Why Amanda Spielman should not be elevated to the peerage
What is leadership?
A good case could be made that the key to leadership is understanding what is wrong and taking action to put it right. This, however, requires the leader in question to admit they have done something wrong and therefore that there is a problem that needs fixing.
On this basis, possibly the most inept leader in Britain in the last 100 years would be Amanda Spielman.
Let us consider what she has done wrong in an extremely inglorious career in education.
- At Ofqual, which she was appointed director of despite her only previous experience of working in education being the finance director of the Ark Academies Trust, she oversaw the introduction of new GCSEs and A-levels. She noted in her application to become chief of Ofsted that these had been brought in ‘despite significant sector resistance.’ It is not hard, speaking as somebody who has worked with these exams now for nearly ten years, to understand why there was resistance. They were appallingly rushed due to Gove’s concern that the Conservatives were about to lose the next election and his anxiety to make these exams at irreversible change before that happened. They were so rushed that the history marking criteria was accidentally swapped around and the marking difficulties meant around 44% of grades were wrong as a result. The all-important pruning of the content to make it manageable was not done, leaving us with innumerable GCSEs including maths and science which were content heavy. They were not well matched to the new A levels with the result that they provided an inferior preparation for them. To compound this error, the exams were made much harder in the naive belief that this somehow would make the people who passed them better at the subject. This error, which serving teachers would have spotted and pointed out, means that they are not as good a test of a wide range of abilities as an exam that is pitched more carefully. As a result, these exams cracked disastrously during COVID and have never quite shaken off the impression that they are essentially a bunch of badly written tests designed to flatter the ego of certain apparatchiks including Spielman.
- Nicky Morgan, admittedly the worst Secretary of State for education ever appointed in a field of very stiff competition, decided to appoint her chief of Ofsted despite this. This was strongly opposed by the education Select Committee, who pointed out Spielman did not understand the complexity of the role nor have any idea of what to do with it. If I were feeling cynical, and I am, I would suggest the only logical reason for appointing Spielman to such a post despite her disastrous mistakes at Ofqual and zero knowledge of the role is because she was a creature of the DfE and would do as she was told.
- Let us consider some of the things that she did. Under Spielman, Ofsted graded all schools from 1 to 4 as they had for many years. However, there was a twist. If a school was graded 4 on safeguarding the Secretary of State for Education had a statutory duty to make it into an Academy whether the school liked it or not. In Sheffield, Bristol and most infamously in Caversham Primary School, schools were failed on safeguarding for errors in the paperwork that should according to Ofsted’s own criteria have been a three. On all occasions, this occurred against a backdrop of schools resisting a takeover by an academy chain. This makes a complete nonsense of all Ofsted reports – if they are being graded for reasons other than Ofsted’s criteria there is very little point in having reports at all.
- In the aftermath of the most serious of these, which led to Ruth Perry’s suicide, Spielman hit out at Ofsted’s critics and claimed that all Ofsted inspectors are current or former school leaders. This is not in fact true and would be undesirable if it were true. Ofsted inspects many settings other than schools including children’s homes and social services and needs people with expertise in those areas to carry out its functions. The jury remains out on whether she was lying or whether she was just in headless chicken mode panicking at her own failure and her denial of it, but in either case it speaks to a failure of leadership. Compounding the error, she said these events had been used to ‘discredit’ OFSTED, never accepting perhaps her actions and not people’s criticisms were the issue.
- Spielman’s own lack of knowledge of education caused considerable embarrassment. On one occasion when in front of the education Select Committee she revealed she did not know what safeguarding was, and on another she confused it with criminal prosecution. On both occasions she blamed the press for taking her remarks out of context. By this I think Spielman meant that they quoted exactly what she’d said rather than what in her rather muddled mind she seems to have meant. How dare they?
- While managing OFSTED she oversaw the introduction of a new curriculum framework. This was praised by the DfE but heavily criticised by an enormous number of people, including I might add Sir Martyn Oliver (the current chief of Ofsted). This curriculum framework being prescriptive, badly written and designed to force ‘one size doesn’t quite fit anybody’ on schools has made it much harder for children to learn to read in the again naive belief that somehow making tests and processes harder makes children smarter if they pass them. But according to Spielman, the criticisms were because people didn’t understand how it made everything better if children couldn’t learn to read in ways that suited them.
- Ofsted under Spielman had a statutory duty to train all inspectors in safeguarding. We must assume this duty has been abandoned because only last week there was an appeal in a court case where an inspector who had touched a boy for no apparent reason won his case for unfair dismissal on the grounds that Ofsted had never explained to him that it had (quite rightly) a ‘no touching policy.’ The fact that he had not been told what their safeguarding procedures and policies were is absolutely extraordinary. If that were found in any school in the land Ofsted would correctly find that school was not adequately safeguarding its pupils. This is compounded by the fact that Ofsted had no way of raising a safeguarding concern about any inspector except through the lead inspector, even if the person who had committed the safeguarding breach was the lead inspector – as has happened at several schools in Staffordshire because of the behaviour of one particular HMI whom I will not name. (At this moment, a school in the West Midlands is appealing a well-deserved failed inspection because the lead inspector ‘acted inappropriately’ during the inspection.) Spielman’s response to this was to criticise teachers for daring to suggest that maybe Ofsted required some safeguarding processes.
- Spielman has now declared that the new Secretary of State for education is a creature of the unions for trying to address some of these rather urgent issues. When Sir Keir Starmer’s spokesman, absolutely justifiably, said that she should reflect on her own failure at Ofsted instead, she reiterated that this was a union line and claimed she had been a dazzling success. The first is absolutely true. It is a union line. In the same way that 2 + 2 = 4 is a union line. Or that the earth is a oblate sphere is a union line. Or that gravity is the tendency of small objects to be attracted to objects of a larger mass is a union line. This is because these are all what are known as ‘objective facts’. For this reason, the second claim is manifestly false.
Amanda Spielman is a bad leader, an inept person, and has done enormous damage to the education of children not I think because she meant to but because she was profoundly ignorant, not especially intelligent and incredibly arrogant. You can see why she was a friend of Dominic Cummings.
Apparently Amanda Spielman is now to be raised to the peerage. This would be utterly disgraceful. She is a coward, a bully, either a fantasist or a liar and above all an absolute failure. It would do more to discredit the House of Lords that even the shocking elevation of Charlotte Owen for apparently making tea for Boris Johnson. It is not just teachers or unions who feel this way. The parents at Caversham Primary School were equally furious with her. So was the coroner.
One parent at Caversham, writing in Schools Weekly, commented that the best thing Amanda Spielman could do for education from now on would be to keep quiet. That is good advice. Appointing her to the House of Lords would compound an already disastrous situation that she has wrought and that she refuses to accept. If these rumours are true, for the sake of our system of governance the offer of a peerage must be withdrawn and should be accompanied by an extremely straightforward and truthful letter explaining why.
There is no way she will listen, of course. But that merely confirms her unfitness to be a leader – or a Lord.
Y Doethur
Y Doethur is an internationally renowned teacher and researcher who has worked in educational settings from primary schools to teaching postgrads for 20 years. He is considerably more intelligent than and better qualified to comment on education than Amanda Spielman, but has not yet been offered a peerage. Sour grapes may be applied to this post if the reader wishes.
