“The public debate seemed to be miles away from reality.”

In this episode, we’re talking to Andrew Old. He has spent the last 20 years describing English schools as they really are on his blog, originally called Scenes from the Battleground (now a Substack – Andrew Old’s Education Battleground). In that time he’s written around 1,000 blog posts and received millions of views. In 2013, Michael Gove described himself as a “great fan” of his “brilliant blog.” Andrew noted that his credibility was now “shot.” Most creditably, 13 years later and 20 years after he started, he’s still going, as both a teacher and a blogger.

We discussed:

  • What he wanted to convey about classrooms when he began blogging
  • The tension between Labour Party membership and Coalition education policy
  • How his classroom has and hasn’t changed in the last twenty years
  • How blogging influenced policy
  • What was underappreciated about schools in the 2000s, and what’s underappreciated today

Andrew’s teaching experience and his chronicle of classroom realities offer a unique perspective on how English schools have changed. We spoke in late August.

You can listen to the episode on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, or read the full transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

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You started blogging in 2006. Why?

Partly I wanted people to know what was going on, but partly somebody asked. At the time, the biggest thing for online teachers was the Times Educational Supplement (TES) forums. There were a lot of opinions on there but not a lot of long-form writing. I wanted to extend the ideas. At the time I thought perhaps it would be more intellectual, but it took off, describing what was happening in schools, and people wanted to see that written down. It was mainly for teachers to begin with, but it got a wider audience as time went on.

What was it that you wanted to convey to teachers and a wider audience about what was going on in schools?

It was behaviour, teaching methods and the curriculum. With all of them, the public debate seemed to be miles away from reality. There was so much on behaviour about how exclusions and suspensions were bad and behaviour was generally good. There had been a bit of controversy in the previous few years, and it ended with a report by a head teacher saying, “People always think behaviour is bad, but actually it’s fine.” It was that kind of debate. Teachers were on the TES forums talking about how bad behaviour was, and you would see people with power in education saying things like, “We don’t look at the TES forums, it’s full of people who moan.” There was always this gap between those with power, a position, and a platform – even those that were in schools – and what those teaching in classrooms were encountering.

  • The behaviour was worse, the methods being used were ineffective, and things had changed in the last few years – there was a real pressure not to enforce rules.
  • With the curriculum, things were getting dumbed down. There were people doing Key Stage 3 English who were studying text messages; famously there was a controlled assessment a few years later on Heat magazine and reality TV.
  • On teaching methods, it was not practical, but it was not scientific either. I think I was one of the first people to notice Dan Willingham’s videos about learning styles and realise that what we were being told about how children learn flew in the face of psychology.

How is it possible for things to be commonplace in schools attended by millions of children and yet not understood in the corridors of power?

Partly, those in positions of power often didn’t go to ordinary comprehensives themselves, so there’s always a gap there. But there was also always a belief that things were changing in schools, so people thought their own experience of being at school was out of date. The conversation about how things were changing was always about how they were changing for the better, and it didn’t involve ordinary classroom practitioners.

The one place where you saw lots of teachers expressing opinions in the early Noughties was this one forum, and it was routinely dismissed as unrepresentative of the teaching profession, even though, as teachers, we saw it day in, day out. Then we’d see it discussed online and people saying, “That’s unusual, no one’s experiencing that, no one’s thinking that.” The gap between what people were willing to say under their own name and what we were experiencing was massive. Some of it was ridiculous. I’m thinking now more of the early days of Twitter: there were people who were shocked at the idea that teachers found INSET days boring. What teacher hasn’t occasionally found INSET days boring, or thought they could be doing something better? That’s not an attack on everyone that runs INSET days, but it’s such a typical teacher opinion, and it was denied outright. Who is this person saying it? It must be a plant who’s not a real teacher, because we all know real teachers love their INSET days.

One of the questions I’m interested in in these interviews is: why did things become interesting in the late 2000s and early 2010s? One answer could be that there was a particular set of things happening in schools which were problematic and worthy of discussion. Another is that if you’d wanted to set up a blog ten years earlier, you’d have had to be a coder, and suddenly you’ve got very easy, user-friendly blog platforms, you’ve got Twitter, and it becomes a lot easier for ordinary teachers to describe what they’re seeing without also having a degree in IT. What’s your view?

The blogging perhaps isn’t that different, because if you looked online for normal teachers you’d end up on the TES forums and you’d find them. It wasn’t that we were hidden away, it was that we weren’t part of the wider education discourse. Even writing our own blogs didn’t make much of a difference until it became known that there were politicians and their advisers reading them.

Twitter is perhaps the bigger one, because that had everyone on the same platform. Suddenly you had these people who were enthusiasts for technology and education on there, then people promoting their own consultancies, and then gradually the teachers got on there. As I say, it was a shock to begin with: who are these people? How dare they say these things? But gradually more teachers got on it, and suddenly you couldn’t deny that the profession was not the voice that you saw. In your interview with Michael Gove [he said that] when the media talked about what teachers were saying, they’d be talking about teaching unions, or at a stretch a subject association. Then suddenly you had often anonymous but genuine teachers expressing opinions in public, and people could look at it and think, “My goodness, we’ve not known what teachers were experiencing for a decade or more.”

You said that people weren’t necessarily willing to say things under their own names what was going on. What made you choose anonymity, and what did you have to do to maintain it?

Again, you have to go back to the TES forums. The TES was published as a newspaper then, not just a website. It had these forums, and through them their journalists could contact teachers. At the moment, journalists look on social media for people they can contact about stories, but this gave the TES an advantage: they could speak to actual classroom teachers. They were careful; people didn’t use their real names.

