Leadership in politics

Following Ed Milliband's recent speech there has been another outpouring of commentary on the nature of effective political leadership. Specifically, can Milliband ever demonstrate it, and is there a role for it any more in today's focus grouped and spin doctored political climate?

Before discussing Milliband's or Cameron's abilities as political leaders, I would like to focus on the broader question of what effective leadership actually is. There have probably been millions of words written (and delivered by inspirational speakers with face mikes) on this subject, and countless academic and commercial institutions dedicated to its study so it is perhaps impertinent of me to think that I have anything to add. Ah well, that has never stopped me in the past, so here goes.

One aspect of effective leadership that I do not believe has been sufficiently discussed is the extent to which leaders hold up a mirror to their followers. Effectiveness in leadership (the consensus seems to be) should be defined not by what the leader does or says but by what the followers achieve. The kind of leader (known as  the "hero head" in schools) who focuses all of their attention on their own inspirational dynamism has long been shown not to be particularly successful.- the conductor who spends all his time blowing his own trumpet isn't going to get much of a performance out of the orchestra.

Yet truly effective leadership is about more than just supporting ones followers and letting them get on with it. Leaders need to inspire and motivate too. The most effective leaders render themselves redundant eventually as their followers, invigorated, empowered and united, set off in pursuit of a common goal. Yet paradoxically the followers would not have been able to achieve that degree of energy, self confidence or unity alone. It was the leader who brought out those qualities and forged that sense of shared purpose.

So how do leaders do that? Partly no doubt it can be about personal charisma and visionary thinking, but these qualities only take one so far. Indeed in some contexts they can get you stoned to death as a heretic rather than lauded as a leader. And in a more mundane context we will have all come across people who are personally charming and/or full of excellent ideas but no one seems particularly inclined to follow them in any important respect.

Partly it is to do with social structures. The boss of a company or the Prime Minister of a country becomes its de facto leader and to some extent people get into the habit of seeing them as such. So even when David Cameron made an utter tit of himself over the Jean-Claude Junckers affair he was seen (by the Press at least) as leading the UK into battle with the reactionary forces of the old EU.

But mostly, I believe, an effective leader does it by showing their followers an image of themselves that is more dynamic and forceful and more focused on the goals the leader wants them to strive for. I was about to say 'better' but of course it is not always clear that the image leaders show followers of themselves is better in any real sense. Churchill presented the British wartime population with an image of themselves as stoically pessimistic, resilient, iconoclastic and always ready for a bit of a laugh at anything and that image was uplifting in a sense. However Churchill was not the only effective wartime leader. Hitler showed the German people themselves as the inevitable inheritors of the New World Order: strong, efficient and ruthlessly intolerant of weakness or impurity in others. Stalin revealed to the Russian people their own brutal vindictiveness, their paranoid distrust and their willingness to submit to tyrannical overlordship in the face of external threats.

So what of today's leaders? Obama I think did briefly show Americans themselves, not as they were but as they could be. However as the machinery of State surrounded him and took him further and further from the people, and as his own ethics became fatally compromised by extra-judicial killings in Pakistan and the Yemen the clarity of that vision clouded and few Americans seem to see any version of themselves in him any more.

The leaders I am most interested in in this regard though are David Cameron and Ed Milliband. How successfully does each of them hold up a mirror to the British public?

In the case of David Cameron it seems, extraordinarily, that he does it very successfully indeed. This is not because he is particularly empathetic towards, or even that interested in, the lives and attitudes of ordinary British people. He is clearly an arrogant, over-privileged toff with nothing whatever in common with any but a tiny minority of the richest members of the electorate. He has also lead a government that has shown frightening contempt for the well-being of a large tranche of the population at the opposite end of the wealth scale.

However the version of themselves that David Cameron shows the British people is remarkably in tune with his own relationship with them. He shows the British people themselves as resentfully sorry for themselves, baffled by modernity, distrustful of the big bad world beyond the Channel yet simultaneously convinced that everything British (including schools, the NHS and the civil service) is by definition crap. And so they allow him, nay work with him, to isolate Britain in Europe, tear up the institutions that made this country what it is and punish the weakest and poorest in society for their temerity in being weak and poor.

With Ed Milliband the case is very different. He appears to be of the Gordon Brown school in this regard, with no apparent connection to the British electorate at all. Tony Blair was hugely successful in showing his followers a vision of themselves as younger, trendier, more metropolitan and European- in short, more New Labour. Until his messiah complex got the better of him and he drifted away into the self-delusion that led us into Iraq and Afghanistan. However Gordon Brown and now Ed Milliband were utter disasters in this regard.

The most revealing incident for me was the notorious occasion when Gordon Brown (thinking he was off camera) called a Labour voter, Gillian Duffy, a "bigoted woman." What was key for me was not so much the incident itself (Gordon Brown was never known for his social skills) but the scale of the mea culpa that Brown indulged in afterwards. You see, it seems that Labour have become so terrified of being seen as out of tune with the electorate that they are desperate to pander to the lowest common denominator on subjects such as immigration, welfare 'reform' and crime. And Ed Milliband, badgered by his spin doctors to appear more 'a man of the people' adopts cringeworthy poses that actually just emphasise the opposite.

This is not authentic leadership. This is not even showing the electorate an image of themselves that inspires them to follow. Churchill was about as far from being a man of the people as it is possible to get and he made no compromises in his addresses to the populace. He told them that he had nothing to offer them but blood, toil, tears and sweat and they followed him almost to a (wo)man. What Ed Milliband (or somebody on the left) desperately needs to do if they are to provide the sort of leadership this country needs is to say to the electorate, "You are better than this! As British citizens you believe in decency and fairness and you are not going to stand for this dismantling of the Welfare State. You have always supported the underdog and you will again, whether the underdog be a homeless family in Birmingham or a newly arrived Syrian refugee."

That is an image of itself that I genuinely believe Britain could unite behind, but Ed Milliband is running out of time to show it to the electorate. His recent speech saying that he was about substance not image was all very well and it outlined some of his core beliefs and principals, but frankly the British people don't particularly want to know what Ed Milliband thinks. They want to know what they think- what they should believe in. How they should live their lives.

