Dear Nicky: Wave goodbye to Ofsted and performance-related pay, while keeping bureaucracy to an absolute minimum (photo: Carl Court/Getty Images)

Dear Nicky Morgan,

Might I offer you some advice? All teachers want to be as good as they can be. But too often that impulse is crushed under the load of bureaucracy that the modern school system has been sprouting over the past 40 years, as the state has become more and more involved in monitoring school performance. 

Yet what I have seen all my career and in particular since becoming the Headmistress of Michaela Community School, a new free school that opened in September 2014, is that it really is possible to flourish without most school bureaucracy. If one gives staff autonomy and responsibility, they’ll fly with it. Bureaucratic control is based on a fear that teachers cannot or will not do a good job. Of course we need oversight of schools and of teachers but in reality our current bureaucracy makes failure all the more likely.

Please set an example by always asking yourself the question: will the decision to require more written accountability make our education system better? Might it even make things worse?

The government requires schools to justify themselves and heads in turn require the same of teachers. The problem is that targets and box-ticking proliferate. And schools get worse. Why? Because everyone concentrates on ticking those boxes instead of actually doing their jobs well. Successive PISA reports, and Sir Michael Barber’s famous McKinsey report, clearly show that the greater the autonomy at school level, the greater the potential for all-round improvement.

All bureaucracy does is make the bureaucrat-administrator feel better. And at the very top it makes Education Secretaries feel as if they are holding schools to account. But just because they feel this doesn’t mean they are actually doing it. It simply isn’t true that if it is written down, it is being done. In fact, the opposite is true, because if staff are writing it down, they are too busy to actually do it. Ms Morgan, you need to make decisions that actually improve the teaching of our children, not just make you, or even the public, simply feel better about our schools.

I want two simple things. Stop the madness of schools trying to justify themselves to Ofsted. And stop the insanity of teachers having to jump through hoops to get their performance-related pay. Both are degrading and make our education system into a joke.

1. Abolish Ofsted. Countless senior teams across the country are locked in their offices right now trying to second-guess inspectors, trying to tick dozens of boxes so that they can achieve a stamp of approval. The reality is that it is impossible to achieve consistency across the Ofsted beast. There are too many inspectors, too many systems, too much personal preference, and it is impossible to make it all cohere. Inspectors are now told not to grade lessons — but they generally do. Desperate to find something to pin their judgment on, they look for any possible box to tick, and write down a justification. So heads of schools and departments spend countless hours writing self-evaluation plans, school development plans and Ofsted strategies, while they should be doing important practical things like supporting teachers on pupil behaviour or raising standards. Similarly, teachers are forced into writing lesson plan after lesson plan instead of simply teaching well.