Anyway, I had this experience, before I was blogging, of a TES journalist asking me my opinions on some issue of the day. I think it was a teachers’ strike, and I mentioned in passing that I didn’t think much of working conditions for teachers, particularly behaviour. They published that with my real name – which is not Andrew Old, it’s a fairly common name, so if you hear my real name you can’t necessarily work out where I work – and the fact that at the time I worked at a Birmingham comprehensive. There are 100 comprehensives in Birmingham, and who cares? Who reads the TES?

Within a few days I got visited in my classroom by my head teacher – that’s not even called in, he went straight to my classroom. At the time my classroom was on the top floor, away from everyone. It was in such an obscure place that Ofsted had inspected the school and completely failed to drop in on me because they couldn’t find it. But he’d gone directly to me and said, “Is this you?” He didn’t tell me off or anything, but he did tell me that all the heads in Birmingham had been phoning each other around to work out who this person was. Once he knew, that was important information, and off he went.

After that, I thought, “I don’t want my name on anything I say.” It’s not something I felt comfortable with, particularly as I was commenting on behaviour. It’s important, if you’re talking about what is normal in schools, that you’re not saying, “This is normal in my school,” and then your school gets named. It’s important to be able to say, “This is what I experienced, but this is what other teachers experience, this is what’s going on.” I always want to be able to talk without saying, “This is a commentary on my current school.”

Things have changed massively. My last few bosses have all followed me on Twitter; they know who I am. It’s not that way round, it’s the other way round: if people don’t like what I’m saying, can they retaliate against my school? That is probably the bigger thing now. But back then, when hardly anyone was speaking and the opinions were more controversial, I didn’t want to be scrutinised at work for what I was saying.

How easy was it to stay anonymous?

It’s pretty easy, inasmuch as it’s hard to trace anyone online without great expertise. Inasmuch as anything leaked out, it was the other way around: people who already knew I was Andrew Old on the TES forums then knew I was the blogger, and things leaked in that direction once or twice. But even then it didn’t always make a huge difference, because my name’s fairly common and often they were out of date on which local authority I worked in. It didn’t tend to be the case that people came for my school. I would have to say I was fortunate that my name was quite a common name. Other people did have retaliation at work, and even more recently my other half got targeted at work because she let slip where she worked, and people who had a grudge against me went after her and were sending complaints to her employer about nothing in particular.

You mentioned getting more traction when people realised that ministers were interested. What do you think happened there? And how close was it? Were you getting phone calls, were you getting drafts of the curriculum?

There was this element of having two shadow ministers who wanted to get involved in the policy area. One of them had been a journalist, so he had that set of skills of wanting to seek out people who will say things. It was then fairly gradual. It certainly wasn’t the case that there was a lot of direct communication with me, but they did gather around like-minded people, and the circles expanded. I vaguely recall one phone conversation with Nick Gibb, but I certainly wasn’t giving him policy advice. It was all about the writing for me. But I knew that there were people reading what I was saying who worked for him or were connected to him, and people confirmed to me that it was getting passed on.

It’s interesting that so much of it was public, and yet instead of policymakers more generally, or journalists, looking at what was being made public, it was getting to politicians directly via their advisers. It was overwhelmingly one step removed: someone who had the ear of one of the politicians would tell me that they’d passed on my blog. Occasionally somebody who was in a position of responsibility, normally somebody who had been a teacher, might ask me for help, or somebody who’d been reading my blog for years and then had a position of responsibility spoke to me. Occasionally there were things where the debate in the media was so obviously wrong and people were looking for people on Twitter who had the facts and were getting it right. There are people I met through that who made a real effort to speak to me, because there was no other source that could discuss these things as accurately as a teacher could.

It was also the case that I made an effort to share what other teachers were saying online, so it was never just me. I would write blog posts that way: here’s what another blogger’s saying. Why are teachers saying this? That had more impact than any one teacher could ever have.

You were one of a number of Labour-voting but traditionalist or Gove-sympathetic thinkers and bloggers. Tell me about that tension, if it is a tension.

It is – but you realise that party politics and working in a public service are often very disconnected. I was quite an enthusiast for much of what David Blunkett did. If you look at the 1997 Labour manifesto, it’s as traditionalist as you can get on education. Then it seemed to drift from about 2000 onwards – partly under Blunkett, but certainly with his successors. Partly that might be the normal situation of a party being in government for a long time and getting more out of touch. But it was also the case that there were more people with the ear of government – the last thing they wanted was for the government to know what was happening in schools. It often became not, “Let’s attack the government for this,” but, “Please, somebody tell the politicians what’s actually happening.”

I mentioned that there was this report on behaviour. That was a fair example of how you get an issue just about into the public eye – in the 2005 election there was some debate about discipline in schools – and then government would look to the education establishment for advice, and it would go badly wrong. The last three years of Labour in government, with Ed Balls as Education Secretary, were insanely ideological. They literally took the word “education” out of the name of the Department for Education. Everything was dumbed down. There was talk of getting rid of A levels and Key Stage 2 SATs, there was a new, more informal system of assessment that was an absolute joke being forced on schools. That kind of chaos doesn’t make you sympathetic to the party in power, but you realise this is the worst case of the party in power.

I never voted on education only, but I was willing to talk to anybody who had influence over education. Generally, you wouldn’t get far in education if you didn’t talk to people outside your own party. There was talking across political divides, particularly as it was a Coalition government to begin with – when Gove was Education Secretary – so it became that bit less partisan. But in a way it was always a helpful thing that I could say, “I’m a Labour Party member.” My hobby, such as it was, was campaigning for the Labour Party. There are certain cases where people categorised me as a right-wing Tory extremist, and I could bring up, “That’s not how I vote.”

