It is speech day at Roedean College. The string orchestra plays Mozart’s Divertimento in D as the parents gather in the Centenary Hall. They have come to hear the Chairman of Council report on the state of the school, to join the applause for the retiring staff and to watch the three head girls deliver their review of the year, but most of all, these mothers and fathers have come to salute the achievements of their children.
The headteacher, Patricia Metham, calls the girls up one by one, announcing their awards and their prizes and their exam results. “Irina Allport, eight and a half passes at GCSE…. Leonara Bowen, nine and a half passes… Angelica Chan, eleven passes.” The applause drenches the hall. Mrs Metham tells the parents that the school’s results are the best in Sussex and place Roedean high in the first division of league tables. And the future? “For those at Roedean,” Mrs Metham declares, “it need hold no terrors.”
Down the grassy hill, on the far side of the Roedean playing fields, on this October Saturday, it is just another morning on the Whitehawk estate – some lads belting a football around East Brighton Park, someone hosing down a car, dogs sniffing at the dustbins. Whitehawk is a sprawl of terraced red-brick houses, home to something like eleven thousand people, most of them white, many of them out of work. Whitehawk is the poorest estate in Brighton and one of the poorest ten per cent in the whole country. It is the kind of place where almost everyone has suffered a crime and almost no one bothers to report it any more.
While Patricia Metham is celebrating the success of her pupils, another headteacher is having a very different experience. Libby Coleman spent three long years as the head teacher of Stanley Deason Comprehensive School on the Whitehawk estate and now she sits at home, less than a mile away, staring out at the scruffy grey sea, looking back over those years which began with so much hope when she had no idea – really, none at all – that by the time she left, her career as a head, her health and the school would all be in ruins.
This is the story of two women. In many ways, they are quite separate – the secure and confident head of the famous old private school where almost every pupil scores at least five top grades at GCSE, and the rueful and defeated head of the state school, where only a tenth of the children could make the same mark. Just as Roedean turns in the best results in Sussex, so Whitehawk has made its mark with the very worst. The two women have never met. Their careers have been quite different. The narrow strip of downland between Roedean and Whitehawk marks the most notorious division in British society. And yet, for all this separation, the two women have this in common, that after several decades in teaching, they know what makes schools tick.
A few weeks before Roedean’s speech day, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, appeared on Channel Four News and talked about this same division. He made clear to Jon Snow how passionately he wants state schools to match the results of their counterparts in the private sector. You can see why. There are only 550,000 children in private schools in this country. They count for a mere seven per cent of the pupil population and yet they provide more than 20% of those who make it to university and nearly 50% of those who go to Oxford or Cambridge. Last year, the Financial Times’ survey of A level results revealed that all but 13 of the top 100 schools were in the private sector. In the private schools, 80% of pupils pass five or more GCSEs at grades A-C; in the state schools, only 43% reach the same standard.
And why is this happening? In government circles, the answer has been agreed for years: teachers in state schools fail to do their job properly. The analysis behind this answer is alarming: over a period of 30 years, beginning in the 1960s, the quest for excellence was undermined by an obsession with equality; student teachers were injected with a theory of child-centered learning which poisoned the heart of pedagogy, allowing the pupil to dictate the pace and direction of teaching; discipline and effort were banned from classrooms where no child might now be accused of failure; whole-class instruction gave way to groups of children ambling along at their own sweet speed; criticism was replaced by endless consolation, achievement was subverted by a poverty of expectation, aspiration was defeated by a relentless leveling down; the grammar schools were lost in a comprehensive fudge, all in the cause of social engineering. By contrast, on this view, the private schools were safely innoculated from this progressive disease by their traditions of competitive achievement with the result, quite simply, that teachers in private schools now do the job better.
