Her allegiance is mainly geographical as the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) is just two miles from the Emirates Stadium, Arsenal’s homeground.

Growing up in Finchley, north London, her father introduced her to the world of football with Tottenham Hotspurs.

She was the eldest of four and was the first to make the trek to White Hart Lane, as her hard-working dad bid to spend time with his children.

“He worked in a factory and would work evenings and Saturday mornings to earn extra money. But his Saturday afternoons were sacrosanct.

“He wanted to see us, so he took me to watch football. He was really delighted that I liked it.”

Sue and husband John on holiday

This relationship is clearly a special part of her life. The family moved to Clacton-on-Sea when she was 17 and, as the cost of travelling to see Spurs became too much, her father switched allegiances to the closest First Division team – Ipswich Town. She stopped going to see the club play after her father died, but still supports the team.

“I owe everything to my family. And the great sadness is that my parents never saw me even get to be a deputy head.

“My mother died from cancer when she was 59 and my dad died when he was 66, from Alzheimer’s.

“Working for SSAT I met Tony Blair three or four times. I have been to Downing Street I think it’s four times now. I got into a taxi at King’s Cross and said ‘Downing Street, please‘ and thought how did I ever get here?

“I had this conversation with Lady Maria Satchwell, the head of Madeley Academy [in Telford] We said we had very normal, ordinary lives and there we were, going into Downing Street. My parents wouldn’t have believed that.”

Her career is atypical, as she spent her first ten working years in administration in the health service.

Sue and husband John on his 65th birthday, they had a flight and lunch on Concorde

Having failed her 11-plus, she attended the local secondary modern for girls where, up to year 9, she spent more time outside the classroom than inside, learning.

She admits to truanting “on the odd occasion” but says it was “minor stuff really, chatting to my friends, I wasn’t interested to be honest.

“One time I was outside the classroom and the headmistress walked past me and said ‘do let your mother down gently’ before stomping off.

“But something must have stuck and I then started to work. I got seven O-levels.”

Discouraged from teaching by her own teachers, it wasn’t until her late 20s that she was gently nudged towards the profession.

“Who really pushed me in the end were the doctors. I wanted to make a difference and work with children.

“It was the doctors who said that good teachers aren’t always the best academically, and because I failed the 11-plus, I had always thought I was not very good at academia.

“They said go for it, do the degree and see if you like it. I got a lot of encouragement.”

“I’ve been to Downing Street. My parents wouldn’t have believed that”

Professor David Hargreaves influenced her most. “He was the man who gave me my confidence. That was about 15 years ago, so it was a long journey. . . I don’t want anybody else to go through that, I want them to be confident.”

After studying at the Institute of Education, she became head of history at the Manor School in Raunds and worked in Northamptonshire for the first years of her teaching life.

She faced the worst moment in her career after she’d moved to become head of sixth form at Slough’s Herschel Grammar School, Berkshire, when a pupil, who had been struggling to pass her maths exams, committed suicide.

“The impact on the whole of the lower sixth was unbelievable. That’s the first time I realised the power of counselling,” she says, still upset by the memory.

Her first headship was at Monks’ Dyke School in Lincolnshire where she dramatically improved GCSE results and oversaw it becoming a technology college.

Newly arrived headteacher at Monks’ Dyke School, 1994

Her time at SSAT, where she has worked since 2002, has had its struggles. After being appointed as chief executive in November 2011, the charity faced massive funding problems and went into administration. Six months later, she led a management buyout.

“I am not making a political statement here, but the coalition government ended the diploma contract, the 14-19 contract, and £30 million in funding disappeared.

“It also decided not to ring-fence the specialist schools’ money, so that was another £11 million.

“It was horrible, really horrible. What prepares you for that? It was awful to lose that safety blanket of grant money, but it is much cleaner now.”

Sue aged 9 at her grandfather’s forge, wearing a leather apron her grandfather made

She lives in a small village ten minutes from Cambridge – or an hour, if you catch the traffic at the wrong time – with her partner of 15 years, and soon-to-be husband, John, and their German Shepherd, Kim, a breed favourite of hers (she has several German Shepherd ceramic statues dotted around her home).

She wanted but was unable to have children. “You have met my baby anyway, Kim. And, I have lots of children, because I have been in teaching.”

John has a daughter and grandson, Callum, who Williamson is obviously very proud of. A large picture of him hangs in the couple’s conservatory, and she regales stories of his academic and sporting success; he is training to be a football linesman and at 16 stepped in and saved the day at a Telford AFC game against Blackburn Rovers when a linesman collapsed.

Her heroine, she says, is Mary Berry. She uses the weekends to practise her baking and cooking, and to relax after a busy week. A normal working day starts at 6am when she catches the train into London and ends at 7pm when she gets in her car and listens to The Archers – “those 15 minutes when I am driving home are sacrosanct. And if I am at home, John knows not to interrupt me when it’s on.”

A fan of MasterChef, she believes some lessons could be learnt from the competition when it comes to education.

“Those challenges are probably a better test than our exams, aren’t they? I always think when you watch MasterChef, you can see the feedback they get, and it’s valued, because you have got two great chefs and a diner – poor old Gregg.

“I bet we only see bits of that feedback, but you can see they take on board the criticism because it is valid criticism. There’s something there. What I do know is that a three-hour exam doesn’t tell you everything about a child or a young person.”

IT’S A PERSONAL THING

What’s top of your Christmas list?

Cooking equipment. I want some nice little flan dishes and some measuring spoons, but that’s it. It’s all minor. When you get to my age you have most things.

If you could cook anything as precisely and as beautiful as anything on MasterChef or Great British Bake Off, what would it be?

Can I think about that one? Cakes of the standard from the best French patisseries

What has been your favourite holiday?

Normandy. It’s the history and it’s because we can all go together and take the dog. My other favourite place is Prague, but it is getting too touristy. And Dubrovnik, have you been? Go. It’s beautiful. The pavements are made of marble. When we first went it was after the war and there were still bombed-out hotels. It’s a beautiful city and the sea is so blue.

Do you speak any languages?

No, and that comes back to school. We were a secondary modern so we didn’t learn languages.

If you could learn one, what would it be?

Chinese. It’s difficult but we do a lot of work with Chinese schools. Or Spanish

In the week we meet he has spoken at two conferences, will soon attend a TeachMeet event where teachers share ideas, and when a passer-by invites him to another
event he expresses concern that he already has two governor meetings that day but he’s hopeful it can still be squeezed in.

With a career in education spanning more than 50 years, Sir Tim is known for a plethora of things – saving London schools, saving Birmingham schools, arguing with the abrasive ex-Ofsted chief Chris Woodhead and, perhaps most extraordinarily, for suing then-education secretary John Patten after he claimed during a Conservative party conference that Brighouse was a “madman” who went around “frightening the children”.

There’s no doubt that Sir Tim comes across as eccentric. His voice booms with enthusiasm; his eyes are bright and warm; his gestures always exaggerated. But these features combine to infuse listeners with a belief that they are special and important, and that teaching is the best job in the world. He is, in a literal sense of the word, brilliant.

“I could take risks and know that the politicians wouldn’t try anything”

He is also well aware of his manner: “I think I was much more informal …even in more formal times… but if you’re informal you’re very quick to overcome perceived barriers. People begin to see who you are and what you say and what you do, and whether it’s genuine or it’s not genuine – I think that’s a help. I mean, it isn’t that I put it on, I am informal!”

Life didn’t begin so informally. In fact, Brighouse’s early school days were quite the opposite. Born in 1940, his memories of attending grammar school in Leicestershire are miserable.

Professor Sir Tim Brighouse recieving his honourary doctorite from Queen’s University , Belfast in 2010 Pic: Queen’s University

“I was school phobic. I would weep at night, I would be physically sick in the morning – this lasted for half a term until my dad lost his job and we moved to Lowestoft.”

On the first day at his new school his eldest brother agreed to check on him at break time. “But when I met him I said, ‘You can push off, I’m perfectly happy here, I like this place’. I remember the first school in black and white: the second in colour.”

