Geoff Barton welcomes members to a new academic year and says over the next 12 months, ASCL will continue to evolve into a trade union fit for the 21st century, setting the education agenda, and representing and listening to the views of members across the UK.

Strength in numbers

Welcome to the first edition of Leader as a new academic year gets underway. Over the past year, we’ve seen many new school and college leaders join ASCL, so if this is your first edition of our magazine – a warm welcome. I hope you find much here to inform, provoke and inspire you.

As you know, ASCL is a professional association and a trade union. We exist on behalf of members to represent you, to lobby, to provide professional development and, most importantly, to support you if you find yourself in difficulty.

Connecting with you

We’ve been interested in thinking what it means to be a trade union in the 21st century, when so much of the social context has changed and when digital technology is transforming lives.

So, in the coming year you’ll notice how as an Association we are updating what we do and how we do it. You’ll find our new website is designed to be easier to navigate, to make it quicker to find the resources you need, to match content to your role and needs. It will be followed in a few weeks’ time by a new app – an example of our aim to ‘put ASCL in your pocket’.

The app isn’t merely a diluted version of the website. It has been designed from scratch to give you immediate information to breaking education news and the range of resources you need from us. It will be launched as we begin this year’s round of our popular Regional Information Conferences (RICs).

Keeping you informed

Many of you see the RICs as a key feature of the academic year – an opportunity to hear from our policy specialists about what’s changing in the education landscape and what you need to know. This year we’re refreshing the format, so that you’ll also get to hear from fellow leaders reporting back on how national policy shifts have affected them. For example, with significant changes to inspection in England, you’ll hear from some of the first heads and deputies who experience the new Ofsted framework and they’ll provide insights as to how the new inspection regime plays out on the ground.

We’ll also talk more about the contractual issues affecting some of our members – the lessons we can learn from our Hotline Team, who spend every day of the year supporting members who find themselves in difficulty. We believe we are uniquely placed to do all we can to keep you informed and aware of the areas of potential vulnerability.

ASCL UK

We’re also aware of ASCL’s unique position in representing members in different parts of the UK and indeed those of you working in leadership in education in other parts of the world. We know that, last year, members in the Isle of Man and Guernsey needed us to take up their cause in the wake of significant proposed changes to their conditions of service. We’ve seen how the big qualifications changes in Wales and Scotland are playing out. We’ve been involved in campaigning for more equitable funding in Northern Ireland.

This emphasis on learning from members in different parts of the UK will start to show up more in Leader as we highlight some of the key issues affecting different parts of the UK, explore the changes taking place and draw out some of the main threads that each of us – wherever we are based – can learn from.

As the reforms to pretty much every aspect of education in Wales gather momentum, we are delighted to welcome Eithne Hughes to the role of Director of ASCL Cymru and to introduce a new RIC for Welsh members, in addition to our annual Cymru conference.

Leading the debate

Meanwhile, it is almost five years since ASCL developed its Blueprint for a Self-Improving System. As a fledgling education system developed from the reforms of the Michael Gove era, we set out then what education might look like and what would help to move a good education system to a world-class one.

Since then, much has changed, and during the coming year we will be talking to members, looking back at the original blueprint and building a vision around what the next phase of an emerging system – moving from fragmentation to coherence – might look like.

In all of this, you’ll see ASCL setting rather than merely reacting to the education agenda. A good example is what you see on the front of this edition: our campaigning work on behalf of the Forgotten Third. As the Chair of the English Commission, Roy Blatchford, points out, no other high-performing jurisdiction would consider it right that after 12 years of being taught by early years, primary and secondary teachers, around 30% of 16 year-olds receive a qualification that isn’t judged as a ‘standard’ or ‘good’ pass in their national language. We have to do something about this, providing the next generation with the dignity of a recognised qualification.

Over the coming year at ASCL Council, at our RICs and at our Annual Conference, we’ll do some bigger thinking about what inspection might look like in the future, how inclusive accountability measures might reward collaboration over competition and how technology might in the future, transform the nature of the teaching profession.

All of which is a way of saying that our core business never changes: your calls to Hotline, your conversations with our field officers, the advice you receive from our dedicated team of lawyers. That’s what we will continue to do, day in and day out.

But we’re also conscious that in a fractured time, we have an opportunity to paint a picture of education as it could be – properly resourced, optimistic, less mechanistically obsessed with measures and metrics.

And because we’re not a think tank but a membership organisation, all of these ideas will be developed through our conversations with you, learning from your different experiences in different roles across the UK and making the case for a teaching profession that regains its professional pride, its sense of self-confidence and its essential role in preparing the next generation to take their place as global citizens. 

‘…we have an opportunity to paint a picture of education as it could be – properly resourced, optimistic, less mechanistically obsessed with measures and metrics.’

Geoff Barton
ASCL General Secretary 
@RealGeoffBarton

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