Caroline Derbyshire is chair of the headteachers’ roundtable, and executive headteacher and chief executive of Saffron Academy Trust in Essex, which comprises seven schools.

Before she took the role, she was a deputy headteacher and executive principal of a school in Cambridgeshire.

She speaks to Tes about the importance of debate, her pride in her career and the fact that she is a Manchester United fan. 

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

I had a lot of great teachers in school but I think my most memorable was a man called Iain Adamson, who was my A-level English teacher. Quite often when you’re a sixth-former, your teachers mean a lot to you because you’re beginning to get a deeper interest in the subject at that stage, and he really did inspire me to go on to study at university.

He was a very witty and engaging man. He used to make reading all the parts in the Shakespeare play extremely funny but he was also really authentic. He was one of those teachers who never held back from saying what he really thought about something. You can always tell, when you’re a child, whether you’re getting the professional answer or whether you’re hearing the human being talking, and he always gave me the human being, and I really appreciated that, and we learned lots of things about politics, we learned a lot about life.

He also was a man who was fascinated by film, so he used to run a film club and put on all sorts of arts movies on it - all these old black and white movies we wouldn’t have otherwise watched.

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

I went to quite a progressive school in the 1970s and early 1980s, and I think the worst thing about that was that education at that point was still experimenting with comprehensive education. And it hadn’t really worked out how to stretch the most able or how to ensure that all children achieved.

One of the things the school used to do was lots and lots of project work, which was very much independent learning, but it didn’t really move us on very much…I think there were quite a lot of bright children in school who were under-stretched and under-challenged at that point.

When we went into sixth form, we got the challenge we were really looking for and it was at that point that people’s educational careers took off.

It was a great school for developing articulate students and people who thought deeply about things, and I think I’ve benefited from that.

There was a lot of emphasis on oracy, and encouraging people to be articulate and have opinions. That’s something that has slipped down the agenda in secondary schools in recent years. That’s a shame because I think the ability to hold your own debate and discuss things, and feel robust about doing that, that’s really important.

3. Why do you work in education?

I became a teacher because I wanted to make a difference. I’m somebody who’s always very much believed in social justice. I was tempted, when I was at university, to go into politics and try to change the world through that direction, and then I thought a little bit more about it and thought, well actually, I can do this in a different way. I can go into education, and I can have a real impact on all the people that I teach and try to improve their lives through giving them the best possible opportunities, by giving them the best education that I could.

I was absolutely determined I was going to work in state schools; I was determined that I was going to work in comprehensive schools and that I was going to give children opportunities that I had enjoyed through going to my state school as well. That, for me, was the motivator - it was about social justice. And that’s continued to be motivational within my career. I’ve only ever worked in state comprehensive schools and I’m passionately committed to them. In education, there’s a freedom to be yourself. I think politics has become a very tough place, particularly for women. I sometimes look at the way that people get treated on social media - politicians I admire…particularly women - that’s a very tough place to be.

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

I think I’m proudest of my association with the school I’m in. I was six years a deputy and I’ve been headteacher and executive head, and now chief executive of the trust for six years as well. So, it’s been 12 years in total and I think, in some ways, this is the model of what a great state school can look like when it’s well resourced, well supported by its community and when it offers a really rich curriculum.

We have, for a comprehensive school, lots and lots of really rich opportunities. So, for example, we offer Latin…we have the opportunity for our students to join the music academy and to work in a wonderful concert hall with professional musicians and to have an incredibly rich music diet.

We’ve got a school farm, so we have an agricultural science unit in the school. If you’re interested in animals and going into that line of work, it’s just great to play at your fantasies of being a vet. But you can also just go and do something as a hobby. A number of members of staff kennel their dogs in the farm, so they take the dogs out for walks, they get to do jobs around the animals at lunchtime. It’s incredibly good for wellbeing to be around animals, to have your mind off your studying for a little bit…it’s something that is a great benefit.

So all of those things make it [the school] incredibly rich and varied but we’ve also got access for all our students to quite a lot of academic rigour.  

I think the thing I regret most about my career…is that I never had quite enough funding to make as much of a difference as I really wanted to make, particularly when I was a head in Cambridgeshire, where a little bit more per-pupil funding could have made the world of difference to what I could have achieved. You feel frustration when you know how much better you can do something if you just had a bit more money.