This perspective was born on the political right as a rebuttal to the comprehensive movement. It was expressed with special clarity, for example, by the former Tory education minister, George Walden, in his book, We Should Know Better: “The idea that every child can advance at his or her pace by informal, non-competitive techniques that favour spontaneity over effort is a beautiful dream which, lodged in impressionable minds and given scientific status, becomes unconscious dogma. In reality, it leads to over-stressed teachers, low aspirations for the gifted and ungifted alike, bored or disaffected pupils, and an enormous waste of time and money. The contrast with the private sector needs little emphasis.”
Right-wing journalists pursued the same critique with passion and found that, in opposition, Tony Blair’s Labour party had joined their crusade. In January 1996, Sunday Times columnist Melanie Phillips celebrated: “They’re now against bad teaching, fashionable education fallacies and failing schools. Terrific.” A year into the Blair government, a Sunday Telegraph columnist, Minette Marin, endorsed David Blunkett’s policies as the key to injecting the technique of private schools into the ailing world of their state counterparts: “If teachers, teacher-trainers and professors of education all had a change of heart and decided to follow the example of the private schools and the old grammar schools, and to teach accordingly, that would not cost very much. All they would have to do would be to follow willingly the government’s various plans for reform.”
It is now close to the heart of New Labour’s approach to education, to see private schools not as an enemy to be abolished, but as a partner to be emulated – as ‘a benchmark of best practice’. In the three months before Roedean’s speech day, both the head of Ofsted, Chris Woodhead, and the Minister for School Standards, Estelle Morris, spoke at conferences of private headteachers, stressing their admiration for their work as a template for state school teachers. Since May 1997, the government has invested £1.6 million in bridge-building schemes to allow state-school pupils to enjoy the techniques of private-school teaching.
It is explicit in this analysis that the strength of private schools is not to be explained by their intake of highly motivated children from affluent families, compared to the deprived and demotivated children in some state schools – “poverty is no excuse” in the government’s words. Nor is it to be explained by the extra resources or smaller class sizes in private schools, as Chris Woodhead has explained repeatedly, pointing instead to ‘a toxic mix of educational beliefs and mismanagement’ as the real problem. As the Department for Education recently told the Guardian: “The quality of teaching is the main thing.”
Libby Coleman was full of hope when she first arrived in Whitehawk. It was January 1995. She had already been a head for ten years, first in Northampton and then in Barnet and she had done well – Ofsted had given her a report full of praise – and yet she wanted something different. In both her schools, she had seen deprived children struggling to make the grade and she believed passionately that she could help them, that poverty was no reason for failure. She was excited by all the new ideas which were bubbling out of the political world – literacy hours, numeracy hours, mentors, beacon schools – and so she had decided to move to a school that was really struggling with deprivation and to try to use these ideas to turn it around. It was an unusual thing to do, but she liked to be unconventional, to listen to her instincts before she listened to the rules. For her, it was a kind of crusade.
The Stanley Deason School in Whitehawk was certainly struggling with poverty. As soon as she arrived, Libby Coleman was struck by two things: some 45% of the children were poor enough to claim free school meals, nearly four times the national average (which is 12%); and almost all of them were white. There were no aspiring immigrants here, pushing their children to succeed. These were second and third generation long-term unemployed. By the time the children reached Stanley Deason, many of them had already fallen way behind. Among the Year Seven children when she arrived, she found only ten per cent of them had a reading age of eleven. And the attendance was terrible. On average, each morning, only 72% of them were turning up – more than a quarter of them simply never came through the door. By the afternoon, even more of them had faded away. And those who stayed often failed to go to the right classroom. Libby Coleman was undaunted. She could do it, she was sure.
As the weeks passed, she found the kids had a kind of wildness in them. There were children who reeked of lighter fluid: they had soaked their shirts in the stuff and hooked them up over their faces to suck in the fumes. A thirteen-year-old boy had started working as a prostitute down on Duke’s Mound on the Brighton waterfront: as far as Libby Coleman could find out, he had originally been seduced by his stepfather, who had then tried to cash in by taking the lad over to Amsterdam to sell him in the brothels there. Then she was dealing with this lovely, bright girl who certainly had the intelligence to reach the top level in her SATs, but she wouldn’t speak. Not a sound. Libby Coleman had come across it before – an elective mute, often a sign of abuse. But when she asked about it, she was told there was hardly any point in pursuing it: there was so much sexual abuse of children on Whitehawk that unless you had real evidence, no one was going to try and prove it.
