Four experienced teachers discuss the perpetual attempts to reform education by successive governments since the 1980s and the counter-productive pressure that this has put on teachers and students.

Dennis Charman is a secondary special needs teacher in London.
Louise Regan is a primary head teacher in Nottinghamshire.
Liam Conway is a sociology and history teacher in Nottinghamshire.
John Illingworth is a recently retired primary head teacher.

They talk about (in order): the different sets of reforms that have been imposed on them by governments over the last 20 years; the promises of the present government to put more trust in teachers; the extra powers teachers are to be given to discipline students; the future of their profession; and reforms to education around the world.

The Government says it is embarking on the most radical reform of teaching for generations and teachers are going to be at the centre of that. It must be a very exciting time for you all?

DC: No, not at all. It's yet another ‘most exciting round of reform’. I seem to have been living through them permanently since the Kenneth Baker [secretary of state for education from 1986 to 1989] days.

DC: You just run out of adjectives really.

LR: I started teaching in the early '80s, so my life in teaching has been a constant reform. I couldn't tell you the amount of folders that constantly get sent into primary schools from the government. We all plough through, we all re-write, we all re-invent, then the next lot come in and say, 'No, we're not doing it like that any more, we're doing it like this.’ And now, I've been around so long, things that got kicked out when I first came in are now coming back in. So I see things [that] we were told were absolutely awful, shouldn't be done, disgraceful, now they're coming back in, as if it's never happened before. The government will say we've got a great new reform for you, it's really radical, but it's exactly what we were doing 10-15 years ago.

One of the biggest examples for me currently is the reading recovery. It was a big programme but got kicked out when I first came into teaching. Reading recovery teachers were 'a waste of time, ineffective.' Then suddenly, a couple of years ago, 'oh, reading recovery's absolutely brilliant, we've all got to be doing that.’ But it's probably going to go again with the latest batch of reforms. It's going to be rubbish again. The other example is the curriculum structure. The creative curriculum vs the prescriptive, [with] lots of English and Maths. That changes every five or ten years. You go through a cycle.

JI: One of the most worrying things is that none of the imposed changes run long enough for there to be any evidential base [to see] whether they're working or not. Education is inevitably quite a long process. If you really wanted to know if a structure worked, you'd have to follow it through for a child, which takes the best part of a generation. That never happens. And when there is somebody who really tries to take a concerted look at it, for example, the Cambridge Education Review - a really serious, in-depth look at the primary curriculum - it was dismissed in a sound bite by government.

DC: Certainly, going back to Kenneth Baker and the national curriculum, reform is always seen as being brought to the profession. But when I started teaching, the reforms that were going on were professionally led and we were in charge. We were bringing in GCSEs and seeing out O levels and CSEs. And I was part of that in the school where I was working. We later brought in A levels. We looked at GCSEs and how they were to be delivered through coursework. We were sometimes working all hours doing it. It was somewhere in the '80s that reforms [became] something that was entirely imposed upon us.

It's not about the old sharing of good practice or things like that. In fact, funnily enough, the more that reform’s gone on, the far fewer opportunities I've had as a teacher or head of department to go and meet other teachers and heads of department to find out what they're doing and how we can share good practice. Underneath it, I think, we still do a lot of that kind of work. We're still always trying out new ideas, looking around, trying to find new approaches. But that's the hidden reform, and development that goes on that gets very little status.

JI: I've been a head teacher of three primary schools and my first headship was in 1981, which was at the very start of these reforms. I had a team of staff, we had no national curriculum, or it was just coming in. We could decide as a team of teachers what things were going to be most effective, how we were going to make changes and check that those changes were working. It was an incredibly fruitful, creative time, where we were making really, really big progress. And anybody who tells me that the standards of literacy of children coming out of primary school were much lower then than they are now is talking rubbish, because I remember the work the children did in 1980 and it was just as good, probably better. And what's more, we were educating children in a much wider sense. We were looking at things like social interaction and how they worked together and related to each other. We weren't narrowly focusing on the things that are testable in Key Stage 2 SATs, which are a minute proportion of a child's education.

We were wanting to build on the enthusiasms of both teachers and pupils. You could plan on a Monday morning that you would take your children, in a couple of minibuses, to the local pond. You’d dip buckets in the pond and bring back buckets of pond water. You’d spend a whole week with microscopes looking at the pond life. We used to do art, science, maths, creative writing. [There was] real enthusiasm amongst kids based on that project, extended over a week. Kids absolutely engrossed in it, not needing to ever talk to them about getting on with the work because they were highly motivated, interested in learning in that context.

And that was replaced by an hour of literacy, and 'for ten minutes of that hour you will do this', and 'for 35 minutes of that hour you will do this', and 'for fifteen minutes of that hour you will do this'... A highly structured, repetitive lesson plan that kids had to sit through year in year out. Seven years of 15,15,20,10, and the same in numeracy. You took away all that creativity, the chance for teachers to think and look at the environment, look at the children they taught and do what was best for them, and you replaced it with a national scheme of teaching by numbers. It might have been exciting for the first two weeks but it went on and on and on, boring and stultifying. And then, of course, the government said, ‘oh well, that's not working, so we'll introduce some other top-down method.’ And that doesn't work either, so we'll introduce another top-down method. The only way you'll improve education is to put it in the hands of professionals.

LC: It's also professionals who are doing their job. The same things going on in primary were going on in secondary. I know the first eight to ten years of my teaching life – I started teaching in 1980 – were the best ten because I was in control of what I did. And I don't mean that in a dictatorial way. I was in control of it as a teacher, and I knew the sort of things that I wanted to do with the kids. A lot of that was us working as teams in our school, but also in collaboration with other schools. The local authority in Nottinghamshire often set up schools or courses or conferences where history teachers - which is what I was then, mostly - would get together and discuss what they were doing. Discuss a piece of GCSE coursework that was common across lots of schools and say, 'well, how are you teaching that industrial revolution then?’, ‘what are you doing with it?’ A common course is the role of Cromford, and Arkwright, in the industrial revolution and its development. Often that involves going to the place and looking at the evidence on site and using that evidence to write a piece of work. So quite a few schools would be doing that based on a syllabus. You'd look at your staff and say, ‘this is how we're doing it, what do you think?’