Why the difference? At the first school he was tested each week. Students sat in rank order and were treated that way too. The second did none of this: “They made everybody feel they were special. They were fantastic teachers.”

His favourite, Mr Spalding, taught history and inspired him to study it further. “He was a terrific person. He was the archetypal after-the-war, been-in-the-war, rode a sit-up-and-beg bike, smoked a pipe, you never knew quite where he was coming from; he would argue one thing one lesson then come in the following lesson and argue the exact opposite; made you do this and that; ran the school debating society, collected stamps, was a fisherman as well, an angler. I kept in touch with him until… well maybe probably a year or two before he died. I thought he was a fantastic guy.”

After several attempts, Sir Tim secured a place at the University of Oxford and thoroughly enjoyed his time there, though initially he felt out of his depth.

“Nobody went from my school to Oxford. I remember being horrified, rolling into an Oxford college to find these hundreds of public schoolboys, all of whom read everything that you could ever read, and I’d only ever read about two or three books.”

After four years he left with his degree and a PGCE, and headed into teaching.

By age 26, he was a deputy headteacher in a South Wales secondary modern but left to pursue a job in education administration. “Educational administrators after the war, there was a number of them, and they were amazing . . . I wanted to do that sort of thing – it looked fun!”

For the next two decades that’s precisely what he did, eventually becoming education lead in Oxfordshire followed by four years as professor of education at Keele University. In 1993 he took his post as chief education officer in Birmingham, just in time for Patten to make his ill-judged claim.

“He made it within three weeks of my arriving in Birmingham. And don’t forget, I was going back into local authority administration, so within three weeks, that was all over the press.”

Sir Tim felt he had no choice but to pursue a complaint. “The fact that I won it and gave [the settlement money] to inner city education, and the fact that during the 10 months of the case, the politicians in Birmingham said, ‘You don’t want to tangle with him, he takes on secretaries of state, so if he says something – listen’, did mean that I could take lots and lots of risks and I knew the politicians wouldn’t try anything.”

During his time, Birmingham school results constantly increased and he became renowned for kindnesses, sending more than 5,000 handwritten letters of congratulations to teachers, and even turning up with champagne to one school after a tough Ofsted inspection.

What prompted this? “Blummin’ hell…that’s about being human!” he booms. “It isn’t that I won’t confront difficult situations where people have made a balls-up of something, because I have, and I do, and I would. But I do think they deserve dignity. And if somebody has not made a success of a particular school, they may have made a success of it earlier on – they may have been a very good head in another place or they may have been a fantastic deputy or they may be fantastic with difficult kids.”

Speaking at Teacher Development Trust in February 2013

This focus on the positive also characterised Brighouse’s time as London schools “tsar” in the early 2000s when he led London Challenge, a programme of support at a time when the capital’s schools were struggling. Sir Tim made it his business to talk schools up, telling teachers they were wonderful and getting them sharing practice. Debate rages about its effectiveness, but London GCSE results are now noticeably higher than the rest of the country, and it has confirmed in many people’s minds that “the Brighouse effect” is a real thing.

The interview winds down and he notices a colleague, nearby, who he motions to come sit with us. By the time he leaves, he is flanked by friends. The next day he sends an email in which he encouragingly writes “you will change the world”. It’s a small kindness, but a symbolic one. You can’t help but believe he says it to everyone; but you also get the distinct feeling that he believes it of everyone, too.

IT’S A PERSONAL THING

If you were invisible for a day, what would you do?

Oh my God! I don’t know. I’d probably . . . gosh, that’s an impossible question. Really tough. Are you inviting me to do something wicked? Um . . . I think I’d want to change all the draft legislation on the Secretary of State’s desk and invite his or her signature.

What’s your favourite book?

War and Peace. I read it for the first time as a challenge in retirement; thought I wouldn’t be able to read it – it’s a very long book – and wish I’d read it when I was 17 because it tells you so much about history and historians, writing and human nature. It’s an amazing book.

What was your favourite childhood toy?

Toy trains, yes.

Where would you like to go on your next holiday?

The islands of Scotland.

What are your hobbies outside education?

I’m keen on cricket and I’ve been a season ticket holder at Oxford United since about the 1970s. It’s a labour of love at the moment.

How do you spend time with your family?

Well I’m married to Liz, who is Labour leader of Oxfordshire County Council. We’ve got four children: two in America, two here, all with partners. We’ve got eight grandchildren and we saw all the American ones in the summer last year, and the rest we see here when we can. Just this morning I dropped one off for breakfast at school! So I get to see quite a bit of them.

“I was quite nervous when it first aired because I didn’t know what to expect. You don’t know what the response is going to be; you don’t know how people are going to respond to you. I remember, having watched it, feeling very comfortable with everything except I was quite embarrassed about that bit . . . I happened to have had a couple of glasses of wine . . . it’s funny, but a little bit embarrassing for me. Now all my friends are, like, ‘Oooh! Take the spoons away, quick!’”

“I can’t just sit in an office, I’d go out of my mind”

Still teaching at Archbishop LanFranc in Croydon South London, Shaw is enjoying her fourth year at the school and wants to stay in teaching for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, the show hasn’t made the job more difficult.

“I don’t think it changed relationships in the classroom. In the corridors they loved that they knew our names, shouting ‘Chloe! Chloe!’ at me and I thought, ‘Is that what you’re picking up on?’ I’ve been looking at cutlery half-tipsy and all you care about is my name.”

Shaw, presented as a “shining light” in the show, was the only second-year teacher and acted as a mentor to the newbies. In life, as on the TV, she combines enthusiastic wide-eyed youthfulness with the soul of a caring grandparent.

From left: Shaw, aged 6, 1995, with brother Tom and their Mother

Born in Brighton in 1989, she enjoyed a childhood so idyllic that listening to her talk about it is a little like chomping on candyfloss. “I was really fortunate, I had a normal, very standard upbringing. I’ve got a supportive mum and dad who are always just lovely and we just always did lovely things as a family.”

Her father works in finance; her mum is a nurse in a local GP’s surgery. “He comes home and has lunch every day with my mum and then cycles back to work,” she says. “I’ve also got a younger brother, Tom. Tom and I have always got on well, we had the usual sort of teenage sibling rivalry but now we get on brilliantly.”

Shaw at primary school in 1994, aged 5

Shaw went to a local state primary before transferring to the independent girls’ school, Brighton and Hove High School. Her year group was small, with just 30 pupils.

Running the Great South run in 2010

She emphasises how safe it felt. “I loved it. I had a really nice group of friends. You felt like you could go to your teachers and ask for help . . . I always felt safe and comfortable.”

It’s noticeable how often Shaw mentions security. In the TV show, she did the same – referencing her classroom as a safe space and trying hard to show vulnerable students that she cared.

By the time she explains how she moved from school to studying at Royal Holloway, a university in pleasant surroundings on the outskirts of London and not too far from home, it’s easy to get the impression that she doesn’t deal well with change.

And then she drops a clanger. She didn’t go straight to university. Instead, at 18, she backpacked the world with a friend. “We flew into Thailand, went all the way down through Malaysia and into Singapore, then hopped over to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji. Then we came home.”

In fact, Shaw has gadded all over – sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. On a recent escapade she backpacked on her own around Mexico and Guatemala. During another, she volunteered at a turtle conservation centre on the Pacific Coast.

On one trip to the US, she and her friends bought a battered 4×4 in such a bad state that they couldn’t stop to sightsee in case it broke down. “We were driving through this beautiful national park and were, like: ‘We can’t stop! We can’t stop until we get to a repair shop, because if we stop it won’t start again’. So we had to just drive through it.”

A Tough Young Teachers photoshoot, taken at Archbishop LanFranc School

Her love of geography is rooted in these experiences. “I like having that culture shock feeling. You feel a bit uncomfortable and you don’t really know what you’re doing, and it takes a couple of days, but then you get on with it and enjoy it.”

Perhaps it was that feeling that prompted Shaw in her final year at university to apply for Teach First, the programme that places graduates into schools with high numbers of pupils from poorer backgrounds and trains them on-the-job.

