Peter Crook, one of Britain’s top head teachers, had just finished morning
assembly and returned to his office at the Harris Academy in Peckham, south
London, when he took a phone call that changed his life.
It was from his solicitor, who was preparing an employment tribunal case
against a former teacher at the school. The long dispute with the teacher -
who was claiming constructive dismissal as the school stepped up the
pressure to improve exam results - had been stressful and bitter. That
morning, in January 2007, Crook was told that there had been another twist
in the saga. It tipped him over the edge. He suffered a nervous breakdown at
his desk.
“Something just snapped,” recalled the 57-year-old Crook last week. “I was
taken to hospital and spent quite a long time there . . . I didn’t know, I
didn’t realise I was under that kind of pressure. The academies unit
described it as the hardest headship in Europe. If there is a harder one,
then good luck to that person.”
After five years at the helm of the Harris Academy, the nearest school to the
spot where 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was murdered in 2000, Crook was
forced to take early retirement. It ended a much-praised career as a
troubleshooter, one of a handful of “superheads” seen as able to transform
sink schools.
Crook, a former chairman of the Independent Academies Association (IAA), last
week spoke for the first time about the extraordinary challenge of turning
around such a school, from dealing with parents trying to assault him and
the effect on the pupils of murders in the streets nearby to discouraging
children from bringing knives to school and, perhaps most frustratingly,
working with teachers who collect their salary but rarely turn up to class.
The government has invested heavily in the academies programme, under which
failing schools are released from council control and turned into partly
independent institutions answerable to Whitehall. They are run by sponsors
who range from multi-millionaire businessmen to church groups and private
schools.
There are about 130 open now and the government’s target is to set up 400.
Supporters say they have been 50% more successful than the national average
at improving the GCSE results of their pupils, although opponents claim that
in some cases this has been achieved by expelling troublesome children and
making the intake more middle-class.
Last week, Mike Butler, Crook’s successor as chairman of the IAA, warned that
the already uphill task of academy principals will be made even harder by
new legislation that erodes the new schools’ freedom to act independently,
tying them up in red tape. “Academy sponsors, chairmen of governors and
principals up and down the land are seriously questioning the long-term
sustainability of the programme,” warned Butler.
Crook’s story exposes the difficulties experienced by those at the sharp end.
His academy was a flagship: David Cameron, the Tory leader, visited it, as
did Labour ministers. Yet nobody realised how much stress its headmaster was
under.
“My doctors said to me the kind of pressure I experienced leads to a stroke or
to a heart attack,” he said. A month before his breakdown he had had a
health check at which doctors told him he had to change his lifestyle as a
matter of urgency and get a healthier work-life balance. “I laughed and said
‘How?’” he recalled.
There were five murders outside the only secondary school in Peckham in the
autumn of 2002, the term in which Crook started as head of Warwick Park, the
sink school run by Southwark council that would become an academy the
following year. Children on their way in to school had to cross cordons of
police investigating the crimes.
Crook would become used to dealing with all kinds of incidents: in one, police
chased two men, one with a gun, into the playground while the staff tried to
keep children calm.
The academy, which is sponsored by the carpet millionaire Lord Harris, had its
own policeman on site; staff were issued with walkie-talkies so they would
not become isolated and could summon help if there was trouble; corridors
could be locked at the touch of a button; and the school hired local men as
community workers. Living on the nearby council estates, they were employed
to warn teachers of violence brewing at weekends which might spill over in
school on Monday morning. A lot of Crook's time was spent sorting out
conflicts.
He had been widely praised for transforming a troubled school in
Wolverhampton, boosting its results from 36% of children getting five good
GCSEs to 80% and achieving a similar outcome for another school in the same
town. He was confident he was up to the mammoth task when he applied for the
job in Peckham. It carried a six-figure salary, but that was not why he
wanted it: it was the challenge of running an academy and trying to improve
the fate of its children.
Warwick Park had been one of the worst schools in Britain: in 2002 only 12% of
children got five GCSEs, compared with a national average of more than 50%.
By the time Crook left he had boosted GCSE results to 38% and was proud of
the way staff and pupils had started to work effectively together.
There were many problems with the pupils. He struggled, for example, to build
an atmosphere in which children would inform on classmates who had brought
knives into school. “You have to get the children to reveal when there’s
trouble afoot - parents have to have confidence in the leadership of the
school,” he said. “If they don’t have that, then it’s survival of the
fittest, and often they feel that to be the fittest they have to be tooled
up.”
Parents could be a problem too. Some would not hesitate to threaten or use
violence to resolve a disagreement. Among many episodes he recalls one
parent who arrived spoiling for a fight with one of his teachers.