Just exchanging ideas on that level, rather than being told ‘This is the package that works, you all do it.’ A lot of the approach is dictated by the needs of the economy rather than the needs of education. If you educate kids, they're going to do a good job in the economy, so the needs of the economy take care of themselves. Most importantly you've got to educate them to think.

A big difference for me, as a teacher of history is in the '80s, and up to quite a long time after that, because it takes quite a while for those reforms to get into the system, was that the kids who got the lowest grades in GCSE history – and we had mixed ability classes then, where everybody was learning from each other – could think about history and they could enjoy it. They were getting something out of it. Now a lot of those kids don't even do history any more because they're told it's not suited to them, or they're not able to access an academic type of education. That type of compartmentalising students, in a way that's not in their interests, but in the interest of some idea that they're going to work with their hands or their brains and so on, is not a positive development at all, from a kid's point of view and from a learning point of view.

And there'd be masses of exchanges of views and there'd be local advisers for a specific subject. We had a local adviser in our area who I thought was absolutely terrific. He'd coordinate the things we were doing, and he was a history teacher. In the whole time that I knew that guy, he never observed one of my lessons; he never had that massively monitoring role. Take the advisers that work for Notts now: all they do is monitor. They're not part of a process of 'how are we doing this, what do you think?' One of the things they're looking for is to see if progress has occurred in the lesson: 'Sorry, I didn't see an example of learning taking place.'

LR: 'The kids haven't progressed. They've not made progress in 20 minutes!'

LC: The key thing is: have [they] made progress over a distance of time?

JI: Anybody who has been a primary teacher will know that, if you measure children’s reading age, they have periods where there seems to be no progress at all, and then suddenly they make two years' progress in about six months. And that's because they suddenly click to some of the process of reading. So this idea that progress is some kind of straight line graph, and you can take part of that graph into a 20-minute lesson and see progress, is absolute rubbish, as is the idea that learning is associated with teaching and being in a lesson; [that] when you're in a lesson being taught well, you will make progress in 20 minutes. Sometimes in a classroom there's no apparent progress. It doesn't work like that. Kids go away from lessons, and when they're not in school at all, they're thinking about things, thinking about life, thinking about experience, and they make progress.

Now that's a basic lack of understanding amongst politicians about the relationship between teaching and learning. They think if kids are under-achieving, you give them extra classes, boost their classes, make them come in the holidays, do breakfast classes and after-school classes, as if, if you just teach them more, they'll learn more. That isn't how learning happens and they don't even understand that basic idea. So is it surprising that they introduce reforms which don't work? You wouldn't put a politician in charge of some aspect of surgery, and say, 'we think it'd be better if you cut him open like this'? God help us! There's an acceptance that surgeons together, slowly, based on research, based on evidence, improve surgical techniques. And they do. Teachers are not treated like that. 'Any idiot can teach.' 'You don't have to have qualified teachers in free schools.' 'Qualified teachers don't matter.' 'Jamie Oliver can run a school and bring in anybody.'

For me the tragedy [is], if you tell a teacher how to teach by numbers - you give them lesson plans, structures, minutes - and they do that for 10 years, that is all they know. You're losing, I think, a creativity from the profession. I've always said, an enthusiastic teacher is, in general, a good teacher, because that enthusiasm spills over to the kids. Kids can tell whether you're going through the motions or whether you have a real enthusiasm for something.

LR: I came in just as the National Curriculum was introduced. The best thing was that we weren't controlled by lesson plans. I did plan lessons but it didn't matter if something else happened. A good example was when a child came into school one day and on the way they'd found a bird’s nest. What would happen now is teachers would think, 'God, I can't do anything about that because, if I don't get through all this literacy, then there's going to be a problem.’

There's no spontaneity and there's no pleasure in learning. When they brought the national curriculum in, they deleted the option of reading whole books to children. We only ever read bits of books. So there’s a whole generation of kids coming through now who probably don't understand what a book is, because they’ve only ever read chunks of books. For me the joy in reading a whole book is just something to behold, and in my school we have tried really hard to keep that structure in. We have hundreds of books around school and we're constantly encouraging kids to read books. We have a generation of children who've been taught how to complete a test. But that test is very minuscule in what it measures. So you can teach a child to pass a test, but I think what we've lost is that joy that life-long learning that children want to go away and keep learning outside of school.

But you're all good teachers. This example's fine if you're a good teacher. But don’t we have to bring the targets in, the regulations, the restrictions, because not everyone is a good teacher?

JI: The starting point is that there are some teachers that aren’t doing the job, so we're going to introduce a curriculum that makes every teacher teach by numbers. So your most creative teachers are going to be dumbed down. You have to remember that there's no evidence that the number of bad teachers has ever been huge. We're talking about a small number of teachers. If you want to do something about improving those teachers and improving their teaching, is the best way to make all teachers follow a rigid, dumbed-down curriculum? Or would it be better to be concentrating on that small number of teachers and using the good teachers around them to improve the quality of what they do? That seems to me to be a no-brainer. You don't make everybody jump through hoops.

LC: It's a childish attitude [to say that] there are all these bad teachers. It's the sort of thing you think when you first start teaching yourself. When I first started teaching I thought, 'I’m coming into teaching to change the world, blahdy blah.' And I looked around and saw some teachers and thought, 'I don't like the way they teach, they're a bit strict,' or, 'They're not strict enough.' You've got this quite narrow-minded approach and that's the approach of the government in a way. It's like there’s a way of teaching, there's the way. There isn't one. In the end, you learn the best way that suits you, appreciate what everyone else does. What you end up doing is forcing people to do something that's completely outside the way they can achieve the best for themselves, in conjunction with the kids they're teaching, and you create a massive climate of fear.

We've got a massive exodus of younger teachers. People come in, they're there for three or four years, then they're gone. When I'm teaching history, I want to be animated doing it. I don't want a strait-jacket round me. I want to use the whole classroom, partly as a stage, as I'm trying to motivate them. In sociology lessons, I’m known for climbing up on tables. As the guy in Dead Poets' Society said, you get a different view from up here. One of the things you've got to do in sociology is you've got to look at the world from different points of view. If you were down in a hole, it'd be different again.

