As Carolyn Roberts retires, ending a 23-year headship career in which she has both championed and embodied ethical leadership, her parting question to the sector is one that she believes school leaders have been “reluctant” to answer.
“What are schools actually for?”
At a time when pupil absenteeism remains stubbornly high, Roberts worries that many families are asking that question, even if headteachers aren’t.
She leads Thomas Tallis, an “old fashioned liberal comprehensive” in Greenwich which has, “by default” rather than design, become a “magnet” school for children with SEND.
Around 30 per cent of its pupils are on the special needs register – around double what it was when Roberts took over in 2013.
But a proud determination for her school to remain inclusive and provide a broad curriculum has had financial repercussions.
She’s “managed to push budget catastrophe a year ahead…but it won’t balance next year”.
The Stockton-on-Tees native stutters slightly when provoked by issues that rattle her. Lately, there have been a few.
Shallow games
She’s “irritated” by politicians and school leaders playing a “very shallow game where everything’s shiny on the outside”. There’s “allegedly highly academic curriculums” and “kids dressed up in 19th century uniforms with blazers and ties”.
But “what is it like for children in those schools who don’t quite fit in, or take a long time to learn things?”
Thomas Tallis’s relaxed uniform policy mean its pupils are currently milling about in an assortment of short skirts, shorts and trousers.
She questions why adults nowadays can wear trainers to work and be “covered in piercings and tattoos”, with “even BBC newsreaders not always wearing ties”.
“Yet we’ve got this idea that children have to be dressed up like dolls. How can it possibly matter what colour socks they’re wearing?”
Roberts worries some of it is about “the policing of girls’ bodies”. She objects to words like “a decent” or “modest length” for skirts. “Well, who’s to say?”
Roberts has an ally in the room; my 15-year-old daughter (with me on work experience) who nods in agreement.
Although Thomas Tallis is not immune to rising parental complaints, they “try not to walk into ridiculous arguments about things that don’t matter”.
She doesn’t “sweat the small stuff”, but she’s “obsessive” when it comes to ensuring her pupils are polite and friendly, and that her teachers are “experts” in their subjects.
Before Covid hit, she had high hopes that the definition of ethical leadership she’s spent the last decade championing might take centre stage.
In 2017, amid concern over the impact of a preoccupation with exam results, Roberts chaired the Ethical Leadership Commission formed by the Association of School and College Leaders.
Its ethical leadership framework, built on the Nolan Principles of Public Service, was promoted by the National Governance Association and picked up by 314 schools and trusts.
But post Covid, the government was “reluctant” to endorse the commission’s plans for an ethics forum and to embed its framework into school leadership training programmes.
The momentum waned, but Roberts’ belief in the importance of ethical leadership has not.
Religious influence
The two great constants that have shaped Roberts’ life have been education and religion.
Despite being “not particularly religious”, she’s “always gone to church”, and it was while she was studying theology at the University of King’s College in London that she met her husband, a Church of England priest.
One of their offspring is an ecclesiastical lawyer, the other a teacher – the fourth generation of teachers in her family.
Her teacher mum was the “steady earner” during her formative years in Teeside, with her dad “in and out of work” as a clerk, shopkeeper and bricklayer.
Her first teaching job, at Birmingham’s Shenley Court College (now Shenley Academy), showed just how “starved of cash” schools were. The window of her classroom was broken when she arrived in 1983, and still that way when she left a year later.
After a break from teaching in which she spent two years as a race relations officer in Leicestershire and four years raising children, Roberts worked at schools in Peterlee, London and Houghton-Le-Spring, before becoming deputy head of Durham Johnston School, in Durham.
The frequent moves, because of her husband’s transient clergy job, suited her “tragically short attention span”. Each one presented an “opportunity to take the next step up” in her career.
In 2001 she became head of St Hild’s in Hartlepool, just as it was becoming a Church of England school.
At the time the church was being encouraged by the government to expand its secondary school provision, “in the hopes that the great success of most church secondaries would have a magical effect on schools falling on hard times”.