Of course most teachers were not particularly Tory-inclined, and it never became about, “Let’s endorse the Tories,” not least because probably the dominant strain in the Tory party was, “Bring back grammar schools,” and it wasn’t about the highest possible standards of education for all. Although Gove was respected by his party for getting things done, he was not part of the dominant strain. He was part of detoxifying their brand to begin with, which is probably why, when he became controversial, he was kicked out.

Everyone else I’ve interviewed — trust leaders, ministers, academics — is not in the classroom, although some of them have spent time in the classroom. You’ve been in the classroom throughout. How has the average school and the average teacher changed over the last 20 years?

The biggest thing is the general expectations of Ofsted. We were told there was an Ofsted teaching style, and we had to teach that way, when we were observed, or when we were inspected, or in some schools all the time. It flew in the face of what worked. I have particular memories of one school I was in that was given a bad Ofsted because of its teaching style – and perhaps not only that it was traditionalist, it was perhaps a bit laid back as well. It changed the teaching style as much as possible, and its GCSE results fell by 20 percentage points. Then Ofsted came back in and said, “Now it’s good.” It was that kind of insanity. There were these things you had to do, and if we wanted to argue it we’d be told, “No, Ofsted tell us these are the right things.” That, to me, is probably the biggest change, other than the mere fact that teachers get in on the debate now.

The curriculum has changed. Again, in the Noughties, there were these meaningless qualifications where people were cutting and pasting into Word, and it was called coursework, and it was meant to be equivalent to an examined GCSE. There is more focus on traditionally academic skills. I mentioned before that people were doing work in Key Stage 3 English on text messages. That kind of thing was ridiculous, and it was not widely appreciated that it was going on, again because no one was talking to classroom teachers and asking them, “Do you want to teach kids how to use text messages or how to read a great novel?” That has changed.

Discipline is the other part of it. I know in so many schools it hasn’t changed, but there was such a culture of pretending the bad behaviour isn’t happening, and if you see it happening, then you must be a bad teacher. There were Ofsted reports complaining about schools where the kids were too compliant, as if disobedience is a positive. But it wasn’t even at that level. It was more a culture of: “A kid didn’t do what you said, so your lesson wasn’t inspiring enough, you must entertain them.”

That’s tended to change, at the very least in that people are aware of what proper discipline systems look like. I don’t think the public debate is particularly intelligent on that now, because you still get the situation where the severity of sanctions, the precision of rules, and how efficiently and effectively they’re enforced are all conflated into one thing, and that’s strictness. Some schools are strict and others aren’t, but they might still be good – rather than breaking it down. Which rules are reasonable? Why do schools use certain rules? What is important about discipline, and what happens when kids are not following the rules?

It’s not that people now have a realistic idea, but it is the case that in schools themselves you don’t have to be quiet about enforcing a rule. You can go to an interview and be asked, “What would you do if a kid did this?” The correct answer was always, “Follow the school’s behaviour policy.” But it used to be the case that the school’s behaviour policy was a nonsense that you couldn’t follow. The school I mentioned before that was doing its best to please Ofsted and getting worse results – it had a behaviour policy which said that the sanctions to be given for various types of misbehaviour were in the sanctions and rewards document. I asked around: where was the sanctions and rewards document? No one could find it. They were giving a behaviour policy to their own governors, and to Ofsted, and it didn’t exist.

I wrote at the time about fake behaviour policies and the two behaviour systems: what you’re meant to do according to the policy, and what was happening. You could get into trouble by following the policy. I don’t think that’s gone away completely, but the days when what you do about behaviour is a secret, when you’d have to have an informal conversation – “I know what the policy says, what do I do?” – that is not as overwhelming as it was.

How do you explain Ofsted and others advocating teaching methods and school organisational structures which didn’t work?

It was a case of where the power lay. If school leaders are the ones who have to say how to teach and then results are bad, where do you shift the blame? Maybe that’s a bit harsh on the school leaders, but there was a lot of teacher blaming: everything that went wrong was down to teachers. There were particular things that were incentivised, and part of the problem was that Ofsted inspectors could also be consultants, and they would explicitly say, “I’m here to tell you what Ofsted want.” The evidence that it was what Ofsted wanted wasn’t always great, but given that they were the inspectors, they could then come into schools and look for it. You started having these documents circulating that had never been across the desk of the chief inspector, but which the consultant class liked to share and say, “This is what we’re after.”

It almost became a game that schools had to be doing the latest thing. At one point, if you were using mini whiteboards you were a great teacher. A year later, if you were using mini whiteboards, what was wrong with you? Things would go through these phases of what was in with the consultants, and the gap between anything Ofsted was writing down, or anything that was in the framework, and what consultants were saying and inspectors were looking for became really divorced. That became most extreme when Sir Michael Wilshaw became chief inspector and was literally saying, “We’re not looking for a teaching style,” and then there would be report after report saying, “They’re teaching in the wrong style.”

Some of it went back a bit earlier. I quite liked many of the reforms David Blunkett did. He put in place these National Strategies that were to a large extent based on direct instruction. There was a lot of improvement in primary maths at the time. Some of the literacy stuff got nobbled by inside groups, but it was good stuff. However, that built this structure within local authorities, and gradually that turned into a thing that was teaching teachers how to teach, and it was always the worst ways. On top of that, the university education departments – you could go back decades on this – had very odd ideas that weren’t empirically based. It started with the universities, then you have this local authority structure that was supercharged by David Blunkett, originally in the right direction, then gradually in the wrong direction. On top of that you had this Ofsted structure, and by the 2010s Ofsted was the main part of that.

The potential counterpoint is that – you’re being told what to do, and the things you’re being told to do aren’t very good, and therefore we want more teacher autonomy. There’s probably a decent case that many of the improvements we’ve seen recently have come at the expense of teacher autonomy, where trusts have been choosing policies that are more likely to work. Where does that leave us on teacher autonomy?