Part of what you're doing is drawing the kids in, engaging them. How can you engage anybody with a bit of a book? Young kids haven't necessarily read that many novels. When you're an adult and you've read loads of novels, you realise that a novel takes a while. You think, ‘where the hell's this going?’ You have to persevere with it. And when you do persevere, you're in it and can't bloody well get out of it. You're nudging your partner in bed because it's engaging you. It's a process.

LR: I think there is a myth about how many teachers out there aren't up to doing the job. There are some teachers in school who aren't up to doing the job, in exactly the same way as there are some doctors who aren't up to doing the job; there are some nurses... Throughout the world, there will be some people who, for some point in their lives, maybe aren't up for doing their job, and there may be a whole host of reasons why that is. I think one of the difficulties is that we no longer nurture our teachers. So we talk about nurturing our young people, and I think lots of schools, particularly primary schools, try really hard to do that. But I don’t think we nurture our teachers any more. I think we blame teachers all the time.

I remember an NQT [newly qualified teacher] started in my school, years ago. She struggled, bless her. I really got on well with her and we put in lots of support, and she's now a really good teacher. In the current climate, there are lots of schools which would just be failing. She’d have left the profession and we'd have lost a very good teacher.

So it's about recognising that we're all at a different place on that path and putting in the support. If you put in the support and the person's still not up to it, that's it then. But there’s not enough support and development. One of my teachers goes into other primary schools and teaches with teachers. She works alongside them. She never makes judgements about them. She never says, ‘You're teaching’s not good enough,’ or ‘These kids should be making better progress.’ She is there purely as support. And all the feedback I get from the teachers she works with is brilliant. She's enthusiastic but she recognises that they're in different places and she works with them.

JI: Did you know that half of all people coming into teaching have left within five years? The Health and Safety Executive classifies teaching as the most stressful occupation in the country. Now, some of this is to do with the demands being made of teachers and the control they have over their own working lives.

Has that increased in the last 20 years?

JI: Absolutely. Demands have gone up and professional control has gone down. As a result, stress levels have absolutely rocketed. Very good, conscientious teachers are being driven out of the profession in their thousands every year, because they are chasing this treadmill of various demands that have been placed on them. Because they're conscientious, it's beginning to affect their mental health, and they either leave because they can't sustain it or they become too ill to teach. There are high levels of mental illness among teachers.

Something like 38,000 teachers had to be replaced last year. The cost of training and appointing those teachers was £1.5 billion, so it's a big cost to the nation. This is the impact of the way teachers are being imposed upon in how they do their jobs. They're not being nurtured or supported; they're just being thrown away when things go wrong. Then we're recruiting more people to come in and fill the gaps, and they go, and then we recruit more people. So we've got a very serious problem, and a lot of that is to do with the interference and imposition from politicians like [education secretary Michael] Gove.

In other occupations, social work or mental health, for example, there's an acceptance that they are emotionally intensive occupations. And so is teaching. Those professions have in-built to their practice this idea of checking out people's well-being, their mental health and so on. They call it supervision. It's not really supervision at all; it's about checking out people's mental health, checking out how they're coping, making adjustments that recognise that. There is no culture of that in education, and I think that's a really serious weakness in the profession. If I was in government now, if I was Gove, I'd be saying that we need to build into a teacher's contract the time and resources for regular checking-up of how they are, so it becomes part of the system.

LC: The other thing about teachers being forced out: you think, 'Is it possible that those 38,000 were all bad people?'

JI: Actually, a lot of them are very good teachers.

LC: Of course they are. They're going because they've thought, 'Shit Jack, this is just not for me; it's a crazy, mad world and I don't want to be part of it.' But at the other end, the older teachers, the massive shame for me is that brilliant teachers are leaving because they're pissed off with what's going on. You take some of the people who have stopped teaching, or have left and are doing supply work, because they didn't want to fit in with the way things were being done. These are brilliant practitioners who've had a fantastic record of producing fantastic results. They love teaching, they love the kids, they love what they do. These are the sorts of people who should be coming back into schools and advising teachers. People who understand what you do when kids kick off in a class. When you're young and you first go in there, you think, well just put them down or shut them up, or whatever. Sometimes nothing works, but the more experienced you get at it, the more likely you are to manage a situation in a way that doesn't inflame it and helps to settle things down. And these teachers that are good at that are leaving. What we're getting is often failed teachers, who go off to Ofsted and think, 'This is a good money spinner here.’ They're coming in and they're monitoring, not interested in supporting the professionals. So the wastage in the education system of people who are genuinely interested in delivering, and genuinely care about the kids, rather than silly systems, is massive.

DC: Two good examples of just how poorly managed it is. That statistic of half the teachers dropping out in their first five years is absolutely rock-solid. And when you think that hasn't changed in the period when those teachers are incurring debts to get to that position. There was a time when perhaps you could drift into teaching because you got a grant. But these are people who have paid to get that qualification. I think something like 30% drop out during the training as well. So you start off with 100, you're down to 70, the 70 go in, [then] you're down to 35.

Also, in your life, you will be different types of teacher. When I was younger, I was a different type of teacher at 25 than I was at 45, and at 55 and 60 I’m just a completely calm one.

LR: We’re all very different, but all young people are very different. So if all teachers are the same, there'll be some young people who won't learn. I remember going through school and there were some teachers that I loved. They just fitted me exactly. I worked hard in all my lessons, but there some teachers who were much better for me, they were just on my wavelength. And I see that all the time in classes when I go round my school. There are some kids who you see really hooked into certain teachers. They understand the way that person learns. If we try to make everybody an automated functioning robot, who only delivers in a certain way, there'll be a whole host of kids who just will switch off.

All this sounds similar to the problems the government has said its reforms will tackle. The government’s white paper for education starts off by saying it will be a 'radical reform programme for the schools system, with schools freed from the constraints of central Government direction and teachers placed firmly at the heart of school improvement,' noting that 'teachers consistently tell us that they feel constrained and burdened, limited to repetitive teaching of the same narrow syllabus to successive classes of young people, often feeling that they are in a straitjacket which gives them little scope to pursue avenues which might unlock the potential of their pupils.'