In Whitehawk, she learned, the apparently simple could rapidly become bizarre and frightening. She was asked to find a place for a 14-year-old boy who had been expelled from another school. It should have been all right. As soon as she met him, she could see he had good in him, but within days, the boy was abducted from the estate by three men who drove him to some woods and took it in turns to rape him. She had the boy and his mother in afterwards to talk about it, but the mother was incoherent with tears and the boy attacked her. There was nothing she could do. He ended up in a locked ward.
Or there was a boy who was playing truant, which should have been fairly straightforward but then it turned out that his mother had witnessed a gang of youths ram-raiding a local store and had then made the simple error of making a statement to police. Now the men were threatening to kill her unless she withdrew her evidence, and the police were putting pressure on her not to back down, and so the lad was staying off school to try to protect her.
The parents were as troubled as the children. One day, she held an open day for new parents but a group of them turned on a young mother who had been a pupil there with them years ago and started taunting her, simply bullying her like beasts, just as they had done as children. The mother was so filled with childlike terror that she fled into Libby’s office where she quaked with fear and told her story and finally relieved her anxiety by vomiting across Libby’s desk. Some parents disappeared, like the woman who had run off to London with her pimp, leaving her boy with his blind grandmother. Some cracked and ended up weeping in her arms in the middle of her room.
Still, this was why she had come here, to help kids who were in this kind of trouble. She was sure she would be all right. If there was nevertheless a problem that worried her, it was in the staff room. From the very first day, she had been warned she was in trouble. The vice chair of the governors, a man called Robert Metcalfe, universally known as ‘Met’, was apparently dead set against her. He had once been a teacher in the school and risen to be deputy head and, even though he was retired, he seemed to look upon the place as his personal fiefdom. When the governors were looking for a new head, he had evidently backed another candidate and lost. Now, he was telling anyone who would listen that this Coleman woman was no bloody good – she was the kind who didn’t understand that what kids really needed was a firm hand. Libby Coleman was warned that Met had several good friends in the staff room who were already sewing the seeds of dissent; they were telling everyone she would be out in less than six months.
Patricia Metham’s study is a peaceful place. There is a group of wicker chairs with coloured cushions in front of the fireplace, a Persian rug on the carpet, a collection of sculpted hands on the chest by the wall, a computer, a printer, a teddy bear, a neat and tidy desk and, most of all, a picture window gazing down across the playing fields to the wide open sea. Mrs Metham is intelligent, forceful and very clear in her thinking.
First of all, she is clear that Roedean is not the school of familiar cliché, all fresh air and hockey sticks. It is a place of academic excellence but, more than that, she says, it is a place of breadth, which prizes drama and dance and sport and music; but more even than that, she wants it to be a place for free thinkers. She was rather proud to find one of her old girls leading a rent strike at Oxford last year. “Intelligent independence,” is her mantra. It may be for this reason that although she knows very well what government ministers and conservative journalists say about private schools like hers, she does not agree with them. Not at all.
Teaching technique comes into their success, but her explanation has almost nothing in common with the government’s analysis. It is built, first of all, on a simple foundation – the intake of children. “Those schools that dominate the league tables choose to be and can afford to be highly selective.” Every pupil who wants to enter Roedean sits an exam. There are some schools which set tougher papers, but the Roedean paper is quite tough enough to ensure that those eleven-year-olds who pass and who enter the school are among the brightest and the best.
Roedean routinely puts its newly selected Year Seven pupils through Cognitive Ability Tests. Last year, not a single child was below the national average for non-verbal or quantitative skills. Most were clearly above average. Some were rated ‘very high’. And all of them could read. Mrs Metham goes further. It is not just that these children have their academic engines already running when they reach the school, but they also tend to be from homes which have impressed on them the need to take education seriously: “On the whole, we have highly motivated pupils and highly motivated parents.” On most days, she will see at least one set of parents who are interested in the school. The contrast with the state sector needs little emphasis.
This is the most important part of the story – the intake of able children from supportive families – but it is by no means the end of the explanation. Three years ago, the London School of Economics produced a revealing study in which they compared the educational achievements of students who went to private schools on the old Assisted Places Scheme with the achievements of those who had been offered an assisted place but turned it down and opted to stay in the state sector. The LSE checked the verbal and non-verbal reasoning scores of their two groups and confirmed that the two sets of students were very similar in their ability. And yet, by the time they came to take their A levels, the group who had opted for the private schools had clearly pulled ahead. First, they had sat more exams and, second, they had scored better results than those who had stayed in the state schools. Translated into A level grades, the children who went through the private schools were achieving between one and a half and three grades higher than their equivalents who had stayed in the state sector – the difference, for example, between three A grades and three B grades. The intake of children is clearly important but equally clearly, as a mass of educational research has shown, schools can make some difference. In the first place, the successful private schools are selecting talent. But they are also developing it.
On the Whitehawk estate, life at Stanley Deason was sometimes like being inside a threshing machine as one incident crashed down on the tail of another. One moment, there was a senior woman teacher in tears because an eleven-year-old boy had spat at one of the girls and reacted to being ticked off by turning round and farting in the teacher’s face. The next, there was a neighbouring school on the phone complaining that two Whitehawk girls had been down there with razor knives, trying to cut up a girl who had been flirting with one of their boyfriends. A boy kicked out a water pipe and flooded the library below. Someone set a fire in the toilets. And then Ofsted said they wanted to come and inspect the place.
Still Libby Coleman knew what she wanted. She wasn’t so sure whether she could pay for it. Early on, she had discovered to her horror that the school roll was carrying ‘ghost children’ – at least 30 kids who were enrolled in the school, whose names were being ticked off on class registers, who were being funded by the local education authority, and who were essentially fictitious. Either they had been at the school but left long ago or else, so far as she could tell, they had never existed in the first place. She called her union. It was fraud, they said, and she could go to prison. “Prison?” she said. “I don’t do going to prison.” So she called the LEA and told them all about it. The ghosts were exorcised from the roll and the school lost something like £40,000 out of its annual budget.
At first, Libby Coleman thought she could live with the loss. Miraculously, the school had managed to store up £80,000 in its reserves and so there was a cushion. Except that there wasn’t. The money was nowhere to be found. She called in two sets of auditors in search of the cash, but it was not there: £80,000 had simply gone missing.
She wanted more teachers. There was no chance of that; the whole LEA was being told to expect a cut across the board. She wanted to buy a computer programme called Success Maker. The Year Seven children could work with it on their own, it would stretch each child to an appropriate level and free up teachers. But there was no money for that. In fact, there was no money for computers generally, and the only ones they had were too old to take any software that used Windows. She tried to tackle the truants: calling the parents as soon as the child was missing, following up in writing, and posting the attendance figures on the noticeboard. She thought it would help to give prizes for the class with the best attendance and for three pupils who most improved their attendance. She knew there was no money for that, so she paid for the prizes herself.
The whole school was struggling to drag itself forward, and she could see the stress pumping through her staff. There were teachers who simply lost it and sobbed or climbed up on a chair and started yelling uncontrollably at the children. She saw one teacher screaming at a boy “You’re useless, you’re completely worthless.” Libby had not known what was most upsetting – to see a teacher reduced to such hysteria or to see a child’s self-respect so battered. In any case, she had gone off to the toilets to be sick.
There were so many staff off ill. An English teacher had died and everyone said it was stress. Another, who was known as Shergar, had simply disappeared. There were several who developed very serious illnesses – cancer of the kidney, cancer of the colon. One of the art teachers had a breakdown, the head of maths left in tears, the new science teacher cracked up and took six months off. Only the most talented teachers could thrive against these odds. A few did – really great teachers. There were others who limped along like walking wounded – with no kind of help or support from anyone in the school or the LEA – constantly calling in sick, constantly forcing the school to hire supply teachers who cost yet more money and, with the best will in the world, could not handle a class full of strangers. And then there were those who, Libby Coleman believed, should never have come near a classroom in their lives, teachers who treated children with contempt, who were glad when they truanted because it made life easier and who were quite happy to manhandle them when it suited them.
She wanted to get rid of these really bad ones, but she couldn’t. It was not just that the law involved a 12-month obstacle course, policed at every stage by unions who would jump on the tiniest procedural fault, but, worse than that, she would need the support of the governors and most of the really bad teachers were also allies of ‘Met’ Metcalfe, the vice chair of governors, who was now making no secret of his desire to oust her. Soon, she was fighting a cold war against this group of teachers who openly treated her with contempt. From time to time, she would discipline a teacher for manhandling a student and there would be a storm of whispers in the staffroom. Teachers who had no time for Met and his gang of trouble-makers began to worry that Libby Coleman was creating a culture where children were encouraged to dish dirt on teachers, whether it was true or not. Some began to say it was her fault they were suffering such stress, because she was so quick to criticise, winding people up to breaking point. The cold war began to spread.
Several times, she went to her desk to find that someone had been looking through her papers. She began to take sensitive work home. As she identified more problems, she found her working day stretching, from eight in the morning until late at night, spilling all over the weekend, trying to motivate the students, trying to energise the parents, trying to activate the staff, firing off ideas – teaching parents how to help their children revise, cadging old computers off local firms, calming disruptive kids in exams by having their parents sit with them. But every solution seemed to spawn another problem. (There were teachers who were furious with her when she succeeded in steering the most unruly pupils back into their classrooms.) Soon, the tide of tension was starting to reach her, too.
She had this lurking feeling of sickness. She found she was grinding her front teeth almost all the time, she realised that her neck and shoulders were constantly tight, in fact the tension ran all the way up around her skull and into her forehead, her head ached, she was smoking more and more – up to 30 a day now – and at night, she was having trouble sleeping. Sometimes, in the evening, she would drink whisky to force the tiredness upon her but then she would wake in the small hours and wander around the house, smoking and squeezing her hands.
She realised just how bad she was becoming when a girl refused to come to school because she had been gang-raped, and several of the boys who had attacked her were in her class. The police seemed unable to do anything, and Libby really could not see a solution in the classroom and so the girl left. Which was tough. But what really shocked her was when she realised that her sadness for the girl had been quickly invaded by quite a different feeling – a curse that this meant she would lose the couple of thousand pounds of funding that went with her. She was getting chest pains, too. But there was no time to worry about any of that. Ofsted were on the way.
By the time they arrived, in May 1996, she had been running the school for 15 months. Things had improved a little, but not enough. The Ofsted team did a good job. The measure of that was that they told Libby Coleman what she already knew: not enough children were coming to school; too many children were failing exams; the school was in deficit and was going to have to make cuts to stay alive; and “the new headteacher is trying to bring about improvements but needs support to do so.” Privately, one of them told her that they had never come across such treachery before.
The Ofsted team offered her their own version of support, but it was not one which she welcomed. They suggested the school should be put into ‘special measures’. They said it would help: the LEA would have to give more support, she could get a better budget, the staff would have to work together to keep the school open. But Libby Coleman was worried. She knew special measures could be a poisoned chalice – the school would be branded a failure, the brand would be displayed for all to see and, in the absence of miracles, the few remaining middle class families would run, taking precious money with them, and, if she was really unlucky, the best staff would start running too. And this was all the help that was on offer.
She went home, too exhausted to think. It was half term and she truly believed she was dying, she could not speak, she could only shuffle, and she stayed cocooned in fatigue, wondering whether she might be rescued by death, until the half-term week ended, and she had go to back. In the car, with her mind pumping, she felt one side of her body go dead. She looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her face was bloodless, her lips were grey. She managed to drive to the hospital where they tested her and told her there was nothing wrong, at least not physically.
Patricia Metham is proud to show you her school: the chapel with the neo-classical ceiling and the Byzantine marble; through the quiet cloisters to the renaissance garden; into the language labs (French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, and English as a foreign language for pupils from abroad); the science labs; and then the network of libraries containing 20,000 books as well as a collection of videos and CDs and 25 computers linked to the Internet. Here is the Roedean Theatre, with 350 seats; the dance studio – ‘one of the best in the country’ – used for jazz as well as ballet; the art studio, the design technology suite, where some of the sixth form girls have been stripping down an old Austin; the six indoor netball courts, two indoor cricket nets, one indoor hockey pitch, the fitness gym and full-sized indoor pool.
It is no secret why a private school may do more for its children than a state school. Mrs Metham might be forgiven if she chose to agree with the government that it is simply because she and her staff know more about teaching, but her answer is less self-serving than that. Money. “If the government want state schools to offer what we offer, they are going to have to spend on each child something much closer to the fees that our parents pay. At the moment, there is such an enormous gap.” Roedean is paid £10,260 a year for a day girl, roughly five times the amount which a school like Whitehawk is given per pupil.
Money shows not only in physical resources but also right at the heart of the school’s business, where the teacher meets the child. It is very simple: “We can do better than a state school with equivalent ability range because of our class sizes.” The biggest classes in Roedean may have as many as 20 girls, usually a highly-motivated group of the same standard, but for those who are not so confident or who are approaching big exams, classes are much smaller, sometimes as small as three. The pupil-staff ratio across the whole of Roedean is only 8:1. For Patricia Metham, this is central: “The point is that we can really match our approach to teaching to what experience tells us works.”
And, although she and her staff may work hard, they are not collapsing under stress and illness. She insists that “I am a bossy and interfering woman and I like to get involved” but she does not drown. From the calm of her study, she watches the whole school work: staff come to see her about projects, prospective parents come to be shown around the school; there’s a problem with the catering or a homesick girl; the bursar may come in to talk about the budget; she writes letters, she sees pupils. Then she goes home, to a listed building in the style of William Morris in the centre of the school grounds.
If Patricia Metham is right – that this combination of a bright intake and adequate resources is the real foundation of her school’s success – nevertheless, there is more to her account. There is yet a third factor which finally defines the division between these two educational worlds.
Libby Coleman knew her school was one step away from closure. She turned to the authorities for help, but the Department for Education took five months just to authorise her action plan; the local education authority was being broken up, and the staff were too busy reapplying for their jobs to look out for her; Ofsted were supposed to come back each term but chose to disappear for a year. She was alone. Worse, just as she had feared, the announcement of special measures was driving some families away from the school; that meant the budget was being cut and the governors were looking for redundancies.
The staff room was a snakepit of dissent and depression. As a direct result of the special measures, every teacher’s job was now threatened; everyone knew they were being watched and judged; every day now, at least half-a-dozen teachers would call in sick. Met’s allies were constantly whispering against her – the person whose judgement would decide their future – and she knew a lot of the others were blaming her for failing to protect them, for criticising their own failure, for raising their hopes in the first place.
She poured out ideas: catch-up lessons for poor attenders, spot checks on attendance, a welfare officer for the lower school, work experience for older children, CCTV to stop vandals, a working party on staff absence, mentors for Year 10 pupils, teachers to visit other schools, new homework programmes, shorter lessons, more lessons. But she was trapped by lack of funds and lack of support and by the special measures themselves. The staff were demanding that some of the most difficult children be excluded; but the rules of special measures forbade it. For her part, Libby had already identified the staff who ought to go but the fact was that she could not get rid of them because no good teacher was going to replace them, not if it meant coming to a school in special measures. The students started to roam wild in the corridors; she set patrols of teachers with bleepers and walkie-talkies to hold the line against chaos. She stopped eating and started smoking like a gangster. Most days, she was riddled with stress.
Eventually, in mid 1997, more than a year after Ofsted’s visit, HM inspectors came back and said things were improving, and the new Brighton and Hove authority came up with some money for a senior teacher and (finally) for the Success Maker software. They refused to fund a summer school for poor readers but she scraped a grant from a crime charity. That September, the school was relaunched with a new name – Marina High – and a new uniform and it became the first secondary school in the country to introduce a literacy hour. Metcalfe’s term on the governing body came to an end. She began to think things might be all right.
However, she soon began to see that there were too many holes in the boat. The students had had a riotous summer, burning out half-a-dozen police cars on the estate. The police said some of the children were working for a new drugs syndicate who had moved down from Glasgow. The few new teachers she had hired were drowning in disorder in the classroom. One of them walked out for good. She decided to bring in a counselor to help with some of the wilder children.
The counselor duly arrived to find workmen removing her study door (someone had smashed a fist through it), and Libby tried to explain that she had lost her sixth girl that year, pregnant; that a 17-year-old former student had just been murdered on the rubbish tip next to the school; that the brother of one student had just been accused of helping to murder the father of another; that a boy had been run down on the crossing outside the school; that she herself had just had her purse stolen by a Year Eight girl who had evidently given it to her older sister, who was a prostitute, and that this older sister had used her credit cards, and so the police had traced her to a flat where they had found her dead from a heroin overdose along with her boyfriend, and so now the Year Eight girl had been taken into care and it was her friends who were upset and needed extra counseling. The counselor said he would have to see what he could do. The caretaker put up a new door.
In November, HM inspectors came back, saw a rotten collection of lessons and narrowly escaped disaster when someone chucked firecrackers at them in a crowded corridor at breaktime. In December, the LEA warned her the school would close if there was not a dramatic change. She went home for Christmas in a fog of defeat. She had had four sessions with a psychiatrist to try to release her stress but now she carried so much tension in her shoulders and neck that her jaw locked tight and she lost the ability to speak. At night she wept and thought of herself as a sin-eater, absorbing all of the anger and blame of everyone from her staff to the secretary of state. She lay in bed, drenched in sweat, and then walked around the house in the dark, although now she was too tired to wake and did the walking in her sleep.
Within weeks of the new term, she knew she was hurtling to disaster. In a single week, children made two serious allegations of assault against staff. She followed the correct procedure and suspended both teachers while she investigated. The staff room went berserk and, when she investigated she reported that both allegations were groundless which, instead of calming the staff, only increased their irritation. And in the meantime, the DFEE and the LEA and Ofsted and HM inspectors were all demanding results and the more that Libby passed on the pressure to the staff, the more they hated her; some of them wrote an anonymous letter to the LEA saying the school was in chaos and Libby was mad; the former governor, ‘Met’ Metcalfe, phoned the LEA and demanded that they sack her.
In February 1998, the DFEE paid a lightning visit to the school and did not like what they saw. HM inspectors were due back and, shortly before they arrived, Libby Coleman went to the LEA and told them she could not go on, and they agreed to let her go with a decent package if she would agree to stay for the HMI visit. The inspectors came and shook their heads and took Libby aside to tell her she had done her best and reported that the school was still failing. It was Libby Coleman’s last day. She felt mad with fatigue and maybe with relief, almost speechless with lockjaw, crushed by defeat. She went for one last walk through the school, leaning on the arm of a visiting deputy head. A Year Eight girl saw her. “Are you pissed, miss?” she said. “No, darling – just very tired.” The next day, she resigned. She was 52 and she would never teach again.
