It is time to reclaim the word "reform."

Now that Michael Gove has left the DfE his name seems more than ever inextricably linked with the word "reform(s)." I suspect astute news management here: by constant repetition of the phrase "Gove reforms" when referring to the unprecedentedly disruptive and reactive changes brought about in his time as Secretary of State, Gove and his henchmen have inveigled into the public consciousness a link between what he did and the largely positive connotations of the word "reform."

I have written here, here, here and here (for example) of some of the casually destructive things Michael Gove did to education whilst in office and this is not another post bemoaning the changes he brought about. Rather I would like to focus on the word "reform" itself, to pose the question as to why so many commentators see fit to talk and write about Gove's education reforms.

The etymology of the word reform is simple- from the Latin reformare, the prefix re- meaning back and the verb formare meaning to form or shape. So in purely etymological terms the word reform would seem to imply a process of putting things back to the way they were. Not so inappropriate then, for Michael Gove's attempts to reestablish a half-remembered version of 50s schooling.

Except that words acquire most of their meaning through a combination of usage and connotation (a concept I have explored here for instance). To take usage first, consider some of the other contemporary uses of the word reform: we have Obama's healthcare reforms; repeated calls from Cameron and others for EU reform; and vague talk of political reform, usually in countries sufficiently far away that reform becomes a less threatening concept. Because actually the connotations the word reform has acquired in current usage are all to do with change, and moving forward not backwards.

The other key feature of the usage of the word reform is that it has long been defined in opposition to two other words: reaction and revolution. From the Protestant Reformation to the Reformist Movement reformers have long been defined as being the opposite of reactionaries. Reform is emphatically not about turning the clock back any more, whatever its etymology might be. These sorts of usages are also notable in their virtually socialist connotations: the process of reform has always been about defeating the reactionary forces of an oppressive higher power. Maybe not so appropriate for what Gove sought to achieve then.

Similarly, reform is now clearly established as the opposite of revolution. Revolutionaries seek to overturn (etymologically as well as by usage) whilst reformers work from the ground up, bringing in more organic, gentler changes. Indeed revolutionaries have often seen reform as inimical to their aims. Dario Fo put it well when he said, "They want a revolution, and we'll give them reforms- lots of reforms; we'll drown them in reforms."

This sort oppositional definition of words is actually how we come to refine their meanings. What is reform? Well, it isn't reaction and it isn't revolution, so it's something in between. And as a result, since reform is by definition (or by usage anyway) not an extremist position, the connotations it has come to acquire are almost universally positive. Reform has connotations of gentleness, of looking to the future, of responding to the needs of the weak and oppressed, of high-minded idealism.

And yet we allow the word to be linked to what Michael Gove did to the English education system in his time as Secretary of State!

I propose a different word. For a start, the prefix has to be de- (from the Latin for "down from," "away from," or "out of" and implying reversal or negation.) So deform maybe? Hence Gove's deformations of England's education system. Not quite, I don't think. Deformation is far too slow and organic a process. We need something more dramatic to describe what he did.

Disruption is another good word. Etymologically it seems to mean "breaking apart," which seems appropriate. However again, connotations are key, and the problem is that disruption has strong connotations of temporariness. After a disruption normal service is resumed. Pretty quickly, so long as Network Rail isn't involved. So no, disruption simply isn't the word, because the damage Gove did will take decades to undo, even suppose anyone tries.

We need another word. I know, not reform, or disrupt, but destroy. Yes, that's it. That seems a much better description of what happened. So not Gove's reforms, but Gove's destruction.

Yup. Happy with that. Carry on.

The DfE website: another casualty of Gove's Stalinist regime

I wrote a piece yesterday about the writing out from history of the entire concept of Assessment for Learning. One of the most extraordinary things I discovered was the removal from the DfE website of any document whatever on the subject, and this led me to investigate further. If under Gove such a central document as the AfL National Strategy document could have been expunged from the government's Education website, what else has disappeared?