Doug Lemov had a good point on this: there is positive and negative variance among teachers. You want teachers to have the freedom to be better, but you don’t want them to have the freedom to be worse. There are policies that back teachers up and there are policies that undermine them and make them worse, and you can judge policies and judge autonomy that way. If this teacher says they should teach reading without using phonics – is that a useful freedom to have, given the evidence? On the other hand, if someone’s saying, “My class already knows this information that’s in the curriculum, can I please develop their skills with it and move them on?” that’s a different matter.

You have to identify where the key places are that autonomy pays off and when it’s detrimental. With behaviour management policies in schools, that’s where autonomy fails, because if you’re well established in a school you can do a lot of informal behaviour management, but if a new teacher came in and copied it, it wouldn’t work. Not only that, if it became normal for too many teachers to use the informal methods, then kids will realise that a teacher who comes in and follows the behaviour policy is probably new and doesn’t know how things work, and they will kick off for that. For routines and behaviour management, you want a whole-school approach.

Similarly, you don’t want complete freedom of what people can teach in the curriculum. Left to their own devices, teachers who are short of time will not always teach what’s most important, but what’s more convenient. The way to solve that is not to put more and more pressure on them, it’s to support them with teaching the right thing. But you need that structure in place. A large part of it is the default. If a teacher says, “How do I do this?” and a school can say, “Here it is in our document, this is what we’d like,” that’s one thing. If a school says, “We’re coming round and checking that you’re doing every single thing on this checklist of 50,” that’s another matter.

Having a model of teaching, having a default for teachers to use, having systems where teachers know that if they use them kids will have seen them in other classes — those are all good things. Micromanaging the details in classes where the kids are already getting good results is another matter. I’ve described how in the Noughties teachers were under pressure to do the wrong thing. I had an Ofsted inspection where I was told I was doing the wrong thing, and that same year I was getting exam results way above other people in the department.

There’s also the thing that if it’s a fashion and it keeps changing, teachers are not going to do it sincerely. I mentioned the fashion for mini whiteboards. They have been in and out of fashion, but they’re such a useful thing to use where the systems are in place that they’re not going away any time soon, whereas you can think of other things that were crazes in teaching that you can’t imagine will ever come back, or if they do, it will be from above.

When teacher autonomy is restricted, it has to be about the circumstances: is this a failing school? Part of the problem in the Noughties is that the pressure is often on the best schools. I mentioned the school that got a bad Ofsted when its results were good and then a good Ofsted when its results were bad. There was a lot of pressure to change schools that were working well. Sometimes it’s down to outcomes. If outcomes are bad, the people in charge need to go in and say, “This isn’t working, what we’re proposing will work.” That’s quite different from outcomes being good and people coming in and saying, “This is ideologically wrong, here’s the next new thing. We don’t have the evidence for it, but Ofsted will want it.”

I tend towards autonomy, but I also believe in defaults: that a school should have its default for teachers to fall back on, and routines for teachers to use effectively. If you can win teachers over by saying, “Your life will be easier and your kids will learn more if you follow this,” that’s better than, “We get you if you don’t do this.” Accountability has to be the important thing. It’s not that autonomy is always good or always bad.

Looking back at your blog, there are various points at which you’d commented on how much things had changed:

  • In 2013, you mentioned teacher depression as “a sign there has been no Govian revolution in schools.”
  • In 2014, you thought maybe the tide had turned, at least as far as the ideas you were promoting becoming more mainstream.
  • In 2024, you looked back at Don’t Change the Lightbulbs, which was published in 2014 and which you and I both contributed to, and you noted that lots of the things you’d advocated for, like teaching facts and using rows, had become mainstream. You said that in the 2000s you were getting incredible exam results, and now you’re nothing special in the classroom, essentially because lots of other people are doing the same things that you’d always been doing, and they may well be doing them better.

To what extent do you think those ideas have become mainstream? If so, when?

I’m going to do a quick correction on the 2013 one. It was a blog about teacher depression, and I started it with: I’ve been going through a bad period. The bad period was in 2013, so that’s three years into Gove being in place, and I was having the same experiences I was having in the Noughties. It was only for a term and at one school, and I left that school, and then the school was closed within that year. I wasn’t linking the depression to a lack of Govian revolution, I was talking about my own bad experience, and that had got me discussing teacher depression.

Generally, though, there has been a real change in methods, and I do think it’s ones I was already using. Part of this might be that I was a maths teacher, and sometimes it’s obvious with maths what you need to do: the biggest difficulty is fluency with the existing facts – on almost everything, including learning new maths. People talk about problem solving, but the biggest advantage in solving a problem is knowing the maths that you need to solve it, and being able to bring it to mind without too much concentration. That might be why things moved in that fashion.

But there were some specific things. I learned very early on in my teaching that if I started every lesson with five revision questions on the board during the register, that paid off. It surprised me to begin with, how some kids reacted. I would have pupils go, “How can we do these questions? You haven’t told us how to do it,” and I’d have to say, “We did it last lesson.” They were so unused to having to memorise things from lesson to lesson. They had an idea of a lesson where the teacher explains something, they copy what the teacher does, and if they were ever expected to know it off by heart, it was because they were going to revise, which often they wouldn’t do. Having retrieval practice at the start of the lesson was unusual, and now it’s extremely common. In fact, at my own school it’s part of every workbook – an engage task during the register — literally the same number of questions as I used to do, five.

Similarly, when Ofsted were forcing people to teach a particular way, I got it in the neck for having the only classroom that was in rows. That changed most with Covid. Teachers were told to do a rows seating plan, and they overwhelmingly stuck with it, and schools stuck with it. It’s something that works, and I would not have been the first to do it. Perhaps I was the only one saying, “Hang on, why are we not doing this?” and now it’s become normal practice.

