Sir Michael Wilshaw may have been in charge of Ofsted since January 2012 — he is arguably the most important educationalist in the land — but in his head he is still very much a head teacher. He’s bossy. He wants to fine parents he doesn’t think are trying hard enough. He has told the Sutton Trust that, when he ran a school, he ‘would have loved’ to impose fines on mothers and fathers who didn’t turn up to parents’ evenings. Asked to clarify what he meant, he added: ‘If it’s a parent that’s doing their very very best but they can’t because of all sorts of personal circumstances, fine,’ he said, ‘but the feckless parent who just does not support the school, they should be told unequivocally that they’re not supporting it and, if necessary, be fined.’
You can take the head teacher out of school, but you can’t take school out of the head teacher. Sir Michael also boasted that he used to write ‘very nasty’ letters to slacker parents in order to shame them towards better behaviour. Naughty adults — they let the school down; they let themselves down.
There’s no doubt Sir Michael was an excellent and inspirational head teacher. It’s why he is where he is today. But do we really want to give school teachers the legal power to fine parents they don’t approve of?
One can’t help thinking that the nation’s chief inspector of schools needs different skills, like knowing when to keep his mouth closed, and thinking a bit harder about how he can make his organisation work better for parents and children. It’s well established by now that Ofsted’s obsession with child-centered learning has wrecked British education. Sir Michael has said he doesn’t approve of the child-centered approach, but it still dominates in many schools. Perhaps he could try imposing fines on teachers that don’t change their class methods. Or just quit and go back to telling people off for a living.
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