No teacher’s pet

“CHRISTOPHER,” Chris Woodhead’s general-studies teacher once wrote, according to the Daily Telegraph, “must learn to convince rather than cudgel.” By the end of Sir Chris’s six years as head of Her Majesty’s Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), nearly all the teachers in the country agreed.

An energetic reformer who favoured traditional teaching over the pious orthodoxies of “progressive” educationalists, Sir Chris produced mixed feelings. After he resigned as head of Ofsted in 2000, he was awarded “villain of the year” by the BBC “Today” programme, but also placed second as “hero of the year”. He had been supported by Tony Blair, then the prime minister, but was at odds with David Blunkett, the education secretary. He raised standards: on his watch the government closed more than 100 failing schools and set about improving 604 more. But he infuriated schools, teachers’ unions and, finally, the Labour Party. He once declared that 15,000 of England’s teachers were incompetent. He later received razor blades through the post.

He seemed to take criticism on the chin. “I am paid to challenge mediocrity, failure and complacency,” he once said. He saw his role as combating “the blob”, a term he popularised to describe the educational establishment, which Michael Gove, a similarly outspoken former education secretary, recently revived. As with Mr Gove, a looming election meant Sir Chris was replaced by a less controversial option in Mike Tomlinson, but not before he hauled the teaching profession onto a straighter and narrower road.

After leaving Ofsted Sir Chris became a journalist for the Sunday Times, where he continued to rail against trendy teaching methods. Later, in 2004, he became chairman of a group of private schools, Cognita, and in 2009 published a book, “A Desolation of Learning”, arguing for a return to grammar schools and against what he saw as the vague thinking and Pollyanna-ish idealism of the national curriculum (which he described as a “solipsistic daydream”). This newspaper praised the book as a “substantial contribution to public debate on education”.

In 2006 he was diagnosed with motor-neurone disease. Later, struggling with the limits of the illness (he had been a keen hiker), Sir Chris campaigned for a change in the law on doctor-assisted dying, but not without identifying another brand of elbow-patched lefty he did not like: “The truth is, I would be more likely to drive myself in a wheelchair off a cliff in Cornwall than go to Dignitas and speak to a bearded social worker,” he told the Sunday Times. Sir Chris died on June 23rd, aged 68. He never managed to change the law on assisted suicide, but his influence on education will last. Sometimes a cudgel works, too.