Former Chief Inspector of Schools
Born: October 20 1946;
Died June 23 2015
Sir Chris Woodhead, who has died aged 68, was a controversial head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) as Chief Inspector of Schools between 1994 and 2000.
Woodhead was sceptical of "progressive" theories of education that had been introduced to the classroom since the 1960s and even more strongly critical of teacher training - he once claimed that there were "15,000 incompetent teachers". This assessment, unsurprisingly, did not endear him to teaching unions, with whom he frequently clashed, especially in his first three years in the post.
In 1997 the Labour Party's overwhelming election victory led many to assume that Woodhead would be replaced, but he remained in the job. At first his confirmation in the post was seen as evidence of Tony Blair's emphasis on "education, education, education", and Woodhead later said that he had many shared priorities with Blair and Andrew (now Lord) Adonis, the party's policy advisor on education. He found less common ground with David Blunkett, the education secretary, and thereafter found himself clashing not only with unions, but increasingly with ministers.
Woodhead concluded, in his book A Desolation of Learning (2009), that the government had used him as a "lightning rod for political controversy" and to be the target for the teaching unions' opposition to policy changes. By that point, he had also concluded that Ofsted itself was "a waste of public money" and an "irrelevance" that had become part of the problem.
After his resignation in 2000, Woodhead remained an active figure in education, first advising Michael Howard, then the Tory leader, and in 2002 became Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham. In 2004 he helped to set up Cognita, a firm which runs independent schools.
In 2006 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and became as outspoken on the subject of assisted dying. But his illness, though it eventually rendered him quadraplegic, did not divert him from speaking out on schools reform. "In fact, it's made me concentrate more on it," he said in an interview last year. "I had been planning to do things like gardening and climbing but obviously I can't now."
Christopher Anthony Woodhead was born on October 20 1946 in north London, the only child of an accountant and a school secretary. He was educated at Selsdon Primary School, Croydon, and then at Wallington County Grammar School for Boys in Surrey. He graduated in English from the University of Bristol, where he also did his teacher training.
After a brief stint at his old secondary school, in 1969 he went to teach at the Priory School in Shrewsbury and, three years later, to Newent Community School, a comprehensive in Gloucestershire where he was assistant head of English. Woodhead was at this time a believer in the comprehensive system and, as he later put it, "utopian, egalitarian solutions", but he began to have doubts when, in his next post as Head of English at Gordano School in Portishead, near Bristol, he found himself trying to teach Shakespeare to pupils who had only rudimentary reading skills.
In 1976, he left secondary teaching and moved into teacher training, becoming a tutor for English at the University of Oxford, a post he held until 1982 when he moved into administrative and advisory roles in local government, at first in Shropshire, and then in Devon and Cornwall. In 1991 he became Deputy, and very soon afterwards Chief Executive of the National Curriculum Council. By this stage his experience of teacher training and LEA bureaucracy had convinced him that traditional standards were being undermined by modern teaching methods, and that "mediocrity, failure and complacency" were endemic in schools.
He backed Michael Gove's changes to education as effective and criticised his removal by David Cameron - though he disapproved of Gove's plans for an English Baccalaureate and thought the notion that everyone could go to university "bonkers".
A keen rock climber and runner before his illness, Woodhead became a patron of Dignity in Dying after his diagnosis, though, characteristically, he told one interviewer that he would rather "drive his wheelchair off a cliff in Cornwall" than "go to Dignitas and talk to a bearded social worker".
He is survived by his second wife, Christine, and by a daughter from his first marriage.
ANDREW MCKIE
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