I think also realising – it’s so obvious as a maths teacher – that fluent recall of facts is important. As that’s become more common, people’s style of teaching has got closer to mine. Although there’s a lot of pushback against these ideas going on at the same time, they’re in the ascendancy. There’s also the case that many head teachers and chief executives are my age – they have gone through the same experiences I had. They saw what didn’t work, and they improved their teaching by trying the same things, in the same way I improved my teaching by changing those ideas.

How secure do you think these improvements are? Are CEOs generally on board?

The big change is that if your schools do badly, you could lose them from your trust and they go to another one. The lack of accountability for local authorities is unthinkable now. Partly because I was involved in local politics back in the Noughties, there was such an attitude of: we have failing schools, and what we must do about them is force more middle-class parents to send their kids to that school. People would outright resent successful schools and think that admissions policy was the key thing, and the idea of expanding a successful school so that more pupils went to it was met with, “No, that’ll make the bad schools even worse off.” John Prescott was meant to have said that, “The problem with good schools is people want to go to them.” I don’t know how accurate that is, but there were definitely people in local government who thought that. The fact that a trust doing the wrong thing could lose schools makes a huge difference. There is pressure to be effective and get good results.

If we come back and have a conversation in ten years’ time do you think we’ll at least have maintained the level of success?

It’s difficult to tell, because there are people trying to undermine it. We’re in results season now, and there are people pushing for the abolition of important exams. I’ve heard that before, and politicians usually resist it, but it’s out there. Maybe there’s an education secretary who will give in to it. There’s also pressure to dumb down the curriculum. I didn’t find the latest curriculum review particularly worrying, but some of the people who are now doing the subject-specific work are the same sort of people who were messing things up in the Noughties, many of whom haven’t been in the classroom for a very long time. That could lead to dumbing down. There are the things being said about vocational education – I wouldn’t say it’s coherent yet, but if you want quality vocational education, you wouldn’t go about it in the way that is currently being suggested. Some of that might be a return to the qualifications I mentioned earlier, where kids are cutting and pasting into Word and it’s meant to be a GCSE.

There are definite pressure points, but we’ve also seen politicians resist these things. I talked about Ed Balls, but Gordon Brown didn’t let him abolish A levels. The Key Stage 2 SATs are still with us, and not replaced with bizarre assessment methods. There are things in place; there’s certainly now a structure that’s different. Politicians have been speaking to people in charge of MATs in a way that they used to be speaking to people in local authorities, who were far less interested in academic performance. There are definite obstacles, and teachers have a voice. The old days when you could completely mess up thousands of schools and not hear a word about it in the press are long gone. If you did a stupid policy and there was an immediate crisis, there’s no keeping that out of the papers now.

What role do you think blogging had in making these improvements happen?

A few years back, Rob Peal was editing a book called Changing Schools. I got in touch with every policy adviser and DfE person I had any contact details for and I asked what effect bloggers had. Overwhelmingly, they said it was on Ofsted. Michael Wilshaw came in and said there’s no preferred teaching style, and inspectors, many of whom had their own private consultancies teaching schools the correct teaching style, went ahead without him. That was pretty much exposed by teachers blogging about their own experiences.

I did a lot on that. Partly because I was anonymous, I couldn’t say, “This happened at my school.” But I looked in the inspection report for my school, looked at the bits that said people are teaching the wrong way, then I searched through as many Ofsted reports for the same phrases, and then I blogged over a year or two every time I could identify a school being marked down for teaching in the non-approved way, usually in a more traditional way. That did have an impact on the DfE. I was told that it was my blog that had that impact. I wasn’t even talking about my own experiences so much as looking through all the Ofsted reports and saying, “This is what they’re saying.” But lots of other teachers were on social media, writing blogs also saying the same thing. That kind of thing, where you could have the chief inspector saying, “This is what’s going to happen,” and then it doesn’t happen for years to come, is more difficult now, because we saw then that it quickly came to public notice.

You’re unusual inasmuch as you kept blogging for all of these years, and I say that as a lapsed blogger. I remember when I was starting out reading a post you wrote where you said your audience was big because, “All the people who are better than me when I started have quit, and all the people who are better than me now haven’t had as long to find readers, and longevity seems to be the key to success as an education blogger.” How have you kept going across 20 years?

That was probably a very brief period when I was one of the most read bloggers. I don’t think that lasted particularly long. The main thing that’s kept me going is that I just teach and blog. I don’t have some other platform for making a difference, so if I want to affect education, all I can do is teach my classes as well as I can and let the world know what’s going on in schools. If I moved to a completely different type of job, it would be much more difficult.

A lot of people were blogging because they had an interest in policy, and then they got positions closer to policy, or at the very least in organisations that have an independent influence on policy, so they don’t need to do it personally. It’s also a matter of ageing out. I was in my 20s when I started teaching, and probably in my early 30s when I started blogging, but that does mean I’ve got another 30 years in the classroom. There are plenty of people who were blogging who have retired, or who have risen up to a position where they’re much busier than they’ve ever been. I’ve gone part-time, so I have more spare time as I get older rather than less. I know many people have left teaching, and some of them have even left education. Thinking back to when I started, and who the other bloggers were, some of them have transitioned to other types of social media. Katharine Birbalsingh was one of them — she was blogging anonymously at the time — and she’s not disappeared from the public conversation, but she’s busy being a head teacher. Other people have left entirely.

You were never tempted to climb the greasy pole, be a deputy head or run a school?