And if Ed Milliband doesn't tell them then David Cameron and Nigel Farage certainly will.

National identity and sporting success

The success of GB in sport (whether as one nation or several) over recent years has been a puzzling rollercoaster, from the glorious overachievements in London 2012 and the 2013 summer Ashes to the humiliations of Brazil and back up to Glasgow 2014. Much of this wild variation is down to chance of course: the margins are so fine in elite sport these days between success and failure that it really doesn't take much to tip the balance. By contrast with 2013 UK riders had a disastrous Tour de France in 2014, but had both Froome and Cavendish not been involved in serious crashes then who knows what might have happened.

However there is another possible explanation for the variation that occurs to me: GB's self-image as a nation and the effect this has on those who represent it in sport. Yesterday's performance in the India test notwithstanding it is in cricket and football that England's recent slump has been most embarrassingly acute. And I do not think it any coincidence that it is these sports that are most affected by a particularly narrow-minded and jingoistic image of British national identity. Support for the English football team seems inextricably bound up with flags of St George (the Palestine-born patron saint of Bulgaria, Romania and Iraq) and evocations of the memories of 1966, 1945 and 1918. In this year's final the debate in England seemed to centre around which of England's wartime foes (Argentina or Germany) one was to hate least. This despite the fact that one war ended over 30 years ago and the other nearly 70.

Cricket is perhaps less overtly jingoistic, but did not Norman Tebbitt propose the so-called cricket test to define which immigrant communities subscribed best to his narrow view of Englishness? Certainly in cricket as in football, supporters of the England team seem almost exclusively mono-ethnic: the classic close-ups of the crowd from test matches being of portly white men, whether elderly and snoozing under straw hats or younger, more sunburnt and balancing unfeasible numbers of pints of lager as they wend their way through the seats.

So it seems to me that in both football and cricket the nation's dominant self-image is an important factor in the success or otherwise of the national team. And in both of these sports it is the nation of England (rather than GB or the UK) that is in question. Not that Scotland and Wales don't have football teams, but... well, you know what I mean. The thing is that it seems to me that England's overt self-image has shrunk and darkened over the last year or so in a way that cannot possibly be helpful to the establishment of a positive and optimistic ethos of success in the national teams.

Although less than 10% of the UK electorate (4.3 million from a total electorate of 46 million) voted for UKIP in the 2014 European election, to listen to the media and politicians you would think that Britain had spoken with one voice in support of a narrow, petty-minded and negative view of the state of the nation today. UKIP's policies seem to me defined by negativity: anti-Europe, anti-immigration and anti-liberalisation. They may not be openly racist or homophobic but the implication is there- they promote an exclusive sense of national identity predicated on hatred and distrust of "the other."

Far from challenging this view of ourselves politicians from the major parties have seemed keen to pander to it, banging on about how tough they are going to be on immigration, or how isolated within Europe. David Cameron's position on the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker was a humiliating embarrassment, but it seemed to play well in the tabloid press.

The thing is that this small-minded, inward-looking view of our national identity cannot possibly act as a motivating force for national teams. And sure enough, whilst teams like Holland or Columbia in the World Cup seemed empowered and liberated by the opportunity to play for their country, England looked introspective, unsure and out of their depth. They looked as if, far from relishing the challenge of mixing it with the greatest players from every continent, they couldn't wait to get back on the flight home for a decent cup of tea and a proper English breakfast.

So if British (and specifically English) national identity is such a negative force in sports like football and cricket, why such conspicuous success in London 2012 and Glasgow 2014? The core reason, I believe, is that at the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games athletes have been able to harness a different, more pluralist and less constricting view of their national identity. Carol-Anne Duffy put it beautifully in her poem Translating the British, 2012: "we say we want to be who we truly are,/now, we roar it. Welcome to us." There is less jingoism in athletics and less mono-ethnicity. One of the undisputed stars of 2012 was the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, another born in Mogadishu. The Olympic opening ceremony celebrated a vision of Britain that had most UKIPers and right-wing Tories spluttering into their fine french wines and the spirit of the entire Games was founded on openness, welcoming of foreigners and celebration of diverse national and cultural identities. Small wonder that the British athletes found this inspiring in a way that England's footballers and cricketers could only dream of.

The Commonwealth Games, I am delighted to see, has captured this same inclusive spirit, and with it the boost to the performance of Home Nations sports(wo)men. In fact in the Commonwealth Games there is another dimension of pluralism. British competitors represent their home nation, rather than GB, yet seem to be doing so in the context of a larger feeling of pride in the country as a whole. So a Commonwealth Games athlete can be Scottish (or English, Welsh, Northern Irish, Manx, Jersey or Guernsey) and British, as well as perhaps being Muslim or Sikh and of Asian or Caribbean ethnic origin too. And the crowds go along with this too. I witnessed Scots cheering on English athletes for God's sake!

These are inclusive, empowering and uplifting identities to celebrate and it is hardly surprising to me that they seem to give competitors a boost, enabling them to over-achieve in a truly impressive way. Just as it is hardly a surprise that a narrow, introspective and negative prevailing national identity hamstrings our footballers and cricketers.

The roots of radicalisation and the limits of extremism

There has been a great deal written and said about radicalisation and extremism within western (particularly Muslim) youth over recent times, to the point where one might think that there is little useful to add to the debate. However there is one angle that does not seem to me to have much considered and that is, coincidentally, relevant to this blog: the etymology and connotations of the two words most commonly used to describe the phenomenon.

The words 'radicalisation' and 'extremism' seem inextricably bound together nowadays in any discussion of the issue of homegrown terrorism, yet etymologically they are poles apart. Radicalisation is about the very centre of things whilst extremism about the farthest limits. In Latin radix/radicalis means root, whilst exter/exterior/extremus means outer, foreign or strange.

