A longstanding core principle of the Headteachers’ Roundtable (HTRT) is that the teaching profession should be centrally involved in developing future education policy.
School leaders are trusted and experienced professionals who understand how curriculum and policy can be applied on the ground and in community contexts.
They regularly manage change and they demonstrated throughout the pandemic that they can provide positive and powerful leadership under the most challenging of circumstances.
It would surely be an own goal to fail to involve your most valued players when developing strategy and policy.
Yet this is where we find ourselves in 2023: we are subjected to the pipe dreams and whimsies of our politicians, who, despite advocating domain expertise in the development of sector leaders, seem at times to base decision-making on their own subjective experiences of schools.
Schools hit by education policy changes
Autumn 2023 has been full of unpleasant surprises.
A whiplash change of policy on how to manage the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in the school estate has resulted in school closures. Headteachers were subjected to this lightning change just 48 hours before the return to school after the summer holidays. Working with the profession this was not.
Just weeks later, while some RAAC-riddled schools were still constructing their new temporary accommodation, the prime minister announced another out-of-the-blue change of policy direction: the Advanced British Standard, which involves compulsory study of maths and English at Advanced level and slightly reduced teaching time for three major specialist A-level subjects or vocational subjects.
Did this announcement follow the detailed and strategic work of sector-representative policy groups? The NEU teaching union, the Association of School and College Leaders and the Confederation of School Trusts claim no knowledge of it, and HTRT was certainly not used as a sounding board as we have been in the past.
Whether we approve of the change or not, there is a clear matter of respect and principle here. If educationalists are not involved in developing education policy, then curriculum and pedagogy become politically weaponised and divorced from evidence-informed practice.
As such, they will be less effective and represent a failure to secure best use of scarce public funds. With a general election looming now is the time for any prospective government to start listening to our school leaders.
Time to engage
With this in mind and with optimism that political parties will want to listen to and heed the expertise of the sectors they want to govern, the Headteachers’ Roundtable is setting out to capture the views of heads and CEOs from every sector around the country.
We want to find out what their prioritises for change are in the first 100 days of government, in the first two years, in five years and then for the next decade.
To do this we will be holding listening sessions at regional headteacher conferences across England over the next few months with a view to distilling ideas about funding, curriculum, accountability, services around the child and teacher recruitment and retention into an education manifesto - a manifesto from the profession, by the profession and for the children.
HTRT members will lead discussions at regional heads’ meetings and associations in November and December. If you can’t attend in person but want to make your voice heard, visit our website and fill in a short form.
If enough of us make clear what we need from any future government, we can ensure that any changes made to education are done so with our input and expertise, rather than handed down from on high.
Caroline Derbyshire is chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable
