It’s given to only a few senior schooling officers to be each universally revered and admired by academics, however Tim Brighouse, who has died aged 83, was one among that uncommon breed. He did it not solely by respecting the occupation and inspiring its members, but in addition by exhibiting them pragmatically how their classes and thus their faculties may very well be – and had been – improved, with out the threats and coercion supplied by successive secretaries of state and his adversary, the previous chief inspector Chris Woodhead.
He was in flip a classroom instructor, deputy head – at 24 – then, climbing the executive ladder, chief schooling officer for Oxfordshire, then Birmingham, then faculties commissioner for London from 2003 to 2007, main the London Problem to enhance schooling within the capital. In a profession additionally interspersed with professorships of schooling, he not solely earned respect however had accomplished the roles and secured enhancements in ethos and leads to the areas he touched.
He championed state faculties (sending his kids to them), fizzed with concepts, not all of which got here off though they confirmed a eager intelligence at work, and spoke and wrote with charisma and morale-boosting wit. He wanted it as schooling ministers got here and went with growing frequency: 10 within the final 13 years alone. Brighouse was scathing in regards to the turnover, not a lot of the personalities because the coverage stasis it produced; they’d, he stated, an excessive amount of energy and too little judgment.
A tall, considerably dishevelled determine, he seemed as if he had simply stepped out of the classroom – which he in all probability had, provided that he ceaselessly selected to look at classes throughout college visits fairly than preach about them within the headteacher’s research – and was at the least as soon as reported by a college caretaker as trying dodgy as he turned up unannounced. However he was to not be taken frivolously, because the Tory schooling secretary John Patten realized to his price when he gratuitously libelled Brighouse in 1993.
Born in Leicestershire, he was the son of Mary (nee Howard) and Denison Brighouse, who offered early tv units for a dwelling, flitting between jobs that took the household across the nation. Tim was educated first at Loughborough grammar college, whose forbidding ambiance unnerved him as a toddler, after which on the extra welcoming Lowestoft grammar in Suffolk, the place he flourished beneath an inspirational instructor earlier than securing a spot to review historical past at St Catherine’s Faculty, Oxford.
He thought he wish to be a journalist however was dissuaded by his dad and mom, who thought the job too hazardous. As a substitute he educated as a instructor, shifting to his first instructing publish at a grammar college in Buxton, Derbyshire, then grew to become deputy head accountable for grownup schooling and warden at Chepstow’s new Neighborhood Faculty for 2 years from 1964. From there he went into administration, overseeing Monmouthshire’s transition to complete schooling.
There have been additional posts in Buckinghamshire after which two years as deputy schooling officer with the Interior London Training Authority (Ilea) earlier than in 1978 he was made chief schooling officer of Oxfordshire, the place he was to make his identify nationally. It was a big native authority with each rural and concrete faculties, some already excessive reaching and with demanding dad and mom, a lot of them lecturers themselves.
In Oxfordshire he gained a fame for creating an academic esprit de corps, not solely amongst academics, however help and ancillary employees as properly. He may bear in mind names and would ship handwritten notes to classroom academics, praising their work and making encouraging options for enhancements: “It’s about being human,” he stated.
His 20 guidelines for academics, which many should have copied if solely aspirationally, included greeting each little one within the morning, remembering birthdays, “discovering the invisible little one” and even stealing crisps, although just one or two, by no means the entire packet, as a result of kids preferred the kudos of sharing with Sir. It was, he stated, “making a local weather during which academics and help employees really feel honoured, valued and revered” and it did wonders for morale. He spoke their language and was on their aspect.
After 11 years in Oxfordshire, in 1989 – with Kenneth Baker’s faculties reforms introducing a extra uniform schooling system supposed to knock faculties into form – Brighouse took up a professorship in schooling at Keele College. Though he was not completely hostile to improvements such because the devolution of college budgets from native authorities to heads, he felt the reforms had been too regimented, notably the nationwide curriculum, which he described as extra prescriptive than the Stalinist Soviet Union. In Oxfordshire he had pioneered the publication of college examination outcomes and the setting of targets for enchancment, although backside up, not high down: faculties evaluating native outcomes, not having them enforced by authorities.
Inside a number of years of arriving at Keele, although, a dream job got here up, as chief schooling officer of faculties in Birmingham. This was one of many largest and worst performing authorities within the nation, with an enormous multiethnic pupil inhabitants and mediocre faculties from which the center lessons had been fleeing to former grammar faculties that had already opted out of native management.
Characteristically, Brighouse was nowhere to be discovered within the authority’s headquarters within the week he was supposed to start out: as an alternative, he was out quietly visiting faculties, speaking to employees and pupils to see how they had been performing.
Inside weeks, as if his job was not demanding sufficient, he discovered himself beneath direct and private assault by Patten, the Main authorities’s schooling secretary, whom he had recognized for years as his native MP. Patten, who was an Oxford educational, attacked Brighouse by identify throughout a fringe assembly on the 1993 Tory convention, saying: “I concern for Birmingham with this madman let unfastened, wandering the streets, horrifying the youngsters.”
Patten tried to snigger the remarks off as satirical and, hubris quickly succeeding conceitedness, apologised. Mates of Brighouse rallied spherical to pay for a libel motion which price the minister extra humiliation and a reputed £30,000 in damages plus virtually as a lot in prices, from which his standing as a minister by no means actually recovered. Inside months he would resign by means of sick well being following a mass instructor boycott of the brand new Sats assessments. Brighouse donated the cash to organising his scheme for a so-called College of the First Age, aiming to enhance the literacy charges of Birmingham’s most disadvantaged youngsters.
When Brighouse resigned from Birmingham after 9 years in 2002, Roy Pinney, the council’s cupboard member for schooling, listed the seen educational enhancements town had achieved within the Birmingham Publish. At key stage two English, taken at 11, the share of pupils acquiring degree 4 (the anticipated normal) or above had risen from 46% to 71%, maths scores had risen from 44% to 67% and science from 48% to 85%. He wrote: “He actually is probably the most inspirational character.”
In 1997 Brighouse had been approached by David Blunkett, the brand new Labour schooling secretary, to grow to be an adviser within the division. He refused, however did comply with chair a job pressure on requirements, solely to search out it was a publish that might be shared with Woodward, whose academic imaginative and prescient was way more prescriptive and admonitory than his personal.
When the schooling inspectorate reported in 1998 on Birmingham as a faculties authority, Woodward, who had not been on the go to, altered the findings to criticise each the authority and Brighouse himself, saying the colleges lacked focus and his rhetoric was operating forward of the colleges’ efficiency.
The report was moderated after Brighouse complained, and a subsequent inspection in 2002 – after Woodhead’s departure – was fulsome in its reward for Birmingham’s schooling requirements as exemplary, because of “the energising and inspirational instance set by the chief schooling officer.”
Brighouse had resigned from the requirements job pressure inside two years and from Birmingham moved to grow to be the federal government’s London faculties commissioner, or chief adviser for London faculties, because the position was later renamed. Inevitably he grew to become a “faculties tsar” in ministerial parlance, although not one with any government energy past persuasion and lobbying ministers.
Nonetheless, he inspired native college partnerships to pool abilities and assets, promoted a constitution instructing scheme to recruit academics for topics the place there have been shortages with bonuses and further {qualifications}: “There’s no tougher nor worthwhile factor to do than to show in London,” he instructed the Guardian in 2003. “Ten years of instructing in London ought to depend greater than instructing some other place the place the wind is at your again.” Such measures should have contributed to the dramatic enhancements in London faculties, which have gone from worst to finest performing nationally in recent times.
Brighouse retired to Oxford in 2007 and was knighted two years later. He wrote a number of books on easy methods to enhance schooling and coaching, and was awarded a string of honorary levels. His most up-to-date ebook, About Our Faculties, co-written with Mike Waters, was printed in 2022.
In 1962 he married Mary Demer and so they had two kids earlier than divorcing in 1988. His second spouse, Liz (nee Kearney), whom he married in 1989, is presently the chief of the Labour group on Oxfordshire county council. He’s survived by her, his son and daughter, and two stepchildren.