The education secretary Michael Gove says in his introduction, ‘at the heart of our plan is a vision of the teacher as our society’s most valuable asset. We know that nothing matters more in improving education than giving every child access to the best possible teaching. There is no calling more noble, no profession more vital and no service more important than teaching.’

LR: Does he say after that, 'but we don't listen to them, we don't value them, and we don't treat them as professionals’? Because if he said all of that, it would make sense. It is just rhetoric. What people hear outside is very different from the practice and the way teachers in schools feel. There's a real blame culture: whatever goes wrong, it's always the teacher’s fault. Teachers are quite different from other public sector workers, in one sense, because everybody's been to school, everybody thinks they know: ‘It's an easy job, anybody can teach,’ which is an absolute lie.

DC: Actually, I don't think [Gove] has, or we any longer have, any idea of what a good teacher is. In schools, a good teacher is very often the one who delivers on those Key Stage 2 SATs, and on GCSE results. It has become very atomised. Schools don't work like that. You can have a teacher who, in her classroom, is outstanding, but doesn't contribute anything in the corridors or in the playground. You've got other teachers who are reasonably good, but are the absolute rock that a school sits on. You have different types of leadership, some of them who are very managerial and get things done, others who are quite inspirational, others who draw the best out of people. None of this is particularly understood any more, the idea of schools being teams of teachers. You blend a set of qualities so that, as the kids go through, they get the best possible education. That's very much been lost. Teachers who have had a long standing commitment to a school, who just with their voice will quell everything that's going on, yet live in fear of their next lesson observation.

We did a big project in my borough about the way the local authority was doing lesson observations of staff. This came about because I was sick and tired of hearing about people crying after lesson observations. That should be the most rare of events and yet it had become regular when local authority inspectors came in. No matter what those people's contribution to the school was - you had people who were meeting all their targets for pupils across the year - they were being failed on each lesson observation because they had a different approach. So I think Michael Gove's words, okay they sound great, but what does he think a good teacher is? And what does he think a good team of teachers, and a good school of teachers, actually is?

When I first started teaching science, I was in a mainstream secondary school. I'd sit down with the head of science every year. For the Year Sevens, Eights and Nines we agreed on the five topics we had to teach in each of the half terms. Then the last one, the sixth half term, you have to think of something. One time, they'd opened up a new, big exhibition at the Natural History Museum, so I did loads on that. Often things that were not in the national curriculum, but they were science. And for 11 years we did that.

Years later, when my career moved on, I ended up in the special school that I've been in [since], and we became a Beacon School. For six years we had an opportunity to do work with other schools and I was the co-ordinator for that. I'd go into schools and I’d talk with staff. We did one school that had failed an Ofsted. One of the key areas they'd failed was science. We found teachers weren't confident about teaching it. They weren't confident about doing activities, their teaching assistants weren't confident enough and the kids weren't enjoying it. To make everybody confident, to make it fun, [we made it] about practical engagement with the kids, which of course could be anything, from drama to an experiment. The teachers were incredibly anxious because we hadn't set any targets: what were we going to raise the levels by? They were in a state of real anxiety about it. I said, ‘I don’t know much about primary practice, I 'm not a primary teacher. I know about science. You watch it, have a chance to see what I do, what's useful, what's not.’ And my colleagues who were doing stuff on other areas of the curriculum were taking a similar approach. And these teachers were astounded at the thought that a man or a woman came in from outside, talked to them about what they were meant to do, didn't use the word targets, and then showed them, not the right way to do it, but a way of doing it. And that school came out of special measures more quickly. Ofsted commented that the science had improved more quickly than they had expected.

The funny thing is, if you had Michael Gove or [the head of Ofsted] Christine Gilbert sitting in this room, what you said about the bird's nest, or what I'm saying about this, they'd be saying, 'That's exactly what you should do.' But they don't understand why it is that people don't do it. People are so lacking in confidence.

LC: The idea that Gove really believes that statement about 'I want to put teachers at the heart’, and ‘it's an honourable profession' - it's just a load of old bullshit. I think a big factor for me is that we've lost our ability to influence things in the way we had before. I started teaching in 1980 and for the first eight years [we could influence things]. I was at Kirkby, where I teach now, for five of those years. We had a collective trade union leadership in the school, and whenever we went to see the head and we didn't like something, we said, ‘Look, this is rubbish, Barry, you can't do that mate.’ And he'd take a few years but, in the end, we nearly always got our way.

In my view, a big turning point was the defeat the teachers had in the 1980s because it let the Tories into another territory: educational reform. They wanted to get into that because teachers and other people in school were in control of it. And the other thing the Tories hated about it was [that] an egalitarian approach - trying to help all children to achieve, both academically and in other types of education - was actually working. Comprehensives had been a massive success. What the Tories want is a type of education suited to their class, their people. An education that makes them think. And they want the rest of the population to be trained to be proles, and to do the crappy jobs in society that don't require you to be able to think. The less they can think, the less likely they are to demand to join trade unions and to organise to fight for a better life.

So I think that was a big factor in what happened: we lost a big dispute. The Tories came out in a very heavy-handed way and New Labour carried on that tradition. I think the one good thing that New Labour did was to introduce large numbers of additional staff into schools who have supported teachers, and that's been a fantastic gain. Teaching assistants and other staff in school - [they've] been tremendously supportive. But what Labour did [with] the academy programme and stuff like that was a pilot scheme, then they've given it to the Tories, who have gone at it with a carving knife.

DC: The most sympathetic thing you can say about New Labour is: they accidentally built a treadmill and got on it. I remember David Blunkett just before the 1997 election. He came to Hammersmith town hall. He was talking about the prospects for education. He had statistics about failure and everything and he said, ‘First of all we've got to get the basics right. Once we've got the basics right, then you can do all this other airy-fairy stuff.’ But every year, somehow we still, apparently, haven't got the basics right, despite all of that change and money. And every year, the basics often get re-defined, but with no input from the profession. Seemingly every year, or every couple of years, Christine Gilbert, the head of Ofsted, will raise the bar for what is expected of schooling. Not by any process of consultation with the profession; she simply raises the bar.