Roberts believes many of the schools’ success was down to the “affluence and education level of most practicing Christians” rather than the schools themselves.
But St Hild’s drew from the same council estate catchment as its predecessor. She made 16 permanent exclusions in the first half term, a decision she never regretted. “We needed to get behaviour sorted out.”
Gaming results
Roberts’ eight years at the school coincided with a period when, she claims, others were dabbling with their curriculums to get their results up.
“Loads of other schools were doing better” on paper, but the “baskets of non-standard GCSEs and other equivalent qualifications” their pupils were taking meant they often couldn’t get into Durham Johnston’s sixth form, which “closed doors” for them.
Roberts was “concerned that children from disadvantaged backgrounds, whose parents didn’t know much about what the education system did, were being sold a dud”.
She questioned what it was about those school heads’ “self-understanding of their role that made it acceptable for them to make kids do these really dodgy qualifications”.
“It seemed to me that people had just gone mad.”
It prompted her to draw up ten principles for effective schools, including one that leaders should “teach children to know and to learn for the rest of their lives, not for short-term gain”.
In 2014, three years after Roberts began leading Thomas Tallis, she co-wrote a book with the educationist Michael F D Young on the topic – Knowledge and the Future School: Curriculum and Social Justice.
She says she wrongly became a “fangirl” for the EBacc, with the BBC regularly including a picture of her when they ran a story about the new qualification.
Her true feelings were more mixed. She believes that headteachers “brought Michael Gove’s reforms upon ourselves” by encouraging the take up of GCSE equivalent qualifications – with a “downward spiral” or narrowing curriculums.
“Schools haven’t got enough money or teachers, so they shrink the curriculum further…and that feeds into the recruitment and retention of teachers.”
Ofsted impact
She also believes Ofsted’s own curriculum revolution has actually stifled innovation.
When Roberts talks to school leaders about “powerful knowledge and the curriculum”, she says they often say “you can’t allow yourself any freedom of thought until you’ve gotten outstanding”.
“Ofsted didn’t ever set out to restrict innovation in the curriculum. [But] It’s because people have been obsessed with what’s easy to measure. The system has started to believe that an Ofsted judgment is a value in itself, rather than a snapshot”.
Thomas Tallis has always been rated ‘good’ under Roberts’ watch. But those inspections have nonetheless caused a “pounding heart, anxiety, stomach churning and breathlessness”.
“Even though you try to look calm from the outside and as though you understand their mad logic, it’s really hard.”
She believes that Ofsted didn’t realize “the stress they cause” until Ruth Perry’s death.
Curriculum nightmare
But funding, she believes, is now an even bigger threat to curriculums than Ofsted.
Thomas Tallis’s pupils get an hour a week each of music, drama and dance, and two hours each of art and DT in key stage three and four.
Slightly under 50 per cent of pupils choose EBacc subjects, with around 30 GCSE subjects also taught. But providing this broad range of subjects has been “financially catastrophic”. Roberts’ successor Steve Parsons, now head of Holland Park School, will “face real difficulties”, she says.
Could the school become part of a trust? She said MATs have “come sniffing around” over the years, but she’s always been a proud local authority head and “too long in the tooth and entrenched in my own views to be somebody else’s head of school”.
But with the marketplace for teachers becoming “so stressed”, there have been unwelcome staff poaching attempts. When one of her heads of department was recently approached by a local academy chain, Roberts wrote to them “expressing regret” over the issue. She didn’t hear back.
She points out how one virtue in the ethical leadership framework is courage. “School leaders need to be more courageous to talk to each other about things that aren’t quite right.
“That might mean picking up the phone and saying, ‘I hear that you’re saying [to parents] that you can’t meet the needs of SEND children. If you have them in, you’ll learn how to meet their needs’.”
This harks back to what Roberts believes that schools should be for.
“Education should be a social good…so that kids understand the world and can change it for the better when they leave it.
“I don’t understand why people can’t see that these brilliant communities of schools are a blueprint for a better world.”