So how is it that these words have come, in recent times, to garner such a similar range of connotations? The notion of radicalisation (of discovering, rediscovering or exploring the very roots of things) seems now inevitably to imply extremism (pushing to, and beyond, the farthest limits of things), and both seem now to connote violence, intolerance and a single-minded rejection of conventional Western values.

The word 'radical' acquired some time ago the political connotations that gave rise to phrases such as radical reform, radical feminism and now radical Islam. It implies going to the very root of things in order to bring about fundamental change, because in a sense, what radicals of any persuasion want to do is to reach into the very centre of whatever ideological system most concerns them. Truly radical feminists would surely rather transform the thinking of their entire society than to split off from the mainstream into some strange, cliquey anti-male wimmin's collective.

And yet the term has come to seem often to imply the latter approach. I can't help feeling that it is the Establishment- those who are threatened by any form of fundamental change- whose influence has led to this distortion of the meaning of the word 'radical.' It suits those who benefit from a given social structure not to have its roots questioned or remade. So social pressure from the majority has come to wrench the word 'radical' in this context well away from its core meaning. Mainstream society, it seems, wants to keep radicals of any persuasion far removed from the roots of the tree in which they have made their home, and so they push them to the margins- to the extremes.

This has always been true of course, and it is difficult to decide whether the word 'radical' has actually changed in meaning over the years, or whether it is simply the case that yesterday's radicals become in hindsight today's reformers. Take three socio-political groups: the Radicals (as in 19th Century progressive Liberals); radical feminists; and radical Islamists. Most people would see these groups as going from pretty much mainstream to totally extremist, but is this because the meaning of the word has changed or because society has now become more accepting of the fundamental changes sought by the earlier groups?

In the context of "the radicalisation of Muslim youth" there is, I believe, another factor at play. It seems clear that there is an impulse in young men towards violent collective action and the pursuit of adventure, thrills and danger. In the 80s and 90s inner city riots fulfilled that need; in the 70s and 80s it was football hooliganism; and in the 50s and 60s there were the battles between mods and rockers on England's seafronts. Before that of course no such need existed because there was actual War, providing more than enough violence and danger.

Yet in none of these cases were the young men involved seen as extremists. Their actions were often extreme: at least as extreme as those of the 'radicalised' muslim youth who cause such moral panic today. Rioters, football hooligans, mods and rockers posed a much bigger threat to the safety and security of mainstream society than do hijab-wearing women or idealistic and misguided young men who head off to fight Assad's forces in Syria. Yet they were allowed their place somewhere near the heart of British society. No doubt it helped that mods and football hooligans for instance went in for the iconography of Englishness in a big way. And the near-insanity of the Tommies in the trenches, marching steadily into machine-gun fire and sacrificing their lives in pursuit of an ill-defined and virtually incomprehensible goal was officially sanctioned of course. Their motivation might have been disturbingly similar to that of today's suicide bombers but they were not extremists- far from it.

Even in the case of the inner city riots of the 80s and 90s, whilst the actions of the rioters might have been loudly deplored in the right-wing press it came fairly quickly to be understood that they represented an upswell of dissatisfaction and anger with the status quo that needed to be addressed. In the language that this post is discussing they were seen by society as a whole as disturbingly radical, but not extremist. They spoke to society about itself, embodying an unhealthiness at its roots that society recognised (eventually) it had to address.

What worries me today is that the constant linking of the words 'radical' and 'extremist' is in danger of preventing that process from happening this time round. We are in danger of believing that today's radical Muslim youth are not exploring and seeking to change the roots of the tree in which the rest of us live, but some other tree entirely, over at the extremes- beyond the outer limits of what is normal and decent and bloody British for god's sake.

And that is something we do at our peril. Because if there is a sickness at the roots it is radicals that society needs to expose it.

The language of exile in "Leave to Remain"

I was privileged to attend a screening on Friday of Leave to Remain, followed by a Q&A session with producers and stars of the film. This is a moving and important film about the experience of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the UK and of the challenges and moral dilemmas they face. The focus of the film is primarily on the issue of story-telling: how stories come to be created and remembered, and the consequences of their being or not being believed. For many unaccompanied asylum-seeking children their stories are literally all they bring from their native land. They frequently have no family, no possessions, no papers and no cultural context, so the stories of their childhood, the traumas they have faced and their journey to the UK are their only currency and all they have to define themselves. Yet this is a currency that is treated with contempt and suspicion by the officials with whom they have to deal.

In the film Lunar House, the UK Border Agency headquarters in Croydon, is a looming grey monolith packed with menace, and hardly surprisingly. Within its walls truthful answers to fundamental questions like 'How old are you?' or 'Where do you come from?' are simply ignored. When one of the central characters says in dari that he comes from Nuristan the interpreter adds for the benefit of the interviewer, "But he may well be from Pakistan." When he says he is 15 the interviewer begins an intrusively personal yet cruelly casual series of questions about pubic hair and wisdom teeth. At one point the interviewer asks his colleague how tall he thinks the boy is and writes down the answer. He neither asks the boy nor actually measures him.

Some stories are believed of course, but it is clear in the film that truthfullness is not the key factor in such belief. When the English teacher/care-worker of the children lies in court about one of them no one so much as questions his account. When, at the beginning of the film, one of the central characters gives a moving but fictitious account of his experiences in Afghanistan his audience of middle class do-gooders is moved to tears. And for the other central character, lost and alone in an alien land, it is the rediscovery of his own stories that brings him back to life. In the Q&A after the film the (non-professional) actor who plays this character told of how the motivation for a central scene in which he catches and rides on a sheep came from a story his older brother used to tell him from before the family arrived in the UK.

In this post though I want to focus on another issue that this film explores- one that has fascinated me since I first came across unaccompanied refugee children early on in my teaching career. This is the question of how unaccompanied refugee children come to develop their own language of social interaction in a new land.

