From Chris Woodhead’s farmhouse, perched high on the side of a sheep-strewn
hillside, he can glimpse a twinkle of sea in the distance. The most famous
name in the dusty world of British education bought his bolthole in
Snowdonia a decade ago. He has pursued his passion for rock climbing and
hill walking from here, as well as continuing his lifelong campaign for
better schools and against the sloppy heritage of liberal, left-wing ideas
in education.
In recent months this tranquil retreat, sitting in 14 acres, has been the
setting for a more desperate battle. Here, the provocative, combative former
chief inspector of schools for England and Sunday Times columnist has penned
a swansong book about the state of British education - racing against time
as a terminal illness wastes his muscles.
With the book about to hit the shops, he talked on the record about his
condition for the first time, explaining how it has driven his final attempt
to tell politicians how they are destroying our children’s futures.
“I have got motor neurone disease, the illness that doctors are said to most
dread contracting,” he revealed, as Christine, his second wife, stoked the
wood-burning stove and served tea in blue china mugs. “In the knowledge that
50% of MND patients die within three years of diagnosis, I thought I would
have one last go at issues that have been a preoccupation for the past 30
years. I wanted to explain why I think things are as bad as they are.”
The result is A Desolation of Learning, a slim book with a photograph of a
pile of abandoned classics on the cover. In it, Woodhead makes his ultimate
effort to convince politicians to give Elsa, 5, and Morva, 2, his
granddaughters, and every other British child “the kind of traditional
schooling I enjoyed, which opened my eyes to the magic and mystery of the
world around me”.
He explained: “The situation in schools is even worse now than it was in 2001
when I wrote my last book.” Thirty per cent of secondary-school children
think that Oliver Cromwell fought the battle of Hastings; 40% don’t know
where the first world war was fought. Meanwhile “useless subjects” such as
citizenship and sex education crowd the timetable and exams get easier every
year.
For such an outdoor type, his home strewn with seascapes and paintings of the
cliffs and mountains he loves, it is hard to imagine a crueller fate than
the diagnosis Woodhead’s London consultant, Joanna Ball, confirmed in
September 2006 – a year after he first noticed, on jumping down from a
boulder in Wales, that his legs had “turned to jelly”.
Three years on, the signs of the illness – which gradually destroys the nerve
cells in the brain that control the body’s muscles – are unmistakable. Once
vigorous, he now walks haltingly with the aid of a stick and can manage only
short distances.
Hesitantly, he asked for the support of my shoulder to negotiate a step as we
approached the house. He used to attack any brambles that sprouted in the
grounds himself; today they are tended by a gardener. His is a crippling
state that he is bearing with impatient fortitude, and one that he has no
intention of enduring to its grim end.
“I have always been a fairly active person and my rock climbing and running
have been very important to me,” he said, his crutch propped against his
chair. “I have found it frustrating not to be able to dress myself properly.
I find it humiliating that Christine has to do everything, even take the
rubbish out, so the prospect of being completely incapable, of relying on
computer-aided assisted breathing, or assisted speech, is not one I would
ever want to tolerate.”
Although few patients survive more than a few years, a handful, perhaps most
famously the Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, have lasted longer, almost
always with the aid of machines. Woodhead, 62, however, rejects such an
outlook. His greatest fear is that the muscles that regulate his breathing
will seize up, suffocating him – a death he would prefer to avoid by suicide.
“I am clear in my own mind that it is better to end it than continue a life
that is extremely frustrating for me and onerous to others who are involved
with me,” he said. “I certainly feel that the quality of one’s life is more
important than its quantity.”
Of course, this careful and clever man has already considered the possibility
that the advance of the illness may be so swift that he may be caught out,
suddenly ending up too incapacitated to be in a position to kill himself.
Nor is travelling to Dignitas, the clinic in Switzerland at which more than
100 terminally ill Britons have had assisted deaths, his preferred option.
The idea of going perhaps to his favourite climb and launching himself off
seems more appealing.
“The truth is that I would be more likely to drive myself in a wheel-chair off
a cliff in Cornwall than go to Dignitas and speak to a bearded social worker
about my future.”