So I visited what used to be www.dfe.gov.uk and my first surprise was that that address no longer exists. The website is now at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education, and lest one think that this is simply a matter of web redirect, look at the URL: the word "education" appears only after the third backslash. So what? I hear you ask. Well, what this means for instance is that the default behaviour of the site's search box is to return results from any of the government departments. So if you put in the word "learning" and hit return without changing any of the default options you will get a large number of results dealing with subjects as diverse as driving, justice and births, marriages and deaths. The first link that returns anything remotely to do with learning in schools is the 25th. Put in a more generic term (but one that is central to the effective delivery of high quality education in schools) like "leadership and management" and fewer than one in ten of the results returned are anything to do with schools at all.

This is not the only change though. The first visual impression of the site is of something put together by one of the more budget school website providers back in the late 90s. Carry out a search for instance and the only way back to the Department for Education's section of the site is via your browser's "Back" button. Click on the Gov.Uk link at the top of the page and you get to this page which has no mention of the DfE on it anywhere!

This is extraordinary stuff. With the internet now firmly established as any teacher's (or school leader's. Or anyone's) primary tool for research and planning how can the DfE provide a website that is so appallingly badly designed and unwelcoming for its users?

And even that isn't the main issue. It is when you do finally track down the content on the site that you face the biggest surprise: there isn't any. Or hardly any, at least. The DfE website used to be crammed full of advice and guidance, case studies, examples of best practice, curriculum resources and a myriad of links to external sites of all sorts that might be of use to the web-savvy teacher or school leader. And now?

Well, the resemblance to a late 90s school website continues as regards content too. There are a number of policy documents, all pdfs and written in the sort of quasi-legalese that marks them out as the sort of thing one takes to a tribunal but otherwise leaves prominently displayed but unread on one's shelf. There are some press releases on the main page, and some of what the site calls "Collections" of guidance douments. Ah ha! Here we are, I thought. And found this. Guess how many of these documents have anything to do with the delivery of education to students in school? Give up? I'll tell you, thirteen, and all, it turns out, the same quasi-legalese pdfs from the policy document section.

There were only two links to external websites that I could find, one to the DfE performance tables and one to the "Get Into Teaching" website. The latter incidentally must represent an as-yet unreformed aspect of the DfE's work that Gove never noticed: it is colourful, informative, packed full of content and actually useful.

Maybe I am missing something. Maybe there is a wealth of government guidance, case studies and sharing of best practice somewhere else on the web, but if so I would be delighted if someone could point it out to me. Out of curiosity I visited the Scottish government education websites and the contrast could not be more dramatic. Even the main departmental schools site is worlds better than the English equivalent, but as well as that there are two other enormous sites: http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/ and http://www.gtcs.org.uk/. There used to be an English equivalent of the latter of course- the General Teaching Council, or GTC, but Gove killed it off and its website is no more.

So aside from anything else he has done, Michael Gove has been responsible for the wholesale removal from the internet of anything that could reasonably be considered useful Governmental advice and resources for school teachers and leaders. It is not just the scale of his scorched-earth policy that amazes though, but its intention. This is a Stalinist elimination from the public sphere of anything ever produced by "the Blob" of those who know anything about education. In fact it is almost akin to Mao's policy of anti-intellectualism and what I find utterly extraordinary is the apparent lack of public outcry against it.

What has happened to Assessment for Learning?

There are unquestionably advantages to not being employed in the education sector any more: I get to enjoy the summer holidays for one thing. As a head the summer holidays were no kind of break at all, and the looming key dates of exam results and start of term would start haunting me before the summer term had even ended.

However not being in the thick of things does mean that I can lose track of what used to be central concerns of mine. If educational issues don't make the news (and it is generally only scandals and stories of failure that do) then I rarely get to hear of them any more. Occasionally I do get curious though, and this morning, for reasons best known to myself, I put Assessment for Learning into Google and chose "News" as the search type. After the first 5 pages of search results I was forced to admit that there was simply nothing from any UK site about developments in AfL.

Yet this is the time when pedagogues do their most creative thinking. These are the precious weeks when, freed from the daily grind of Year 9 Geography, teachers plan and share ideas and look to the future. With the new academic year approaching and "Back to School" sections already opening in supermarkets (it's the beginning of August for God's sake! Why do they DO that?) there seems to be nothing to reinvigorate the nation's teaching profession in the crucial business of effective assessment for learning.

