Julian Grenier recently found himself in the early education spotlight when he authored the new version of the Department for Education’s Development Matters guidance to accompany the revised Early Years Foundation Stage framework.

The advocate for play-based early years education has worked in primary, special and nursery schools. He has also sat on two committees for the department: the Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum, and the Nutbrown Review of Early Education and Childcare Qualifications. He currently heads Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre in Newham, East London, and co-leads the East London Research School.

So, what did Grenier have to say when faced with Tes’ 10 questions, designed to draw back the curtain on the person behind the profession?

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

I have got that book, that Dr Seuss book, My Book About Me, where, as a child, you fill in information all about yourself. And I remember absolutely loving that as a seven-year-old because I’d never had a published book that you could write in. One of the questions in there was “who is your favourite teacher?” - and I put Mrs Gape.

She must have been my teacher at that age and, in my memory, the reason she was my favourite teacher was because we were all given the opportunity to make a place mat. I did a chicken. Not sure why, really, but I did. And I remember just absolutely loving the idea that this drawing that I did as a seven-year-old then got turned into something permanent. It’s one of my best school memories.

2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?

My experiences of going to private school have really made me very motivated as a teacher in the state sector to … do everything I can to make sure that children get the sort of opportunities that I got.

For example, as a teenager, theatre trips to the West End were an incredibly memorable time of my education and a very joyous experience with a very gifted English teacher, Mr Tyrrell.

But I’m not at all starry-eyed about the schooling I had - I mean, I was pretty unhappy for most of my time at school. And I’m too much of a libertarian to think that we should ban private education, but I’m certainly very strongly committed to state education and to comprehensive schooling.

3. Why do you work in education?

At university, I was involved in what was then called the volunteer reading scheme, which puts reading volunteers into primary schools. I worked in a primary school on the edge of Oxford in really quite a disadvantaged area and realised both how tough it was for those kids but also how much I enjoyed spending time with them and reading with them, and encouraging them and seeing the progress they made.

And I think there was one day when I just suddenly thought, “this is actually what I really like doing and this is what gives me a sense of personal fulfilment: I love doing this, I love being with kids”. So, then I enrolled to do a PGCE and things kind of flowed on from there.

4. What are you proudest of in your career and what do you regret?

What I’m proudest of is Sheringham Nursery School, where I’m headteacher at the moment. I’m just incredibly proud of the school, the nursery school, the team, all that we’re doing. One of the highlights at Sheringham was being designated as a research school by the Education Endowment Foundation.

Regrets? Well, when I first started as a class teacher in Tower Hamlets in the early 1990s, it was at the height of the reading wars - and I was very, very persuaded by the whole “real books” approach and the apprenticeship approach to reading, and was in a school that adopted that 100 per cent.

And I’m afraid, when I look back, my review of that time would tell me that there were lots and lots of children in my Year 3 class who simply couldn’t read and didn’t have any way into reading. And I think that is something that I feel huge regret and shame about, and it’s one of the reasons why the most recent part of my career has been around supporting children’s early literacy.

It was a terrible thing that happened to those children in some Inner London schools in the 1990s, and I was there and I was part of it.

5. Who would be your colleagues in your perfect school staffroom?

If it was a maintained nursery school and a children’s centre, here are some of the people who I continue to admire and would definitely have with me there.

Laura Henry, a really inspiring early years speaker, consultant and leader, has done an incredible job to engage with parents and children. I would, I think, like to have Margy Whalley, who, for many years, headed Pen Green Centre in Corby, and I studied with the Pen Green team to get my MA in integrated early childhood education and care.

My former deputy, Michele Barrett, who now heads up Vanessa Nursery School in Hammersmith and Fulham.

I’d like to have [early years assessment expert] Jan Dubiel there. I’ve really enjoyed working with Jan over recent years and I find him very thought provoking.