When I was younger I did think about promotion, but I had bad experiences under the system in the Noughties of being promoted. You think you rise up in order to make a positive difference, but you discover you’re part of a group of people who are making things worse for teachers. There are various times I’ve rethought it, but eventually I realised I was making more of a difference by blogging than I would as head of department. Then when I went part-time, that rules it out anyway.

Particularly in the 2010s, you worked on things like the Echo Chamber and Labour Teachers, trying to coordinate, encourage and support people writing about education. What happened to those initiatives?

The Echo Chamber was a blog that shared links to all the teacher bloggers, whether I agreed with them or not, so people could have a resource that showed what teachers were writing about. The main thing that happened is the usual thing with online tools: once they started charging, I could no longer automate it, and I couldn’t spend time on that. There was an automated one that was every teaching blog, and then there was me curating what I thought were the best blogs, but even keeping up with reading them became a bit impractical, so I was often sharing things a bit late and putting my favourite people on there. Eventually it became standard for anyone in education to have a blog. Obviously that peaked and then stopped, although Substack now means there’s a resurgence, and a lot of the old bloggers have come back. That was mainly technical, and then blogs becoming less important as many of the people that were talking about education on blogs had positions of responsibility and were affecting policy.

Labour Teachers is a bit different. What changed there was ideological change in the country and in the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn became leader. Teachers who had supported Labour for decades often left, because it was, shall we say, a difficult situation. I left the Labour Party for a small amount of time there. The person I left the blog with lost interest as well. There was no one pushing for, “Let’s give teachers a voice in Labour’s education policy,” whereas previously it had been about, “Let’s see if we can get Labour to listen to teachers. It’s ridiculous that only the Tory ministers are listening to what is, by all polling, quite a left-wing, Labour-leaning profession.” That died out with those ideological shifts. I don’t know whether it would make sense to restart it.

It also became very focused on silencing classroom teachers. It was always the case, but it became less about the establishment wanting to shut people down and more about trolls focusing on individuals to try and shut them out, and you don’t want to bring that onto people. There were people who were trying to get Labour Teachers shut down, because it was seen as: “No teacher should be expressing some non-hard-leftist opinion.” And I guess it just hadn’t had the effect that we’d wanted. There was a brief period where a group of Labour teachers would go to party conference and hold an event. I wasn’t interested in doing that, not least because I was too busy teaching. It didn’t get anywhere after a certain point.

If I came to your classroom now, what would I see that would be different, compared to 2006?

The continuity is probably more noticeable, particularly because there are things that I did as a rebel in 2006 that I’m now expected to do by my school leadership. What has changed? I use mini whiteboards a lot more. It’s not that I didn’t think they could be useful, but I was always using number fans. It’s less hassle than having to have a board, a pen, a board rubber. But now I’m working at a school where whiteboards are the recommended method and the routines are in place. I won’t say I use them all the time, or with every class, but often they’re exactly what you need to fill in things that aren’t in the workbooks. It’s also the case that with AI you can generate 100 questions from any whiteboard work in seconds, whereas before I was cultivating PowerPoints that might be useful eventually.

Because I’m now part-time, I’ve got much longer to prepare lessons. I used to improvise so much more. Now, if something arises that I’m not prepared for, I will still improvise, but I’ve got the time to prepare properly. I’ve got AI to help me produce things that previously would have taken a long time, and I suppose the biggest difference is I’ve got workbooks someone else has devised, and although I adapt them a lot, that’s a complete difference from when I used to be far more strategic in what I taught. Most of that is a difference of circumstances and where I happen to be working, and it could all change.

Everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve adjusted a bit. It’s just that at times what we were meant to adjust to was something you’d avoid if you could. My routines have tightened up a bit. I used to do some weird things, but that was because the kids were so used to so little structure, so I used to concentrate on whether kids were sitting down or standing up. Now it’s not normal for kids to just get out of their seats at any moment, and they know they’ve done something wrong if they walk to the bin while you’re teaching them. For a long time I had a routine where they’d come into the class, stand behind their chairs, and didn’t sit down until they’ve got their pen, pencil and ruler out. I used to do that because it used to be ten minutes before some kids would even start. Now the expectations where I am are different. But again, that’s me meeting expectations. I’m always going to change with different classes, and there are differences between classes. But the main thing, if you had to look at me then and now, is how much improvising is going on.

What have you changed your mind about over the years?

I need to write blogs about this. I’ve had two huge changes of mind. The first is that I always used to believe – and it’s something David Blunkett used to say – that standards are more important than structures. I said before how important it is that trusts can lose schools if they’re getting terrible results. I think it’s more than that, I don’t think I was ever fully aware of how much informal pressure local authorities put on schools. When I saw academies doing great things that local authority schools weren’t doing, people would tell me nothing had changed in that respect, or if they did say what had changed, it would be fanciful, not what was happening.

It used to be the case that when you got interviewed at a school, a governor would come and interview you, and that governor would have been appointed by the local authority. Sometimes they would even work for the local authority. There was constant informal local authority pressure on governing boards in a way that we don’t see now, and that has changed the priorities. Also, there were many more people on governing boards whose interest was politics rather than education. The governance has changed, and that’s changed the informal power of local authority educationalists. I didn’t realise how much until I read an academic article about exclusions in Glasgow. It’s not that Glasgow local authority has said, “No one can exclude.” It’s just that because schools there are all under local authority control, it became the thing without much debate, without anyone recognising it.

I mentioned the National Strategies influencing schools via local authorities, but there was that informal aspect: a local authority would employ people who had a particular ideological outlook, and that would affect the schools, and they would be appointing head teachers with that outlook. Ideology became the same within the entire local authority. I think back to the idiotic ideas of so many head teachers in the Noughties – they were standard. People would come into the system with better ideas and they’d be in a state of war with their local authority. At the time, I saw the formal sides of that. I saw federations being shut down and schools being banned from expanding because they were too successful. But I didn’t see the behind-the-scenes thing – how many ideologically homogenous networks there were.