A bearded social worker? “I know from watching the recent documentary about
Dignitas on Channel 4 that, although the doctor responsible for Dignitas
doesn’t attend the actual suicide, a representative of the organisation does
go along. In the documentary this representative was a bearded chap, a
social worker type. He didn’t administer the injection: you have to do that
yourself or drink a lethal mixture – which is problematic in terms of timing
for MND patients – but he was there to help look after you.
“This bloke, it was reported, had once sung Beatles songs on such an occasion.
Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not my idea of a final rave.”
All the same, “I might need help to die”, he admitted. In Britain, it is
illegal to assist suicide. Legal challenges such as that of another MND
sufferer, Diane Pretty, have failed to change this state of affairs –
leaving Woodhead unsure of how to proceed.
“I don’t believe that politicians will have the courage to alter the law. And
I don’t want Christine or my daughter Tamsin to be complicit in any way.” He
fears the prospect, however theoretical, that they could be sentenced to up
to 14 years in jail.
In some ways he wishes that those campaigning for the law to be changed would
shut up. As long as it remains a grey area, the police seem content to turn
a blind eye. Nobody has been convicted of aiding and abetting a suicide
although the police have investigated several families who have made the
trip to Geneva.
“Given the pusillanimous politicians we have got, it is better to live within
the grey area of the law than stir up lots of debate from the pro-life
movement and all the rest of it.” In the meantime, he struggles on. “There
are around 5,000 patients [of MND] at any one time in Britain – not enough
of a market for the drug companies to invest heavily in researching a cure,”
he said. “The only thing they can offer is riluzole, a drug that prolongs
life by two months. There is research being done in Sheffield – and it would
be good to be able to highlight the need for more to be done.”
China seems to be better at treating the disease. As a result he has –
“suspending my natural scepticism” – turned to eastern medicine. Since last
August he and Christine have twice weekly made the three-hour round trip to
the town of Mold, where a Chinese doctor, Dr Chuan, administers herbal teas,
massage and acupuncture.
“Forty needles at a time – I feel like a pincushion,” he groaned, managing a
half-smile. Dr Chuan, who also brought him back from China a laser machine
that oxygenates the blood, apparently believes it is possible to arrest the
progress of the disease. “Well – I am prepared to give it a go,” Woodhead
said.
Despite the impracticality of living in such a rural location, he insists on
staying in his eyrie. Christine, a London girl born and bred, acquiesces
simply because her husband loves it so much, even if the jeep gets stuck in
the muddy track down to the road. “He’s happy here,” she confided as she
drove me back to the station.
He in turn praised the woman he met at Ofsted nine years ago and married in
2006. “Her remarkable patience with me is matched only by my legendary
impatience,” he said. A Desolation of Learning is dedicated to her.
IN the past, plenty of people might have volunteered to push that wheelchair
over the edge of a Cornish cliff. Perhaps the most significant figure in
education, Woodhead has, in a career spanning 40 years, also been one of the
most divisive, prepared to speak out when more timid civil servants bit
their tongues. Since 1994, when he first became Her Majesty’s chief
inspector of schools in England, appointed under a Conservative government,
this back-to-basics evangelist has generated countless controversies and
created many enemies.
“Sack the 15,000 useless teachers” was one of the earliest headlines of his
tenure as chief inspector. In fact it appeared the day after his
appointment. His argument that 4.2% of the teaching profession was not up to
the job earned him the undying hatred of the unions.
Like many of his beliefs, including his insistence on the value of teaching
traditional subjects such as history, geography, Latin and Greek and the
classics of English literature, his incendiary claim can be traced back to
his own childhood and his understanding that things could have turned out
very differently for him had good teaching not opened the doors to a life of
the mind and an upward social trajectory.
An only child of a self-taught accountant and a school secretary, he attended
Wallington grammar school in south London. He was a troublemaker even then.
The clever youngster and his classmates humiliated teachers who weren’t any
good. “There was one French teacher in particular. It was his joy to pin
French postcards and posters to the walls and we took pleasure in messing up
his displays.”
