempted to articulate complexity, 

Her thoughts were 'reported' by TES and 'rereported' in the Twitter echo chamber, which jumped on this as further evidence of 'horrible Ofsted' not caring about hungry children or not caring about teacher workloads or just not caring. I suspect she was trying to say something much more nuanced.

It is perfectly possible to care deeply about all of the following:

• the loss of learning from Covid
• the loss of livelihoods from Covid
• the dispropotionate impact of both of the above on those already disadvantaged
• the huge and unjustifiable variation in education offering between schools in similar contexts, largely due to an absence of planning at both governmental and local authority level but also at school level
• the impact of all of the above on teacher workloads
• the sheer scale of the recovery work needed over the coming years and the complete failure of the DfE to acknowledge and fund this

These are not mutually exclusive or contradictory ideas. In fact they are largely interconnected. The messy truth is that some schools prioritised support to their most vulnerable families, some schools prioritised remote learning, some schools did both, some schools did neither, some schools prioritised in school support to key worker and vulnerable children and some schools prioritised the wellbeing of staff. But all children have lost significant amounts of learning and all schools must be involved in the long and slow process of rebuilding for all children.

Schrodinger’s appraisal

As far back as 2009, I wrote an article for the Training Journal about the ineffectiveness of appraisal processes in organisations being rooted in their compression ratios. We try to compress a year's worth of work into an hour's worth of feedback and fail because this is beyond the tolerance of human communication. 

Appraisals don't work because appraisees arrive as a hot neurotic mess of hyper-vigilance, 

"Do you love me? Tell me you love me. Purlease.... tell me you love me. Oh God, you hate me, don't you?!" 

They over-interpret every available clue whether visual, verbal or otherwise from their line manager until they decode the central message as either good or bad. At which point they stop listening. If they perceive the negative, they either turn in on themselves in an auto-perpetuating spiral of self-loathing or they launch a counter offensive to rewrite the wrong that their manager is peddling. If they perceive the good they also stop listening and bask in self-satisfaction or start positioning for a pay rise.

Compare this with lesson observations for trainee teachers. Feedback sessions almost always occur directly or soon after the observed teaching. The feedback can sometimes take longer than the observed teaching itself. The student knows that they can improve and actually wants to be helped, so often the feedback doesn't feel like criticism and is thus welcomed.

The difference between the two approaches has parallels with Erwin Scrodinger’s famous thought experiment involving a cat, a radioactive source and a flask of poison. At the risk of an epic oversimplification only possible from a historian talking about quantum mechanics, Schrodigner’s cat inter alia articulates the superposition, in which the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. It is only when we open the box to observe, thus collapsing the waveform, that we establish the reality of whether it is alive or dead.

In the common or garden annual organisational appraisal described above, the appraisee tends to collapse the waveform very early on in the appraisal into the binary choice of either good or bad. Contrastingly, in the trainee teacher feedback session both trainee and mentor tend to maintain the superposition of both good and bad at the same time for much longer.

When we feedback about teaching we tend to reinforce and amplify positive behaviours e.g. “It was really good when you did X Y Z, you could also try using that approach in the following situations…”. We also tend to suppress negative behaviours with positive substitutions e.g. “Did you notice it went a bit flat when you did A B C, next time you could try D E or F”. The conversation holds onto the idea of both good and less than good teaching behaviour as being present in all lessons.

It’s odd that we don’t always take what we know from one domain to another.

Mistaking authority for control

I was unsurprised but nonetheless disappointed to read that giving evidence to the Education Select Committee yesterday the National and Regional Schools Commissioners argued that there was no need for Ofsted to inspect MATs because, together with the ESFA, they are in control.

In fact the converse is true, there is every need for Ofsted to inspect MATs precisely because RSCs and the ESFA are not in control. 

The reasons the RSCs and the ESFA are not in control I have set out at length in the chapter I co-wrote for Education System Design: Foundations, Policy Options and Consequences (Hudson, Leask, Younie et al) last year. But in short the gearing ratio is too high. RSCs have less than half a day per year to think about (let alone act upon or seek to improve) each of the different organisations over which they have authority. As a result all they can do is perform a bureaucratic function that points at failure. Pointing at failure is Ofsted's job, one which it does well and, on the whole, fairly. 

