Mark Lehain is no stranger to arguing about the education system both on and offline. He  admits he quite enjoys being cast in the role as a player in “a shadowy neo-liberal conspiracy”.

As the director of Parents and Teachers for Excellence he has spent the past two years advocating a knowledge-rich curriculum and a traditional approach to behaviour.

Before that he was a leading voice in the free school movement as one of its first founding heads.

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And, as someone at the forefront of what is at times a fierce debate about what and how we teach, he believes the education sector has something the rest of the country can learn from - how to disagree well.

“I think generally the quality of conversation in education is good. Sometimes things can get heated but I think the good thing about education is that everyone wants to make things better and when we disagree it is about how we do that.”

Lehain was one of the first free school heads at Bedford Free School, which opened in 2012, and more recently led the New Schools Network - which promotes the free school movement - before heading the PTE campaign for the past two years.

“The reason I am happy to debate with people is that I have changed my mind over so much stuff,” he says. “I mean completely. I have completely changed my views on what we should teach since about 2014.”

Buying into fads 

While he is now a fully signed up advocate of a knowledge-rich curriculum, he says this wasn’t always the case.

“I have always been a traditionalist in terms of behaviour but in terms of the curriculum there was no 2000s fad that I didn’t buy into.

“Group work, flipped learning, discovery learning. In the business case for Bedford Free School we were going to do Google time.

“In the early days of Google they had this thing where their staff could spend 20 per cent of their time on any project they wanted . 

“Google loved it because that is how people came up with Gmail...so I thought, ‘Yes, 20 per cent of the timetable should be pupil driven project based learning.’”

But all this was to  change when Nick Gibb came to town.

So much of the story, Lehain recalls, today seems somewhat bizarre.

He tells how back in 2014  he took the Conservative politician - who was visiting Bedford Free School during a brief time in which he wasn’t the schools minister - and was shown, among other things, a geography lesson in which pupils rapped about fairtrade coffee.

“It was the least Nick Gibb thing ever,” Lehain admits.

“Afterwards in the corridor he put his hand on my elbow and said, ‘Mark, that was really nice but if I had asked them what the capital of Sudan was could they have told me?’

“It wasn’t a damascene conversion but it got me thinking and I thought about the question on two levels.

“I didn’t know if they knew what the capital of Sudan was and I didn’t know whether they were meant to know what the capital of Sudan was.”

Nick Gibb’s ‘gateway drug’

Lehain said he came to realise that his school was focused on the process of what pupils were doing rather than curriculum content and what they were learning.

“I realise now Nick was luring me into the knowledge thing. It was like a gateway drug, the next thing you know I am reading a bit of ED Hirsch, people are dealing me Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodolou. It sent me on a journey.”

But now Lehain is set to leave both his role at PTE and the education sector altogether for the first time since he became a maths teacher back in 2003.

He says his next move will be working on a way of helping people to have better conversations, debates and disagreements, and he believes education can show the way.

Disagreement in education, he says, is OK.

“The starting point is: ‘What is the purpose of education?’. And because we have different views on that, which are informed by our values and beliefs, then we are going to have different views about what we should teach and how we should teach it.

“I think it is inevitable and I don’t think we should shy away from disagreeing but can we disagree nicely. And can we disagree without accusing the people we are disagreeing with of either being evil or stupid because they are not.”

However, some debates in education are more difficult than others.

Behaviour and exclusions for example are online discussions which don’t always end with people disagreeing nicely.

Lehain is a little more cautious when asked about this and about the recent controversies on off-rolling.

Interestingly, he links the question to the creation of Progress 8 and the discussion about unintended consequences.

“The advantage of the Progress 8 score is that every kid counts. But are there some schools who as a result of that have done things they shouldn’t have done? 

“I am really wary of jumping on the off-rolling bandwagon because while there may be some stuff there a lot of it is hearsay and even now when we have got a definition which Ofsted have come up with and are inspecting in schools I still think it is very difficult to prove.”

Warm strict

On behaviour, Lehain speaks much more enthusiastically about schools that take “a warm-strict approach”.

“I love the warm-strict stuff because it is inclusive,” he says. “If you are warm as well as strict those kids who might have wobbled and gone off the rails a bit generally don’t. Your kids who are vulnerable or who have special educational needs tend to benefit from a calm, safe, orderly environment.

“And then when you have a lovely warm, calm and strict environment you can spot the kids who might have slipped under the radar. If every school was doing that they would all be lifted by that approach.”

He thinks over time the results of this work will win the argument “unless”, he says, “bad ideas pushed largely by people who have never run schools and never would run schools win the ear of future governments”.

And that is Lehain’s biggest worry. While he argues that agreeable disagreements can happen within education, when he turns to Labour’s ideas he suggests policy is being driven by people outside of the sector.

“I think we have got to the point where curriculum has got better, the exam system is more robust and Ofsted is in a better place, but there is no doubt at all that if there was change in government we will lose all those gains. We won’t just go back 10 years, they will take us back to the 1970s. 

“I was at Dixons Academies conference in Bradford last week. That success story would never have happened given the type of policies they want to bring in. Labour would neuter the Nick Wellers, the Rachel de Souzas, the Dan Moynihans and Martyn Olivers. They do not trust the bulk of the profession.

“It’s not that I don’t like the team around Angela Rayner. I think they have got some great people there. But let’s be clear they are not the ones writing policy for the Labour Party. It is being written by the hard left around the leader.” 

Lehain is leaving education at a time when the free school policy appears to once again in the ascendency. Boris Johnson has committed to opening more and there is a sense of wanting to get back to the original vision of free schools.

“One of the things I am most proud of is that when I was helping to run New Schools Network that we managed to help reignite the passion of the politicians for the policy.”

Lehain’s work has given him a high profile on social media and ”#edutwitter”. He says he enjoys being teased about being part of a “shadowy neo-liberal conspiracy” or the Tes photograph in which he is seen posing in a PE cupboard for a profile interview.

“My friends have teased me so much about doing a ‘blue steel’ look in that photo but what nobody realises is that there [were] some kids over the photographer’s shoulder messing around. That is what I was looking at.”

Hitting the North

But he is keen to stress that social media is not real life and is only a small part of his work at PTE. He says the majority of the job is learning about and sharing what schools are doing well. To that end the group is now setting up regional hubs to allow schools to learn from one another.

He tells Tes that getting out of London and the South East to meet school leaders across the country has shown him that some of the most exciting things happening in the system are taking place further afield.

“You can’t beat getting into a school, speaking to the kids and meeting the teachers and having that one-to-one or eye-to-eye contact with someone about how they have done stuff. So I have made the point of visiting schools to share stuff or just going to schools to see what they do and I absolutely love it.

“That is why I was in Pontefract, I was in Bradford for the Dixons conference last week, a few weeks before that I was in Lincolnshire.

“As soon as you step out of the, let’s call it the South East bubble, you see the rest of the country is not like that, and amazing things are going out and every area is stepping up to their challenges the way that works for them.

“Whether you are looking at coastal places like Folkestone or Great Yarmouth or what is going on in Blackpool or whether you are looking at deeply rural areas where kids have to travel miles to school there is really great stuff going on out there.”

And although Lehain is now preparing to work outside the education sector he describes being in a school as his “comfort zone” and he is already setting his sights on returning one day - as a teacher.

“My long term game plan is definitely to go back into schools again as a teacher. I would have to go back and train again to refresh my practice.  I am quite clear about that. Reading Craig Barton’s How I Wish I’d Taught Maths blew my mind. But yes I definitely want to teach again one day. It’s in my blood.”