Once again, I was brutally overlooked in the New Year’s Honours list. 

It came as a savage blow, not helped by the fact that this latest crushing morale-sapper followed so soon after a similar snub, when Tes revealed its annual list of the “top 10 most influential people in education”. 

Admittedly, there was never a chance of my featuring in that list either, but the pain felt all the more acute this year given that even Kim Kardashian West made it into the panel’s chosen top 10.

Kim may have once poetically tweeted that “people only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade” but, quite frankly, what has she got that I haven’t got? Frankly, I’ve worked my butt off this year to move the world of education forward. What has she done?

‘Criminal injustice’

I’m obviously not bitter but just try to guess whether it was Kim or I, for instance, who had the vision this year to analyse secondary schools’ exam results and reveal, exclusively in Tes, that bearded headteachers tend to be hopeless? You’re right. It wasn’t her who made this ground-breaking, beard-busting discovery. 

So maybe it was Kim who bravely stuck head above parapet to speak out in favour of reviving staff Friday lunchtimes down the pub? I think not.  

So surely it must have been KKW who came up with new uses for the lanyard, including staff “Lanyard Quoits” where colleagues’ necks are the target hobs. Or maybe she had the idea of hanging the lanyard ID behind our back whenever we wish to work without interruption. Team-room productivity must have surged after this.   

No, the lanyard project wasn’t hers either. All that Kardashian West has done to win her a place in that blessed Tes top 10 is, supposedly, to light a beacon for lifelong learning after signing up for an apprenticeship at a law firm. Criminal Justice? Criminal injustice, more like. 

A fairer system

As for the New Year’s Honours list, many (genuinely) amazing people in education are rightly recognised, but  we never have any sense that the selection system is at all fair.   When I read about the people honoured my mind soon begins to think about the many immense colleagues who are equally or even more deserving of such national acclaim. 

To make the “nominations” system fairer perhaps every school and college in the realm should be obliged to hold a staff vote each summer, leading to the putting forward for an honour of up to three colleagues, depending on the institution’s size. This way, we could at least sense that everyone has a fairer chance, if they wish to be considered. 

More importantly, such an annual procedure would also mean that we would automatically develop a way of marking our huge appreciation of especially wonderful colleagues. Some kind of annual award could be presented internally, whether our people are then royally honoured or not. 

What would the criteria be? Classroom joy, all-round kindness and supportiveness, cakes, trips - we surely all know the sort of people I mean.  

The alternative is for us to continue to wait until people leave, retire or die before we ever get round to honouring the genuine heroes found throughout the school system.

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire