Schools in London “50 times better” than 1980s

Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted chief and former head of Mossbourne academy school (pictured), has given an important interview to Christopher Cook of the Financial Times. What shone through was his impatience with resistance to change, often framed, implicitly or explicitly, in terms of wanting to return to a better yesterday. The best bits:

I’ve been a London teacher all my life. It wasn’t a good place to be in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s; now it’s one of the top performing parts of the country through London Challenge. Same happened in Manchester. So, why can’t we do that in these areas? …

One of the advantages I have is that I’m quite old. In fact, I’m very old. And I’ve been around a long time in the education system and seen a wide variety of schools, and the reason I say that is because I remember what it was like in the ’70s and ’80s in London, in places like Hackney and Peckham  and so on, and it was a lot, lot worse. Fifty times worse. Whereas now it’s a lot better. And it’s a lot better because we’ve got better people coming into teaching; we’ve got better leadership in our schools. More demands are being made on the school system, and it’s now a top political priority in the way that it wasn’t 30 years ago. And that’s been enormously helpful…

I’ve been a teacher and a head for most of my life. I know what good teaching looks like and I know what good leadership looks like. And there’s nothing better than being a good teacher in a good school. And that’s what I want, through the changes we’re making, all teachers to work in good schools. If they work in good schools then they’ll stay in teaching. I think part of the problem is that you’ve got a lot of good people coming in. Are they going to stay there? And they won’t stay there if they’re working in poor schools. That’s the issue.

CC: There are lot of people who are convinced that if only we could go back 20 years or 30 years, you know – what have we lost?

MW: Well, we haven’t lost much if you go back 30 years. And this is only because I remember how bad things were, when huge swathes, it was an unaccountable system. I started teaching in the late ’60s and into the ’70s and ’80s, and became a head in ’85, we failed generations of young people because of an unaccountable system that schools could get away with blue murder. Hackney Downs [which was replaced by Mossbourne] was a typical example of a school that had declined, year after year after year. And people knew it was declining, but nothing much was done about it until it reached the point when it became headline news and was called the worst school in Britain because Ofsted wasn’t around, because we didn’t have league tables, because we didn’t have the publication of results, etc. We don’t want to go back to those days. We’ve moved on since then.

I’ve come into this job at a time when we had moved on it was the best system. The question we’ve got to ask ourselves now, well, two big questions, really, are we world class? And if we’re going to compete with the Chinas of this world, and Shanghai, which is two years ahead of us in maths, etc.

CC: So you think we’ve made progress.

MW: We’ve made huge progress, but are we world class?  We’re certainly not world class in terms of closing the attainment gap between the massive number of kids who come from disadvantaged homes and we’ve got to do that.

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• http://twitter.com/sufc21 SUFC

  Hope he is not “Wiggy” Wilshaw who was in Peckham, 1975

• porkfright

  I too know what good teaching looks like and I know what good leadership looks like. I have seen a lot of good teachers who got out in disgust and even more school leaders who couldn’t organise a two-person punch up in an extensive dockside pub. Both, however, exceed in competence and efficiency the complete waste of time, space and money which is known as Ofsted.

• porkfright

  Yes-that is what the world needs. More Control Systems.

• Tim

  I am amazed that a former teacher can so imperiously dismiss the huge efforts made by teachers throughout the country during the 70s, 80s and 90s.It is interesting how his view of teaching at the time touches on his experiences in inner-city London. You know, there is a world outside of London, I suppose? In that world, I was fortunate to work with scores of dedicated professionals who had to grapple with the introduction of comprehensives, the rapid and ill-prepared introduction of GCSEs and the farcically bureaucratic and unwieldy National Curriculum introduced by the ever unctuous Ken Baker spurred on, of course, by the Tory mistrust of teachers not to teach the children according to Tory dogma. How ironic that another Tory Education minister is now promoting so-called “free schools” ! Make up your minds for God’s sake! And here we have an Ofsted inspector lecturing the poor saps who put the kids first and stayed in the classroom instead of moving over to the personally lucrative field of School Inspections. You have done those teachers a disservice,Sir, by wild generalisations and offering a real slur which they do not deserve.

• http://twitter.com/sufc21 SUFC

  The slum schools of any inner city area would be the same. I knew Wilshaw when he became “Housemaster” at one of the most notorious schools in London in 1975. There was no pretence of teaching merely unspeakable suffering. Racism, hooliganism and a thin veneer of Roman Catholic hypocrisy.

• porkfright

  Yes-in the Maoist perpetual revolution which is modern state education the history of what went before is being denegrated as that history is rewritten.