Some time ago I heard a radio programme (which I cannot now track down) about the development of a particular creole language in the Caribbean in the 17th or 18th century. Children of slaves were taken from their parents at a very early age and effectively imprisoned in large "convent schools." The explicit purpose was to remove them from the (presumably pernicious) social context of language, ethnicity and culture into which they had been born, so "saving" them from eternal damnation. Yet they were given no new context. No effort was made to teach them language and they were left pretty much to their own devices socially, being treated simply as mute and compliant servants. What these children did was to develop a creole of their own, stringing together whatever words and snippets they overheard into an entire language. This became their only language, as they had no memory of the language of their parents, and over a surprisingly short period of time it developed into a properly sophisticated language of its own, with the complexity of a tongue developed over hundreds of generations.

And this is precisely what happens to unaccompanied refugee children, only it is not the literal language they have to create from new (we are marginally more enlightened now, and at least help them learn English) but the language of social interaction and inter-personal relationships. Like the Caribbean slave children they have been utterly ripped away from their native cultural and family context and placed in a new 'family' alongside other adolescents with whom they have little in common. In the group of teenagers in the film there are individuals from every war-torn region on the globe. Outsiders may see such groups as principally "asylum seekers" but what similarities really are there between Afghanistan and Angola? The teacher of the group clearly feels relieved for Abdul that there is at least one other afghani boy in the group, but Abdul is hazari and Omar pashtun. They may both speak dari but they have little else in common.

What is more their new context is one in which the accepted rules of social interaction no longer apply. Truth has no currency in this new world: tell the truth and you will be automatically disbelieved; tell a big lie and you may well get away with it. Adults in this new world are almost invariably hostile and threatening. The officials in Lunar House and the lawyers in Omar's immigration status review hearing are rude, contemptuous and uncaring and there is only one adult in the film- the teacher- who treats the children with anything like respect.

Superficially these children may appear to be living the same sort of life as those whose immigration status is not in question but appearances can be deceptive. In one scene they all dress up in fancy dress (or those who have more than one set of clothes do) to go out to watch the Diwali fireworks. Aside from Abdul's initial terror at the sounds of the explosions they have a nice night out- another group of teenagers loudly enjoying themselves without any adult escort. Yet the mood changes rapidly and dramatically when they see police outside the overground station. This is not because they have been up to no good- they have no drugs or weapons, have not been drinking and have caused no trouble- but because they have brown skins and no valid papers. And sure enough one is arrested, handcuffed and taken away, presumably to Yarl's Wood or one of the other charmingly named immigration removal centres.

So what do these teenagers do, ripped from their cultural context and placed together to make a new life between themselves? They do what the Caribbean slave children did: they begin to develop their own language. They work out modes of interaction and ways of communicating friendship, mutual supportiveness and compassion. So on the issue of truth and lies they seem to accept that some lies (like the specific area you came from) are entirely socially acceptable because they are simply weapons in the battle with the immigration service, whilst others are forbidden because they corrode some fundamental sense of who one is.

Some of their invented language of social interaction is a little bizarre: when Zizidi is devastated because her leave to remain has been refused Abdul seeks to comfort her by stealing an entire lamb carcass and attempting to roast it in a small domestic oven. Much is hidden from the outside world and the film reminds us that we will never truly understand the languages these children have had to work out for themselves. When Abdul first arrives he speaks no English and Omar translates for the benefit of the teacher. However we the audience (unlike the teacher) have the benefit of subtitles and know that actually Omar is not translating accurately at all. There is a strange battle going on here of which the teacher (well meaning as he is) guesses nothing.

I have had experience myself of this impenetrability: when you think you understand the social language by which unaccompanied refugee children live their lives but suddenly realise that you understand nothing at all. There was in my school a boy who had escaped one of the conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. He had been well supported and integrated into the school and now seemed happy, well adjusted, sociable and popular. And then one day he severely wounded his best friend with a Stanley knife. He was only messing around and had no intention of hurting anyone but what struck me was his reaction afterwards. He immediately said sorry to his friend, but was then apparently completely baffled that despite this people were shocked by what he had done. I had to exclude him permanently and in the hearing, when asked if he wanted to speak, he simply said, "But I said sorry. I thought that would make it alright."

In the last line of the film Abdul says (in dari) "I didn't know it would be so difficult." For me it is not just the pressures and perils of living on the edge that makes life difficult for these children. It is the fact that, alone and unsupported, they have to develop an entirely new language of social interaction to make sense of their new lives.

Of Trojan Horses and loose cannons

I have finally read Peter Clarke's report into the so-called Trojan Horse allegations about Birmingham schools. I have to say that I have been left holding two conflicting views about the issue but I think there is a central point here that has so far been ignored in the discussion of the incidents.

My first reaction to this whole affair was that it formed a part of the current government's ant-UKIP-backlash-backlash attempt to appease the more rightwing and islamophobic elements of its own party and of the electorate as a whole. It also felt to me like a skirmish in the internecine war between Michael Gove and Theresa May that led eventually to Gove's demotion: Gove's spin-doctors using it to brief against May for failing to tackle Islamic extremism in society and May seizing on it to to blame Gove for inadequate supervision of schools.

 The image of the Trojan horse may not have been invented by Micahel Gove or Theresa May (it came from the original anonymous document that sparked all the furore) but it is a telling one. The original Trojan horse was a means by which armed soldiers were smuggled into the heart of the city which they then attacked and destroyed from within. This seems very much the fear of a proportion of the more narrow-minded and islamophobic rightwingers who live amongst us and whose extremist views are rarely challenged. In fact the report carries no implication of jihadist radicalisation of students in these schools.

The closest I could find to evidence for anything similar was an account of a visit to a Year 10/11 assembly by a preacher called Shaykh Shady Al-Suleiman. There is no indication of any specifics of what this assembly contained, but this passage of commentary is included to show how "extremist" it was: "Some students made comments to staff along the lines of ‘Oh my God I can’t believe what he has just said - there are people dying in Afghanistan’ and talked about it for days afterwards. Some students wondered why he had been talking about them being oppressed in this country." Hardly sounds to me like a jihadist call to arms. As this is the only evidence I could find of attempted radicalisation of students within these schools it is hard to justify the widespread use of the term "Trojan Horse" to describe what went on.