“I knew I wanted to do something where I was working with people, and I always wanted to do something to help people. I can’t just sit in an office, I’d go out of my mind, I’d be so bored. Teach First really appealed because it gave me a real sense of purpose.”

She nevertheless admits to being naïve about the realities of teaching in a tough part of London. “But I’m glad I was naïve because I think if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have applied.” Why not? “Because it’s hard.”

Within weeks of beginning, there was a brawl between two opposing gangs that had congregated at the school. Shaw was told to grab students, get into a classroom and lock the doors. “We just had to sit in there and wait with no real idea of what was going on outside. I was terrified. I went back home on the tram that night back to Clapham and called my mum, crying. It was just so alien to me, and it was such a shock.”

With time and effort, she developed her teaching skills and, even when shaken, has always loved the job and describes her gratitude to the supportive staff around her.

At the end of her first year, the producers of the Tough Young Teachers approached her to be a participant. After talking it through with friends and family she decided to go for it. “It’s not like it was prime time BBC One,” she giggles.

Despite being on BBC Three, the show had a following of 3 million and became the channel’s most-watched show in its history.

Shaw seems unaffected by her mini-celebrity; having been recognised only a handful of times and always greeted positively. But an enigma remains. How does a person for whom safety is so vital find themselves alone with a backpack in South America, or teaching in a school where gangs batter each other?

“Maybe the reason why I’ve wanted the danger is because I see everything around me as very secure, very routine and very lovely.” She recalls how generations of her family have always stayed in Brighton.

“I wanted to break away from that a little bit,” she says, with a hint of excitement. “And I have. I’m really really glad I have.”

What is your favourite book?

To Kill a Mockingbird. I read it when I was younger. Does everyone say that? I also liked A Thousand Splendid Suns. I like that they are about real-life things.

What are you most grateful for?

A supportive family and a good set of friends.

What would you do if you were invisible for a day?

I love people watching so I would love to be a fly on the wall in a really silly place – like a big department store at Christmas so I could see the chaos when they are setting it all up.

What is the most important phone call you’ve ever received?

Probably when I got on to Teach First; it started such a huge chain of events. I was in a lecture and I could feel my phone. It was a number that I didn’t recognise, so I walked out because I guessed it was Teach First. And on the back of that call I’ve been on TV and watched by 3 million people – that would never have happened otherwise.

If you could go back to any era in history, when would it be?

The 50s, with post-war excitement, brass bands and people learning to swing dance. Everything was being rebuilt and there was a new lease of life. It sounds like fun.

Who are your role models?

My inspirations are people that I’ve worked with. My former headteacher was a big role model. I looked up to his principles and values, and his heart was always in the right place. Every child had a chance, and a chance, and a chance – because he knew that because of where we were, if we got rid of a child he or she was doomed.

]]> http://academiesweek.co.uk/chloe-shaw/feed/ 0 http://academiesweek.co.uk/john-howson/ http://academiesweek.co.uk/john-howson/#comments Tue, 18 Nov 2014 06:30:31 +0000 http://academiesweek.co.uk/?p=2912 John Howson’s 40-year career seems to cover everything: teacher, teacher trainer, academia, data expert. So to sum up his life in a way that does not exclude any of his achievements is tricky.

But one thing is certain. It doesn’t seem there will be any let-up as he approaches his 68th year.

Born in Haringey, north London, Howson always lagged behind his twin Peter who excelled at school. While Peter was often the top of the class, John was comfortable in the middle ground until he blossomed academically towards the end of his school days.

From left: Peter and John in 1951

He followed in his father and brother’s footsteps – Peter finished school a year ahead of John – and went to the London School of Economics (LSE). This was during the “troubled years” of 1966-69 when the university went into lockdown for six weeks.

He then began his career in education as a supply teacher and at 24 was head of geography at Tottenham School, by then changing from a grammar to become a comprehensive with many pupils from Broadwater Farm (later to become infamous for riots in 1985).

But perhaps the most significant moment in his career was in 1977 when a former pupil attacked and stabbed him in his classroom. It is hard to talk about the incident without reference to the stabbing of Leeds Spanish teacher Ann Maguire in April. Last week her teenage killer, William Cornick, was jailed for life.

“My guardian angel was working overtime, because unlike the poor teacher in Leeds, the knife missed my backbone and all my vital organs.

“Had it been a fraction one way I would have been paralysed; a fraction the other and it would have been in my heart and I would be dead. I am extremely lucky.”

I might have ended up as a head, earning a lot more money

The former pupil had been removed from Tottenham when he was 15 and sent to a school for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties. But it was clear that the boy was truanting and in November 1976 he was found with two alsatian dogs, which he was looking after for someone while they were in prison, on Tottenham School’s premises.

Howson and the deputy head approached him and said that if the dogs were seen on school property again, they would report it to the police and the dogs would be taken to Battersea dogs’ home.

That Christmas – and without the school knowing anything about it – the dogs were taken by the police. The teenager blamed the school and, on the first day of term in January, spent the morning in a nearby pub drinking with two older friends until closing time at 2.30pm.

From left: John and Peter Howson 1962

“He comes out of the pub and strolls across to the school and walks in looking for somebody to attack,” Howson says. “He is seen by a cleaner who thinks he shouldn’t be there and who follows him up the stairs, but who doesn’t confront him.

“The classroom doors had little glass slots and the first person he recognises through one of these is me.”

John, halfway through a double period at the end of the school day, is sitting on a desk talking to pupils about their mock O-level results.

“He comes in straight past everybody else, hits me round the head and then starts stabbing me.

“Fortunately the cleaner comes in with her broom and starts hitting him round the head and his two mates come in and drag him off.

“I know that I have a broken nose. But I don’t know anything else, so I head off to the office to sort this out, take my jacket off and there is blood pouring out of my back.”

The boy was jailed for six months – the maximum for a minor at that time – and Howson was off work for seven weeks.

“That sort of violence is off the scale. There is disruption in schools but these types of incidents are rare.”

He was already looking for a change, he says, and at the end of that year was offered a job in professional development, managing a new programme for secondary teachers.

Clipping from Daily Mirror, January 12, 1977

He then went to do a research degree at the University of Oxford – the city in which he still lives, now in a house which backs on to Castle Mill Stream and Worcester College sports ground. He continued working in teacher training until 1984.

Since then his main focus has been on education data and teacher supply, with a nine-year stint as the first deputy head of Oxford Brookes University’s School of Education, and a longer term serving as a magistrate in Oxfordshire. And since last year he has been a Liberal Democrat councillor on the Conservative-run Oxfordshire County Council.

“As a councillor in Oxfordshire in the third party, there is a limit to what you can do. You can do a lot more through the press than you can in the council chamber. I could take the easy option and sit back and do nothing, but because I have an interest in education I feel that I have a lot of expertise to offer.”

He says that he also enjoys the “discipline of writing 500 words” and two years ago set up a blog, “Some stories behind the education numbers”, which now has more than 200 posts. “I only write about what I want to write about. I enjoy it and it’s part of understanding communication.

“Those things, plus family life, keep me going. I don’t do as much politically outside the county as I used to. There are younger people who should be doing that sort of thing now.”

John says his life could have taken a very different turn if he had had children, but his two marriages ended, in part, he says, because of his infertility.

“You learn to live with it and, like everything else in life, you cope with it. But it does distort what would be a normal desire to have a life with children.

“So I have done other things. I have done the research and I have the done the magistracy, as a public service, and I have had a great life.

“It has not been the life I might necessarily have chosen if I had a family with kids. I might have ended up as a head, earning a lot more money rather than having, in a sense, to take control of my own career!”

What is your earliest memory?

Certainly the newspapers on the death of King George VI being boarded in black and, about the same time an, early Christmas and playing with some Dinky toys as presents. Exactly which of those is the earliest memories is difficult to say, but I was about 3 or 4 I think.

What was your favourite subject at school?

