Cat Scutt is director of education and research at the Chartered College of Teaching. A former English teacher with a particular interest in edtech and professional development, she has worked across the state and independent sectors, and has been a member of several advisory groups for the Department for Education.

Scutt is also a PhD student at the UCL Institute of Education and leads on the Chartered College’s award-winning peer-reviewed journal, Impact. She was awarded an MBE for services to education in the Queen’s birthday honours this year.

So, what did Scutt have to say when faced with Tes’ 10 questions, designed to reveal the person behind the profession?

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

I wanted to do Latin for A level, and I was at a state school and they didn’t offer Latin. But, actually, this particular teacher, Mrs Geers, taught me bits during lunchtime and they scheduled one hour a week to enable me to do it - so I’m incredibly grateful to her.

Probably the other one would be my English teacher, Sue Dooks, who ended up being the head of English at that school [Dr Challoner’s High School, in Buckinghamshire] when I taught there.

I remember we used to sit in the staffroom talking about books in a way that probably wasn’t that dissimilar to what we did in some A-level lessons.

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

I really enjoyed school. I was always really enthusiastic in lessons, so I genuinely enjoyed a whole range of different subjects.

What was the worst thing? This is going to sound really clichéd but I actually don’t know. I didn’t really enjoy PE, I suppose.

I was always quite into computers and I wanted to do electronics at GCSE but they weren’t able to run that because of lack of interest, and I ended up being put into the group that had some space, which was textiles. Not really my thing, it has to be said.

3. Why do you work in education?

I haven’t come from a teaching family at all, so I wasn’t one of those people who knows they want to be a teacher from a young age, but there was probably a weird sort of inevitability to it.

Working in education as a teacher and then supporting teachers, you really feel that you’re doing something worthwhile.

I do believe it’s the most important job in the world and it’s an absolute privilege to therefore be able to work in that sector.

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

Probably the proudest would be the work at the Chartered College of Teaching. I’ve been really lucky since teaching that, actually, most of the jobs that I’ve done have been the first time that job existed in an organisation, which has given me an amazing amount of scope for making it my own and setting the direction of what I’m working on.

I do regret not staying longer in the classroom. There are amazing opportunities now, such as the new specialist NPQs (National Professional Qualifications). If they’d existed, I would have possibly stayed longer because I would have felt that there were more opportunities for me.

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

I could probably take my entire organisation with me. The other side of it is that there are people, I guess, who would benefit from working in a school.

So, perhaps I would also quite like to see a greater number of our ministers having school experience.

It does make a difference being able to remember what it was like in the classroom, to know what it’s like as a school leader, to understand the pressures that they’re being faced [with] when you’re making policy decisions that influence them.

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

The best one - and this is sort of simple but you forget the advantage of it - is that we have high-quality, free education available to all, with expert, well-qualified, specialist teachers and a varied and demanding curriculum, with high expectations for all. So the best thing is the access to that education and the high-quality teachers that we have, who are really committed.

The worst thing, I suppose, still remains the challenge around workload, which means that sometimes teachers are not necessarily able to achieve everything that they would want to be able to. There’s more and more that’s being expected to be handled by schools that, actually, is beyond the scope of what they should be reasonably expected to do.

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

My teaching colleague, Mary Sharp, influenced my thinking about education in my early teaching career. She was a fab informal mentor and champion - we all need one of those to encourage us to reach our potential.

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

If I had the money to - and I accept that funds are not unlimited - I would massively reduce teachers’ contact time because there’s a whole bunch of things that I think are really important that, actually, the government currently are focusing on really well - things like professional learning, coaching and mentoring, time to engage with evidence.

These things all matter if we want to improve outcomes for children but they only work if teachers have got enough time to do them.

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

I guess a lot of people would be talking about schools of the future as something really radically different.

But, fundamentally, I’m not sure things will have changed that much and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

What we’ve seen over the pandemic is that, actually, when you move to really digital approaches to learning, there is something that’s lost.

I think we often beat ourselves up about needing to transform things when, in reality, teachers are doing an amazing job and we don’t need to be so critical of the way that things are done right now.

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

Marcus Rashford. He’s great and what he’s done is great. Not meaning to take away from that but it’s kind of frustrating, sometimes, that it takes his voice to say exactly what all of our headteachers were saying in order to bring a change about. And that is something that, fundamentally, is still a bit of an issue, I think, with how education policymaking happens.

Cat Scutt was talking to Amy Gibbons

This article originally appeared in the 27 August 2021 issue