When she was talking to the parents at Roedean’s speech day, Patricia Metham made a small joke at David Blunkett’s expense and then warned her audience: “It’s not easy being a teacher these days. What other profession is so beset by ‘experts’ who haven’t ever done the job themselves and who wouldn’t last five minutes in a real school? Having in the distant past been a pupil is felt by too many to be qualification enough to dictate terms to those who are trained and experienced professionals.”
But nobody dictates terms to the teachers in Roedean. They are not answerable to David Blunkett or his department or the LEA or Ofsted. They are not bound by the national curriculum or SATs tests or special measures or any of the other proliferating superstructure of supervision which has settled over the state schools. And that is the third factor in Roedean’s success – freedom to teach as they think best.
Mrs Metham cites, as an example, the electric car project. Her head of physics decided that Year Nine would learn a lot from designing and building an electric car, to be entered into a competition at Goodwood racecourse, and so he rewrote the whole physics course for them. Mrs Metham said: “We didn’t have to check whether it fitted with Attainment Target A or whether the ticks would be in the right boxes. Being independent, we can choose how best to excite and inform our pupils – free from bureaucratic constraints. That is what being a professional is all about. I would find it very hard to be a head in the maintained sector.
“The difficulty is that all teachers in the maintained sector have been constrained by the same rather rigid bureaucracy and requirements. If you talk to people who have had a really good educational experience, nine times out of ten, they will tell you about the charismatic teacher who stimulated an interest in a subject, an idiosyncratic person who knew enough about pacing and matching, understanding what was required. At independent schools, teachers are highly accountable, to the headteacher and to the parents, but how they get their results and what they do in the classroom or in a department, the judgement is left to them.”
Libby Coleman is better now. She has recovered her health and has found new work as a consultant. The school on the Whitehawk estate never recovered and finally closed, eight months after her departure; all of the teachers lost their jobs. Looking now, at the yawning gap between her school and Roedean, just across the fields, Libby Coleman finds a kind of unity with her counterpart.
The two headteachers with their very separate experience can see the same three factors at work in their success and in their failure: the intake of children; the provision of resources; the freedom to be professional. The stars of the private sector have all three. The perceived failures of the state sector suffer in relation to all three. In each case, the state sector has suffered from government policy: from the Tory reforms of the late 1980s which polarised the intake of children in state schools, concentrating the least motivated into struggling schools like Whitehawk; from the historic underfunding of British state education, which has been reversed by New Labour only in rhetoric; and from the enormity of the current interference by the DFEE and its agents with their highly politicised analysis. The great irony here is that the DFEE are trying to emulate private schools by adopting a superstructure of reforms which, almost without exception, is regarded with fear and contempt by the private schools themselves. Indeed, they cite their exemption from this superstructure as a key factor in their success.
In the most superficial sense, the analysis of the government and the conservative journalists is right: the quality of teaching is worse in some state schools, and so is the quality of learning. But this is not because they use different techniques or rely on different theories. Indeed, almost without exception – and contrary to the right-wing fantasy – teachers in the state sector have been trained at the same colleges in the same techniques and with the same ideology as their private counterparts. Whitehawk had no special involvement with progressive teaching. On the contrary, its most troublesome teachers were a cynical breed of authoritarians. Roedean has no special attachment to traditional methods, such as whole-class teaching which is embraced with such passion by Chris Woodhead and his followers. Patricia Metham says there are times when classes should be taught as a whole and others when they should be taught in small groups. “Differentiation is the key,” she says. She herself learned her teaching in the state sector.
There is almost no connection at all between reality and the easy consensus of distant journalists and politicians. The real division, it transpires, is not between the teachers of the two different sectors, but between the practitioners, on the one side, and the politicians and the pundits on the other. The great advantage of the current official consensus is that it allows the politicians to deny all responsibility for failure which is, on their account, entirely the fault of teachers, many of whom now collapse in stress and lose their jobs as a result. The great irony is that David Blunkett sits in his office, lost in admiration for the success of the private sector, entirely failing to understand that the key to that success is his own absence from their schools.
Additional research by Helene Mulholland