Susan Young - Education Otherwise

Embattled prime minister John Major gave a couple of gifts to the English language. The first was the tautological phrase "safe havens" which was initially derided but now in common usage. The other was the ringing phrase that we should "condemn a little more and understand a little less" when it came to criminals.

I'm now wondering if that mantra is engraved on the desk of the Chief Inspector of Schools. Chris Woodhead was famous for loudly and frequently asserting that there were 15,000 incompetent teachers in English schools. Now, a month into the job, Sir Michael Wilshaw is effectively saying that a quarter of school leaders aren't good enough.

You won't find this anywhere on the Ofsted website, where the news and press releases section are filled with rather more anodyne tales. Sir Michael confined his remarks to the Sunday Times, telling a reporter he wanted "less tolerance of poor leadership" from which "everything flows... that just had to be said."

But did it really have to be said, in those terms, at this point in the game? Underpinning Sir Michael's words are Ofsted figures showing that one per cent of schools have "inadequate" leadership, with "satisfactory" leadership in a further 23 per cent. The problem here is that Sir Michael is about to decree that satisfactory is anything but. Instead, it is about to become "requires improvement".

Well, Sir M is the chief inspector and if he wants to move the goalposts on what is or isn't satisfactory, that's his prerogative. I'm just not sure that this is the way to manage people effectively.

If I were a head whose rating was "satisfactory" I suspect I'd be feeling more demotivated than determined in the aftermath of those comments. Leadership theory talks about carrots as well as sticks: at the least suggesting that there was room for improvement and help on offer for leaders in the "satisfactory-but-won't-be-satisfactory-next-week" category might have been helpful.

And if a quarter of school leaders are not satisfactory at a time when applications are not keeping pace with vacancies (funny, that) then where are these 5,000 good new head teachers to come from? Does Sir Michael see increasing numbers of school federations and chains plugging the gap, with "outstanding" schools swallowing their "satisfactory" neighbours? Where is the remedial programme and support for heads who may be struggling, particularly as local authorities lose staff?

And while I entirely agree that poverty and deprivation shouldn't be an excuse for poor results, to completely disregard these factors isn't fair to schools or pupils either.

There are many schools getting terrific results in areas of great deprivation, in contrast to their neighbours. But for one reason or another, some of those neighbouring schools may be getting a higher percentage of the really hard-core pupils, whose personal and family inclination is to disregard school and all its works. Despite the Government's best efforts, I have yet to see a league table which differentiates between the deprived and malleable child from an education-friendly family and the deprived and intransigent one from a family of school refusers.

And he's right to stress the importance of good school leadership, and not least to the staff being led. I used to spend more time than was strictly healthy peering into the TES teacher chatrooms, where a regular complaint was about senior management team members' lack of support on disciplinary issues. But leadership is also about tone, and the tone emerging in reports of the Sir Michael interview is punitive rather than supportive.

I do wonder why it always seems to be teachers, school leaders and schools which get the public whippings. Remember, we're in a world where officials could overlook hospitals with soaring death rates where patients were reduced to drinking water from flower vases, where bankers could carry on investing money in financial products they didn't understand -- and nobody cast the slightest aspersion until everything had gone disastrously wrong.

But then, I'm not sure that any other profession is scrutinised in quite the same way. Our dentist was sighing the other day about yet another new regulation his tiny practice has to meet, that of proving that he is protecting patients' data. Does anyone actually look at his dentistry? "They used to call in patients at random, look at what you'd done and order you to re-do it if they didn't like it," he said, adding: "but they haven't done that for years now. Nobody checks the quality of our dental work: just everything else."

Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack at googlemail.com