Yahoo News Sir Tim Brighouse, charismatic schools administrator who drove up standards but fought the inspectors – obituary
Sir Tim Brighouse, the educationalist, who has died aged 83, believed in using the carrot rather than the stick; he enjoyed success raising standards in schools as the charismatic director of Birmingham’s Education Service during the 1990s and as Schools Commissioner for London from 2002 to 2007, when he led the London Challenge.
The core of his approach was encouraging and motivating teachers to have confidence in themselves – and to be ready to share insights they had gained from experience in the classroom with others. Brighouse became renowned for such kindnesses as sending handwritten letters to welcome teachers joining schools in his area or to congratulate teachers when he encountered an interesting lesson on a visit or heard of good practice. On one occasion he even turned up with champagne to a school after a tough Ofsted inspection.
“It isn’t that I won’t confront difficult situations where people have made a balls-up of something, because I have, and I do, and I would,” he explained. “But I do think they deserve dignity. And if somebody has not made a success of a particular school, they may have made a success of it earlier on – they may have been a very good head in another place or they may have been a fantastic deputy or they may be fantastic with difficult kids.”
Writing in 1994, the Telegraph’s Ben Fenton described Brighouse as a radical who had “won praise from teachers, parents and politicians of all hues throughout his career in education”. Yet in the 1990s he was seen as a sort of bogeyman by some Tory ministers and was, famously, the bête noire of the then chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead.
In 1994 the embattled education secretary John Patten had to pay substantial undisclosed damages for defamation and issue a full apology following a 1993 Conservative Party Conference fringe meeting at which he had described Brighouse as a “nutter”, adding: “I fear for Birmingham with this madman let loose, wandering around the streets, frightening the children.”
The jibe, which Patten acknowledged had been “entirely untrue and without any justification”, was thought to have been a key factor in his removal from office by John Major. Brighouse said that he would donate the damages, as well as £27,000 raised by supporters from around the world, to education projects in inner-city areas.
The feud with Chris Woodhead was not so easily resolved. It began as a clash of ideologies, with Woodhead portraying Brighouse as the personification of a “progressive” education establishment that had undermined academic rigour and tolerated, if not encouraged, failure, and Brighouse accusing Woodhead and his Ofsted inspectors of conducting a reign of terror.
Certainly Brighouse was guilty, on occasion, of spouting the sort of educational jargon guaranteed to raise Conservative hackles: the way forward, he once claimed, was to encourage teachers to “exploit the alter ego dimension of teaching to create an alternative persona to unlock the mind and open the shut chambers of the heart”. Nor, presumably, did it help that he sometimes looked so dishevelled that his arrival at a school sometimes led caretakers to report “a dodgy character” on the premises.
Yet when Ofsted inspectors descended on Birmingham, where Brighouse had presided over a marked improvement in exam results, their report, published in 1998, brimmed with praise for his “inspired” work in the city. “The local education authority would not have made anywhere near as much progress without his leadership,” the inspectors declared, and they paid tribute to his “enormous personal impact” in raising educational standards and improving teacher morale.
“To those who follow the ideological battles in the educational world, Woodhead backing Brighouse is like Disraeli making peace with Gladstone,” as The Daily Telegraph noted. Yet Woodhead’s hand was discernible in its criticism of Birmingham’s policy of praising teachers at every possible opportunity. “The celebration of success ... may turn all too easily into a refusal to acknowledge and confront failure,” it read. It was also reported that Woodhead had been persuaded to remove the suggestion that the best Birmingham schools knew when it was best not to listen to Brighouse’s “march music”.
There was surprise in 1997 when Labour’s incoming education secretary, David Blunkett, appointed the two men joint vice-chairmen of a new education standards task force. The move was interpreted as an attempt to harness their opposing philosophies in a concerted campaign to improve standards in schools. But the honeymoon, if there was one, did not last, and Brighouse stepped down after a little under two years.