It has to be geography. I enjoyed English literature and then later the drama side of it, but it wasn’t a favourite subject in the same way. I take that on to adult life in a way because the great thing about being interested in geography and the world is you go to really exciting places. One of my more recent, fantastic memories, is standing at the watchtower at Machu Picchu on a December morning and watching the mist unfurl, the whole time devoid of people. The place is just unveiled in front of you. Absolutely magical.

Where would you like to go that you haven’t yet been?

Oh, Australia. And I have been round bits of Russia but I would liked to have gone south into Kyrgyzstan and the Gobi desert and that area, although I am getting a bit old and doddery for some of those sorts of things. And I have never been across the Atlantic by boat; I suppose I am the tail end of the Atlantic liner generation so it has always had an interest to me. I think Australia is probably top of my list.

If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

What an interesting question. I guess, probably, one of the philosophers. Perhaps Comenius or Erasmus, but Comenius had an impact on thinking about education and there is that famous quote from him about educating the whole person. I think it would be fascinating to talk to them about education.

But that young rebellious streak undoubtedly got her to the top – and is what continues to drive her.

“I was never going to become a teacher. Never,” she remembers. Perhaps a strange statement to hear from the daughter of a primary headteacher, and from the woman at the helm of Yorkshire’s first academy.

The eldest of five, her relationship with schools in her youth has clearly affected the adult McMullen.

Ros with parents Gill and Vin

Her father left school at 14 to work in the shipyards but eventually became the headteacher of a small primary in the fishing village of Amble, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. When McMullen was 11, the family upped sticks for the Waterloo area of Liverpool and a headship for her father of a larger Catholic primary. “He was a working class lad made good,” she smiles.

She spent three years in a Catholic grammar school in Crosby but her father moved the family again, this time to Southport, so all the children could attend a comprehensive. He did not agree with a selective system – and neither did his daughter.

“When I was at the grammar I decided that I didn’t agree with selection. The teachers would all be lobbying the council for the preservation of grammar schools and I would be the other side. I was a bit of a radical.”

She says she was “under-stretched” at the comprehensive and put all her energy into politics.

Ros back row, third from left with fellow sixth formers at Christ the King, Southport

“I was a real teenage rebel. I put any kind of intellectual stretch or passion into that because I wasn’t getting any at school. The 70s were a different world.”

Even her parents did not push her academically – despite her father’s profession – something that she now describes as “odd”. She says her younger brother, who was closest in age to her, was not academic and that perhaps was why they did not want to emphasise her abilities.

“It was a shame, but that’s how it was. There was a lack of push. I took my time with politics as a consequence.

“I was involved in Labour’s Young Socialists, a hotbed of trouble in the 1970s. I started, or tried to start, a branch of the National Union of School Students, rather unsuccessfully.

“I remember my dad getting phone calls from my headteacher complaining about my political activity in school. It was an overreaction, totally unjustified. So the one thing I was never going to be was a teacher. Never.”

She went off to Lancaster University to study educational studies and sociology – and became inspired to teach.

“I wanted to do it better than it had been done to me. I felt education was a mess; and to be frank if we look back to the 70s, it was a bit of a mess. I came at it from quite a bolshie, rebellious angle; that I was going to change the world. That’s why I trained to teach.”

Her first teaching job was in Luton, at Lea Manor High School, on the notorious Marsh Farm estate, before she headed to Manchester with her then husband – a short marriage to a childhood sweetheart.

While teaching at Wright Robinson School in Manchester she became interested in school leadership and at 32 (she’s now 52) became deputy head of Wellacre Academy in Trafford. She was the first woman in a senior leadership position and there were only five women on staff.

“I was going to change the world. That’s why I trained
to teach”

She missed out on the top job when the incumbent head left. “Apparently it takes a man to run a boys’ school. So I decided that the best thing to do was not work for that governing body and get a headship elsewhere. Which is what I did.”

After applying for 12 jobs, she began to realise that being young, female and ambitious was not looked on favourably. She thinks she finally got her first headship “because nobody else wanted the job”.

And that job was Kingsdown High School in Wigan, where in 2000 only seven per cent of pupils got five A-C grades at GCSE, not including English and maths.

It wasn’t easy: the school was on what she describes as a “confluence” of two council estates and, she says, initially she was threatened by the community and had to be walked to her car each night by the school’s caretaker.

But McMullen turned the school around.

“There had been a lot of that cuddle and muddle, we are very good at pastoral, rubbish. The one thing that actually wasn’t happening was children in lessons being taught and entered for exams. I paid no attention to the things that I was supposed to.”

Teams were sent out on to the estates to get kids in class and by the time she left, she had managed to get achievement at GCSEs up to 30 per cent five A*-C, including English and maths.

She moved on when the local council thwarted her plans to grow the school and David Young Community Academy (DYCA) came calling – the first in Yorkshire under Labour’s academies programme. That was in 2004.

But it was a difficult journey. She moved her family from Manchester – husband Steve, and children Roisin, Finn and Erin – to York and set about forming the school that was to serve the large Seafield estate in Leeds.

Ros with youngest daughter Erin

“I was castigated at the time. And it sounds so silly now, but some of it was for putting the kids in smart uniforms. All the schools put kids in smart uniforms now.

“One of the big myths about me was that I didn’t care about vulnerable children. Why on earth would I do this job if I didn’t? I was here because I cared about vulnerable children.”

David Young was formed from two troubled secondary schools. Of 1,000 pupils, 300 were then persistent absentees; now 67 per cent are eligible for free school meals.

She has this year stepped up to executive principal and is the chief executive of LEAF, a multi-academy trust of David Young and two primary schools. A bid for an alternative provision free school in the east of the city is on the table.

Why did she want to take on another big challenge? “The idea of being an independent head and being able to do it my own way, in a way I knew worked – I was so attracted to that.

“In the person specification for the job they had said an essential requirement was a passion for social justice and I had never seen that on a personal spec. I thought I can work for these people. I couldn’t have worked for loads of sponsors but I could work for the Church of England and I could work with passion for social justice.”

Where did that passion come from? “That’s the influence of my dad. I have been steeped in Catholic social teaching. I’m not the firebrand, the dangerous radical that I was in my teens. In fact I am a good Blairite. But it all comes from a passion for social justice that’s rooted quite deeply in my Catholic formation.”

What has been your favourite holiday?

Italy. I adore the mountains. Tuscany, the mountains of Tuscany. The time I am thinking about was 2009. There was a village called Montefegatesi, it’s just a village that nobody would ever find. It’s a village you have to work really hard, really, really hard to find. About 3,000m up and you have to find it. It’s near Bagni de Lucca. It’s beautiful if you google it.

If you could go back to any period of history, when would it be?

Oh, I would be a suffragette. There’s no doubt about it! I would have liked to have been with them as they formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, to have been right in there at the start. No doubt about that one.

Favourite book?

Loads of them. That’s a really hard question. Well, there’s a series of books which I keep re-reading and they are the Susan Howatch novels, the Starbridge novels. And I like them because they are a rattling good read but because there is a lot about theology in them as well. A lot of sex, but a lot of theology too.

What about your favourite meal?

Errrr, I like cooking for all the family, I like cooking Christmas dinner, I like cooking traditional meals. I cooked Christmas dinner for 12 last year. Funnily enough, I’ve got this reputation of being really hard and actually I am a Mother Earth character.

His name, voice and academic background aren’t stereotypically “Labour” – a point keenly brought home in David Cameron’s recent Tory party conference jibe that Tristram wasn’t a fit name for a politician of red hue.

Hunt is irked by the comments. “You know, the tactless: ‘I can’t believe he’s not a Tory’ . . . but I’ve never felt a Tory; I have always felt very at home and at ease in the Labour tribe.”

Despite the demeanour, the 40-year-old Hunt’s tribalism is no surprise. His father, Julian Hunt, a meteorologist and now life peer in the House of Lords, was a Labour councillor who led the Cambridge Labour Group just before Hunt’s birth.

Further back, Hunt’s great aunt Peggy sat on London’s local council and was instrumental in setting up the 10 o’clock and 1 o’clock clubs in London, an early version of SureStart.