The ESFA is currently the principle funder and primary regulator of the academy sector a dual position it cannot and should not continue to hold if we seek a self-improving system. Regulation must be separated from funding if you want your system to function. 

This is not the first time the RSCs have made a grab for the reins of the ESFA but it should be resisted because it further confounds the process of accountability and improvement. Regulation and accountability are by their nature process-heavy functions. Whereas system improvement requires flexibility, innovation, experimentation and fleetness of foot. These ideas were part of the genesis of the academies' movement but have long since been on the wane.

Slow down and do it better

Although a significant number of the posts in this blog over the years have been "Get it off my chest" rants, so that I can keep on doing the job, I am at heart a postive and optimistic person. It's just that sometimes it is hard to find the appropriate voice for constructive critcism in the education sector. Speaking the truth to power is essential but when power doesn't really listen for the best part of a decade, frustration can creep in.

• The DfE contains highly skilled, highly motivated and highly dedicated civil servants who have been rushed off their feet throughout Covid trying to issue guidance to support school
• Unfortunately due to the massive fragmentation of the education sector, the DfE no longer actually knows what is actually going on in schools [see many other posts on this blog on fragmentation]
• Political leadership at the DfE and in No. 10 appears to believe that the role of the department is to strongly assert certainty and ‘best practice’ when only uncertainty and emergent practice exist 
• This is why there have been so many ‘U-turns’ as information comes to light that overtly contradicts the department’s over-confident assertions
• Consequently, much of the department’s ‘guidance’ serves only to shift blame for failure from itself on to school and Trust leaders and in doing so creates work with significant opportunity cost to children and communities

The purpose of this blog is to highlight the importance of focusing on quality and not speed when issuing education guidance during Covid by constructively reviewing its latest Framework for reviewing remote education. So let's quickly and superficially identify what is wrong or insufficiently thought through:

• As a whole the framework adds little value and much confusion, it is effectively a self-assembly noose with instructions to, “Insert neck of responsible officer here”
• It's based on a false premise as we simply do not know which are the better ways to deliver remote learning to children not in school yet, so we should be seeking first to understand before we rush to measure
• It is confused about whom it is for and confuses governance with operational management throughout
• It imposes a self-assessment grading system without evidence base or terms of reference and although it (optimistically) asserts it will only take “approximately 1 hour” to complete fails to show how this will achieve anything other than the creation of a piece of paper marked 'remote learning self-assessment'
• Having been drafted at speed for multiple audiences, it is less than clear over who is responsible for what and fails to even mention Trustees from whom authority must be delegated in MATs for some of the decisions it mentions
• It wrongly and dangerously attempts to make schools and Trusts responsible for the safety of the home learning environment when this can only ever be a parental responsibility
• Although it is merely repeating the line from other guidance, the requirements are stated in terms of quantity (hours per day) not quality when the role of remote learning is not to fill time but to help children learn
• It appears to add a requirement to provide real time both way communication ‘school community events’ which are likely to be safeguarding nightmares
• It lobs a reminder about GDPR in at the end just to keep us on our toes
• And its last line is one of the best “There are clear rules for behaviour during remote lessons and activities. Pupils know them and teachers monitor and enforce them.” 
• Anyone who has attended Google hangouts, MS Teams or Zoom meetings in the last year will immediately understand the impossibility of controlling behaviour of primary school children remotely. NB the Spanish councillor or other example of carelessness and stupidity whilst online

So far so easy and so negative. But what would better and more succinct look like? To which I offer the following:

Postpone all formal examinations for the forseeable future

The government and Ofqual and some education bodies are currently arguing furiously over how we will be able to run examinations in 2021 if Covid continues unabated.

They are entirely missing the point. It is like arguing over what colour to paint the lifeboats whilst the ship sinks.

There is a limit to what an examination system can tell you. No amount of brute force trauma on next year's exam statistics will be able to redress the unfairness in the learning already lost to Covid since March. Exams are not impossible. It is perfectly possible to design a comparatively safe way to conduct them next year. But why would we bother? We already know beyond any doubt that they will be irrelevant and fundamentally unfair.