A ringleader in such escapades, he was caned twice – prompting him to remark
now: “I am not sure that the abolition of corporal punishment in our schools
is a good thing . . . children can find sarcasm can be much more cruel.”
His experience at Wallington fuelled his lifelong belief in selective
education, inspiring his campaign for more grammar schools to educate the
brightest children. Every political party, even the Tories, has now rejected
this demand. Woodhead, however, simply does not believe all children are
born equally clever.
In his new book he approvingly cites the novelist (and former teacher) DH
Lawrence, who said that every teacher knew it was “worse than useless trying
to educate at least 50% of scholars”. Especially, Woodhead argues, when you
can’t get a good plumber or brickie for love or money.
Such apparently elitist views infuriated David Blunkett, the last education
secretary he served under as chief inspector. Newspapers spoke of a private
war between them. Things got so bad that in 2000, aged 53, Woodhead decided
to resign – “jumping before I was pushed”. Since then he has carved out a
portfolio career as chairman of Cognita, the biggest private schools company
in Europe, as a columnist for this newspaper and as professor of education
at the private University of Buck-ingham. He intends to carry on working as
long as his illness will allow.
His career as chief inspector included many turbulent times, yet he regrets
nothing – neither his views nor the uncompromising way he rammed them home.
At one formal dinner, the chief executive of a local education authority,
furious at the outcome of his inspections, “would have liked to have punched
me, had he not been so drunk”, he recalls.
More woundingly, some believe that stories that emerged about his personal
life were planted by his enemies. After his first wife, Cathy, claimed that,
as a teacher, he had had a relationship with a former teenage pupil at a
Bristol school, Woodhead hit back angrily, pointing out that the
relationship with Amanda Johnston did not begin until some time after she
had left school and he and his wife had separated.
Nor has his style been dented in recent years. His last book, Class War, sold
40,000 copies when it came out in 2001; but the paperback edition had to be
pulped because the head of one school he had savagely attacked took umbrage.
The publisher backed down when libel lawyers took up the cudgels. Woodhead
thinks it should not have caved in so quickly.
CHRISTINE served dinner, and as we ate we listened to a CD of Geoffrey Hill
reading his own work – “the poetry that consoles me at this time. It’s
lasted longer than any of my women”.
His book’s title, A Desolation of Learning, is taken from The Triumph of Love,
a poem by Hill – a man Woodhead maintains is an immensely greater poet than
Carol Ann Duffy, who has just been appointed poet laureate. As he read aloud
from Hill’s melancholy poetry, the shadows lengthened outside.
What will be the legacy of this most combative of public men? In the book he
argues that the fastest way to improve standards now is for the state to
give parents vouchers to pay for their children’s education. This, he
believes, would spur companies to open more private schools, bringing an end
to the state’s stranglehold on provision and forcing the closure of sink
schools as parents voted with their feet and spent their vouchers elsewhere.
It is a view the Tories may yet embrace, should they win the next election.
Ed Balls, the schools secretary, recently dismissed Woodhead as being “out of
step”, a comment that infuriated him. “Is Mr Balls right?” he asks in the
book’s preface. “Am I out of step – which is code, of course, for ‘isolated,
embittered and probably mad’?”
He answered his own question: “I do not think I am embittered and I know I am
not mad.” The anxious parents and teachers who write in droves to him as our
Sunday Times education columnist, asking for advice, don’t think so either.
What he is, I thought, as I looked back at the house nestling into the
hillside, is brave and dignified and good-humoured in the face of an ending
that most of us cannot even contemplate.
A cap, a cane ... and a lost world of learning
I went to a typical 1950s south London primary school, where my teachers
taught me to read and write. I learnt a few facts about history and
geography and natural history, enough to send me to the library to find out
more. I took the 11-plus a year early and suffered, as far as I am aware, no
long-term trauma.
Wallington grammar school was pretty characteristic of the period, too. The
uniform included a cap, which was meant to be worn to and from school. There
were prefects. The cane, as I discovered twice, was the punishment of last
resort. We were allocated to different houses and competition between the
houses was a main aspect of school life. That competition fed through into
classroom life. We were streamed according to academic ability and lists
were published each week giving our position in the form.