Ping pong: Hunt in December 2013 at Stoke-on-Trent College’s new Sports Academy. Pic: Stoke Sentinel

It would therefore be easy to believe Hunt’s political charisma was an inevitability. But the description of his early years reveals a clunky former self. Tall from the age of 6 or 7 (he’s now over 6ft), the young Hunt was also desperately short-sighted, and wore bottle-thick glasses. Matched with his long limbs and blonde hair, he acquired the nickname Milky Bar Kid.

“There was also that dreaded phrase, ‘lanky’,” he says, half-laughing, half-weary.

Terrible at sport, aged 11 he swapped his glasses for contact lenses in the hope that it might help. It didn’t. “I was terrible at all of them . . . rugby, football, cricket. I think ended up with badminton as my sport.”

He did, however, find solace in studies. Right from primary school some of his happiest memories involve lessons in lateral thinking (“there was a particular problem about if you removed all the seats from a bus and people would be able to stand up, would you get more in?”) and of history trips — to the Iron Bridge in Telford, and to his constituency area of Stoke-on-Trent.

Hunt focused on art subjects, and for A-level chose English, history and Latin. The first two were long-time passions; the latter chosen because of an encouraging teacher.

From University College School in north London, he then went to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, with history the natural choice for his degree subject.

“I just enjoyed history more and more. I’d always enjoyed it, right from my early years, and then I did GCSE — and that was sort of fine but not totally compelling — but then I greatly enjoyed the A-level, so went on with that.

Hot rod: In July pupils at the Co-operative Academy of Stoke-on-Trent showed Hunt their project. Pic: @STEMNET

“I luxuriated in the past and enjoyment of the past, but the element of history I’ve always liked – which is why I’m in politics – is the political fight over representations and misrepresentations and historiography. One of the best papers I did was on the history battles in the late 16th/early 17th centuries. So all the Shakespeare, history plays, the sort of crafting of a notion of Albion and Englishness, and the fight about truth and legend and national identity.”

It is not the only time Hunt mentions big theoretical ideas in our talk. Speaking of his time studying in Chicago, he references economists and monetarist theorists as a prompt to his strong belief in social justice: after all, their tough talk on the economy was not matching the reality of what people were experiencing. On welfare reform he often talks in historical sweeps, his examples more likely to be of political debate than examples seen face-to-face.

After completing a PhD in history, Hunt was asked to screen test for a new TV series that a friend was working on. They needed a young historian for a programme about the English Civil War. Hunt was cast, and, through the experience, learned about “truth narratives”, and marrying visual messages with written and spoken ones.

He continued volunteering with the Labour party, working each election campaign from 1997 through to 2005 in an array of roles. In 2001, for example, he was the party’s “digital press officer, or something equally bizarre”. Did this require him to learn web coding? “No! People would phone up and I’d sort out an interview with David Blunkett for Yahoo.co.uk or something.”

After the 2005 election, and aged just 30, Hunt decided he wanted to be an MP. He began throwing his hand in for seats. In 2007 he lost out to Stephen Twigg for the safe Labour seat of Liverpool West Derby. In 2009 another slipped through his hands.

Finally, he stood for Stoke-on-Trent Central in 2010. Selected on the Thursday night, the general election was called on Monday morning. He was a prospective parliamentary candidate for all of three days.

“I’ve never felt a Tory; I have always felt very at home and at ease in the Labour tribe”

Hunt’s wife and three children are all supportive of his career, and help to keep his feet on the ground: “The children are . . . well, it’s sort of beautiful, because it’s just a thing that you do. So they know that I work at Big Ben, and that’s nice, they know David Cameron is the prime minister, and they know Ed Miliband is the leader of the Labour party, and they know Stoke-on-Trent. That’s their sort of framing for it, basically.”

Do they allow him to act like an important politico at home? “Absolutely not!”

After just three and a half years as an MP, Hunt replaced Stephen Twigg as shadow education secretary – a reversal of their 2007 fortunes.

How did he cope facing the formidable Michael Gove in the Commons?

“By that time Michael had been in an education role for six or seven years, and [he] enjoyed the theatre and form of it . . . but holding government to account in there is very, very important, and you also have to realise, as it were, that out of that world, things are very different.”

Has Hunt’s confidence grown now that Gove has stepped down, and he has been in position longer than new education secretary Nicky Morgan? “Well yes, and we’re right too – which always helps.”

College walkabout: Hunt on a tour at Walsall College last September Pic: FE Week

At that juncture, Hunt breaks into political patter. He sticks cleanly to policy lines: Labour wants world-class teachers, no more free schools, to revive AS-levels and to focus on teacher quality.

Opponents who criticise him for not talking up teachers are wrong: he is desperate to do so. It’s clearly important to him, just as it is clearly a rehearsed spiel. His years of wondering about truth, and speaking in front of a camera, have made him aware that a few key messages, ruthlessly hammered home, are what makes the difference.

For those who like their politicians more earthy, he’s disappointingly anodyne. But Hunt isn’t afraid of that gap between what people might want him to be and what he actually is.

“I am who I am. I can’t do a very good, you know, repositioning of my accent or name or whatever.

“You’ve got a choice – you’re either authentic and you are who you are, or you’re trying to be what you’re not . . . I think people value authenticity more than trying to be what you’re not.”

It’s a personal thing

What is your favourite book? (And why?)

I think Anna Karenina – love, drama, history, death, marriage, children, trauma. Brilliant.

If you could go back to one historical moment, when would it be?

Elvis Presley at Madison Square Gardens

What was the best party you attended as a child?

My 9th birthday party playing football at Wandlebury

If you could have dinner with one person – living or dead-who would you choose?

Fred Engels – lots of questions…

Where would you like to go on your next holiday?

I’d like to go to Cape Cod. But I will be going to Devon

“It’s changed so much . . . it has definitely gone up in the world and the schools in the area have probably helped to mould that change,” she says in her soft Lancashire accent, as ever passionate about the influence education has on everybody’s future.

The former teacher, turned blogger and author, is known for her outspoken views, not least after an open letter she wrote almost 18 months ago to then education secretary Michael Gove about his reforms gained more than 4,000 signatures. In her words, it “went a bit mental”.

Her desire to stand up for her views is clearly embedded in her school life and childhood.

Girnhill Infant School, 2007

She grew up in Burnley, “on the football terraces mostly”, and was in the first cohort to miss the 11-plus and go to Ivy Bank High School in its first year of comprehensive status, in 1979.

“All the children older than us were doing things like hairdressing courses and mechanics, lots of vocational courses and CSEs, and I am not quite sure the school really knew what to do with this new group of children they had which was much more of a mixed ability.

“But it was a really good grounding because it meant that I grew up being able to mix with all kinds of people and I understood that people have different strengths. It toughens you up. I also learnt to play hockey and defend well,” she says, laughing.

Asked whether it was this background that made her want to stick up for others, she says: “I think so. I spent quite a lot of time being bullied at secondary school. I played the piano – that was a big mistake, so was doing well in a maths test.

“I learned by the end of it that you should still say what you think and you should just take what comes to you on the chin.

“Ultimately people respect you more for being consistently gobby, than for compromising on the ideas or the thoughts that you have. So yeah, I did learn to speak up and stick up for myself.”

Working with middle school children at the Eden Project 2014

Debra did not stay in the state system to do her A-levels. Her father had set up a business so could afford to send her to a nearby private school for her sixth form studies.

“I am sure that he thought he was “saving me” from the state system.

“But in terms of quality of teaching there ended up being very little difference and, in fact, it was probably better on the whole at the comprehensive because the teachers were used to having to keep people engaged.

“I felt like I saw both spectrums in society in a way and I had to integrate at both ends.

“Now when I think about the private/state divide, I see people thinking that they are buying a bit of safety and social networking for their children. It’s not really about the quality of education at all.”

After school she headed “down south” to London, for the first time, to study English and drama at what was then Westfield College (now part of Queen Mary University).

The young Debra wanted to be a music teacher. She was the first in her family to go to university and had aspirations to be like those teachers she had met at school.

“The only graduates I had ever met in my life were teachers. So, if you were going to be aspirational, then becoming a teacher was an aspirational goal. My music teacher, I loved her, so to look up to her and think I could be her was really inspiring.”

