It is given to very few senior education officials to be both universally respected and admired by teachers, but Tim Brighouse, who has died aged 83, was one of that rare breed. He did it not only by respecting the profession and encouraging its members, but also by showing them pragmatically how their lessons and thus their schools could be – and were – improved, without the threats and coercion offered by successive secretaries of state and his adversary, the former chief inspector Chris Woodhead.
He was in turn a classroom teacher, deputy head – at 24 – then, climbing the administrative ladder, chief education officer for Oxfordshire, then Birmingham, then schools commissioner for London from 2003 to 2007, leading the London Challenge to improve education in the capital. In a career also interspersed with professorships of education, he not only earned respect but had done the jobs and secured improvements in ethos and results in the areas he touched.
He championed state schools (sending his children to them), fizzed with ideas, not all of which came off although they showed a keen intelligence at work, and spoke and wrote with charisma and morale-boosting wit. He needed it as education ministers came and went with increasing frequency: 10 in the last 13 years alone. Brighouse was scathing about the turnover, not so much of the personalities as the policy stasis it produced; they had, he said, too much power and too little judgment.
A tall, somewhat dishevelled figure, he looked as though he had just stepped out of the classroom – which he probably had, given that he frequently chose to observe lessons during school visits rather than pontificate about them in the headteacher’s study – and was at least once reported by a school caretaker as looking dodgy as he turned up unannounced. But he was not to be taken lightly, as the Tory education secretary John Patten learned to his cost when he gratuitously libelled Brighouse in 1993.
Born in Leicestershire, he was the son of Mary (nee Howard) and Denison Brighouse, who sold early television sets for a living, flitting between jobs that took the family around the country. Tim was educated first at Loughborough grammar school, whose forbidding atmosphere unnerved him as a child, and then at the more welcoming Lowestoft grammar in Suffolk, where he flourished under an inspirational teacher before securing a place to study history at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.
He thought he would like to be a journalist but was dissuaded by his parents, who thought the job too hazardous. Instead he trained as a teacher, moving to his first teaching post at a grammar school in Buxton, Derbyshire, then became deputy head in charge of adult education and warden at Chepstow’s new Community College for two years from 1964. From there he went into administration, overseeing Monmouthshire’s transition to comprehensive education.
There were further posts in Buckinghamshire and then two years as deputy education officer with the Inner London Education Authority (Ilea) before in 1978 he was made chief education officer of Oxfordshire, where he was to make his name nationally. It was a large local authority with both rural and urban schools, some already high achieving and with demanding parents, many of them academics themselves.
In Oxfordshire he gained a reputation for creating an educational esprit de corps, not only among teachers, but support and ancillary staff as well. He could remember names and would send handwritten notes to classroom teachers, praising their work and making encouraging suggestions for improvements: “It’s about being human,” he said.
His 20 rules for teachers, which many must have copied if only aspirationally, included greeting every child in the morning, remembering birthdays, “finding the invisible child” and even stealing crisps, though only one or two, never the whole packet, because children liked the kudos of sharing with Sir. It was, he said, “making a climate in which teachers and support staff feel honoured, valued and respected” and it did wonders for morale. He spoke their language and was on their side.
After 11 years in Oxfordshire, in 1989 – with Kenneth Baker’s schools reforms introducing a more uniform education system intended to knock schools into shape – Brighouse took up a professorship in education at Keele University. Although he was not entirely hostile to innovations such as the devolution of school budgets from local authorities to heads, he felt the reforms were too regimented, particularly the national curriculum, which he described as more prescriptive than the Stalinist Soviet Union. In Oxfordshire he had pioneered the publication of school exam results and the setting of targets for improvement, though bottom up, not top down: schools comparing local results, not having them enforced by government.
Within a few years of arriving at Keele, though, a dream job came up, as chief education officer of schools in Birmingham. This was one of the largest and worst performing authorities in the country, with a huge multiethnic pupil population and mediocre schools from which the middle classes were fleeing to former grammar schools that had already opted out of local control.
Characteristically, Brighouse was nowhere to be found in the authority’s headquarters in the week he was supposed to start: instead, he was out quietly visiting schools, talking to staff and pupils to see how they were performing.
Within weeks, as if his job was not demanding enough, he found himself under direct and personal attack by Patten, the Major government’s education secretary, whom he had known for years as his local MP. Patten, who was an Oxford academic, attacked Brighouse by name during a fringe meeting at the 1993 Tory conference, saying: “I fear for Birmingham with this madman let loose, wandering the streets, frightening the children.”
Patten attempted to laugh the remarks off as satirical and, hubris rapidly succeeding arrogance, apologised. Friends of Brighouse rallied round to pay for a libel action which cost the minister more humiliation and a reputed £30,000 in damages plus almost as much in costs, from which his standing as a minister never really recovered. Within months he would resign through ill health following a mass teacher boycott of the new Sats tests. Brighouse donated the money to setting up his scheme for a so-called University of the First Age, aiming to improve the literacy rates of Birmingham’s most deprived teenagers.
When Brighouse resigned from Birmingham after nine years in 2002, Roy Pinney, the council’s cabinet member for education, listed the visible academic improvements the city had achieved in the Birmingham Post. At key stage two English, taken at 11, the percentage of pupils obtaining level four (the expected standard) or above had risen from 46% to 71%, maths scores had risen from 44% to 67% and science from 48% to 85%. He wrote: “He really is the most inspirational character.”
In 1997 Brighouse had been approached by David Blunkett, the new Labour education secretary, to become an adviser in the department. He refused, but did agree to chair a task force on standards, only to find it was a post that would be shared with Woodhead, whose educational vision was much more prescriptive and admonitory than his own.
When the education inspectorate reported in 1998 on Birmingham as a schools authority, Woodhead, who had not been on the visit, altered the findings to criticise both the authority and Brighouse himself, saying the schools lacked focus and his rhetoric was running ahead of the schools’ performance.
The report was moderated after Brighouse complained, and a subsequent inspection in 2002 – after Woodhead’s departure – was fulsome in its praise for Birmingham’s education standards as exemplary, thanks to “the energising and inspirational example set by the chief education officer.”
Brighouse had resigned from the standards task force within two years and from Birmingham moved to become the government’s London schools commissioner, or chief adviser for London schools, as the role was later renamed. Inevitably he became a “schools tsar” in ministerial parlance, though not one with any executive power beyond persuasion and lobbying ministers.
Nevertheless, he encouraged local school partnerships to pool talents and resources, promoted a charter teaching scheme to recruit teachers for subjects where there were shortages with bonuses and extra qualifications: “There’s no more challenging nor worthwhile thing to do than to teach in London,” he told the Guardian in 2003. “Ten years of teaching in London should count more than teaching somewhere else where the wind is at your back.” Such measures must have contributed to the dramatic improvements in London schools, which have gone from worst to best performing nationally in recent years.
Brighouse retired to Oxford in 2007 and was knighted two years later. He wrote several books on how to improve education and training, and was awarded a string of honorary degrees. His most recent book, About Our Schools, co-written with Mike Waters, was published in 2022.
In 1962 he married Mary Demer and they had two children before divorcing in 1988. His second wife, Liz (nee Kearney), whom he married in 1989, is currently the leader of the Labour group on Oxfordshire county council. He is survived by her, his son and daughter, and two stepchildren.
• Timothy Robert Peter Brighouse, educationist, born 15 January 1940; died 15 December 2023