Exams are merely a proxy for what we think young people may or may not be able to do next. They are effectively passports or letters of introduction which say, "You can trust the bearer of these results to be able to..."

• Study 4 A levels with a reasonable chance of passing them
• Reasonably hope to complete a BTech
• Cope with the academic rigour of a university course
• Thrive in this apprenticeship
• Etc etc

Surely as a sector we can come up with some form of emergency letters of transit that equate to a letter from their current school that says, "Peter could reasonably have expected to have achieved between x & y GCSEs at grade q or above had he not lost six months of school in the last year". The next institution can accept Peter onto its programme of study or work; perhaps with a novel probationary period, if it turns out that Peter can't actually keep up with the demands of his new programme.

This is the only way that massive regional and economic unfairness is not further baked into an already divided country. 

This emergency process need only be for the duration of Covid and the only risk is that we admit a small number of people onto programmes of work or study that are too challenging for them. Well, what is wrong with that? Provided we treat them fairly and supportively, we can say, it looks like this course is a little too hard for you why don't you try 'x' instead.

The three arguments that the government has used thus far to defend its absurd attachment to exams under Covid are:

• To do any different undermines the credibility of the exam system as a whole
• It is unfair to those in previous and future years
• It risks promoting people beyond their capabilities

The first point only matters if you are trying to protect the myth of a meritocracy. And can you really tell me that anyone in the current cabinet other than perhaps Rishi Sunak is there on merit?

On the second point if you could find me one person from the past or the future that says, "No we shouldn't err on the side of kindness to this year's cohort, whose education was ripped away from them by Covid. No. Let's mark them down because it's unfair on me". I'd say you'd managed to find an idiot and a heartless one at that.

And on the third point, see my answer to the first point.

What is a school?

 As you already know, dear reader, I am a classical liberal educator. Unfortunately, we live currently in a period of deliberate endarkenment. But there is always hope...

I sincerely hope that America gets rid of Donald Trump next Tuesday. But there is nothing I can do to make that happen. Closer to home and in a field where I might have a tiny bit of influence, I sincerely hope that the Covid pandemic impact on the operation of schools will lead to a re-examination of the process of education that is to the benefit of the learners themselves. 

Wilhelm von Humboldt said, "We cannot teach language, we merely create the environment in which it is learnt". And with the rolling ongoing closing of schools I hope that we can deconstruct what we understand by a "learning environment".

As I have written before, most people have strong opinions about education because most people at least attended a school and thus believe they have received or suffered an education. But the extent to which most people, including many politicians, actually think about or understand the process of learning is tiny. We tend to conceptualise the process of educating through its machinery, namely schools.

Education is done to children - in classes - by teachers - in schools - run by headteachers - held to account to a greater or lesser extent by local or national governments. Even the late Ken Robinson in his famous TED talk used the metaphor of a factory to explain what he saw as wrong with education, when he asked if "schools were killing creativity".

But as Le Corbusier famously described houses as being, "things for living in" then schools should be "things for learning in" and here we can see that the process of education, or 'schooling', is not defined by the physical school or classroom itself.

Indeed children can and do learn at home, in the park, online, in the playground... anywhere in fact. Equally as schools are forced to send more and more children home to learn "remotely", they must realise that they have lost control of the learning environment, if indeed they ever had it. 

Much of the flurry of Covid remote learning has been the creation of pre-recorded lessons in video format that children can watch at home. But however much care is given to the platform through which teachers communicate, test and feedback to children, I don't think anyone has got the technology to tell whether any particular child actually watches the videos with the sound turned on and pays attention.

I suggest a school should be determined by its output. A school is the thing which creates, in the mind of a child, sufficient trust that appropriate risks can be taken from which learning may occur. Schools should create learners. If they do not, then they are not schools, they are merely childcare facilities.[1] 

This in turn poses questions about how you measure whether learning human beings have been created by our schooling process but that is for another post.

Footnote

[1] The Covid pandemic has revealed that our current government cares more about schools as childcare for workers than it does as instruments of social progress