As Gavin Williamson was grinning his way through the full gamut of political missteps like a lost Cheshire Cat, one of his policy advisers - who had joined his ranks just as the pandemic kicked in - must have wondered quite what she had got herself into.
Dr Jo Saxton’s CV to that point was exemplary: academic, then teacher, then external adviser to the Department for Education (DfE), then chief executive of a multi-academy trust (MAT), and then founder of her own MAT. The chance to make a difference on an even bigger scale as an advisor to the then education secretary must have seemed an obvious switch as March 2020 began. Unfortunately, as has been well documented, the DfE didn’t have the best past 18 months.
Remarkably, being a part of that faltering machine - an extremely effective part, sources say - did not dull Saxton’s appetite for national roles: in June, she was announced as the chief regulator of Ofqual, just as it faced the biggest challenges in its history.
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Speaking exclusively to Tes after her first week in her new role, she seems far from intimidated. But then, she has arguably had tougher first weeks in a new job.
“My first day in the DfE was the day after exams had been cancelled and schools closed,” she recalls, “and someone asked: ‘You have been on the board of Ofqual, haven’t you?’.
Within a couple of weeks, she had been deployed to advise on that area. It was a shift she welcomed.
“I was already interested in Ofqual, I had already been on the board of it for two years before I went to the department,” she says. “I don’t think anyone thinks when they are a little girl they are going to grow up to be a regulator... [But] I fell in love with Ofqual the first time I walked across the threshold of its office when I was on the board.”
Impact in the classroom
That might give you the impression that Saxton is a technocrat in love with the statistics and who resides far from the practicality needed for the classroom. But she has run both the Future Academies Trust and her own MAT, Turner Schools. She talks passionately about former students and the curriculum and pedagogical barriers that stood in their way. She talks openly about the transformational impact of knowledge. In short, she is much more engaged with the classroom than you might expect.
Will that influence her decisions in the next few weeks and beyond, as she guides the direction for examinations for hundreds of thousands of students?
“My mission for this academic year is that we need young people and their families to again trust qualifications, [to trust] that exams are fair,” she says. “I think the best way of doing that is to put the interests of young people first. That has to be the compass that guides our decisions.”
Fairness, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. There will be significant differences between how teachers, pupils, parents, businesses and the wider public view fairness in an examinations context. Trickier, there will be differences within each of those groups, too, and many will question the worth of having these qualifications at all.
She can’t please everyone. Is she ready to handle that?
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It’s a question that will be answered in time, but she certainly has faith in the qualifications system and that, in her view, it is the fairest system whether the pupils and their parents recognise that or not.
“In terms of the evidence, this is the fairest system we have in terms of [having] the least influence of various biases,” she argues. “One of the huge lessons from 2020 was for young people to have agency over their ultimate outcomes and I think they didn’t really like that being taken away from them.”
So future decisions will be determined on this basis?
“I am thinking first about students,” she says. “But I also think a lot about teachers and school leaders and, to do my best to get them the information they need when they need it.”
That will be a pledge welcomed by the profession but probably only believed when it actually happens. Decisions have been previously promised in a timely way and never materialised, causing huge anxiety among all in schools and significant workload issues.
Saxton says she is already trying to change this ministerial bad habit: “I’ve literally spent the week lobbying in Westminster to get the clarity that teachers and leaders need, and hopefully we will be able to do that very soon.”
Research versus practicality
Of course, the clarity on the next steps is different from clarity on why those decisions have been made and the evidence that underpins any discussions. Ofqual has for some time failed to do enough to help the profession and the public understand the evidence in a clear and transparent way. Too often, it is mired in technical language and statistics that simply do not cut through.
Saxton says a key part of her mission is to bring more transparency to this area.
“I want to help as many teachers as possible understand why exams really are fair. That this is not just something we say, it is based on really, really good evidence,” she explains.
Will that require her to simplify that evidence base for general consumption? That has happened constantly in the journey from education research to practice, and usually lethal mutations arise that cause chaos. Saxton says she is aware of that and wants to avoid it.
“I am not going to be trying to dumb down anything, but what I hope that I can bring is explaining things in terms of…I know what [teachers’] day-to-day priorities are like,” she explains.
Imminent decisions
While that may be the case, there is a danger in what is an incredibly technical area for the decision-making process to still become too theoretical and not aligned far enough with practical reality. She stresses, though, that her aim is always to have the right mix of the two.
“I will always do my best to be guided by the evidence - what does the research say? - and try to line that up with what people need and what they are asking for,” she says. “I make informed decisions, I am not just acting on my gut.”
If the process is sound and she has confidence in it, does that mean she is not nervous about the decisions she and her board have made that will very soon be revealed to teachers?
“The nerves come in,” she admits, grinning. But she says that this is because she is a contingency planner.
“My late father used to teach me: [think about] what’s the worst that could happen, and if you do your best to eyeball that and plan for it, then hopefully it won’t happen, but if it does happen, you have a plan,” she explains.
After 18 months when the worst did happen, and there did not seem to be a plan, such talk will certainly ensure Saxton starts on a good footing with the profession.
But whether she achieves her self-defined marker of success as a regulator - that “the public believe that assessment by exams at 16-18 is fair” - will depend on how well she converts that talk into action.
