If you were Secretary of State for Education, what would you do in your first day in office? Here, ASCL members have their say...

SOS

Listen and support people

I would ask two questions of myself:

1. If my child were at school, what would I want their experience to be like? and
2. If my child were a teacher, what would I want their experience to be like?

I would then work with teachers and parents to see if the sentiments are shared, and work towards their realisation. This would involve visiting schools, listening to staff, students and parents, listening to unions and research organisations, setting up a grass roots advisory panel and then listening some more. This may result in abandoning systems that have been put in place to support political aims, in favour of those that support people. Then, at 9:30am...

Michael Phillips
Assistant Headteacher in Hertfordshire

What do they know?

I’d start by working out what my department and parliamentary colleagues knew about education.

I would survey MPs and those involved in education policy and practice to find out their (positive and negative) school experience, what they actually knew about different types of education and to discover what lack of knowledge might need to be addressed, and what prejudices might exist. The results would be publicised and form the basis for strategic improvement of the department’s expertise.

The other thing I would do is relentlessly promote the role of teachers and teaching. I would ask all MPs to contribute a story about their favourite teacher who had had a positive influence on their lives, and I would publicise those answers nationwide, contacting the teachers concerned where possible.

This would kickstart an aspirational campaign about ‘who is teaching our future MPs?’

Day two: teachers’ pay...

Dr Marcella McCarthy
Deputy Headteacher, Designated Safeguarding Lead, Royal Latin School

Leave it to the experts

I would seek to do something on my first day in office as dramatic and as profound in its long-term consequences as overseen by a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. A few days after Labour’s election victory in 1997, Gordon Brown, the new Chancellor, unexpectedly announced that the Bank of England, and not politicians, would now have control over interest rates in our country. Pretty much all analysts judge this to have been profoundly positive in its effects.

As Secretary of State for Education, I would immediately seek to hand over oversight of key agreed areas of education policy (approaches to pedagogy, curriculum design, professional development pathways and others) from politicians to the experts, namely the teaching profession.

This would obviously include the Chartered College of Teaching, the teachers’ professional body in our country. I believe that posterity would judge this to have the same deeply positive impact on our society as Gordon Brown’s bold move is now acknowledged to have had.

Stephen Munday
President, Chartered College of Teaching and Chief Executive, The Cam Academy Trust

Starting points

If I were Secretary of State for Education (and I have given this prospect considerable thought), I would do the following things on the first day:

1. Stop performance measures from being a zero-sum game. Judging the success of one school against the relative failure of others is not a good enough measure for improving standards, as, by the nature of their design, it is impossible.
2. Have a centralised exam board that is a not-forprofit organisation.
3. Ensure that I have a diverse and experienced team of advisers who understand what excellent education is across the range of demographics.
4. Develop a curriculum that enables students to know stuff and be able to do stuff (really emphasise knowledge and the development of skills).
5. Move Key Stage 2 SATs to the September of Year 7 and use them as a ‘temperature check’ not a judgement of primary schools’ effectiveness.
6. Bring in a national reading test at the start of Key Stage 4.
7. Build an education system that promotes schools working collaboratively and not competing against one another.

That’s probably enough for the first day; in fact, some of that might need to be done on day two. However, this would definitely all be sorted out by the end of the first week...

Nicola Mooney
Assistant Headteacher, The Hereford Academy

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