In fairness, I’d really like the Sheringham team to be there with me because there isn’t anyone I wouldn’t like to keep on board from our team.

And then, I guess, the person I’m going to add now is Cassie Buchanan, [former] head of Charles Dickens Primary School, who I got to know through the research school network.

And also [University of Oxford professor of child development and education] Iram Siraj, whom I was lucky enough to come across back in the late 1990s when I was working in Haringey, London. She is one of the people who has really helped my learning and understanding of early years so much, and with her background as an early years teacher, I would definitely like to have Iram with me.

6. What would you say are the best and worst aspects of our schools system today?

The worst aspect of our school system is definitely the long-standing problem of how close the correlation is between being a disadvantaged child and not doing well in school.

In England, how well-off your parents are significantly predicts how well you’re going to do at school, and I know there are lots of individual exceptions but that’s the big picture.

Half my family is from Canada - my mum is Canadian and my brother lives in Canada, and it’s always really thought provoking for me to think about how much better Canada does on this front than England.

But I think that we can be really proud of a lot of aspects of our early years education in this country. We underrate how good early education is in England all the time and we forget that people around the world come to see what we do, to see that traditional English early years practice around play and using the outdoors, and all of the ways that the staff interact with the children - we undersell ourselves too often.

7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you the most?

I might say Sir Kevan Collins at this point. When I worked as early years adviser for Tower Hamlets, Sir Kevan was the chief executive of the council but, prior to that, he’d been in charge of services for children and young people, including schools. And, of course, he then went on to head up the Education Endowment Foundation.

When I had my first teaching job, which was in Tower Hamlets, the schools there were some of the lowest-performing schools in the country.

And through the efforts of hundreds and thousands of people - professionals of all sorts, and the parents and community leaders in Tower Hamlets - we found ourselves in this extraordinary place where children in Tower Hamlets now do better than the average child in England in their education.

And I think that’s because of several qualities that Sir Kevan Collins was able really to galvanise. First of all, to get a whole range of different people to come together and to talk about their shared vision for children. And then, he was very, very relentless that we were going to deliver those great things.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what would be the first thing you would do?

I would get people together to talk about the challenge, to find that common ground, and to produce that shared sense of what it is we’re trying to do for children and families at this very difficult time. And then have that can-do attitude around getting all parts of the system to pull together.

I’ve just read Andrew Adonis’ biography of [Ernest] Bevin. It’s incredible to read about how Bevin used his skills as a trade unionist before the war, so that when Churchill called on him to galvanise the war effort, Bevin really understood how to get people round the table to thrash out grievances and disagreements, and then come up with a plan.

I’m an ant compared to him as a giant, but that’s who I would draw my inspiration from, and that Churchillian motto of “action this day”.

9. What will our schools be like in 30 years?

I would like to think that, in 30 years’ time - to talk about a bit of the system I know best - we’ll have sorted out funding for the early years so that there is a proper level playing field and high level of funding.

I’d like to think that [early years] would be a graduate-led and mostly graduate workforce, and that we would have sorted out many of the problems we have with qualifications.

I think the entitlement to parents would be much greater, so that it would be much more of a Scandinavian approach, where early education and childcare is really part of the universal welfare state.

In 30 years’ time, I would like to see that all of those children are going into an early years setting where there’s ample space for outdoor play, and a real focus on physical development and movement, and health more generally.

And that there are health professionals embedded in that organisation; that it is a very community focused and driven place where parents are in and out.

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools in the past 12 months?

[Founder and principal of Reach Academy Feltham] Ed Vainker, because of the incredible work that the team at Reach Academy has done, and its great commitment to community development, to equal life chances for all children. Its strong focus on the early years is really admirable.

And, of course, Reach Feltham was, in a big way, behind Oak National Academy and the whole approach to trying to create all those online lessons to support the system during this very difficult period.

Interview by Tes reporter Amy Gibbons

This article originally appeared in the 29 January 2021 issue