“Mr Woodhead and I have disagreed about almost everything, but doubtless the disagreement has often proved creative,” Brighouse said, unconvincingly. In a 2001 article in the Telegraph, Woodhead wrote that “roping us together was a cynical exercise in the big-tent, keep-everyone-on-side, be-all-things-to-all-people, New-Labour way of doing things.”
That their disagreement was as much personal as political became apparent when Woodhead published his memoir, Class War, in 2002. Brighouse, Woodhead wrote, was guilty of “appalling” condescension for suggesting that his inspection regime was bullying and destructive. Brighouse, for his part, dismissed his old adversary as “sad and angry – a Victor Meldrew of education, without the humour”.
Woodhead had retired as chief inspector in 2000, and two years later Ofsted returned to Birmingham to deliver a report that was almost lyrical in its enthusiasm for Brighouse’s leadership. The city, Ofsted declared, was “an example to all others of what can be done, even in the most demanding urban environment”, and its success was attributable above all to “the energising and inspirational example set by the chief education officer”.
Not long afterwards Brighouse was appointed London schools commissioner and head of London Challenge, a five-year programme launched by Tony Blair in May 2003 aiming to improve the performance of every teacher and secondary school student in London.
As leader of the challenge for its first four years, Brighouse oversaw a wide-ranging programme which included offering support to low-attaining secondaries, including pupil mentoring, extra teacher training, with leaders of successful schools on hand to work with those in weaker ones. When it began, London schools had the lowest proportion of pupils achieving the Government’s benchmark of five A*-C GCSEs out of England’s nine regions.
By 2010 it was topping the table, becoming the only capital city in the developed world where state schools had higher standards than those in the rest of the country – higher, for example, than in leafy Oxfordshire, East Sussex or Wiltshire.
Timothy Robert Peter Brighouse was born in Leicestershire on January 15 1940 and was educated at Loughborough Grammar School and Lowestoft County Grammar School. After reading history at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, he remained at Oxford to take a PGCE. Then, after a few years teaching, when he became deputy head and warden of Chepstow Community College, he decided to go into educational administration in Monmouthshire, and then Buckinghamshire, where he played a major role in designing the school system for Milton Keynes.
Brighouse’s critics liked to point to the two years he spent in the 1970s as deputy director of the Inner London Education Authority, whose Left-wing politics led Margaret Thatcher to abolish it. But he never demanded its return, seeing advantages in the intimate size and local contact which schools could enjoy under borough control.
In 1978 he was appointed chief education officer for Oxfordshire, where he was recognised as a radical who favoured self-evaluation for schools (a process by which staff members reflect on their practice and identify areas for improvement) over outside scrutiny, winning the respect of colleagues and teachers.
Following the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act, Brighouse emerged as a leading critic of the new National Curriculum, which he described as “Stalinist”. Yet while clearly on the Left of the political spectrum, he was no ideologue, and expressed disappointment when local union officials blocked proposals to allow private sponsors to support the education of musically gifted and mentally and physically disabled children.
When he left in 1989 to become professor of education at Keele, tributes came from all quarters, including Douglas Hurd and Tony Baldry, both Conservative Oxfordshire MPs.
Brighouse’s approach in Birmingham was based on the idea of schools improving by competing against their own previous best and with an emphasis on basic numeracy and literacy. His policies included baseline assessments for five-year-olds entering primary school, summer schools, and rigorous targets set by the schools themselves for improvements against their previous best achievement scores.
But what made him popular with teachers was the fact that he spent more time in schools than in City Hall, talking to teachers, asking questions – even reading children stories. Before Brighouse took the job, the city’s schools were in a state of simmering rebellion; 23 schools had opted out of council control and more were threatening to do so. By the end of his tenure, the atmosphere had been completely transformed: the 1998 Ofsted report observed that Birmingham teachers no longer displayed the “cynicism and disaffection so often apparent five years ago”.
Brighouse was knighted in 2009.
In 1962 he married Mary Demers. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1989 he married, secondly, Elizabeth, formerly Kearney. She survives him with a son and a daughter from his first marriage.
Sir Tim Brighouse, born January 15 1940, died December 15 2023