Within trusts, they’re now sometimes quite homogenous, but they’re more likely to be full of people who run schools well, more likely to be people who are familiar with teachers. That has changed the culture for the better, and I was wrong to think structures didn’t matter. I think that’s one of the reasons things might not go in the wrong direction now: there are sensible people in governance and trusts who weren’t there in the ’00s.

The second one is citizenship. Before I was even a teacher, back in the Noughties, probably when I was still a postgraduate student, I would go to Young Fabians events or other things where people were discussing policies, and there was such a push for: “What we need in schools is citizenship.” There was this real belief that if we talk to people enough about citizenship, the ideology of the entire country will change. “People just need to know how good the EU is, or why pressure groups are important, or how to organise a campaign,” all sorts of things like this.

It’s not that I objected to knowledge of how government worked, but the whole citizenship policy situation was insane. Firstly, what they seemed to think was important seemed wrong. Do you need to know about pressure groups? Yes and no. Is the way you engage with politics through organising a campaign? Why not run for office? Why not join a political party that’s closest to your own ideas? Reading documents about human rights – I’m not against human rights being enforced in the court, but I don’t think it adds to public discourse if people are looking at documents and saying, “This is what I believe. If I squint at this document, I think it agrees with me. Therefore everyone who disagrees with me is against human rights or breaking the law.” That was a harmful trend. Although there were citizenship teachers teaching a proper curriculum, it was also the case that it was often added to PSHE, and the teachers teaching it knew nothing about politics. I remember volunteering to do three lessons. It would rotate, so every PSHE class, would have a different teacher each time. I volunteered to do the one on local government, because that was what I was familiar with. I remember being given the following advice about how to teach kids about local government. The advice was, “Tell them it’s like voting on X Factor.” How dumbed down. Is that helpful? It went across PSHE: non-subject specialists. It was just assumed every teacher was an expert. That was my opposition to citizenship. Generally, if you’re telling teachers to teach outside their subject and you’re not testing what the kids have learned, you end up with a low-quality educational experience anyway.

Where have I changed? It started when Elon Musk took over Twitter. Suddenly I saw how many people have the strongest possible views on politics. A little knowledge often doesn’t stop people having ridiculous opinions, but it was the deepest possible level of ignorance, and there’d be thousands of these people proclaiming deep ignorance. The thing that hit me was that there was a lot of discussion of whether the police or the criminal justice system was politically biased. You’d have people who seriously thought the prime minister was phoning up judges and telling them what sentences to give. There were people who were reacting to the political bias of the courts after a jury verdict, and they had no idea what a jury was. They’d say things like, “This is out-of-touch judges, the public would never go along with this” – literally it was 12 random members of the public who decided this.

Involvement in the criminal justice system, as a victim particularly, or as a juror, is not voluntary. People need to understand the basics of how courts work, and what a judge is. I started to think that we’ve now reached a point where, perhaps, people who knew nothing wouldn’t form particularly strong opinions, but with social media where it is now, people who know nothing are encouraged to be absolute partisans. I don’t want to be one of those people I was criticising, who believe that if people knew more, they’d vote the same way. But there is a basic level of knowledge that unscrupulous politicians would come up against if people had it. You see politicians who have spent their pre-political career as lawyers attacking judges for things that they must know judges have no choice about. When I see that, I think we need people to know more about how systems work. There’s a lot that people need to learn.

Is there anything we’ve not talked about that I should have asked about?

We’ve gone all the way back to debates of the Noughties, but if I had any impact on any issues since then, one of them would probably be the fuss over exams and assessment. When the existing exam system was breaking down, there was pretty much an education and media consensus that results would be down 10% in English because of decisions made by Ofqual. I was one of the first people to say, “No, this is what they’re doing.” I don’t necessarily think I’m hugely influential there, but I’ve certainly done my bit to correct the record on assessment. We went through a burst of it recently, when people wanted to bring back coursework, which is something that had failed. Controlled assessments failed back in the Noughties and the 2010s, but that was before AI. There is no path – other than saying we don’t care what grades kids get – to bring back old-style coursework. I think I had an influence on that.

There was also a debate about the head of Ofqual becoming the head of Ofsted. I’ve been told that the blogs I wrote, saying Amanda Spielman knows how to run an organisation – based on what she did at Ofqual more than anything – and that other bloggers wrote that I publicised, went to ministers. They could have backed down about her appointment. Amanda Spielman, as the head of Ofqual, had been turning up at teacher events, talking to teachers, and was well known to at least the online teachers. That was someone who was more in touch with teachers than the education establishment. I’m not claiming sole credit, but that was a debate I was part of, and something people told me ministers saw my blogs on.

The final one, and this has been my crusade of the last seven or eight years, is permanent exclusions in schools. Another one where the debate in public was so different to what teachers would tell you. We know from Teacher Tapp polls that teachers are utterly supportive of the school’s right to permanently exclude. But you would get these media articles that said there’s an absolute consensus – with government, unions, NGOs, everyone in education – that schools shouldn’t permanently exclude, and that it needs to stop. I’ve had my little mission there of getting statistics out. It’s not even about campaigning so much as putting on social media the facts about school exclusions, because for a long time completely incorrect summaries of the statistics would appear in the media. If that’s happening less, it might well be that me replying to people, and people involved in government who read my work, knowing that there’s an issue around that. That’s the thing I’ve been most vocal on in recent years – although with upcoming changes to the curriculum, I might have more to say then.

I began by asking what it was you wanted people to know about what was going on in schools in 2006. What’s underappreciated about how schools are today?

