There’s yet more evidence this week that Justine Greening’s appointment as education secretary signals a change of tone in the Department for Education’s approach to the profession.

Setting to one side the controversial segue into grammar schools (which is being driven by No 10, and certainly not Ms Greening’s favourite policy) her speech today at ASCL conference was really rather teacher-friendly, and reinforced the impression she gave a couple of weeks ago at the launch of the College of Teaching.

“I see my job as education secretary being to do everything I can to create the right environment that allows teachers and leaders to flourish…” she told the assembled ASCL heads.

“… I want to take this opportunity to talk about where I see the biggest potential for gains in education. That is teachers and teaching as an increasingly mature profession, with evidence and best practice at the core of everything it does…

“In particular, that means a core commitment to the ongoing professional development of our teachers and leaders…”

This speech came on the same day as a TES exclusive revealed there’s a very real change of heart in the DfE about ITT - something that will probably be welcomed by most classroom teachers.

Signaling a significant move away from Michael Gove’s all-out war on university teacher training  - which one wag from the right is supposed to have damned as “left wing madrassas” - a senior official said he wanted to rebut the idea the DfE was focused exclusively on school-led teacher training.

“I think that was a narrative that was true for a number of years,” the DfE’s head of teacher supply, Ben Ramm said at a Westminster Education conference in London earlier this week.

“I think that we have seen significant changes in the department over the last year or so. We now have an approach that I would describe as pragmatic rather than focused on any specific structural preference for school-led or university led-ITT.

“The secretary of state has been very clear in the speeches she has made that she recognises very clearly... the importance and the value of high-quality university involvement in teacher training, and I think that is very much a direction that we will see sustained and increased in the coming years.”

I’ve written before about how Ms Greening’s approach contrasts with No 10, which has done almost all the running on the controversial schools green paper, but what about education ministers?

Certainly Ms Greening’s junior colleagues don’t appear to have got the memo about talking up teachers.

Nick Gibb is still taking the profession to task for its - as he sees it - misguided approach to classroom practice, as this quote from his speech in January to the Education World Forum suggests:

“These ‘child-centred’ [pedagogies]… focus on eliciting and developing ethereal and often poorly-defined skills in pupils. Teacher focus is turned away from ensuring all pupils are taught the core of academic knowledge that they need, and instead teachers attempt to inculcate creativity and problem-solving as if these skills transcend domains of knowledge. We know from decades of research - and most recently from the boom in understanding the workings and limits of human cognition - that this view is deeply misguided…

“… I believe this has been deeply damaging to millions of children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

This contrast becomes even more pronounced when it comes to utterances from Mr Gibb’s fellow schools minister Lord Nash a couple of weeks ago:

“The question people often ask is ‘what is the difference between education leaders and business leaders?’,” he said.

“I think one of the things that it’s easy to say - but I have noticed - is that sometimes in education there is a tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt too often.”

“I think in the past too often teachers have confused their individuality with their professionalism,” he said. “Being a professional means embracing accountability, standardisation and consistency, although of course we want our teachers to be inspiring.”

Teachers will be pleased with the change of tone they’re seeing from the education secretary herself, but it’s clear doesn’t stretch to the whole of her team.

While Nash and Gibb remain in post, teachers can still expect to be poked every now and again by their ministerial masters, but can such conflicting messages from what is supposed to be a unified ministerial team be sustainable? One wonders. 

Ed Dorrell is head of content at TES. He tweets @Ed_Dorrell

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