Much has been made of the promotion of a conservative form of Islam within these schools, and of this there is more evidence. However it is not clear to me the extent to which the schools involved were creating or simply responding to a pervasive climate of religious conservatism, given that the very large majority of the students were from religiously conservative households. Much is made for instance of an incident when a group of girls who had been sent out to a tennis coaching programme were then sent home when they realised that some of the tennis coaches were men, and the teacher responsible for arranging the trip was forced to write a letter of apology.

As someone who has worked for many years in schools with students from socially conservative households (by no means exclusively muslim) it is clear to me that the teacher involved did make a serious error in not checking whether the coaches would all be female. As liberal-minded Europeans we may not like it but the fact is that an awful lot of families living in this country would object strongly to their daughters being placed in close physical proximity with an unknown adult male, particularly whilst skimpily dressed in PE kit.

In another issue, the report has been used to suggest that Birmingham Council were remiss in not responding to and following up the allegations contained in the "Trojan Horse" letter. The implication is that Birmingham knew what was going on but were too concerned with political correctness to do anything about it. The report seeks to provide evidence for this view by suggesting that Birmingham knew before they even got the letter that something was amiss. However the only piece of direct evidence I could find is extraordinary- a passage from an internal email that mentions"growing concerns amongst head teachers that some governing bodies of schools with large numbers of pupils from an Islamic background, or at least groups of influential governors within governing bodies, were putting unreasonable pressure on head teachers to raise standards and/or address other issues of concern." According to this, the much-feared Trojan horse was a means of raising standards and addressing other areas of concern! Hardly a plot to massacre the city.

In fact, reading between the lines, it is pretty clear that officers in Birmingham council suspected the letter to have been written and circulated by a head teacher as part of their battle against their own governing body, which the head felt was submitting him/her to undue pressure. This implication is very clear in an analysis of the letter produced by Birmingham in 2013: "The document seeks to imply that there is manipulation of local authority officers to deliver an overall plan. Very few of the facts are accurate. The document reflects the views of some head teachers, who have expressed their concerns to a number of elected members, local authority officers and governors" (italics mine).

So there is certainly an element of this whole saga that is feeding off the islamophobic paranoia of little-Englander UKIPers to emphasise the need for a firm hand against these weird veiled fifth-columnists with their silafi this and their jihadi that. Ironically, much of what is alleged to have been promoted within the schools investigated would be far more distasteful to the liberal Guardian readers amongst us than to said UKIPers: homophobia; strict codes of dress and comportment; the elimination of any pre-sexual contact between male and female students; and religious conservatism.

And yet.

As an ex-headteacher who was, in effect, "hounded out of office" myself there is a great deal in this reports that rings true to me on another issue entirely. The report blandly states that "I have seen no evidence to suggest that there is a problem with governance generally," yet it really is not clear how the author could possibly be in a position to make a judgment about governance generally.

In fact, what the report highlights is precisely that issue- the problem with governance generally, in schools up and down the land and the new academies and free schools in particular. Those with no direct experience of governing bodies may be surprised at just how antiquated and amateurish the system of school governance is. It was developed in an era when schools had little autonomy, being under the direct control of local education authorities. So governors were there to be "critical friends" and give the head teacher some perspective on the views of parents and the wider community as to what was going on in the school. In the most enlightened schools they played this role effectively, but the whispered truth was that actually governors really didn't matter.

And this was just as well in a way, because there have always been major potential problems with the entire system. In theory governing bodies have a constitution and their functioning is bound up in a range of regulations, guidance and even legislation. Yet in fact, far too often, they end up being a group of more (or less) well meaning amateurs, with little understanding of educational issues and sometimes very odd personal agendas who meet for a couple of hours late into the evening every month or so to engage in futile and repetitive debates about uniform and behaviour.

A proportion of all school governors must be elected parent governors, and on the face of it this guarantees effective representation from the parent body. In fact, in every school in which I have been involved, so few parents are prepared to put themselves forward as governors that anyone who does is elected unopposed. Indeed in the few instances where candidates outnumber available parent governor vacancies the unsuccessful candidates are often shunted into the governing body anyway as some other category of governor.

So rather than being elected representatives of the parent body, parent governors can often be individuals with time on their hands and a specific axe to grind, generally in regards to the treatment of their own son or daughter. I am not, of course, saying that all are, but there is effectively no mechanism in place to prevent anyone with such a self-serving agenda acceding to the governing body.

A (smaller) proportion must be staff governors. However here, as well as the unwillingness of staff to put themselves up for election (governing body meetings typically finish after 9pm, and staff will often have been in school since 7 or 8am) there is the issue of status. Staff governors are quite often mistrusted by the rest of the governing body. They will for instance routinely be excluded from the part 2 (confidential) sections of meetings, even if parent governors are allowed to remain, and their contribution to debates close to other governors' hearts (but of which they know little) such as how to manage student behaviour will often be ignored. Unsurprisingly this often gives rise to a feeling amongst staff that the position of staff governor is utterly unrewarding and pointless, unless for some reason you want it on your CV.

In theory governing body constitutions ensure internal democracy too. However in fact a forceful and politically astute governor with one or two allies can generally very easily become elected chair. It is a job that most (largely amateurishly well-meaning, often elderly) governors would not dream of standing for and many will be happy to vote for anyone who is prepared to do so. Once chair, the politically astute governor can very easily pack the governing body with allies. There are always vacancies, and I have many times witnessed a chair appointing to the governing body some crony whom no one else had any knowledge of, then getting that appointment ratified by a show of hands in which other governors were too embarrassed, or cared too little, to show any dissent.

The head of the school, who is generally an ex-officio governor, has to learn to manage the governing body with a mixture of assertiveness, smarminess, lowdown politicking of their own and regular schmoozing with the chair of governors. Generally this works, and so long as the head can bear to sit through endless hours of pointless, ill-informed commentary on just why the students in the school aren't half as well disciplined as children used to be in the old days then they can get on just fine with only minimal interference. And, to be fair, just occasionally governors actually can act as critical friends, and give the head new perspectives on issues of concern.

