'the blob' to transform teaching

Sir Chris Woodhead battled with 'the blob' to transform teaching
The former Ofsted chief's insistence on rigour in schools informed Michael Gove's reforms as Education Secretary
Chris Woodhead loved a challenge. "There’s nothing more exhilarating," he once told me, "than hanging by your fingertips 200ft up on a Cornish cliff face. Each move has to be planned. If you have an adequate toe-hold and your knee starts shaking it’s because your mental control is failing."
During the course of a 25-year friendship, much of it honed on unforgiving mountains in Skye and Wester Ross, I often knew him to be hanging by his fingertips politically, personally or physically; but his mental control never failed.
Courage was his defining quality: the courage, when I first knew him, to confront an education establishment that, in his view (and mine), was demonstrably betraying one child in three; and, over these last 10 years, the courage, with the devoted help of his wife, Christine, not to be daunted by what was for him the cruellest of all diseases.
For he was an exceptionally physical man, a long-distance runner as well as a mountaineer who, since his grammar school days, had prided himself on his fitness and agility. Imagine, then, the bitterness of a muscular disease that kills by a thousand cuts but leaves untouched a fierce intelligence and a craving for outdoor beauty.
The full poignancy of it was brought home to me four years ago when he and Christine asked me to drive them to Scotland so that he could look again at the mountains he had once strode over; look at them, that is, sitting inertly in a wheelchair anchored in the back of a van. "I hate MND," he said.
Although capable of great charm, Chris was not good at ingratiating himself and usually scorned to make the effort. By nature, austere, uncompromising, impatient and un-suffering of fools, he accumulated enemies almost as quickly as he rose up the education ladder. By the time he was head of Ofsted, his carelessness about those who disagreed with him had become a real issue.
Cabinet ministers, MPs and senior civil servants complained privately about what they saw as his arrogant contempt for them. His “body language” at meetings became legendary: slumped in his chair, legs crossed, papers shoved aside, boredom inscribed on his every feature. “Why can’t you hold two ideas in your head at the same time?” he snapped at an MP during a public hearing of the Commons education committee. And, of course, he was just as bracing with trade union leaders, teacher training colleges, headteachers and classroom teachers generally. He came to refer to the lot of them – the entire education establishment – as “the blob”.
All this was driven by his understandable outrage at the damage that so much professional incompetence and stubborn prejudice was doing to children’s schooling, and by his impatience to fix it. However by 2000, he had run into the sand and resigned.
What, then, is left? First and foremost, the teaching of reading, the most fundamental skill of all, especially for children from deprived backgrounds who encounter little intellectual stimulus before school, has been transformed by his espousal of “phonics”, a method of formal, as opposed to haphazard, instruction.