But her tutors were not keen on her plans, a derogatory attitude that pushed her into the world of PR and advertising. But her strong spirit prevailed.

“I felt like I was selling my soul,” she says, again laughing. No matter what the subject, Debra looks at it with a positive attitude.

“I remember working on a water privatisation campaign for the Conservative party. I had gone from the Lynx anti-fur campaign, which felt like it had validity, to something that I was vehemently opposed to politically. I realised I didn’t want to be in a profession where I would compromise my principles like that.

“So I applied to become a teacher. Then I fell pregnant and had to defer for a year.”

But teach she did, and it is where she spent the past 21 years until July year — in every tier of the school world, starting in a sixth form before moving to primary and secondary schools, and university.

“People respect you more for being consistently gobby, than for compromising on ideas or thoughts”

The mother-of-three stuck to schools in the Oldham area, wanting to move back close to her parents when her oldest son was born and to do her PGCE at Manchester University in the 1990s.

But despite her clear love for the profession, she stopped teaching in July, exhausted, stressed and disillusioned.

“I suppose one side of it was me thinking that I have to step out and do something, I have to have some kind of effect, and the other thing was that I was just starting to feel the relentless treadmill of chasing data.”

It is here where you can really see Debra’s passion, and her self-proclaimed gobby-ness, come to the front. She worries that children’s other talents – in drama, sport, and art – are being looked at as only secondary to academic accomplishment.

Was it triggered by her letter to Michael Gove? “I got home on the first day of that Easter holiday and sat down and wept, and just thought I don’t know if I can carry on doing this job. Then I saw him on BBC’s Question Time with the ‘yadda yadda’ and ‘enemy of promise’ and I just thought how dare you. I sat down and wrote the letter and it went a bit mental,” she chuckles.

But the Michael Gove incident cannot be solely responsible for her exit from teaching.

“It was after a particularly difficult week at work where I had spent about 15 hours putting data into a computer, and I knew that none of it was really honest data because we were being told to make charts turn from red to green. The children had just done a Shakespeare unit and had struggled with it a little bit, so to try show any kind of progress was just fictional, everything was fictional.

Year 12 – 1984

“I think that was the trigger that really pushed me over the edge. I was thinking ‘I am not doing this for children any more, I am doing this for the school and to make everybody look good’.”

Since taking a step away from teaching, Debra has taken on a number of roles – including writing a book describing her concerns about education. With a following of almost 5,000 people on Twitter, and a popular blog, the impact of the book is likely to be strong – but her willingness to speak out does, occasionally, get her in trouble.

“I do get carried away. Rather than me thinking that I have lots of influence, sometimes I feel like I am in a private conversation and forget that there could be up to 5,000 people following it.”

She says her only regrets are jumping on those who aren’t capable of “looking after themselves”, such as young teachers, but adds: “I don’t regret the thumping of heavyweights. I’m from Burnley!”

It is this outspoken streak that she feels would put heed to any future in politics. “I could never be measured enough not to speak my mind if I felt something needed to be said.”

@debrakidd

What do you do to relax?

Swim. I do yoga as well. But when I get in the pool and set off I don’t think about anything but getting to the other side. Just to have 30 or 45 minutes when you are not thinking about anything else is liberating.

Favourite book?

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s about a missionary teacher who takes his wife and four girls to the Congo to try to convert the natives, and is a really searing account of how our attitudes towards other people are so misaligned.

You obviously have a strong passion for music, what’s
your favourite album?

Oh God! My favourite album? Two things really jump out at me. That first Stone Roses album will always be a favourite: it is from when I was younger and it was the whole kind of Manchester music scene.

But when I was 15, my music teacher took me to see the Hallé Orchestra. I had never heard any classical music, ever, and they were playing Rachmaninoff Second Concerto. It was like a whole new world. I still love that piece of music because it takes me back to that moment where my brain was ripped open to this amazing thing.

What’s your favourite place and where do you want to go?

I do some work for the International Schools Theatre Association, so about three or four times a year they will send me to different places in the world and I work with children for three or four days to put a piece of theatre together. In January I am going to the Urals in Russia. I’ve been to several places in China, really enjoyed that, and I went to Singapore last year. But I just love turning up somewhere that I have never been before, meeting a group of kids and making some theatre based around the place that we are in.

“Have I been briefed?! I’ve never been so briefed for the press since I started working at the department. Almost every word you have to memorise.”

If the press officer at his side looks concerned, he needn’t. Green’s honesty is refreshing and reveals a forthrightness that no doubt helps with his role.

As England’s Schools Commissioner he now leads the eight Regional School Commissioners, people tasked with scrutinising academy performance and encourage collaboration.

However, if “Frank” is perfect nomenclature; “Green” is anything but. After all, he has no shortage of experience.

Before becoming commissioner, he headed two schools, began an academy trust, taught science for many years and once worked as a taxi driver in Philadelphia.

Yet his beginnings did not suggest a career in education. Born in Kent, he first attended primary school in Goudhurst before being “packed off to boarding school” at 10.

“I was taught by the Jesuits,” he says. “First at Beaumont College, which no longer exists, and then they sent me off for my sixth form years to Stonyhurst College.

“I hated school. When I left I swore I’d never be back in one in my life”

“I really hated, hated my time at school, and I swore when I left… I can remember walking down the drive one last time, it had this long drive, and thinking, ‘I’ll never be back in a school in my life.’ Haha!”

History was top of his list of dislikes, although one teacher, Mr Fish – or “Fishy” as the pupils called him – helped to inspire his interest in science.

He then studied metallurgical engineering at Imperial College, London, but a stint at the Central Electricity Generating Board put him off it as a career.

“It wasn’t fast enough, it was boring, and you had to work fairly tightly to rules. I thought, ‘If that’s what engineering is, I don’t want it’.”

When he finished university in 1971, Green was a full blown rebel – hair grown past his shoulders and harbouring a love of rock music. Matching his wild spirit he headed to the US and worked as a cabby in Philadelphia, before travelling across the country.

He was offered a PhD place at the University of Denver but turned it down after getting a call to say that his father, now living in Spain, was sick.

“Being half-Belgian [Green’s mother is Belgian] there is a view that the eldest son is the one responsible for parents,” he says. At the time, however, Green’s older brother had a newborn baby and was unable to leave England. He asked Frank to look after his father, instead.

“I said I’d take a year off. So I did that, and nursed my father for the last two months of his life. He never knew who I was for those two months… you can learn a great deal about life when you see somebody that close to the end of it.”

Returning to England he wanted to stay near his mother, and needed a job quickly. Knowing that science teachers could then be employed without full qualification, he filled out a Bromley council supply teacher form.

Alongside chemistry, physics and maths he unthinkingly ticked a box marked “technical drawing”, a skill that he didn’t have. Inevitably, this was the subject that he was sent to teach.

Frank Green in 1992 when he was appointed head of Lincoln School of Science & Technology

“Don’t worry, they said, you’ll pick it up quickly!” Did he? “Yes! I did!”

After a year of supply teaching he completed his teacher qualifications at Westminster College in Oxford, before teaching science for more than seven years. One of his pupils was the actor, Kenneth Branagh: “Great school plays at that school!”

His first leadership role was as head of science at a school in Brighton where he soon realised that three existing staff members had also interviewed for the role – and they were not happy about his selection. Concerned they wouldn’t be responsive to change, fate threw Green a lifeline.

“Through luck, serendipity, fate or whatever you want to call it, about a week after I got there the head said they were going to have a full HMI inspection. And in those days, full inspections involved 22 HMIs who came in for a week; you had two alone just for science for a week!

“So the great thing about it was, after HMI had done their bit, we had a final briefing and they said, ‘We’ve found these issues and those’, and I said, ‘Can you please add this, this and this, because I think they’re real problems too’, because they hadn’t spotted those. Basically I got them to write me a report that I would then use very easily and depersonalise all the key decisions that I had to take!”