However should the shit start hitting the fan the head will soon discover that governing bodies, for all their amateurish incompetence, are not subject to any effective means of control. Should a parent governor for instance start conducting an overt campaign against an individual teacher, purely on the basis that their son or daughter does not like them, the head will find there is little they can do. Parent governors once elected cannot be removed, and the head has no powers whatever to address unprofessional behaviour on the part of a governor. There are internal disciplinary procedures for governing bodies, but the bodies concerned are often extremely reluctant to use them- governing bodies are a social grouping as much as anything else. And what if the governor behaving unprofessionally is the chair of governors?

All of this used to be simply an irritation, and one that courses such as NPQH taught heads to manage and/or survive. However increasing numbers of schools are being taken out of any sort of direct supervision or control from their local education authorities (because they are academies or free schools) and governors are suddenly finding that they have an extraordinary degree of unfettered and unsupervised power over everything that happens in the school. In particular they find that, should they want to, they can make the headteacher's position untenable, and there will be very little the headteacher can do about it.

One section of the report- the Slatley Story- made very uncomfortable reading for me. My position vis-a-vis my governors was not as extreme as Mr Bains but I saw a large number of parallels that brought back painful memories. The head's position (as ex-offico member) on the governing body is often a very difficult and isolated one. When things are difficult the head can find himself/herself the only representative of and apologist for what is going on in the school. As well as being the only one with any actual educational expertise they will be the only one with direct experience of life in the school on a daily basis. And should the governing body start coming to a view informed by a mixture of gossip and their own prejudices then the head's educational expertise and direct knowledge can come to be seen (perversely) as a problem rather than an asset. I have actually been told by a governor, when making a point about what makes for effective behaviour management in the classroom, "You would say that. You're a teacher!"

In addition, as the head is often the only representative of the school with whom governors come in direct regular contact, he/she can easily become a focus for any resentments about the school the governors may hold. Many people have negative views about schools, and governors are no exception. Partly this is a result of our society's negativity about its state education system, partly because of a generalised fear of the sort of loutish teenagers who typically pour out of the gates at 3.30 and throng the local bus stops. Sometimes it is also because the governor's own child is going through a difficult adolescent phase and the governor sees the school as a useful scapegoat for their own anxieties. So should things start getting difficult there will always be governors who turn against the head, at which point the head will suddenly find just how isolated their position is and how truly ungoverned the governing body can be. It is bad enough when the head has the local authority to go to for support (as that is something local authorities are not always capable of or willing to supply) but if the school is a free school or standalone academy it must be truly awful.

So whatever the degree of concern one should have about the apparent attempted back-door conversion of a few Birmingham secular schools into faith schools the real issue this report raises is the one that it dismisses in half a sentence. Because actually there is a serious problem with governance generally, and one that needs to be urgently addressed.

An ex-headteacher celebrates the end of term

I used to be a headteacher. A combination of governor incompetence, toxic internal politics, Oftsed intransigence and Local Authority panic did for that career but a part of me is still tuned to the rhythms of the school year. So I could not help but notice that this is end-of-term week for English schools, as evidenced of course by the throngs of newly-liberated teenagers basking in the daytime sunshine and hatching great and complicated plans for their weeks of freedom.

This was always an exciting and forward-looking time in the school calendar for me when I was a head. Headship is supposed to be a highly strategic role, yet for most of the year it can be very hard to lift ones eyes from the constant, wearing stream of daily crises that arise from heading an organisation of 1200 students and 200 staff, all with their individual and collective aspirations, grievances, complexities and conflicts. Finally at this time in July as the last kids wander off, too tired to be fractious, and the the last staff party winds down you get to look to the future and start really planning for and imagining all the opportunities the new academic year will bring.

The timetable for the next year will be written by now (even if you have had to step in and finish it yourself), new staff appointments made, next year's Year 7s inducted and a major programme of essential building maintenance works no doubt planned for the holiday closure. Yes there are the exam results to anxiously await but there is nothing that can be done about that for now. By the time the A level results come in on 13th August ( a day earlier than the students get them) and then GCSE results the week after the work of the new term will in a sense have begun. There will be exam analysis to be carried out, press releases to be written, tactical approaches to be devised to address areas of under- (and over-) performance, new sixth formers to be admitted, and on and on it will go.

Yet just for now all that can be ignored. For the next couple of weeks it seems that anything is possible. The school will be emptier than it has been all year, displays taken down and exhortations to last years Year 11 to get their coursework done and plan their revision finally disposed of. It is a time for dreaming big dreams, of what can be achieved if only everyone works together in the same spirit of cooperation and bonhomie that still vaguely lingers from that last staff barbecue. Forgotten for the moment will be the dispiriting stream of negativity from government announcements and tabloid stories. The traditional upsurge in school-bashing that always accompanies exam results is still weeks away.

This is often the time when a new head takes over, the previous one having finally cleared all the junk out of their office, taken down the "inspirational" and utterly meaningless posters from their office walls and moved on. New heads are always positive and welcoming at this time: staff are generally nice to them, particularly if they despised their predecessor but were too afraid to do anything substantial about it while he was in post. The new head will be making bland promises about working together and building an atmosphere of cooperation and shared commitment to a common goal. My door is always open, they will be saying to their staff. You can see me as an ally.

And yet blazing sunshine, empty corridors and the feelgood effect that comes from knowing you've made it through another year can only take you so far. Idealistic plans for the future are wonderful things but as a head you don't get to stay long in that fantasy land where everyone involved in education works together for the good of students. However grand your ambitions might be for a curriculum that enables and encourages all students to acquire the learning skills that will make them citizens of the 21st century you will still find yourself in Michael Gove's narrow-minded 50s-inspired curricular straightjacket. However noble your aspirations are to work collaboratively with other schools and the local authority to address wider issues you will still be caught in the divide-and-conquer policies of near universal academisation. However much you dream of the positive effect of building works for your school you will find that the only capital money available still is for academies and free schools.