“He came in looking for one of my staff to thump him and I wouldn’t let him
come in,” said Crook. “It was all captured on CCTV - thank heavens for CCTV
in schools.”
Crook had just come out of assembly and was in the entrance hall when the
aggrieved parent entered. He had his assembly notes in my hands and it was
“a standoff like you get in a football field, his face pressed to mine. He
started breaking up school property; we called the police.
“They took him and his partner, who had attacked my female deputy, away in
handcuffs.”
The incident brought praise for Crook. “One member of staff said to me you
have done yourself a lot of good by the way you handled that. [But] it
didn’t feel like it. You are walking a tightrope the whole time but you try
to weight the odds in your favour by creating an environment in which other
staff will play their part.”
However, one of the most stressful battles he would have to fight was with
poor teachers. “The children,” he said, “were hungry to learn.” Sometimes he
would stand in a class and see the faces of children in front of an
inadequate teacher. “It was as though they were asking me, ‘What are you
going to do about it?’.”
Like other head teachers brought in to failing schools, he says that one in
three teachers sometimes have to be replaced before standards start to rise.
Chris Woodhead, the former chief inspector of schools and a Sunday Times
columnist, said a decade ago that the problem with Britain’s schools was
that there were 15,000 bad teachers. Crook thinks there are fewer now but
that the problem is still pressing.
First there were the ones who were rarely at their desk, constantly “off
sick”. At the Harris Academy he identified them by combing through absence
records.
“One boy told me he had had 11 different teachers for English - this was a
child in his GCSE year,” he recalled. “Why should he bother doing his
coursework or his homework when there was hardly ever a teacher there the
next day to take it in and mark it?”
Next were those who were deemed to be not up to the job. Crook refused to take
the easy way out and pay the massive compensation payments so many sought
and expected as a matter of right. Without a local authority to write the
cheques and bearing a responsibility for the school budget, he dug his heels
in.
“You have to brazen it out. You cannot give up because that is what local
councils do - pay off six months of salary or make huge ex gratia payments.
You have to stand firm. But the personal cost of taking it on is very hard,”
he said.
The result was several arguments and appearances at employment tribunals. Some
cases were taken on by “ambulance-chasing” lawyers, on a no-win, no-fee
basis. One teacher tried to sue Crook for £2,500 for schemes of work she
said she had done for a department that never existed. He won.
This weekend a spokeswoman for Harris Academy defended its record. “We serve
one of the most socially disadvantaged communities in the country,” she
said. “It is inevitable that community issues will from time to time spill
over into the academy. When this happens, we manage it well. Our GCSE
performance has quadrupled since becoming an academy and will continue to
improve in future years.”
It is clear that Crook was not alone in his troubles. The problem of
dismissing incompetent teachers was highlighted by Sir Cyril Taylor, former
chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, in an article
earlier this month in The Sunday Times. He argued that being able to “get
the wrong people off the bus and the right people on the bus and in the
right seats” was vital to academies’ prospects of success.
He warned, however, that this was an extremely irksome process, taking 18
months on average. “Procedures to move on ineffective teachers or staff in
English schools are absurdly complicated, time-consuming and frustrating,”
he wrote.
The problem of violence is also widespread. One academy in Carlisle has been
placed in special measures by Ofsted, the schools regulator. As the
principal lost control of the new school, discipline collapsed. There were
fights in the corridors between gangs of pupils and both schoolchildren and
parents staged protests.
Last week dozens of boys from a Sheffield academy, wearing their uniforms,
went on a vandalism spree, smashing up cars and fighting. Eventually, they
had to be driven off by police in riot vans.
Finding people to take on these tough jobs is difficult. There is a shortage
of head teachers and a reluctance among many deputies to step up to the top
job. Crook is not the first head of a failing school to break down and will
not be the last.
“It is stressful,” said Woodhead. “There is a hell of a lot riding on an
academy. The sponsor wants it to work, the government wants it to work and
of course the parents want it to work for their children’s sake.
“The pressures are tougher now than they ever were because of the drive to be
seen to raise standards. It is all well for the bureaucrats and politicians
sitting in their offices to hold forth. It is the head on the ground who has
to deliver and it is very, very tough.”
After Crook left early in 2007, another head was appointed at Peckham; after
four terms she left. Now the school is again without a permanent head
teacher - instead, an “executive” head shuttles between two academies.
Despite what happened to him, Crook is adamant that he was right to take on
the challenge of Peckham. He is proud of what he achieved, including
mentoring seven deputies who are now head teachers in their own right and
getting parents more involved in their children’s education. Teaching is the
best job in the world, he said, and without the academy programme, “social
unrest among teenagers would be a lot worse”.