I then searched the Department for Education site, and more scarily still there was nothing there either on what I would call AfL. It is as if the phrase has vanished. As if a concept that was utterly central to my thinking for years as a teacher and head has slipped quietly away while my back was turned.

This is maybe not that surprising once I come to think about it. Despite impassioned pleas such as this to Michael Gove I am not aware of him ever having said anything on the subject of Assessment for Learning. Assessment was for him, it is clear, nothing to do with learning at all. Assessment meant testing and nothing else. Testing was there to determine who had succeeded and who failed and what was tested was principally to be knowledge, not skills, and certainly not something as woolly and amorphous as learning. AfL, it is pretty clear, was a product of the Blob, and so to be ignored and marginalised.

Just to be clear on the issue, by assessment for learning I do not just mean the old National Strategy document (which I eventually tracked down in the government's web archive) but a broader way of thinking about education that actually engages with how students learn and how teachers can support and assess that learning. Experienced educationalists know all this stuff of course, but if the Department for Education doesn't then maybe I should clear it up.

Assessment is crucial to effective teaching. There is still a weird belief that, because many teachers are critical of the SATs, the revised GCSEs and A levels and league tables in their current form that they are anti-assessment. This is utter crap. Any teacher with any experience of education in the real world knows that assessment is something without which they simply could not function, because unless you know what students know, understand and can do then how can you possibly decide what to teach and how?

For effective assessment there have to be targets against which performance can be measured. I know the language of targets is anathema to some (because of its ubiquity these days) but actually the setting of targets has always been central to the relationship between teacher and pupil. What is a conversation like, "That's excellent Jasmine. How about putting in a bit of conversation too? Remember what we learned yesterday about speech punctuation," if it is not setting targets for learning?

However there is often insufficient thought given (or no thought at all, in Mr Gove's case) as to the different types of learning targets teachers can set. Personally, I find the following diagram useful in this context:

Learning outcomes are the only part of this diagram Michael Gove thought about. They are things like exam results, thought they can be smaller things too, like producing a piece of software that works, or being able to conduct a conversation in French. 

Barriers to learning are obvious really. If a student isn't in school then they are unlikely to be making much progress and if they mess around in class they will impede their own and others' learning. So removing those barriers is a necessary, but certainly not sufficient, step in achieving learning outcomes. 

Learning behaviour targets are what a lot of teachers spend their time and energy setting students when they have to write reports. They are things like, "Do your homework," "Always bring a pen," or "Work collaboratively with other." These are crucial behaviours of course, and without them students will be very unlikely to reach their desired learning outcomes. However they are no guarantee of getting there. A student who just doesn't understand calculus can dutifully turn up to every lesson on time and properly equipped, every week plugging away at homework they simply don't get and working collaboratively with a group of peers who also do not understand calculus, and if that is all they do they will never make any real progress.

The key to this diagram, and what assessment for learning is all about, is the box in the centre- learning gains targets. If students are to achieve meaningful learning outcomes they need to know what specific things they will have to learn in order to get there. Good teachers knew this before the term AfL was ever coined, and gave students targets like: 

Embed analysis of how writers use language to create effects in your essays 

Learn the past subjunctive tense of some key verbs and practise putting them into sentences from memory. 

Break a complex calculation into simpler steps, choosing and using appropriate and efficient operations and methods. 

Develop your use of a wider range of media and techniques in creating work 

The best teachers also assessed their students' progress against these targets, which is why their students made such significant progress towards the broader learning outcomes targets. The government's Assessment for Learning strategy, whilst cumbersome and bureaucratic, was at least an attempt to embed and validate that approach- to force everyone to recognise that you cannot simply deliver content to students and then test whether they have absorbed it or not (whatever Michael Gove might think).

So if assessment for learning as a concept really has slipped away in the brief time since I was a head then I despair even more as to what is happening in education. And thank my lucky stars yet again that I don't work in schools any more.

