In the UK, it seems everyone's an expert

There is a curious phenomenon in education; the further some people get from an actual classroom, the more certain they become about what should happen inside one. It’s quite remarkable.

Apparently, years spent teaching, leading, safeguarding, managing behaviour, navigating SEND, interpreting policy, dealing with parents, analysing data and attempting to persuade thirty children that throwing a glue stick across the room does not constitute independent learning, can all be trumped by someone who once went to school…and, naturally, has thoughts. Lots of thoughts. Education is one of those rare professions where almost everybody believes they possess insider knowledge because they have experienced the service it provides. We don't generally assume that having once had our appendix removed qualifies us to reorganise a surgical department. Few people emerge from a flight to Tenerife with a detailed improvement plan for the aviation industry. But school? Well, we all went to one. So pull up a chair, Headteacher, Karen has some feedback.

The seductive simplicity of “just”

There is one word that should make anyone working in education immediately suspicious: ‘Just.’ Just make them behave. Just teach them to read. Just ban the phones. Just give them a detention. Just get them their 4 in English and Maths. Just raise standards. There we are, education fixed before lunch. The problem with “just” is that it removes every inconvenient complexity between identifying a problem and actually solving it. Teachers and leaders work in precisely that space.

A behaviour decision isn't made in a vacuum. Neither is an attendance intervention, safeguarding referral, curriculum decision or response to a child with additional needs. Schools operate within overlapping legal duties, statutory guidance, funding constraints, staffing pressures, accountability systems and thousands of individual human beings. Human beings are sadly, notoriously resistant to flowcharts.

Research has repeatedly demonstrated the importance of teacher quality to pupil outcomes. Yet teachers do not exercise that influence under laboratory conditions. What happens in classrooms is shaped by workload, school culture, leadership, pupil need, socioeconomic circumstances, attendance, behaviour and the resources available to schools. Of course context isn't an excuse. It is, however, context. Pretending it doesn't exist doesn't make you rigorous or edgy, it makes you a hot-take merchant cosplaying as an expert.

Everybody remembers their favourite teacher. Another problem is that everybody has a school story: “I had a teacher who…” Yes, so did we all. Don't get me wrong, there is a place for personal experience and parents and pupils should absolutely be heard. Communities also have every right to scrutinise the institutions educating their children. But experience of being ‘in’ a school is not synonymous with expertise in running one. The classroom somebody remembers from 1978 is not the classroom teachers are working in now. Expectations have shifted substantially even in the 2 decades I served in schools and so has technology. So too has the wider social landscape in which schools operate. Yet education debate has an extraordinary capacity to collapse all of this into: “Well, my teacher managed.” Splendid. Mine also wheeled in a television the size of a washing machine whenever we watched a video. Perhaps we should bring that back too.

Schools: now responsible for absolutely everything

One of the stranger developments in public discourse is the expansion of what schools are apparently expected to fix. Literacy and numeracy, obviously, also behaviour. Attendance, mental health, online safety, healthy eating, relationships, sex education, financial literacy, careers, physical activity, citizenship, bullying, misogyny, knife crime, social media and whatever societal crisis is trending. Some of these things quite rightly belong within education because schools are central institutions in children's lives and inevitably play a role far beyond the transmission of academic knowledge. But there is something deeply unserious about continually expanding schools' responsibilities while simultaneously expressing bewilderment that teachers appear overworked. It is the educational equivalent of loading another six suitcases into the boot and then complaining about the suspension. Teacher workload is not some elaborate fiction devised so that educators can spend more time drinking tea in the staffroom. Workload surveys and workforce research have repeatedly identified long working hours and workload pressures across the profession and recruitment and retention difficulties have likewise been persistent concerns. Yet still we hear it: “Nine until three though, isn't it?” Of course…and restaurants only work while you're eating.

The truth is that the hard yards are largely invisible. The public just sees lessons, it doesn't necessarily see what makes them possible. Then there is the work that fits poorly into a spreadsheet:

• The child who waits behind after the lesson because something is wrong.

• The parent who needs forty minutes when you had ten.

• The colleague quietly falling apart.

• The safeguarding disclosure five minutes before home time.

Teachers and leaders do all these things with grace because teaching is an intensely relational profession. That is part of what makes it wonderful. But it is also part of what makes simplistic commentary about it so maddening. A school is not a factory where identical raw materials enter at one end and GCSE grades emerge neatly packaged at the other. Children arrive with different experiences, strengths, needs and teachers meet the children who actually walk through the door, not the hypothetical ones in somebody's policy thread.

Criticism is not the enemy

None of this means schools should be protected from criticism. Quite the opposite. Education matters too much for that. Of course poor teaching should be challenged, as should weak leadership. Unsafe cultures, low expectations and practices unsupported by evidence should be challenged. Parents deserve explanations and pupils deserve excellent provision. Public money should be scrutinised: professional status cannot mean professional immunity. But there is an enormous difference between scrutiny and sneering. Good criticism begins with curiosity and bad criticism skips all of that and heads directly for certainty. And increasingly, I find it difficult to countenance that certainty when it comes from policymakers and MPs who have never done the job, never carried the responsibility and never had to live with the consequences of the policies they so breezily prescribe. There is something particularly galling about watching people who have never led a school explain, with magnificent confidence, what dedicated leaders in our toughest communities are apparently doing wrong. Leaders who make impossible decisions before most people have had breakfast; who know which families have no food in the cupboards; who lose sleep over safeguarding, attendance, exclusions and staffing; who absorb anger from every direction and still turn up the next morning because several hundred children are depending on them.

By all means scrutinise them. Challenge decisions. Demand evidence. Nobody gets a free pass simply because the job is difficult. But spare me the sneering from politicians whose experience of school leadership extends to a photo opportunity in a hi-vis jacket and fifteen minutes in a suspiciously immaculate classroom. Some of the people pontificating about “failing leadership” are not fit to lick the boots of the dedicated heads doing the hard yards in our toughest schools. That isn't hero worship. It is recognition of expertise, responsibility and moral courage earned at the coalface rather than manufactured behind a lectern. If you want the right to criticise from a position of power, at the very least have the humility to understand the work before you condemn the people doing it.

Come and have a go

Perhaps this is what frustrates teachers and leaders most. The ease with which people can pronounce upon the work while remaining completely insulated from its consequences. It is easy to devise the perfect behaviour policy when you never have to implement it. Easy to announce that schools should provide another intervention when you don't have to decide what stops happening to make room for it. Easy to tell teachers to build stronger relationships while simultaneously demanding more content, more assessment, more evidence and more accountability. From the sidelines, everything looks wonderfully straightforward doesn't it?

So come in. Not for the carefully choreographed twenty-minute visit where everyone knows you're coming and somebody has mysteriously located the good biscuits. Come and do the hard yards and spend a proper stretch of time in a school. Then tell us how easy it all is.

You do not have to work in education to have an opinion about education - that would be absurd. But perhaps we could reintroduce a concept that seems to have gone missing from some educational commentary: humility. The possibility that the person doing a difficult job every day may know something about that job that isn't immediately obvious from outside it. The possibility that an apparently simple problem might have already occurred to the people whose professional lives revolve around solving it. Schools do not need unquestioning admiration but they need professional respect. Challenge them, hold them accountable and expect high standards. But before explaining from the comfort of the sidelines how effortlessly schools could solve every problem currently deposited at the school gate, perhaps acknowledge the people already carrying them because everybody is an expert on education when somebody else is doing the hard yards.