How did he know to be so strategic? “I don’t know – it just seemed like the right thing to do at that time. If you ask the question of how much formal training have I had to be a headteacher, then the answer would be zero.’

His first headship in 1992 was another controversial project. Lincoln School of Science and Technology was born out of the city technology college (CTC) movement of the late 1980s and was the first of the new “specialist schools”.

“In those days, CTCs were worse than vampire stuff. They put the garlic round the door.”

He dealt with the negativity by standing apart from it. “You say, ‘No – we’re here to do what we need to do – this is about the children’. You don’t sink to the kind of negative commentary that came from a lot of other heads who took a rather silly view of what was happening.”

Academies Week deputy editor Laura McInerney interviewing Frank Green

From there he went on to be headteacher at another school that came from being far below average in results to achieving significantly above-average and was rated outstanding by Ofsted. Asked to help other struggling schools, he spent five years as chief executive of the Leigh Academy Trust, which enabled him to oversee six academies.

One secret to his success is surrounding himself with like-minded people who share information. During the late 90s he helped to pioneer an email list for headteachers. “They said that the head had to be technically proficient enough to operate it. So, you had to disconnect your phone, connect your modem, reprogram your computer and do it yourself.”

Speaking with other heads taught Green a great deal, and it is clear that a similar cross-pollination of information is what he wants to encourage in his new DfE role.

Beyond school, Green talks about his wife (who was also a teacher) and his three sons – all of whom are now grown. One of the perils of headship is that it can mean moving around the country, and the boys had to move from Brighton to Newark, though Green managed to do so when they were all at school transition ages, which made it easier. His wife has now officially retired, though she still teaches French at the University of the Third Age.

As our time comes to a close and the recorder is switched off, Green looks disappointed. He hasn’t been asked why he wanted to be Schools Commissioner.

The recorder is duly switched back on.

With bright eyes he simply says: “I took the job because I could influence more children’s lives than in my previous role. There would be no other reason to do it.”

The message is clear. If Frank Green is going to be memorising anyone’s lines, you can be certain they are going to be his own.

If you were stuck on a desert island, would you take a book or a film to keep you interested?

Definitely I’d pick a book. If I was going to take just any book… I’d probably end up picking Pride and Prejudice. I know – it’s not usually a man’s choice.

Tea or coffee? And how do you want it made?

Coffee, definitely. Depends what time of day. After a meal, double espresso. Early in the morning, a white coffee to dunk my croissant.

Best day of the week?

Saturday! It’s the weekend and you’re in full control of what you’re doing.

Where would you ideally go on your next holiday?

I have a house in Spain, so it’s kind of a second home – I go there when I can, long weekends and all, but the place I really want to go more than anywhere else is Peru. I want to go to Machu Pichu and I would really like to walk the Inca Trail. I want to be able to retire fit enough to be able to walk the trail, or at least attempt it.

Earlier this month, Baker was crowned as president of teaching union ATL (the Association of Teachers and Lecturers) after a 30-year career in special educational needs: “There was a magic to it that has just never, ever gone. I use that phrase a lot. But I never get tired of saying it, because it was a different experience.”

“Whatever has come along or whatever I have ventured into in between times, teaching in a special school is the most challenging, but the rewards are phenomenal – and the wisdom and understanding you get from it are just beyond any sort of price or value.”

As he talks, Baker’s face makes it clear that school, and learning, make him happy. Having attended Springhead Primary School, he passed the 11-plus and headed to Oldham Hulme Grammar School. “I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it thoroughly,” he says, emphatically.

“I remember being involved in many things from chess to squash, lots of activities. We used to have incredibly long lunchtimes. You took part in all these various activities – and, I have to say, pretty well unsupervised. I think we would probably worry too much now if that were the case!”

Though he worked hard at school, he professes to being a poor cricketer and terrible at German. “Modern languages – it was a mystery to me; no matter what was tried, it just never happened.”

Instead he found solace in the visual arts – a love still evident in the sculptures adorning his house, though none are his own creation. “Mine all turned to dust over the years,” he says wistfully.

At 18 he decided it would be “interesting to go into teaching” and so moved to Liverpool to pursue a full-time teaching course at Christ Church College. His focus was secondary geography teaching, with a minor in art.

“The human geography I found fascinating. I found geographical models that you could apply to everything, without getting too technical about it, and it was something that served me well and something that always carried a fascination to me. I think those few years went rather quickly.”

After graduation, he travelled for a few months before returning home. On his first day of leisure a friend of his mother’s phoned him. She was looking for a teacher to work in a local special needs school. “The woodwork teacher had taken early retirement, which is something that was quite prevalent in the early 80s, and they needed a supply teacher. I went along, and it just extended and extended and extended…until 33 years later!”

He began at Alderman Kay Special School in Middleton, Rochdale, in 1981. In 2007, the school became part of Redwood Secondary School, where he is still based.

He laughs heartily, “I knew then that teaching is what I loved, I enjoyed, and what I felt I could make a real difference with.”

Despite this, it was not an easy era in which to begin teaching. The mid-80s were tough and the school was situated in an area of Manchester overspill council estates. “They were quite austere and turbulent times then, and there was a lot of poverty.

“In many ways, that just reinforced the value of what you did, and the necessity of it; because you realised then that if you weren’t standing up for some of the most vulnerable people in society they were going to get left behind, because there was nobody else doing it.”

Over the years Baker took on several leadership roles including head of IT, head of inclusion and even head of languages for a short period – something he worried about, given his terrible German skills. “We were sufficiently pragmatic, sufficiently flexible, and knowledgeable that we managed it,” he says.

In 1981 Baker joined the Assistant Masters’ and Mistresses’ Association (the precursor to ATL) as a school representative, later rising to the position of branch secretary for Rochdale. “They said to me when I took the role: ‘Don’t worry Mark, you’ll just have to meet with the local authority – there won’t be much to do’. How wrong they were!”

Within weeks of taking over as branch secretary he was involved in a redesign of Rochdale’s special schools. Instead of small schools scattered across the area, council leaders wanted to rebuild several of the largest schools and put them onto the same site as mainstream schools.

In 2007, this led to Alderman Kay being merged with a mainstream school – a process which was difficult, but which he relished.

Baker also worked with ATL on national policy regarding bullying – something he talks passionately about. “When you work in a strong, northern mill town where people have often faced a lot of adversity, where there is an expectation of supporting each other, then any sort of bullying really does stick in the throat.”

He also believes Ofsted and the accountability framework facing schools sometimes push senior managers into behavior that amounts to bullying – when teachers really need support.

“It’s the poorest sort of management. If someone has to resort to bullying, it’s because something is not being done properly. So there’s a benefit to everyone in challenging that,” he says.

It is clear throughout our conversation that Baker’s greatest excitement comes from being able to take messy problems, and clear them up – whether that’s taking a classroom from chaos to productive learning, or a complicated school system to a streamlined one.

If he was a type of geographical ‘model’, I ask, what would he be? In truth, the expectation is that he will describe a narrow highstreet with a few neat cul-de-sacs. He defies that expectation.

“I would be a nucleus model!” he exclaims –a type of town with a central hub and roads radiating away from it. “I’ve always felt, given my background – bringing in education, training, the trade union – they all sit in separate boxes. But all of them work together, and very hard indeed!”

He laughs again, and offers to close the door in case the brisk northern air is getting in. If it was, his sheer warmth has made it very hard to notice.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I didn’t know. I drifted around a lot, whatever the latest fad was. But until the decision had to be made to go to college, I didn’t have anything particular in mind.

What do you do to switch off from work?

That I find incredibly difficult because my love of small print and detail carries with me, whatever I am doing!

What is your favourite book?

It would be some policy or other! I’m not one for novels, but I’ve just got hold of the new SEND report that has come out and that is part of my leisure reading list. When I got Sky TV, the first programme I watched, which I was enthralled with, was the Commons Transport Select Committee on parking policy. It’s tragic, but that’s the sort of thing I find interesting.

So you watch Transport Select Committees in order to switch off from work?

Yes. It’s shocking, I know.

If you were to invite anyone to a dinner party, who would it be?