My demand for inaction from the world's leaders

The Gaza conflict is the latest area on which the world's spotlight has fallen and the latest conflict concerning which people across the world have demanded action. Quite right too: the impact of the last few weeks' carnage on the Palestinian population, already suffering overpopulation, crippling sanctions and an utter lack of basic freedoms, is unimaginable. What is happening to them is not just unforgivable but incomprehensible. So how can we in our safe, secure neighbourhoods look on as the situation spirals downwards?

The same spotlight fell earlier on the Ukraine and Syria, before that on Libya and Egypt, and before that on Afghanistan and Iraq (it is difficult to remember now, but before the US invasion there was real and pressing concern over the treatment of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Kurds and Marsh Arabs by Saddam Hussein in Iraq). The impulse to act to prevent injustice and suffering is a noble one, and surely if the world's leaders cared about anything beyond their own shores then these are the situations in which they should intervene, aren't they?

In fact this is a relatively recent perception. Not so long ago the only circumstances in which national leaders would intervene in a conflict, let alone seek to use force to influence the behaviour of another regime, was if their own geopolitical interests were directly threatened. No one expected anything else and I am not aware of anyone counselling intervention even when the Khmer Rouge were engaging in their bloody reign of terror. More recently there seemed very little international pressure for intervention in the appalling and genocidal civil war in Rwanda. But we are all internationalists now, it seems. Social media and citizen journalism have brought the world's conflicts into our living rooms and onto our handheld devices and we can no longer stand idly by.

 This is a truly excellent thing and I applaud it heartily. I am firmly of the belief that the trajectory of humanity's development is upwards and this is an excellent example. When the world's people will no longer stand idly by as injustice and brutality is being inflicted on our neighbours we know that we have taken a great step forwards.

However that is not the same as saying that what such situations need is intervention and action from the world's leaders. As I have said, we haven't got much of a history to go on to gauge the efficacy of such interventions, but it doesn't look good so far. Just list the countries in which world leaders took direct action, not primarily because they were under threat themselves but in the name of wider geopolitical interests and/or the welfare of that country's citizens: Bosnia, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Ignore for a moment the indisputable fact that this is hardly a comprehensive list of countries that have suffered from internal conflict and/or brutal regimes in the last 20 years. Simply look at the success rate for such intervention. Hmm. See my point?

Or look at more recent times. Four days ago the closest thing yet to action by world leaders in the Gaza conflict was announced with great fanfare. The US and the UN (specifically John Kerry and Ban Ki Moon), making the most of their undisputed status as world leaders, declared that they had delivered a 72 hour ceasefire that would lead to a lasting peace. A few hours later the killing started up again. I shall probably be proved wrong by the time this post is finished, but my personal belief is that today's much lower-key ceasefire brokered by Egypt has a better chance of sticking. To use my daughter's wonderful analogy  the first was like a pompous and overbearing police officer intervening in a dispute between rival groups of youths; the second like a neighbour saying, "Listen lads. I've had enough of this, right. Keep it down or I'm going to tell your mums. And you KNOW that'll mean big trouble."

The thing is that world leaders, having typically reached their positions of power through an unassailable belief in their own wisdom and forcefulness, tend to overestimate massively their ability to resolve situations through intervention. In fact they are often crap at it, frequently because they simply do not take the time to understand the situations in which they intervene. Leave aside the iniquities of the US/UK invasion of Iraq: it was notable also for its incompetence. Through its policy of De-Baathification of Iraq the Coalition Provisional Authority sowed the seeds of religious conflict in that country and the recent Isis insurgency.

The EU has often been viciously attacked for its sclerotic inability or unwillingness to act decisively and quickly when the situation demands it. On economic issues it has been repeatedly derided for "kicking the can down the road" rather than taking action and on foreign policy issues many have bemoaned the absence of a strong and unifying voice.

The implied comparison is with the US of course. Now there is a world superpower that acts decisively and speaks with one voice. And just look at the results. Unencumbered freedom to act led first to the extraordinary and unsustainable financial bubble started by Reagan (and Thatcher) in the 90s. And although that almost led to the downfall of the world's financial system the response has been not less but more extreme action. Quantitative easing has been and is an incomprehensibly vast gamble, pumping literally trillions of dollars into precisely the financial institutions that almost gambled away the world's prosperity once before.