I had done well in primary school, but soon found myself struggling, which
might be why I spent a fair amount of time playing the fool and ended up in
the headmaster’s study with my bottom in the air. The dinners were foul and
we had two or three hours of homework a night. I can remember standing in
the rain waiting for the bus one November night after a detention thinking
that I had one advantage over the teachers who were persecuting me: I was
younger than they were, and the odds were they would die first.
So, when I say that the seven years I spent at that school opened my eyes to a
world I did not know existed, I am not romanticising a period of my life
that was in some ways very difficult. Visiting the school some years ago to
give the prizes, I stood in the classroom where on Tuesday mornings we were
tested orally on our grasp of the previous night’s Latin homework. The old
terror flooded back. That said, as I wandered round, poking my nose into the
showers to see if there was still mould on the walls (there was, I am glad
to say), I knew that this school had given me opportunities that I want
children today to have if they can benefit from them.
It was, first, a school that functioned as a community. We were expected to
contribute to the life of our houses, represent the school in sporting and
cultural activities, take responsibility for ourselves and others. Time was
not wasted on citizenship and PSHE (personal, social, health education)
lessons. The understanding and values that these pseudo-subjects now
struggle to make explicit were embedded in the everyday fabric of the
school, and were transmitted all the more effectively because of that.
The focus was unambiguously on the academic. There was no nonsense, to quote
from the government’s Children’s Plan, about “successful learners, confident
individuals and responsible citizens”. If asked, I am sure the headmaster
would have agreed that these were not unreasonable aims, but he would also
have pointed out that they were aims that depended as much upon the
abilities and personalities of his pupils as the magic wands of his staff,
and he would have added, no doubt, that he rather hoped that his pupils
might end up knowing a little more science and Latin than they did when they
arrived at the school.
At first, of course, the mastery of that knowledge involved a fair bit of
grind. The current wisdom is that every lesson must be instantly enjoyable,
that children must immediately appreciate the “relevance” to their everyday
lives of everything they are taught. These are misconceptions: what is worth
learning is without exception difficult to learn. We delude ourselves and
damage our children if we pretend otherwise.
Yes, of course, those Latin lessons were a trial. I cannot even pretend that I
ever came to achieve anything other than a very rudimentary competence in
the language. My teacher shared my amazement when I passed the O-level
examination. But I did learn that if you want to make any progress, you have
to struggle, and, in some subjects, like, above all, English, the subject I
eventually read at university, the horizons did begin to broaden as I moved
through the school. Gradually, very gradually, I began to realise the
poverty of ignorance.
Then there were the teachers. Again, I must defend myself against the charge
of nostalgia. There were bad teachers at Wallington when I was a pupil. Some
simply could not teach, and, looking back, I wonder how they survived our
calculated and determined attempts to render their lives miserable.
But the good were good: teachers who cared passionately about their subject,
who expected their pupils to be interested and to succeed, and who, while
more often than not mavericks and eccentrics who would find today’s
formulaic approach to “good classroom practice” risible, were masters of
their professional craft. Such teachers exist, I know, today. They are,
though, a rare breed, and they are getting rarer.
This government has done everything in its power to programme the teaching
profession into a robotic conformity. I do not blame our teachers. Their
promotion depends upon the enthusiasm with which they espouse the latest
modernising fad.
Six principals of major city academies attended a talk I gave recently in
which I questioned the “agenda” they had been appointed to implement. Not
one responded. Was my eloquence so compelling that there was nothing anyone
could say? I doubt it. The more likely explanation is that these men and
women were embarrassed, but whether they were embarrassed by my mentioning
the unmentionable (arguing, for example, that it was rather a good idea to
teach children new knowledge) or by their agreement and the inauthenticity,
therefore, of their position, I shall never know.
Whatever: I look back at my own schooldays and I want my grandchildren to have
the chance to attend a similar school.
© Chris Woodhead 2009
Extracted from A Desolation of Learning: Is This the Education Our Children
Deserve? by Chris Woodhead, to be published by Pencil-Sharp Publishing on
May 22 at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.99, including postage, from
The Sunday Times Booksfirst on 0845 271 2135