Tragically, again, it would be the Secretary of State – to have a conversation and dialogue with her, to try and understand the mind-set. It would have been interesting to meet Michael Gove.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

People expect me to be serious. There’s a programme called The Inbetweeners and if anyone were to say, “This is something Mark would not like, then that is it”. But I think it’s fantastic! I just find it so comical. I don’t know why, I just do!

This determination is typical of de Souza who, at 46, is one of the younger chief executives of a multi-academy trust. She’s also one of the most controversial.

As principal of two “turnaround” schools she became renowned for sending staff to drag students out of bed and introducing uniforms designed by Savile Row tailors. Despite her unorthodox ways, both schools improved their results.

Since 2012 she has been CEO of Inspiration Trust, a Norfolk-based academy chain overseeing eight schools and a teacher-training centre. Inspiration’s four trustees, besides de Souza, are wealthy businessmen. One is Theodore Agnew, a non-executive director at the Department for Education, and long-time Conservative donor.

Celebrating with students at Ormiston Victory

Referred to by de Souza simply as “Theo”, Agnew has clearly been crucial in the trust’s development, providing significant financial and moral support. However, his position at the education ministry raises eyebrows and in the week that I visit, de Souza is batting off newspaper allegations that she was “tipped-off” about the date of Ofsted inspections (see page 4). The investigation caused people to titter about her successes. Was it all down to back-scratching?

But de Souza’s current mingling with millionaires betrays her humble beginnings. Born in Scunthorpe in 1968, she was the middle child among three brothers. Her father was a steelworker, her mother an Austro-Hungarian refugee who looked after the four children.

Being at the front of the academies movement means that it’s very hard to be seen neutrally”

De Souza attended her local comprehensive. “I remember one of the nuns there, Sister Anna, saying to me, ‘The trouble with you, Rachel Kenny, is that you can’t cook and you don’t like cleaning up – how are you going to get a husband?’ There was a sense that we were going to be wives and mothers. I remember telling my auntie ‘I think I’d like to be a doctor,’ and she said, ‘No, no – that’s not for us’.”

De Souza’s mother and grandmother disagreed. “They would say ‘You can do whatever you want’ and I met a couple of very good teachers at sixth form that gave me a ‘puff’ to start studying.”

Inspired by an ex-Jesuit teacher, who led her A-level philosophy class, she began reading classic texts – even teaching herself Greek so that she could read Aristotle’s original prose.

“This was during the miners’ strike, which we were very aware of, and very interested in politically, but I was also interested in Hungarian and Czech literature because of my mother’s background. I couldn’t readily get my hands on it, though. It just wasn’t available in Scunthorpe.”

Unable to find the books that she craved in the local library, her teacher lent her his own collections that she would read in corners, away from family and friends. “I did think of it rather as a secret. There was a whole other side to me that had a very fun, sociable time in a working-class community. So it was all a big surprise to my friends when I got my A-levels and left.”

Aged 18 and clutching the book of her new philosopher-crush, Simone de Beauvoir, she boarded a train at Doncaster and headed to Heythrop College, a small Catholic college affiliated to the University of London, where she would study theology and philosophy.

Michael Gove visiting Ormiston Victory Academy 2012

“It was a dream come true, really. I’d been in an environment where access to academic things was difficult, so I just loved it from the day I got there. I really became properly focused academically when I got to university.”

She rediscovered her love of music (she had played the violin as a child), and was fascinated by the Jesuit priests who trained at the college. “They were doing things like flying back from Guyana, going off to set up communities in the East End… very different things.”

Watching de Souza’s face as she talks about Heythrop, it is clear the experience was transformative. Animated throughout our conversation, it is as if her whole soul is aflame as she describes the joy of digging out dusty books in the caverns of the college’s library.

As ever with life though, those times could not last forever. It was 1989 and after graduation “everyone was going off to be an accountant”. De Souza tried it. She lasted five days.

After a year working in museums and office receptions, she completed a PGCE at King’s College London before moving with her husband to Oxford. They met on her first day at Heythrop and married so that she could move with him to complete his studies at Jesus College.

She taught in a “typical Oxfordshire, slightly under-performing, slightly coasting” school, and quickly became head of the religious education department, introducing GCSE and A-levels in the subject, as well as philosophy.

From Oxford she moved to London’s Tower Hamlets. At first she was overwhelmed by the school’s large, urban and largely non-white population. “I looked around and thought, ‘I don’t know whether I can do this, I really don’t, I’ve just come from Oxford…’ And then the more I went through the day, I thought, ‘No, I can, I can, and we can do it! We can do this.’ I could see the problems, there were immense problems, but it was so fascinating and really compelling.”

The opening of Jane Austen College 2014

After Tower Hamlets she took a short break to look after her young son, Joe, before returning part-time as a sixth form religious studies teacher. Initially facing low take-up numbers, the department grew to more than 200 students.

Still only in her early thirties, she became deputy head at Denbigh High School in Luton. But when a nearby failing school was selected to become one of the first “turnaround academies” under a plan by the then-Labour government, de Souza’s ears pricked up. She knew it was a tough school with low results. She knew they would struggle to find a headteacher. She knew, however, that she would be perfect for the job.

“I just thought, ‘I’m going to have to run it’. I was absolutely determined. And that was it.”

At 36 and having worked as a deputy for a short time only, she was not the obvious candidate – but after hours of interview preparation, she got the job.

The school’s challenges were enormous. Twenty-five teacher vacancies, endemic low aspirations among students. But she set to work. Yes, she ordered new uniforms. Yes, she sent staff to get students out of bed. To get around the lack of permanent maths teachers in the school, she hired an Australian teacher to teach all students doing the higher paper, for two hours each night, in the school hall using a stereo mic.

It was tough work, but it made a difference. In her second year of headship, 100 per cent of students achieved five A*-Cs at GCSE. It became the stuff of legend.

From Luton she moved to be principal at an academy in Norfolk, run by Ormiston Academies Trust. After successfully turning around this second school she decided to set up a Norfolk-based academy trust.

“I started to think: is a national chain the right thing for here? The right thing for Norfolk? Resources for academies were gone, it wasn’t like the early days when money was just no object.” From this thought, Inspiration was born.

Though she clearly loves her work, it comes at a price. “When I was first a headteacher, I think definitely my family suffered, because I hadn’t learnt the art of going home and switching off. So I think I was present but not voting for a good few years.” She professes to being much better at this now – clearly separating home-time from work-time.

Visiting Great Yarmouth Primary Academy 2013

More recently she faced the problem of becoming a face known to the media: “You can quite naively go around just being you, and then you suddenly realise that actually you’re relatively well-known”. The Ofsted investigation brought this into sharp relief; it concluded as we went to press, ruling that she did not know the date of their visits – so vindicating her hard work.

Always self-deprecating during the interview, at one point she refers to the way some people see her as “that evil woman”. Does she really believe they think that?

She appears taken aback for the first time. Slowly she says: “Being at the front of the academies movement means that it’s very hard to be seen neutrally. Some people immediately think it is fantastic, and there are others who think it is ruining the educational system. But I have always had a very strong drive for standards, whether that’s for behaviour, academics, standards of professionalism, and though I hope that we all get pleasure from our work, I actually think we’re here to deliver for students.”

And if you’re left in any doubt that she means what she says, there’s a road in Norwich she’ll happily drive you the wrong way down to prove it.

What book would you take to a desert island?

Oh, goodness me! Well, I’m a trustee at The Globe, so I’d probably take the complete works of Shakespeare because I need to read them all. But if it was a book that gives me solace or one that motivates me, I would probably take my little book of poetry where Samuel Beckett’s poems are all translated into French and back

What did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was three I wanted to be a headteacher. I definitely wanted to do something to do with a school. I probably lost it as a teenager, but I’m somebody who has been on one path all her life

What do you normally have for breakfast?

It’s changeable. At the moment it’s probably some yoghurt and fruit with some good strong coffee

Next holiday?

Florence. I’ve never been, so I would love
to go and look at the art. I also want to go to Rome and see the opera and look at the galleries. Italy is definitely
on my “bucket list”