In foreign affairs terms, the Us' freedom to act decisively and speak with one voice has led to a huge and virtually unquestioned campaign of extra-judicial killings in Pakistan and the Yemen, countries with which the US is not even at war. It has also led to the US wresting control of vast quantities of data away from the citizenry in its huge surveillance programme.

Perhaps EU leaders would have done all these things too, had they had the power and the unified voice behind them, but thankfully they havent. The EU is characterised by compromise, negotiation and fudge, and what that leads to typically is inaction rather than action. And all power to the bureaucrats' elbows, I say, if it prevents EU leaders from acting as decisively (and disastrously) as US leaders have.

Of course I recognise that this argument tends perilously close to the laissez-faire insularity that actually hands control of the world to the world's despots and multinational corporations. We need governments and we need international bodies to help deliver on our growing awareness that the world is interconnected and that no man, and no country, is an island (in the metaphorical sense, anyway). However we kid ourselves if we believe that it will be decisive action by these governments or these international bodies that will resolve the world's conflicts.

So what will? Well, there is no easy answer to that, and each conflict is different. But the key, I firmly believe, is increasing awareness of and political engagement in such situations across the world amongst ordinary people. It is one thing for regimes such as Netanyahu's to "stand firm" against pressure from world leaders; it is another for the Israeli people to ignore the constant and unrelenting flood of Facebook and twitter posts that must be slowly making them realise just how isolated they are becoming in the world over this issue.

So share those FB posts and RT those tweets (the constructive and helpful ones anyway). Recognise the limitations in the power of leaders to change anything much for the better outside their own sphere of influence and understanding but recognise too the immense power of the world's citizenry- you- to influence the beliefs and actions of your neighbours, wherever in the world they live. What world leaders need to do is to use their influence (through sanctions, UN resolutions, expressions of international disapproval) to support that of their populace. What they do not need to do is think they alone can march in and resolve an intractable situation overnight.

And to return to my daughter's analogy, I have seen at first hand which approach is more effective at calming and then resolving a potentially volatile situation between rival youths. The pompous and overbearing policeman will pretty soon have a full-on gang battle on his hands. The canny neighbour may just have a chance of getting the lads to calm it, and even perhaps to begin talking again.

Never such innocence again?

It is the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War and a lot will be said today about sacrifice and nobility and loss of innocence. The 1914-18 War stands as a powerful symbol, it seems, of a better time, when the world wasn't as messed up and confused and people knew what they believed in and were decent and true. Phillip Larkin, that most curmudgeonly and un-nostalgic of poets speaks for us all it seems when he writes, in MCMXIV, of "never such innocence again."

Only that's all bollocks of course, and Larkin knew it. In fact the 1914-18 war, as programmes like Radio 4's 1914: Day by Day have made clear, was the result of tangled, messy diplomacy going horribly and pointlessly wrong. The lead-up to it makes the current international wranglings over Ukraine and even Gaza look purposeful and measured. And not all soldiers signed up in a spirit of selfless nobility. There was xenophobic jingoism too, and a pathetic naivety that saw War as something like a grand rugby game. And then there was the appalling social pressures of the white feather movement and the shameful treatment of conscientious objectors. During the war soldiers were shot for displaying PTSD and on the first day of the Somme officers ignored spotters' revelations that the barbed wire was still undamaged and ordered their soldiers to walk, not run, into the German machine gun fire. Never such innocence again.

And yet. Still some symbols have survived from the 1914-18 War that speak to us of nobility and sacrifice, and have us bow our heads in solemn remembrance of a better time. I would like to look at two of them: the two minute silence at 11 am on the 11th of November, and the battlefield war graves of Northern France and Belgium.

The two minute silence has always moved me. As a head teacher I always insisted on it and was impressed every year by the seriousness with which students took it. Communal silence is always powerful- it is the core strength of Quaker worship- and the connotations of remembrance and loss that come with the 11/11 silence speak to everyone. We forget that of course the silence is not observed in Germany, because it doesn't feel like a celebration of victory. There are no patriotic anthems or waving flags. The visual symbol is the blood-red poppy and we stand with heads bowed.