There’s a lot of press and educationalist debate about zero-tolerance or no-excuses schools, and there’s a misunderstanding about what that covers. It’s not a term the schools themselves are using now. There was a brief period where the key thing about school behaviour policies was whether they were applied or not. Some of us would argue that the problem is not the policies as they stand, it’s the fact that no one uses them, that there are two behaviour systems – the actual one and the theoretical one. There are people like me who referred to enforcing the rules as zero tolerance or no excuses. We got out of the habit of that because it became apparent that those terms were used for something completely different in the US.

Then it suddenly became the thing that if you wanted to attack a school over discipline, you would say it was a zero-tolerance or a no-excuses school. It became a thing: there are some schools that are zero tolerance and they’re bad, and there are other schools that aren’t and they’re good. It’s mainly people who haven’t worked in a school. Schools vary in several dimensions when it comes to discipline, and it’s entirely possible to be labelled zero tolerance when discipline is terrible. Parents tend to judge a school’s discipline system by whether their child is in trouble. I’ve had people at parents’ evenings say, “You’re running a boot camp” — and this is in the Noughties, in a school where discipline was largely collapsing.

If you don’t understand how school behaviour systems work, then you cannot understand why some schools are controversial and some aren’t, and what they differ in. The number of stories where I’ve seen pupils or parents tell these lies about a school and have known it’s not true, and yet here it is, with no corroboration, in a newspaper article, in speeches by politicians, or recently in a safeguarding review. Unless you understand the dimensions of discipline, you’re going to get it wrong.

One thing is the severity of punishments. The moment a school is labelled zero tolerance, people go off their heads claiming the punishments are severe. If any school is strict, it’s Michaela. Its standard punishment is a warning, and then a 20-minute detention. Some of the least strict schools in the country would have that listed as their exact same policy. I’ve worked in a school that genuinely did have a disproportionate punishment. I worked in a school where, if you forgot your pen, pencil or ruler, you got a 45-minute detention. That’s too severe for me, and here I am, a defender of supposedly zero-tolerance schools. I thought, no, that’s a bit unfair. It always sticks in my mind because suddenly even kids with the most severe SEND managed to bring in a pencil, ruler and pen, so part of me thinks it worked. But it’s still disproportionate.

Schools get accused of disproportionate punishments, and normally the only thing quoted is a child’s account of what happened: “I was just picking up a pen,” rather than, “I threw my pen on the floor for the fourth time.” But also, people don’t understand the systems, how many warnings, how many mild punishments, how serious things have to get before there are suspensions or exclusions. If you don’t understand severity, anything you say about a school being zero tolerance is clueless. In the latest round of schools being accused of being strict, you look at their Ofsted reports and it says teachers are inconsistent in enforcing the rules, or behaviour is good in lessons but bad around the corridors. It’s schools that don’t stand out for strong discipline but have awkward parents, the media catch hold of it, and they get absolutely shamed, and it doesn’t mean anything. To get the severe punishments you have to work hard at it, and most kids won’t.

The other aspect is consistency. Most schools that get a reputation for being strict, it’s entirely that they enforce the rules, and the rules may not be that different, or certainly not harder to keep, than other schools. If there’s a change of leadership in a school, that can be a big culture shock: their child has turned up in the wrong uniform, and although the policy had always been that if you turn up in the wrong uniform you’ll be out of lessons until you fix it, or you’ll be sent home, suddenly they have a head teacher who enforces the rule, and it’s controversial. There is a conversation to be had there about how flexible teachers should be about minor breaches of the rules, but every bit of research on discipline is that consistency is important. People complain about SEND kids being more likely to be punished, but nothing’s going to be worse for a kid with many types of autism than telling them the rule is this, and then letting them break it, and then suddenly enforcing it unexpectedly.

I’m absolutely pro-consistency. I want the people who say that a school consistently enforcing rules, even a bit, does result in lots of kids in detention, or being removed, or even suspensions – I want them to spell out what rules they want to be disobeyed, how many times kids can disobey them. It’s not about teachers being unsympathetic or cruel, it’s literally how much disobedience do you get.

The third one, and this is the bit that most winds me up, is the unreasonable nature of specific rules. Usually it comes down to some rules being too vague to enforce. “Don’t be rowdy in the corridors” – where do you draw the line? When there’s an established behaviour problem, schools write more precision into the rules. “Don’t be rowdy in the corridors” will become, “Be silent in the corridor.” “Don’t disrupt learning” will become, “Here’s the routine, be silent and follow the instructions.” We have these routines that make it easier to follow the rules, and therefore easier to enforce the rules. There are countless examples of this. People do make exceptions, but you get people looking at a rule and saying, “That’s not the rule they had when I was at school, this means this school is extra strict.” Clear rules are not a bad thing, they’re a good thing. If a school has unusually clear rules, it might be that they’re doing it to help kids stay out of trouble. Many kids benefit so much from knowing exactly what’s expected.

Consistency and clarity are, to me, absolutely good things in schools, and I want people to realise that they work. Disproportionate punishments are another matter, but you have to be accurate about whether they are disproportionate or not. The whole debate on zero-tolerance and no-excuses schools, and demonising particular schools, loses all of that. Often it’s people who are against rules in general, and they know they can’t persuade the public that schools should tolerate all sorts of bad behaviour, so they don’t try and have a public debate on “schools should be like this, schools should be permissive”. They look for particular schools or MATs and put them under pressure. If teachers stand up, they attack them as bad teachers because they’re enforcing rules. Again, it will all be about bits of paper: “If you were following what I think this law says, or this document says, then this wouldn’t happen,” even though there’s no court case for that. I would extend this to suspensions and exclusions, and telling people how those come about and why they’re necessary.

It’s good to be keeping the fight going and still having things to write about. Andrew, thank you very much.