Never have I experienced tougher times. Money is unbelievably tight and colleagues are leaving the profession in droves (never the ones you want to leave, mind). You know things have got bad when schools minister Nick Gibb says we shouldn’t have to stump up for pencils and paper ourselves. But where is our leading lady in all of this, the Protector of the Profession, our hero of the piece?  

You really have to wonder what Justine Greening stands for. You can only say “I love teachers” so many times before people start to tire and ask “But what else?” OK, there have been attempts to re-energise social mobility. But those of us who have been around a while see this for what it is: just a lacklustre re-tread of many initiatives under Labour and Every Child Matters (remember that?).

So with mutterings of an imminent reshuffle getting louder, Greening and her minions must be becoming more than a little twitchy. And if they’re not, they certainly should be.

Never did I think I would say that I missed the Gove days. But at least you knew where you stood. It was a radical agenda that got everyone talking about education. But those days are gone.

There is no clear direction. What we have instead is a messy hotch-potch of policymaking. The only clear theme of the secretary of state’s time at the tiller that emerges is contradiction.

Contradictions from government

And you see it everywhere. The introduction of regional schools commissioners was supposed to herald a new era of decentralisation, about regional decision-making and subsidiarity. But everything today smacks of recentralisation - even teacher training and regulation. Who would have thought that after the bonfire of the quangos under Gove, just a few years later we’d have a “Teaching Regulation Agency” under a Tory government?

The curriculum provides more rich pickings. The greatest freedom ever to be afforded to academies was on the curriculum. If we want to start GCSEs in Year 9 or teach only BTEC at sixth form then we can. If we want our Year 7s to immerse themselves in the full text of Hamlet or to have a cross-curricular project on community, we can do that. Or can we?

Again, the Department of Education is on manoeuvres to curtail this freedom, and instead ministers celebrate a more prescribed view of the world, one in which the only curriculum is a “knowledge curriculum” (even if those who bang this particular drum struggle to delineate precisely what they mean); a world in which phonics - and quite specifically a particular type of phonics - is taught; and a world in which Singaporean maths becomes the norm.

Colleagues running multi-academy trusts feel the same contradictory forces at play. Having pursued a hell-for-leather strategy where they were encouraged to forge forward and scoop up as many schools as possible, they are now being punished for having moved too quickly. Those of us who resisted such pressures, although now a wee bit smug, do feel for our more voracious peers (well, some of them anyway).

And, of course, there are free schools. Toby Young’s head must be spinning on its axis with the new “powers” being given to local authorities to commission new free schools. Once demonised by Tory command, councils are now no longer out in the dark. They are back in the driving seat with new SEN schools. And maybe not just SEN or free schools - with a failed academy effectively rebrokered to a council down in the Isle of Wight just recently, perhaps there is more of this to come.

Politicians can’t help thinking about legacy - it’s part and parcel of their weird DNA. With January approaching and a reshuffle imminent, the secretary of state would do well to think on about hers, if she doesn’t want to be remembered in education as Janus Greening. It’s time for a new direction - in fact, any direction is better than this jumble of contradictions.  

The author is the CEO of a multi-academy trust somewhere in England

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