And so now, more than at any other time in the school year, I really do not envy the heads who used to be my colleagues. There was a brief period of euphoria when Michael Gove (and Dominic Cummings) got booted out but I doubt very much if that lasted. Nicky Morgan has wasted no time in confirming that Gove's recipe for the future demoralisation and disintegration of the State schools system remains largely unchanged. So what's the point in dreaming?

And without the capacity to dream a better future for your school and its students the summer holidays can come to seem a pretty bleak time.

 

Ofpiss- the role of inspectors in the public sector

There was yet another item on the Today programme this morning about the CQC (Care Quality Commission). Presumably it detailed more "worrying findings" about the nation's healthcare system- I wasn't really listening. Instead I got to thinking about the similarities and differences between Ofsted, CQC and the like and organisations like Ofwat, Ofgem, Ofcom and the FSA.

On the face of it the two groups of bodies perform the same function: ensuring consistently high standards in the area of their remit. However the differences are actually quite significant. Let's start (appropriately) at a linguistic level: Ofsted and CQC inspect, the others regulate- quite different words. "Regulate" implies a far higher degree of intervention than "inspect" since, etymologically, regulation imposes "regulae" or laws whereas inspection merely involves looking in. The implication is of course that regulation is an end in itself whereas an inspection is a precursor to some other action. Except that that isn't quite how it works any more.

To understand the similarities and differences better perhaps it would be useful to draw an analogy. Consider all of the bodies listed as medical professionals who carry out diagnostic tests. However they would have to be very different sorts of tests in very different contexts. Ofwat, Ofgem and the like seem most like the dope-testing officials who accompany the Tour de France. Their job is to ensure that there is a level playing field between competitors and that no one gains unfair advantage through dubious or underhand tactics. The analogy is actually quite a good one in many ways: like the financial bodies regulated by the FSA cycling teams are always one step ahead of the testers in finding new and sophisticated ways to beat the system. Like them too they are prepared to sacrifice any notion of honesty, ethics or fairness in pursuit of a competitive advantage. If Lance Armstrong hadn't been a professional cyclist he would probably have been a derivatives trader.

Once the regulators have identified misconduct there are a range of sanctions they can apply. Here of course the analogy does not hold so strongly: no lifetime bans from Ofgem or the FSA. Rather it is as if Lance Armstrong had been told to pay back 25% of his winner's fees and asked to try not to cheat quite so much in future.There are other ways in which the analogy is not perfect: The anti-doping doctors in the Tour de France don't work as cosily with the cyclists as UK regulators seem to with the industry bodies they regulate.However for the purposes of this post the analogy will do.

Ofsted, CQC and the other inspection bodies that work with public services would be a different set of medical professionals entirely. They would be more like the staff who carry out universal breast cancer screenings on middle aged women. Again, the analogy fits well in places: the process, which takes place every few years, is unpleasant, occasionally painful and involves exposing ones intimate secrets in front of strangers. When it works it identifies problems buried deep within the body politic that have the potential for catastrophic effect. However the process can also over-diagnose and doctors can identify as cancerous, cells which were actually growing healthily.

Like women facing breast cancer screening, schools and healthcare trusts engage with the process surprisingly willingly, being polite and well-mannered as the staff involved place their tits in a vice. The analogy isn't perfect, mind. I have yet to hear of a woman recalled for a second mammogram before then being told, "You know those cells that we said weren't cancerous? Well they're not, but my boss thinks they might be a bit Muslim."

However the biggest area in which the analogy falls down is in terms of what happens when the process is complete. Following a mammogram the patient will be offered a range of treatments, from watchful waiting to full mastectomy, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. In enlightened GP practices they will be offered counselling too, pointed to a range of support groups and given a host of useful literature. This will all be done in an atmosphere of professional discretion. It will be up to the patient who they do or do not tell that they may have breast cancer.

Not so the school or healthcare trust. Their "failure" will be broadcast far and wide for all to see, and in particular any existing or potential staff or students/patients. They will be asked to come up with their own "recovery plan", which is like a cancer patient being given a kitchen knife and a self-help book on breast surgery, or be paired up with a more "successful" school or trust. That is rather like the GP taking the patient into the waiting room and saying, "See that woman over there? She looks pretty healthy. Why don't you ask if she's got any tips?"

It didn't used to be like this of course. I can only talk about what education used to be like, but I am sure healthcare was similar. There used to be HMIs, highly skilled and experienced professionals who would work with schools in difficulties without pre-judgment. Local Education Authorities had teams of advisory teachers who could go into schools and there were a variety of LEA-run centres where teachers could go for support and interaction with their peers. These systems were very variable in quality of course, and no doubt some were pretty useless, but now there is absolutely nothing. It is as if, because some treatments for breast surgery had poor results the NHS just decided to pull them all. Leaving the patient, whose (possible) cancer has just been broadcast to the world, twisting in the wind.

Partly this is down to cuts at all levels of the civil service, both nationally and locally. Partly though it seems to be recommended neo-con policy. The state, it appears, is the problem and therefore cannot be the solution. Even were the staff there to carry it out neo-cons seem to argue that State bodies (like HMI and LEA advisory teams) are by definition incapable of improving public services. Only the market is capable of doing that. Where a public service institution has failed or is failing, the neo-cons believe, instead of the heavy hand of the State intervening and making things worse with standard and unresponsive interventions the institution itself should be free to access the support it deems most appropriate itself.

There is a strange logic behind this argument, or might be if things were done rather differently following "failure" in an inspection. In fact, far from being free to access the support it requires, the "failing" institution will suddenly find its freedom to do anything much drastically curtailed. Its head may well be summarily dismissed, as may its whole governing body (or equivalent). Furthermore, it may well (in the case of a school) be compulsorily converted into an academy, with or without the support of its staff or users. There will be little or no additional funding available to finance additional support (because that would be seen as rewarding failure) and any distinctive character the institution might have had prior to its "failure" will be seen as fair game- renaming is, for instance, often a favoured option. And if none of that leads to improvement there is always enforced closure- the institutional equivalent of euthanasia.