LR: There's also an assumption there, with ‘you've got to go back to the basics,’ as if, for some children, sitting them down and constantly teaching them English is the way that they're going to learn. Some children, they need something else; they need other ways of learning. There's a view by the government that, if you just sit children down and dictate English and Maths, that they'll make progress. It's the same with the constant haranguing of schools, and the floor targets and standards. But those standards change all the time. You're always in this fluctuating world of what it is that they want. You're always aiming for these SATs results, but for lots of us they aren't that important.

One of the ways they will empower teachers is by giving new powers to control discipline and behaviour. Quoting again from the White Paper: ‘the greatest concern voiced by new teachers and a very common reason experienced teachers cite for leaving the profession is poor pupil behaviour .... We know that a minority of pupils can cause serious disruption in the classroom .... It is vital that we restore the authority of teachers and head teachers. And it is crucial that we protect them from false allegations of excessive use of force or inappropriate contact.'

It goes on to say the reforms will, among other things:
'Increase the authority of teachers to discipline pupils by strengthening their powers to search pupils, issue same day detentions and use reasonable force where necessary.
Strengthen head teachers’ authority to maintain discipline beyond the school gates, improve exclusion processes and empower head teachers to take a strong stand against bullying, especially racist, homophobic and other prejudice-based bullying.
Change the current system of independent appeals panels for exclusions, so that they take less time and head teachers no longer have to worry that a pupil will be reinstated when the young person concerned has committed a serious offence.’

DC: It begs so many questions. So, a head teacher who has excluded a child on grounds that are not sustainable on appeal, will not have to worry about taking that child back in. But a school down the road that is just slightly under fully subscribed, will have to take that child. So one group of teachers, or one head teacher, might be in a bit better-off position, but the school down the road are going to pick it up. All that does is just move the problem around. So that is a complete piece of nonsense.

The thing about the anonymous allegations, I think that is helpful. We deal too much with those.

LR: But I think most governments have said they're going to do that.

Is behaviour worse in schools? I don't know. I don't see that personally, in my own school, and I work in quite a tough area. But if there is a difficulty in behaviour, nobody's looking at the causes. It's no good just saying we'll give [teachers] more power, because restraining a child or booting a child out …

JI: … or searching them …

LR: … just moves the problem; it doesn't sort out the problem. I think if there is a difficulty with behaviour, in some places it's to do with the curriculum, which doesn't fit the needs of the pupils. The fact that teachers are over-worked and over-stressed, and that for lots of those places, where there are difficulties with behaviour, there are such levels of poverty and disaffection in the community. Violence becomes inbred in those communities. If you talk to staff in schools, and they work in tough communities, and you ask what would help, they'll tell you. The government aren't going to fund any of those things. In fact, they're taking away a lot of those things that have been put in that are supportive: Sure Start, lots of the community work that goes on in places like Kirkby and Sutton. All of the funding for that is being stripped away, so all of those things that may have started to have some impact will be gone.

LC: On that point of whether behaviour's got worse, I think it has, but I think you can take it in clumps. I've been teaching at Kirkby since '83, and I would say that from '83 to '95, behaviour was better overall than it has been since '95. I think you can coincide it with the changes that have been made to the way we deliver. It comes back to nurture really. The fact is, if you nurture kids and show you care about them, even though they've got all the difficulties that Louise has talked about, you can actually make school a place where they're escaping from something else, because you're showing a concern for them in the generality of things, part of which is to help them learn. But you’re doing that in a way that recognises that they’re not just someone who has got to be got from level 3a to level 4a, or whatever. This thing where Ofsted or local authority inspectors come into the classroom and say, 'Kids, do you know what level you are?' One of the biggest tests of whether you're actually teaching a kid properly is whether they know their level.

LR: ‘Do you know what your target is?’

LC: And if that kid says no, then it’s 'this is really bad, what's going on?' Kids internalise this type of stuff and they're asked to put all their levels down in their planners. I was a head of faculty for years. For a lot of that period, you'd get kids who cause problems. That's always been there, but you very rarely got kids going on about ‘all my levels are three when they should be five, I'm crap.’

I had to take them out of lessons and say, ‘Sit down and try and do that work in a separate classroom.’

They'd say, ‘I can't do the work, sir.’

- ‘Well why can't you do it?’

- ‘Because I'm no good.’

- ‘What do you mean you're no good?’

- ‘I'm a failure, I'm useless, I'm thick.’

I'd say, ‘No you're not, you can do this,’ and it was very hard to convince them that they weren't actually all those things. The number of those kids increased dramatically as a result of the pedagogy, or codology, or whatever you call it, that we've got now. And I think you do have to go back to what causes problem behaviour. Our union has always taken the position that we will protect teachers from very bad, violent behaviour from kids; that we're not prepared to go to work with that sort of environment. But you've got to get back to a situation in which kids are nurtured and valued, so when they come to school they think, 'Thank god I’ve got here.' It's an island of relief, instead of coming through the door and [getting], 'Eh, you've arrived, have you? Do that lesson. Your level’s rubbish. You need to sort that level out. You can't spell...' That sort of approach is very counter-productive in helping children's behaviour.

The big change for me was Year Seven. For years you could have gone in and slept in the corner in a hammock. I could literally have gone into most of my Year Seven classes, put a hammock up, and said, ‘Do pages seven to thirty,’ or whatever. And they would have done it. And at the end of the lesson they'd still be doing it. With all the changes coming in, all of a sudden, Year Sevens, they were off the wall. They were bouncing off the brickwork. Still coming from the same community but something had changed.

JI: Some of [the government's] statistics are quite interesting, because they're actually saying the reason that teachers leave is because of behaviour. I challenge that strongly, because I've done research that looks at why teachers are stressed at work, why they are leaving the profession. And it's true that about a quarter or a third of them have problems with pupil behaviour, but that compares with 80% who've got serious problems with excessive working hours, with excessive accountability, with having no control over their working lives and so on. So they're playing with statistics here. There are certainly a small number of teachers for whom pupil behaviour is a serious problem. To do something about that you've got to look at the causes.

