Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: The Triumph of the Bureaucratic Mind
29 January 2015
One day in the autumn of 1970 I was sitting with thirty of my eleven year old pupils on the shore of Llyn Cau under Cader Idris in North Wales. The weather had been reasonable when we had started our walk up the mountain, but as we climbed the cloud descended and the rain set in. Our plan had been to walk to the summit, but it was obvious, sitting by the lake, that some of the children were pretty cold and that morale was collapsing.
So, we messed about by the lake for a while, seeing who could skim one of the flat stones the furthest. I told them a story about the dragon that lived in the lake and watched their shivers increase. We then retraced our steps down to the coach and drove to Barmouth where they potted about on the beach and purchased ice creams to warm them up.
In other words, common sense prevailed. There were no risk assessments in those days. Teachers were expected to weigh up any potential dangers and to respond appropriately. Nowadays, nobody is allowed to go anywhere until umpteen forms have been filled in and every possible contingency analysed to death. You want your children to toast a marshmallow or two over a campfire? No way, unless the battery of forms has been completed in advance.
It is the same with other aspects of education. Take school inspection. Now inspectors, if they ever actually visit a classroom, have a battery of criteria to inform their judgements. Fair enough you might think in that teachers need to know what inspectors are looking for, but when the assessment turns into an exercise in compliance, the teacher having to demonstrate their ability to deliver each and every one of the behaviours their inspectors deem to be desirable, then the joy and creativity of teaching are inevitably squashed.
Lessons, for example, these days must have a clearly demarcated beginning, middle and end. It is right that there should be a structure and a momentum to any lesson, but when a teacher is marked down because the structure is supposedly not sufficiently clear, then we all have a problem.
It is the same with appraisal within schools. The appraiser enters the classroom, his head stuffed with a detailed agenda against which the teacher is expected to deliver. Not surprisingly, many teachers feel that what ought to be an exercise designed to promote a professional dialogue has become one more requirement to tick the relevant boxes.
We like to believe that as the years roll by things get better. I am not so sure. An era when professionals were expected to act professionally and common sense was to be trusted seems to me to be a better bet than one where the requirements of the paperwork trump all.
If I were writing a history of education, the chapter covering the last couple of decades would be called “The Triumph of the Bureaucratic Mind”.
Professor Sir Chris Woodhead was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 until 2000. He is author of Class Wars and A Desolation of Learning. His areas of expertise are education and leadership, accountability and the drive to raise standards; his research interest currently is the involvement of the private sector in raising educational standards. He retired at the end of 2013 from the chairmanship of Cognita, the international schools company he established in 2004.