Is it any wonder that, far from swallowing the line that inspection by Ofsted or the CQC is the key to driving success in education and health, many professionals in those sectors simply want their inspectors to piss off? It is not that they are afraid of scrutiny, or oblivious to the need to ensure good and consistent standards. It is simply the feeling that if a medical test doesn't lead to the offer of any treatment, what is the point of enduring it in the first place?

By coincidence, later in the same edition of the Today programme there was an item about Switzerland stopping its universal breast-screening programme. Doctors there have concluded that, whilst the screening might allow early intervention that may save some patients' lives, the cost in terms of anxiety, stress and unnecessary treatment arising from over-diagnosis is too high. A doctor interviewed on the programme reminded listeners that they can choose to opt out of breast cancer screening should they so wish.

The problem for public service institutions like schools or hospitals is that they do not have that choice.

So farewell Mr Gove (or why the English seem to hate their own schools system)

I shall not waste any time celebrating the demotion of Michael Gove to Chief Bully at Westminster. Given the damage he has already done as Secretary of State for Education I for one am not in particularly celebratory mood. However looking back on his time in office it does occur to me to wonder why it is that again and again Tory Secretaries of State for Education give themselves the additional title of anti-Schools Minister. Gove is not the first to have done this, just the most brutally casual in his destruction of the State system for which he was responsible.

The problem is that there is always political mileage in rubbishing the State education system and those who teach in it. The tabloids love it of course, as do the right-wing papers, but it never ceases to amaze me how much approbation is on offer, from parents and from 'liberal' papers like the Guardian, to anyone who voices "trenchant" (i.e. negative and ill-informed) criticisms of our State schools. It seems almost a given that English and Welsh state schools are crap (the position may be slightly different in both Scotland and Northern Ireland), "lag behind the world" and require a process of continuous revolutionary change to make them fit for purpose. Oddly enough this relentless storm of criticism tends to seep in to the attitudes of students and parents alike to the extent that should anything unsatisfactory occur in a child's schooling (from bullying to poor results to a deterioration in the child's own behaviour) then clearly the school must be at fault. Parents reserve the right to respond to any such problem with a promise either to "go up to that school and tell Wayne's teachers to sort themselves out!" or to "take poor Annabel out of that dreadful place. Don't worry, Daddy can afford it." And odder still, these attitudes are not conducive to the creation and maintenance of a self-confident school ethos focused on achievement and success.

It doesn't have to be like that of course, and my sense is that in other countries it simply isn't. Other European countries (let alone Asian ones) seem far prouder of their State education systems, and far more inclined to trust that by sending their children to school parents are placing them in the safe hands of highly-skilled educators. Not that said educators are likely to be any better than their UK equivalents (if films like Entre les Murs are to be believed, anyway) but because parents, politicians, the press and society as a whole value their schools more highly in such countries students will inevitably attend in a more positive and compliant frame of mind.

So what makes England and Wales so different? One could argue (as I have done repeatedly) that these attitudes go back to the lovely Margaret Thatcher. Certainly, in a technique enthusiastically borrowed by this generation of Tories vis-a-vis the NHS, she set about rubbishing the State education system so as to reduce public opposition when she implemented her 'reforms.' Certainly she introduced some important tropes on which the tabloid press could fasten in their attacks on schools: the idea of London teachers as "loony lefties" for instance, or of "the education establishment" as a malign and anti-progressive force. She also abolished the Schools Council so that, uniquely amongst the great professions there was no voice for practitioners in any of the overarching regulatory or advisory groups for the schools sector. She was also responsible for the introduction of the insidious notion of "parental choice" of a school place for their children. This was always, practically speaking, a nonsense idea, since parents have only very rarely been able to exercise real choice as to where their kids went to school, but it implanted the idea that some schools were simply not the sort of school one would choose to send one's child to. And, oddly enough, market forces tended not to be that efficient in driving improvement in such schools. Because once you label a school as the sink school in an area and populate it exclusively with students whose parents do not or cannot move their children elsewhere it tends not to thrive.

However perhaps the root cause of this English attitude to schools actually lies much further back. Most countries appear to have realised in approximately the same era the importance of universal compulsory education. And in most countries this system of education quickly came to be seen as a centrepiece of the State's image of itself. The results of this have sometimes been overtly political (like the French Republican education system ), sometimes grotesque (the Nazi introduction of subjects such as Racial Studies for instance) and sometimes- to me at least- deeply cringe-worthy (the US daily pledging of allegiance, anyone?) but they always maintained education, and specifically the State Schools system at the heart of the nation's image of itself.

From the start it seems that the English approach was different. England started its Industrial Revolution earlier than anyone else, and by 1880 when education became compulsory, there were huge numbers of children of industrial workers living in England's cities. And as much as anything else the State education system seems to have become a mechanism not just to provide the masses with the basic skills required to make them more productive but to control them too. This attitude is satirised by Dickens in Hard Times of course, though Mr Gradgrind would not look out of place in Michael Gove's policy team. In England State schools did not define who we were as a nation: public (fee paying) schools did that. Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, not of some Manchester grade school.

So from the start English State schools do not seem to have been an institution of which we as a nation were proud: that defined our sense of who we were. They were a grubby, tedious necessity to keep the children of the hoi polloi off the streets. Then, when glimmerings of social conscience made such attitudes unacceptable grammar schools were introduced as faux public schools so that a proportion of the great unwashed could lift themselves from this slough of despond and pretend at least that they belonged to the elite whose education defined them as truly English. I say English deliberately here. In Scotland at least it appears that education for all remained at the heart of the nation's sense of itself. And I don't just mean the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie- my own father saw his brothers and uncles club together to finance his journey through university so that he could become a missionary, and thus augment the social status of the entire extended family.

So farewell Mr Gove, but I have to say that I am not particularly sanguine as regards the chance of his departure making any significant difference. So long as we as a Nation hate and despise our State Schools system there is little hope for it.