And you're going to be given power to discipline kids for things that happen outside the school? A parent comes into my office on a Monday morning and says, ‘Such and such a kid's been beating up my kid on Sunday on the playing fields. What are you going to do about it, Mr Illingworth?’ You know, there are limits to what a teacher can do in terms of controlling behaviour in society more widely. Some of the driving forces of poverty and deprivation, and so on, that lead to those problems are outside the control of teachers.

I think it's just a smokescreen. We're going to cut all these support mechanisms, we're going to impose a dull curriculum, and then we're going to say to teachers, 'When the kids kick off, you can search 'em or you can keep them for detention without giving notice.’ I entirely agree with the thing about false allegations, not naming teachers; that's absolutely right. The Labour Party said they were going to do that but they never bloody did it. When it actually happens, I'll believe it. But the rest of that, I think, is a smokescreen for what's really going on that they're not addressing.

DC: When I deal with teachers who are really distressed about the aggression that's come from parents, or the problems that have come up from pupils, or the general class tenor in there; when you actually talk with them, it's not that they're thinking they're at their wits end because of a kind of breakdown in society. What they're thinking is they’re not getting the support they should be getting from management. It’s two things, depending if it's a smaller school or a bigger school. Sometimes in the bigger schools, it's about whole layers of management getting more and more divorced from teaching. Even in some primaries and small schools, I’m finding the head and deputy have no teaching commitment and there's this separation. They feel over-worked: ‘I've got to go to this meeting, and the inspectors are coming in, and we've got to do that report.’ and [the teacher] is saying, ‘I've just been kicked.' Somehow it doesn't loom large.

Another thing is, right at the top, a feeling - even with some of the most confident heads I know, and quite charismatic heads - a sense of anxiety about what taking serious action is going to do to their image. Almost every time, management had the mechanisms to do something but didn't apply them. Now whether that means they need better training, whether it's because of the balance of responsibilities that's fallen on them, whether it's because they’ve got into this thing of looking at the school's position, as opposed to what the kids need and the teachers need, I can't say.

LR: I think the management issue is big. In some schools, it will purely be over-worked and over-stressed management, but there are some maverick heads who really believe that it's the teachers' responsibility. Nobody goes back to the people who are doing it on a daily basis; nobody tries to engage with them about what would make it better. When something happens in my school, my first port of call is to talk to the member of staff and say, 'How can we help, how can we sort this out?'

LC: That's not a normal practice now. In my opinion, a big problem is that management increasingly, certainly in secondary schools, are saying discipline's a problem for the individual teachers in the classroom. The way the school is managed plays such a big part in how they feel about their working environment. Teachers can put up with a certain amount of difficult behaviour, as long as they feel they're supported and they feel that there's not going to be a massive outcry about the fact that a kid lost it in a particular lesson, which happens in teaching. It's part of what we do and you've got to expect it. Having management around the corridor and popping into your lesson is a really good thing - unless they've got an agenda; they're just checking whether your [learning] objectives are on the board and all that sort of nonsense. But if they come around and kids can see there's a whole team of people working together here - that's the point; it creates an atmosphere.

The other thing is if the head teachers and the managers teach more. I haven't done a massive survey on it, but I know from talking to teachers, in my role as a union rep over the years, that in schools where the head teacher teaches, the atmosphere in the school is better. If you divorce management from the job of delivering, then they disappear into a place and make judgements about what's good and bad. They say, ‘That's your job, my job is to manage,’ and create an environment in which you're going to have discipline problems.

The coalition is keen on increasing the numbers of 'National and Local Leaders of Education – head teachers of excellent schools committed to supporting other schools – and develop Teaching Schools to make sure that every school has access to highly effective professional development support professional performance support.' How do you think that's going to help?

DC: We're a small borough but we've got three head teachers who are regarded as excellent enough that they're working across other schools, sometimes across other boroughs. When I’m in those schools I hear the staff saying, ‘Our head's never here any more,’ and that really has an impact. People get really fed up about that. Even if there's nothing going wrong, they expect their head to be in sight and on school.

So that's one thing. [Regarding] teacher leaders, what teachers need is an opportunity to get together on some kind of horizontal basis, to thrash ideas out. One thing about teachers is that, within two months of being a teacher, you're a complete ideas-kleptomaniac. If there is anything that you see or hear or notice that will be of use to you in your class tomorrow, you will take it. You'll loot anything if you think it could be a teaching aid. So I think having teacher leaders isn't the thing. In my borough, what we need is more opportunities for some cross-phase things, for Year Six teachers to be talking to Year Seven teachers. We need special needs teachers talking with mainstream teachers. We don't need another bunch of people who've got some stripes or grade that says they’re a leading teacher; they’re what the rest of us aren’t. You know who's excellent or not once you get talking to people.

LR: The local leaders will be your heads, or executive heads, of outstanding schools who are never going to have Ofsted inspections any more because they're so brilliant, and who just follow the rhetoric and work in certain areas. They will come into schools in areas like mine and say, ‘You're not good enough because your results don't go high enough.’ Whatever I do my results aren't going to change, because of where I am and the nature of the community that I work in. There's a view there that schools who can write brilliant plans are the best in the world. And I don't think much of plans really.

JI: I think a lot of the idea behind super executive heads, super teachers, whatever you call them, advanced skills teachers... it's based on this hierarchy in education. You often hear talk amongst politicians of 'good' schools and 'bad' schools. You have to think about what happens when you create some sort of a hierarchy of schools, or a hierarchy of heads, or a hierarchy of teachers. It brings me back to how people learn. One of the key elements of learning, apart from teaching and experiencing things, are role models, the most obvious ones being parents and siblings, but [also] school friends and teachers and so on. Once you categorise schools, and you have the popular, good schools, the excellent schools, the schools that all the parents – middle class parents – want their children to go to, they suck out the role models. The children that have good role models themselves, rubbing shoulders with other children with good role models, leaving other schools with a paucity of good role models. So that school sinks while the other schools go up. The response to that is 'right, we're going to improve these sink schools, we've got to make them into good schools.' The only way you can do that is to somehow make them the one that parents want to send their children to. So you give it a new name, call it an academy, give it a lot more money, or make it a church school. And it'll suck in those kids, the good role models, and leave another school, somewhere else, with a paucity of good role models. So that'll become the sink school.

