John Dunford talks in a way that is almost comically fitting for a former mathema-tician. His words are all formulae, figures and diagrams, referenced to a handwritten list. Even sentences are equations: balanced, logical, precise.

The 28 years he spent as a maths teacher — 16 of them as a head teacher — laid the founding stones for his ten-year tenure as the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL).

“My street cred is having done the job,” he says proudly. The job is not an easy one to do. Recently, a number of suicides have been linked to “unfairly punitive” Ofsted inspections. It is no coincidence that many were head teachers, he says: in the past two years scrutiny has shifted from the classroom to management and the pressure is intense. “It’s a very serious situation.” Dunford’s solution is “intelligent accountability”, a commonsense manifesto that he applies equally to assessing six- year-olds and head teachers.

A positive point, he says, is that leadership at the top level is becoming better distributed. Head teachers used to don the mantle of “hero head”, making all the decisions. Now, they typically take on one of 18 different roles other than running the school; local autho-rity consultant, for example.

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It is part of an emerging culture of collaboration, he says. “We’re often told that the biggest failure of the system is the gap between the really successful schools and really unsuccessful schools.” The Thatcher era brought market-style competition. “If the school down the road was doing badly we were encouraged to say ‘that’s great’, we’ll get more children coming to our school.”

But competition polarises the school system, he says: the best get better while the worst get worse. A recent ASCL study set out principles for successful schools to work with less successful ones to raise the education standards of entire areas. “Polarisation is so damaging to the life chances of the children at the bottom of the pile.”

London, the most visible hotchpotch of rich and poor, is proof that inter-school collaboration works, he says. “In five years London state schools have gone from way below average to above average. It’s remarkable.” League tables, an overt manifestation of competition, are a personal bête noire. The data is valuable, he says, but useless out of context.

Dunford is sympathetic to parents who are anxious to get children into good schools, but says that government rhetoric is misleading, citing the sug-gestion by Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, that parents who don’t get their first choice should appeal. “Parents don’t have a choice of school, but they have been led to expect it, which has led to dissatisfaction within the system.”

The political pledge to get the 638 allegedly failing schools to achieve above 30 per cent GCSE passes at A*-C was unhelpful, he says. “Very few are actually failing. Some are outstanding, despite hugely difficult circumstances.”

Test results do not show the whole picture of a child’s attainment any more than they do a school’s. “National tests are not fit for purpose,” he says. Children sit more than 100 tests in a school career but the real purpose is far from clear. “National tests are used to decide whether pupils are making progress, whether teachers are doing a good job, whether the country is meeting its targets. It’s crazy.” Dunford advocates in-class assessment backed up by external moderators, as in art and modern language oral exams. “As a maths teacher I used to test children endlessly — to see if they’d understood,” he says.

You get the impression they learnt a lot. “I bet you can’t do quadratic equations, can you? Most journalists are terrible at maths,” he smiles.

Born: November 10, 1946, Somerset.

Career: Maths and economics, Nottingham University; MEd and PhD, Durham University; various teaching posts starting as teacher of maths at Mundella Grammar School, Nottingham, finally becoming head teacher at Durham Johnston Comprehensive School, Durham. From 1998 general secretary of Secondary Heads Association (now the ASCL).

What he says: “We are constructively critical. It’s very easy to pick up the phone to a journalist and say ‘this \ is all a load of rubbish’. You’ll very rarely find me saying that.”

Little-known fact: Fell off a ladder in 1993, survived, but had both arms in plaster and hasn’t been up a ladder since.

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