Two heads who mark our schools

The men in charge of inspection and the curriculum are powerful symbols of a new education consensus, argues David Aaronovitch

All too soon Gillian Shephard, David Blunkett and Don Foster, the three politicians slugging it out over education policy, will come knocking for our support at the ballot box. But the two men who could decide the outcome of this battle don't need to seek votes or to court popularity. Chris Woodhead and Dr Nicholas Tate lead the two semi- autonomous agencies that now report and advise on the state of British education: the Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted), and the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA). These men's pronouncements are not overtly political, but they have profound political consequences. And both are making big waves.

Today's headline-stealer is Mr Woodhead, aged 48 and Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, whose annual report has been described as a "savage indictment" of Britain's schools. Formally, his organisation's role is to supervise the inspection of schools, hand out contracts to private inspectors, and give general advice to the Secretary of State.

In some senses Mr Woodhead lacks the direct influence over policy that his successors enjoyed in the days before 1992, when Ofsted was set up. Then, the Chief Inspector was a constant visitor to the Department of Education, expecting to be involved in decision-making. Not any more. Chris Woodhead keeps his distance, and is more likely to show up at 10 Downing Street than in Mrs Shephard's suite.

Paradoxically, this independence from the minutiae of government is one factor that confers power on Ofsted. The other is the new transparency in education. Ofsted's reports on schools fill the pages of local newspapers, dispensing gloom and cheer. Parents and communities can see what is going on - the veil on how their children are being educated has been lifted. So when Mr Woodhead - as he did yesterday - publicly pronounces about the state of things in the education system, he packs a lot of punch.

The more so since his attitudes seem to reflect the growth of educational consumerism. Unlike the old HMIs, who were part of the old education establishment, and often used by teachers' lobbies to put pressure on government, Mr Woodhead shares the impatience of many parents with a professional culture that has become both defensive and defeatist. That culture is exemplified in yesterday's reaction by Nigel de Gruchy of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers to the claim in the Ofsted report that 25 per cent of teachers were not up to snuff: "This stubborn statistic is an indication of other deep-seated causes. These include disruptive and difficult children, uncaring and unco-operative parents, curriculum overload, subject specialist problems in the latter part of the primary sector and inappropriate teaching methods when set against the resources available."

In other words, anything and anybody is to blame - bar the teachers themselves.

Mr Woodhead, whose partner is an outstanding teacher in a deprived area of London, has no time for such talk. Five years ago, when chief executive of the National Curriculum Council, he wrote of the "unthinking mediocrity" of teachers who failed children by "not demanding enough; by not knowing enough themselves; by relying too heavily on questions and praise when instruction and honest feedback would achieve much more; by failing to teach".

He went on: "To deny this is to collude in the defensiveness and complacency which is one of the most unattractive characteristics of our profession."

This outlook forms the ideological backdrop to the approach of an entire inspectorate. It dictates that this teaching method is poor, that one good; that resources are a problem, but only up to a point; that many teachers are terrific, but a quarter should sling their hooks. At the next election we can expect all three major party manifestos to quote Mr Woodhead's report approvingly, and promise to take action. He is a power in the land.

As is his opposite number at the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority, Nick Tate. Dr Tate was appointed as chief executive of SCAA in 1994 as successor to Chris Woodhead, and many have detected a rivalry between the two agencies, each ensuring that it is rarely out of the public eye.

The man in charge of scrutinising what children actually learn is a former history teacher who sat on the old National Curriculum Council when it was involved in some fiercerows about the content andimplementation of the national curriculum.

Much of the early controversy has died down. Everyone, from unions to government, now buy into the curriculum and into testing. Much of the SCAA's work is uncontroversial, as it reports on physics teaching or minor revisions to some GCSE syllabus.

Despite this, Dr Tate has shown a taste for public controversy. Over the past 16 months the traditional right has come to love him. What has got their juices flowing has been Tate on History, Tate on Britishness and Tate on Morality. He has argued in the past year for more emphasis on heroes and heroines, rather than upon "role models". Last summer he advocated that children should learn a strong sense of their British identity: "The best guarantee of strong minority cultures is the existence of a majority culture that is sure of itself."

And Nick Tate is sure of himself. He is a committed Christian and invariably described as a "family man".

Last month, in the confused wake of the murder of the London headmaster Philip Lawrence, Dr Tate pointed to shortcomings in schools' approaches to the teaching of moral precepts. Approvingly quoted by high Tories were his strictures on moral relativism, his criticism of political correctness and his dislike of "pervasive hedonism". A call for more RE lessons also received much coverage. In a worrying and terribly uncertain world, here was a man who seemed to stand for a return to the past.

New Labour liked it, too, if not exactly the same bits that the moralistic right so drooled over. David Blunkett's office is decidedly warm to Dr Tate, which is not so far-fetched when you consider the following Tate pronouncement: "Education for citizenship consists ... above all of having a set of attitudes which emphasise the community as much as the individual. If the prevailing ethos encourages people to think of themselves as detached from any community, it is hardly surprising if we have a diminished sense of the wider group and of our responsibilities towards it." Add the word "stakeholder" in there somewhere and you have the Blair credo in a nutshell.

New Labour is less enthusiastic about Mr Woodhead. While Mr Blunkett and Mr Blair accept much that he says about teaching, they regard him as a more overtly political figure. Often his statements, they say, seem designed to hit the headlines, rather than to give the best understanding of Ofsted's work. And he recently published a pamphlet under the auspices of the right-wing think-tank Politeia.

One event in particular worried Labour. An Ofsted report on class sizes last autumn favoured Labour's view that small classes were important for the under-sevens. This contradicted Gillian Shephard's oft-repeated assertion that size didn't matter. But Ofsted had done some calculations ("on the back of a fag packet", grumbled a Labour man), purporting to show that Mr Blunkett's estimation of the cost of smaller classes was wildly optimistic. The suggestion was that the canny Woodhead had sugared Mrs Shephard's pill.

Many education insiders, including those well to the right of new Labour, believe that Mr Woodhead and Dr Tate embody a historic victory of the traditional right over the progressive left for the soul of schools. The truth, however, may well be more complex. Responding as they do to public perceptions,the new tsars of education actually signify the empowerment of education's consumers over its producers. That is why no serious politician seeks to put the clock back.

But is this automatically a good thing? Much as we need agreed standards, yearn for test results, desire moral absolutes and certainties (particularly for our children), we - and the two men who sit in judgement over our schools - may be in danger of stifling initiative, preventing exploration and closing down creative thinking in a world that has never before required so much inventiveness and enterprise.