And as long as we keep doing this, messing, so some schools go up and other schools sink, we'll always have that disparity. That’s why, in this country, we’ll have a huge disparity between high achievers and the low achievers, until we understand the comprehensive, the kind of Finnish, model: truly comprehensive with a cross-section of good role models in every school. And you see that in this country now, not in London, not in the big cities, but in the small town that only has one school. You take a place, a small town in Derbyshire - it has one comprehensive school. All the kids in the school go there and it's successful. If you have two schools in a slightly bigger town, one's the popular one; one's the sink one. In London, you have this massive cascade, creating this idea of success and high achievement and super-heads, and it will never work. It will never work. Whatever you call it, whatever you do to create these tiers of schools, it will never work.

All the evidence is, if you fragment your school structures and systems, then that's less successful than a country like Finland, where virtually all schools are comprehensive schools, very few independent schools, highly successful.

The Finnish education system is referenced throughout the White Paper as an inspiration for the government's reforms.

JI: They're very selective about which bits of it they use.

LC: Everything that is going on in Finland is contrary to what we've been experimenting with here for the last 15-odd years, and they bring up Finland and say, 'Oh, Finland has got great results.' Finland’s got an all-through comprehensive system. In Finland there is no point at which parents have a decision - at age 11 - to send their kids to another secondary school. That mad, crazy world of transfer from primary to secondary. It doesn't exist in Finland.

JI: No formal testing till 15.

So what do you see happening in the future?

DC: One of the things we worry about, our generation of teachers, is this new lot have gone through their own education under this system, and then they train to be teachers under this system. Ofsted did a report on the teaching of science earlier in the year. There were two things: there was the abolition of Key Stage 3 SATs, which was a complete accident due to a commercial failure; and at Key Stage 2, science was taken out from being a regular [SAT]. Within 18 months, there were signs of more creativity going on in the teaching in Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 science. Now, that's like one of those things where you go to some place that's had some huge volcanic disaster and yet, a year later, there are little flowers starting to grow through. One of the things it shows is that, actually, the creativity that teachers have has maybe been stifled but I don't think it's destroyed. It's still there; it's just a natural part of the job. And I think it's because it is a good job. It’s extremely rewarding when it goes right. Teachers, once they're together, they're so animated, they're so lively, they're so full of ideas, they're so questioning. That's why I've got an amazing hope that, if some things can be loosened up, things would go well. But it is a great job. I'm reducing my teaching time now and heading towards retirement, and I absolutely miss those interactions in class.

LR: I think people will still want to be teachers whatever, because I think lots of young people can think back and remember somebody who influenced them as a teacher. There's very few other people in your lives, apart from your parents generally or carers, who have that level of impact on you. But I can think back and remember a teacher that had a massive impact on me, and I think lots of people can do that. So given that for lots of us we work in communities which are quite tough, have quite a lot of disaffection and poverty in the area, for some of those young people, school is the one constant in their lives. They feel safe, they feel secure. So I think sometimes people will think, ‘I want to give something back for what somebody did for me.’ One of the big difficulties now is, when people get into it, they realise how rubbish it is because of everything that comes from the government. But I think we still have a lot of people that want to be teachers.

JI: There's no doubt in my mind that what makes teaching a rewarding career, and makes you want to do it, is the interaction with the pupils. Sometimes it's quite difficult interaction, sometimes you’re dealing with quite hard problems, but that still can be rewarding if you resolve a problem.

But just an example of what can make teaching a joy. Outside in the nursery play area, one sunny day, a little girl, a three year old girl, is playing in the sandpit. Half the sandpit's in the sun and the other half is in the shade. I'm just watching the children, being a head, wandering around. And this little girl sees me, and she comes over to me. She takes me by the hand and leads me over to the sandpit. She puts [my hand] down on the sand in the sun, and then she puts it down on the sand in the shade. And then does it again. Never says anything to me. Just because she's discovered that the sand in the sun is hot and the sand in the shade is cold. She just wants to communicate that. She's learnt something and she wants to share it with somebody else, without a word being spoken. Now, moments like that just make you want to be a teacher and you realise that, by creating circumstances where little children can play and socialise, how much they're learning all the time. Learning is going on in all sorts of unexpected ways and that's a joy. That's what I miss.

DC: It's the same for secondary teachers, particularly if you're teaching a curriculum subject. People have studied science for 10,000 years, not because they wanted to reach a Level 4 by the age of 11, but because it was interesting. So if I'm not enjoying what I'm teaching, then I’m doing something terribly wrong. Sometimes I'm enjoying it despite something, and sometimes I do come out feeling a bit awful about a particular lesson. One lesson I broke up a fight and got knocked out, by accident. Both boys burst into tears and ran away! But basically, if you've got a love of some knowledge, if you've got a love of how to transmit that, that is such a powerful force.

Things get in the way a bit. Some things are natural, sometimes the kids get in the way - that's all right, that's what we can deal with. It's just when other people are snapping at your ankles, peering over your shoulder, not valuing what you do - that's the sad bit. But no, I wouldn't have been anything else. I know it sounds a bit of a tale of woe but, on the other hand, if you'd have wanted to hear a whole selection of after-dinner stories about why teaching was good, we could have done that for you for two hours.

So how do you stop that [the reforms]. It's been going on for 30 years – top-down, targets, things like this, increasing commercialisation, privatisation, commodification, whatever you want to call it. How's it going to change?

LR: I think teachers have to take some action over that, but whether they'll be strong enough to do it, that is a different matter. I think the difficulty is teachers are very worn down. They don't feel they have that control any more, so it's about trying to empower them. I don't know, given the current cuts that are now happening across the country, I don't know whether we might see teachers take a stand because of the impact it will have. Ultimately, all teachers are there because they want to do good by young people. Nobody goes into it for any other reason really than to want to educate young people, and to want to nurture them and bring them up and make them the best they can be. So if we want that, and we see everything that enables us to do that being taken away, maybe there will come a point when some young teachers decide it's time to fight instead of just taking all the rubbish that's thrown at us.