But every year one of the central thoughts in my mind as I stand in silence is that of how the silence comes to be at 11 am at all. The armistice was actually agreed in the early hours of that Monday morning, the 11th of November 1918, but at some point someone must have noticed the powerful symbolism of the date. So the decision was taken for the ceasefire to take place not immediately, but at the 11th hour. And the morning of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 saw fierce fighting and several thousand casualties. Part of the issue was that newly-arrived reinforcements, who had yet to see any action in the war, wanted to see some "fun" before it was too late. There is an article on the American angle to this here but the principle is a more general one: lives were pointlessly cut short in an unnecessary few hours of fighting that morning, just so that we could experience the powerful symbolism of the sonorous phrase, "The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month."

Pointless loss of life at any time anywhere is shocking and unforgivable. I am as appalled as anyone by the shooting down of MH17 or by the shelling of UN schools in Gaza. Yet there is a particularly vicious pointlessness for me in the loss of life on that morning nearly 100 years ago. There may be a lot of crap going on in the world right now, but for me none of it surpasses the slaughter of young men simply in pursuit of a poignant symbol for the generations to come.

For anyone who has not visited them the first world war cemeteries of the Western Front are deeply moving places, rich in symbolism. The simple Portland stone headstones stand in silent serried ranks, tucked away in the French and Belgian countryside, mute reminders of the countless thousands who lost their lives there. All follow a similar simple pattern, with a cross near the centre and, at the entrance, a large Portland stone block inscribed with the words "Their Name Liveth Forevermore." Most headstones have a name and a regimental badge, and sometimes a short phrase added at the request of friends or relatives. The most popular is "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." Many are simply inscribed "To a Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God," because of course many corpses remained unidentified, sometimes bundled into shell holes during brief breaks in the fighting.

They are beautiful, serene and noble places and they cannot help but make you think higher thoughts, about sacrifice and heroism and loss. There is little concession to the the large numbers of non-Christian dead, many from Britain's colonies, but Christian or not, even the cross makes for a solemn symbol of suffering and loss, and the quotation from Ecclesiasticus (the whole verse is, "Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.") surely resonates with everyone.

Yet there is one cemetery in Northern France that my late wife and I visited that brings these symbols into focus in a new and disturbing way. I cannot now track it down, but it is an appallingly moving place. On the face of it it is a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery like any other. It is placed on a low hill, overlooking the Somme valley and at the rear is one of those long walls inscribed with the names of the missing whose bodies were never found. It has the cross and the Portland stone block at the entrance, and the row upon row of silent headstones.

What marks this cemetery out as different though was not revealed until we noticed, on the wall of names at the rear, a small sign that said that this monument had received damage during fierce fighting in the 1939-45 war. There was a tower at the centre of the wall, and all around the small window near the top were the scars of heavy machine-gun rounds. Suddenly I pictured a sniper crouching at that window, firing at soldiers who fought their way through the cemetery. And indeed on closer inspection we found that many of the headstones were chipped and scarred from sniper or machine-gun rounds. Attacking soldiers in the Second World War had used them for cover of course. Why not?

Yet the most potent symbol was one that I had probably seen before but not noticed. Because some of the damage had been carefully repaired, leaving no more than its ghost in the stone, but once you knew what to look for it was obvious. And there, right in the middle of the word "Evermore" on the Portland stone block was the scar of some substantial explosion. A mortar bomb maybe, fired by troops attacking up the hill, or a shell from a tank.

There is a prevailing sense of doom in the air at the moment, and a sense of lessons unlearned from the past and history repeating itself in the devastation of Gaza. Yet what today's commemoration of the outbreak of World War I reminds me is that, to quote Ecclesiastes this time, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." And maybe even it shows me that as a species we have progressed rather than declined. Because however awful current affairs may be there is nothing happening today that is as appallingly, criminally wasteful of young lives as what lies behind precisely those noble symbols of the First World War that we remember with such reverence.

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.