About

I’m a Director of Curriculum and Assessment for a MAT. I previously worked for Ofsted leading the Curriculum Unit which was a team of subject specialist HMI. Originally I was a teacher of history and politics.

If you are interested in my longer story it is below:

I wrote my first blog for this site in February 2014. Looking back that time feels like it was a golden age for education blogging. Social media had brought together a disparate group of teachers from across the nation who were united by their desire to learn everything possible about teaching. We could see that the orthodoxies dominating education were not informed by what we learned from each other about human cognition. We thought things could be better for pupils in our schools and we read and shared research, incessantly argued on twitter and blogged our reflections – perhaps rather obsessively. The combination of thrill from finding out new and fascinating things and the dopamine hits from seeing your thoughts and ideas retweeted, favourited and praised, was all a bit intoxicating.

At that time I was a head of history and politics in an independent school and mother of three pre-school and primary aged children. My blogs reflected my preoccupations as a teacher, an examiner and also as a mother working out how to best teach my own children reading and maths because of the bumpy start to their schooling.

As I looked at education then I remember feeling like Alice in Wonderland. I was through the looking glass seeing teaching practices, advocated by some in positions of authority, which made no sense to me. They clearly didn’t really work. I called my blog, Esse Quam Videri (to be rather than to seem to be) because (as well as happening to be my old school motto) it expressed my desire for my teaching practice to really help children learn rather than simply following apparent ‘good practice’ uncritically. I wanted to pursue substance not form, the truth not a simulacrum or veneer.

I never expected my reading and blogging to lead anywhere. What use is an encylopedic knowledge of early reading research, (obsessively read from tomes, propped up on baby number 3, so I could read them whilst breast-feeding) to a secondary history and politics teacher? I did sign up for a Masters, in education research, with the enormous good fortune to be supervised by Christine Counsell. She then uprooted herself from academia and became a Director of Education for a multi academy trust serving children in a region of significant social deprivation. I uprooted myself too and followed her to take up a Vice Principal position. It was a huge move for me. I learnt an enormous amount from that experience as well as meeting so many good people.

From that position, after 23 years in teaching, I moved to a training role in Ofsted. Amanda Spielman had just taken over as HMCI and wanted a new inspection framework which focused on the curriculum – or the ‘substance of Education’. It was a vision I could get behind. I found that my obsessive interest in education across subjects and age ranges has become incredibly useful. I worked with colleagues who were passionately committed to ensuring children had the best possible education. I was very involved in the development of the new Education Inspection Framework and then the ITE inspection framework and I wrote training for inspectors. I became an HMI and then a senior HMI.

Talk about ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’! My old blog posts were riddled with my critique of Ofsted as it had been. I was to get my comeuppance – as I learned the challenges of inspection. The move to Ofsted meant an end to my blogging. After four years and 85 blogs you’ll see they stop abruptly in 2017. As an Ofsted employee it’s not appropriate to share personal views on education, politics or anything much. My twitter feed gradually became a place to post pictures of my garden and my dog.

I threw myself heart and soul into doing my bit, in Ofsted, to be ‘a force for improvement’. I was appointed to jointly lead Ofsted’s new Curriculum Unit which became a truly expert team of HMI subject leads.

To inspect requires judgement – that is, unavoidably, the job of inspectors. It is a judgement made by humans and thus fraught with difficulty – as the awful tragedy, which dominated our thoughts in my final months with Ofsted, demonstrated. I felt, given the innate frailty of human judgement, that our Curriculum Unit should work to support inspection of education quality that was as valid and reliable as was (humanly) possible. ‘Validity’ required that inspection judgement was based upon the best possible conception of what was a quality subject curriculum and teaching. My team of subject specialist HMI explored research, both general and subject specific, which could guide us as to the nature of a high quality education across all subjects.

Those insights were distilled into internal training for inspectors. The training for the workforce was crucial because ‘reliable’ inspection requires that all inspectors share the same conception of quality. Transparency required that that conception of subject quality, used for inspection, was shared and so we published ‘Research Reviews’. I was blown away by the demand for those subject Research Reviews which had nearly 500 000 unique downloads by the time I left Ofsted. It was clear there was a real vacuum that needs to be filled by research informed reflection on the nature of high quality subject curriculum and teaching. Those reviews also informed my team’s thinking about quality in our ‘Subject Reports’. These were ‘state of the nation’ type reports on the quality of subject education in English schools.

It genuinely was a privilege, to serve, as an HMI. I did work with so many superb colleagues. They taught me the craft of inspection. My own team taught me about their subjects – and their intelligence and considerable insight kept me in my box!

I’ve just begun a new role as Director of Curriculum and Assessment for a multi-academy-trust. I’m enjoying being back closer to the action. This means I am allowed to blog again! Of course, I don’t agree with everything I once wrote. Anything new I do manage to write represents my own personal reflections.

I remember a civil service colleague once naively suggesting that if I chose to return to classroom it would all feel too simple and easy having moved on. Oh, dear me, no! The challenges of classroom teaching are never fully solved. The questions arising are infinite and I suspect the fascination with all of it can last a life time.