Pouring scorn on teachers is a press strategy, not a plan for reform

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. Stephen here.

On Friday evening, news broke of an enormous loss to public policy and politics: Sir Tim Brighouse, perhaps one of the most effective public service reformers in recent decades, died at the age of 83.

Brighouse improved the lives of untold tens of thousands of people through his work lifting up schools in London and Birmingham, in particular. His effectiveness provides us with some useful lessons on how to manage and reform essential services.

I was keen for the newsletter to mark his death and legacy in a meaningful way — fortunately, Chris Cook, who knows the education beat better than most, kindly agreed to write the rest of today’s note. Over to him below.

A one-man public service reform agenda

In 1993, the then-education secretary answered a question at a Conservative party conference fringe about a recent local authority appointment:

You know, Birmingham have put this nutter in as its director of education . . . I fear for Birmingham with this madman let loose, wandering around the streets, frightening the children.

John Patten, whose brief tenure was otherwise un-noteworthy, was sued by the “nutter”, Brighouse. He duly won damages, gave the money to local charities and then went on to prove his appointment was a stroke of genius.

By 2002, Ofsted inspectors noted that Birmingham was “one of a very small number of LEAs which stand as an example to all others of what can be done”. They picked out for praise “the energising and inspirational example set by the chief education officer”.

That year, Brighouse moved on to London, where for five years he led the citywide “London Challenge”. This was a multipronged programme, which did lots of fiddly things. It is famous among teachers for building support networks between schools and helping with recruitment.

More than a decade ago, when I was an education reporter, I got front-page stories out of the fact that schools in the capital had — miraculously and unnoticed — risen from being notorious to, somehow, being streets ahead. This sparked a long-running academic argument about what drove it — but I remain sure some of it was Brighouse’s leadership as London schools commissioner.

And leadership, above all, is the thing he brought. Since the early 1990s, England has tried to generate better outcomes through league tables, targets and inspections. This programme drove improvement: our school system is much better than it was 30 years ago.

But Brighouse’s incredible skill set was to use his remarkable empathy and charisma to make sure teachers did not see this as a threat or insult. Instead, he made educational improvement into a collective challenge to which they would want to rise together.

Sir Jon Coles, who was the senior civil servant on London Challenge, noted that Brighouse was a pioneer in the use of data in benchmarking school performance. But “all of that information, which could be used in a very managerial top-down way, he used to motivate everyone involved”.

“Everything about him began from the assumption that of course all of us are trying to make children’s lives better, that teachers wanted children to succeed and would work hard to make them successful.”

It worked. Here is Ofsted, again, on the London Challenge. There was:

“a clear sense of moral purpose among teachers and school leaders to close attainment gaps between London and the rest of the country. The staff in almost every school that contributed to this survey expressed their commitment to London children, not simply to those in their own school.”

At root, Brighouse was above all, a decent man: you cannot fake that. One theme of the social media outpouring on his death was people reporting the letters he sent out — he wrote literally thousands of them — to console teachers or congratulate them.

He cared about small things. I was struck by a very sweet list of things one headteacher kept from Brighouse on their wall to help find little ways to build community and connect with children (“give them a cutting from a newspaper or magazine, about their team etc”).

But he had steel to him. The London Challenge is remembered as a gentle thing — it sometimes sounds like it was all knitting and muesli. But it also involved setting stretching targets for schools. A lot of teachers were also moved on.

Coles said: “He wasn’t soft on things that weren’t working. He just thought if someone hasn’t succeeded, it’s probably not because they’re badly motivated or bad people. Maybe something needs to change but they need to be treated with dignity.”

Sir Chris Husbands, who ran the Institute of Education in London, said Brighouse “always found out something about a child, teacher, school they were doing well . . . So from the get-go he showed them they could succeed and softened them up to receive tougher messages. We can all do that with our friends and loved ones. Tim’s genius was to do that at scale.”

There are lessons here.

The most important of these is that bringing people with you gets you a long way. In education, there is an audience for people who assume that the way to deal with public sector employees is by berating them, by setting ever harder targets and by painting any dissent as indifference to the quality of services.

But Brighouse did not care about what the Daily Mail would say. He cared that, when the classroom door shut, the teachers inside would know what they needed to do, would feel motivated to do it and would want to come back and do it again the next day.

A challenge for us all: we need more space for people like Sir Tim Brighouse in our public life.

Now try this

I love Slow Horses. Its third series about a group of useless spies is rolling out on Apple TV. The show is a proper delight. (The books are superb, too.)

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