DC: I'm in a small borough and, I have to say, our union membership has gone up; more people are engaged being officers. The transition from my generation to the next is underway already. It’s very interesting, the generation up to about their mid-30s, I would say are in some ways a more assertive generation than mine was, which probably they've had to be. There are some things that they're brought up with that are taken as normal, that we would never have accepted. But on the other hand, they're quite assertive and there's a lot of strength there. So I feel confident about that.

I think partly it's about us having stronger links between our unions and the other public sector unions, which I think is working very well. The third thing, though, just on a smaller scale, is that - again, I’ve noticed in my borough - things like the free schools have thrown up people who want to set [them] up but they’ve also thrown up people who don't want a free school built 100 yards from where their local school is. And parents have come forward and started up campaigns. The closing in my borough of children’s centres, of Sure Start, the fact that another free school took away a local library, all of a sudden, I'm not just going and meeting up with my colleagues from ATL or PCS or Unison; I’m actually going to this residents' association, or that parents' group, and we're working together, sometimes quite successfully. And that, I think, is where a large part of the answer lies. Not only is it teachers acting, but people understanding what it is that teachers are acting about. Most people, interestingly enough, if you asked if there was a problem with education in this country, they'd probably say yes. If you asked them whether they liked their school, [they’d say], ‘Oh, it's great.’ I think they always think it's those other schools that are having the problems. And then they see an Ofsted report for their school and they're shocked, because it's not what they recognise.

JI: If the government wanted to know what to do to education, you can look back in history, not very far away, to look at some quite good role models. In the '60s, there were question marks about how children learnt in primary schools and what was effective. They set up a commission, the government at the time, to look at how young children learnt, and what were the most effective ways of learning. It involved teachers and educationalists, chaired by a politician and people from government, and so on, and they spent a long time producing a big, big report called the Plowden report, which then became the basis of primary practice, right through until the early '80s, when the national curriculum came in. It was a really, really good thing, because it looked at how children learn. It was a professional, thoughtful document that influenced teaching for 20 years, and for the better.

That's the kind of approach that you need, something that looks in detail, that takes something like the people who have done the Cambridge Education review, and looks in detail, with the profession, at how you make things good, and then stick with them. Stick with them for a generation, before you start tinkering around with them. But politicians want a sound bite for today, or for next week, or for next month, to say they are doing something, regardless of whether it's any use. That's not what they're interested in, and we've got to get back to that Plowden approach to education.

DC: We've lost that kind of intellectual, or academic, high ground. Not necessarily because there's something that's better – it’s trite, a lot of what the government puts forward - but because it's got ignored. There's this idea that, rather than having academics and so on producing those kinds of reports, it's now think-tanks, who come in with their own biases. One of our roles, partly as a union and partly as a profession, is to actually put forward that alternative. The Plowden report and the Warnock report (on special needs) looked at the needs of children, the process of education and how teachers would function in it, and they were comprehensive in doing that. Most things that we get now just look at a little bit.

JI: Contrast Robin Alexander, who headed up the Cambridge review, which is an incredibly thoughtful, evidence-based piece of work, with Chris Woodhead, who's on the TV or the radio all the time, just spouting dogma, really - no evidence base at all. But he gets more press and publicity than Robin Alexander will ever get.

We've previously done interviews with teachers and educationalists in India, about the changes to education being pushed through there. There are a lot of similarities and the reforms really are international in scope. Do you think that means a need scope for an international alternative to what's being pushed through?

JI: It's absolutely an international issue. A few years ago I was president of the NUT, and in my year as president, I went around the world to various places. Everywhere you went the agenda was the same. It was about privatisation, the handing over of education to multinational companies, the testing arena of measuring teachers simply by assessment data and so on. There has to be, in my view, an international response, we have to work with other teachers all around the world because it is a global agenda that's being driven by neoliberals, or whatever, around the world. And unless we deal with it internationally, I think we'll really struggle.

The academies here are based on the charter schools from the US. There we are taking a model from a country that's doing very badly, and ignoring the model of a country like Finland that's doing very well. I think the organisation Education International, which all teachers unions in the world are involved in, needs to be a much more powerful organisation. I think there are too many vested interests behind that as well, probably.

DC: I went to New England last year – I’ve got friends who are teachers and trade unionists – and I ended up doing some workshops in Massachusetts at a conference. And, you know, within ten minutes, you are talking as teacher to teacher about exactly the same problems, exactly the same arguments. But - and this was good - we were learning techniques and tactics.

Capturing that intellectual high ground again is not just a national project. Ark [Education Group] is a very good example. Ark makes no profit from what it does in this country, but I know two excellent teachers from Ark who are now travelling around to Shanghai, South East Asia, China, Singapore - to do what? Set up some more non-profit schools? No way. Britain is the loss leader for Ark, so they can say they can do all this stuff in Britain. They don't care whether they make a profit off Britain, but they can make a profit in India and China and the Arab Gulf.

JI: But opening up education to the market, that involved the World Bank [telling] third world countries they can only have aid if they open up their education to companies. It's a multi-billion-pound business opportunity for companies, and that's where we're going. And this government wants that. We've only seen the start of it but I think every school will be privately owned. Parents will have a voucher, as it were, to buy their child's education that they can top up themselves with their own money if they want to.

DC: When I do go to the states and meet teachers, if you imagine everything that is going wrong here, going wrong for another 20 years, it's like what it is over there. But teachers are still feisty; they still push, they're still well unionised, whether the unions are recognised or not. They support each other, they’ve got ideas and they still have that status in the community. So, in a way, I’m a ridiculous optimist, but the ground on which we're having to address these things is changing. We might be further back but I don't think for a moment that 20 years from now, 40 years from now, teachers will have become an acquiescent workforce. I just don't think they ever will.

JI: If you look round the world, teachers in Bahrain, in Mexico, are being shot and arrested for their belief. Politicians, world leaders, see teachers and teacher trade unions as a significant obstacle to doing some of the things they want to do. In North Africa, Egypt, Tunisia and so on, the teacher unions were very influential in the kind of things that have been happening there. So I'm always very optimistic about teachers and what they can achieve, but I think for our education system, unless there's a serous re-think, it’s a grim future really.