5. If you could choose your perfect staffroom, who would be in it?

I’d like to go back to the staffroom that I was in when I first started teaching and the colleagues that I had at that point in my career. The reason is not so much because that was the best school I’ve worked in or that it was the best time, but we did go at break and lunchtime everyday to that staffroom, and we would sit and we would talk, and we would eat our break and lunchtime snacks.

The pace of life when I was first teaching (which was from about 1989) was just that much calmer. You had the time to do that with no guilt and you got to know the people that you were working with, and there was a camaraderie that developed because you were allowed to do that.

One of the regrets I have a little bit is that schools have become such frantic places; there’s so much going on all the time and there’s so much work that’s expected of teachers now that I don’t think they have quite the same time just to talk and enjoy the company of other professionals.

6. What do you think are the best and worst aspects of our schools’ system?

The best aspect of the school system is that still, fundamentally, teaching is about working with young people who are infinitely fun, and the best thing about the job always is how much fun they bring to every day that you’re in a school. I think the best thing that’s happened in education is the fact that we’ve got higher and higher expectations of what all young people can achieve.

The worst thing about education at the moment, I think, is Ofsted and the grading system and the fear that schools live under all the time that they’re going to be publicly shamed. And I don’t think that has an improving effect upon the system whatsoever…People don’t go into education because they want an easy life. I think they want to get into education because they want children to do really well and they’re passionate about making a difference. And they don’t need to be shamed for the efforts that they make.

I’m not saying we don’t need a regulator; we absolutely do. But I see no benefit at all in the grading system and I’ve never been convinced that it was a good thing, and I never really understood why it was that we as a profession ever put up with it and accepted it in the first place. It’s almost like a kind of red letter on your door, which I think is totally unacceptable.

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

Can I say two people? I would say the two people I’d like to highlight would be Vivienne Porritt, who was one of the founders of the Women’s Ed movement. And I think that the work that Women’s Ed has done, which I’ve been involved in, has done a huge amount to encourage women to consider leadership in schools. And there was a massive need for that. I really admire what she has done to further that cause.

The other person would be Professor Dylan Wiliam, because I think it was when I heard him speak that a penny dropped about learning, and that penny was to do with the fact that a lot of teacher activity makes no difference whatsoever and that, actually, what you need to do is the things that have an impact.

For example, the work that he did on assessment for learning and what really has impact, and how you can know that what you’re doing is enabling students to make progress. That was a shift in my thinking when I was a teacher.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what would you change?

I would reform Ofsted and start by removing all the ratings from schools, because I think that we’ve had Ofsted in its current format now for a few decades and there’s time for a relook and re-evaluation.

Of course, I might address the levels of funding in education and see how much I could get away with - ask Mr Sunak to give as much money in our sector as possible. In “building back better”, we need the funding to be able to do that properly; that would be another thing that I would do.

I would get rid of the current way of determining grades at A level and GCSE, and I’d go back to proper criterion referencing, whereby you can model and show students what a particular grade actually looks like, what quality looks like.

We’ve moved away from that, to attributing grades after the event on proportions that are comparable to the year that went before, rather than actually saying, “You work hard and you’ve achieved work at that standard and that quality, that’s what you should get”.

Teachers themselves are sometimes unclear about what grades look like and this was evidently clear when we started to do the teacher assessed grades process.

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

I don’t think they will be too bizarrely futuristic. I think they’ll resemble schools that we have today in the sense that I hope very much that human teachers will be teaching human children face to face, and that we’ll be able to enjoy all of the things that are great about schools currently.

But I would hope to see state education evolved to the point where it’s the only form of education that everybody needs, that schools right across the country provide education for free, of an extremely high standard, so that nobody would ever need to pay to go private. And, for me, that’s the dream - to get to the point where every parent feels completely confident that their local school is exceptional. That’s what I’d like to see in 30 years’ time. I’d like to see it tomorrow.

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools over the past year?

I’d be tempted to say Marcus Rashford because he’s amazing, he’s inspiring. I’m a great Manchester United fan anyway, but he’s also done something that he was uniquely placed to do. However, I do think he’s had a lot of accolades for the work that he’s done and he’s been properly acknowledged.

There’s a group of people that I think does need to be acknowledged and it’s the headteachers that have managed through this pandemic. Dealing with all the things that we’ve been dealing with over the past two years has been an act of heroism. They’re the people that have made the biggest contribution in education over the past year or so and they’re largely unsung heroes.