The Authentic Leader

On East Birmingham, national reform, and the quiet work that comes before the moment.

There is a deception at the heart of how we talk about leadership, and about reform. We notice both only when they are loud: the announcement, the launch, the headline policy unveiled to a bank of cameras. We attach change to moments, because moments are easy to see. They arrive with witnesses.

But the most important work in any school almost never arrives that way. It is quiet. It is early. And by the time anyone can see it, it has usually already been done.

I have been thinking about this a great deal this summer, because for the first time in my career the direction of national policy, the ambition of regional government and the physical regeneration of our own streets in East Birmingham are all pointing the same way at once. Three reforms, a new national curriculum, a technical-education settlement that will give fourteen-year-olds a genuine route into skilled work, and a wave of devolution handing real power to our regional mayor, are converging on a single date: September 2028.

For a decade, reform arrived in East Birmingham as something done to us: designed elsewhere, for schools unlike ours, and handed over to be complied with. This time feels different. This time the question is not how we comply. It is whether we are willing to author it.

Here is the claim I want to make, and it is not a modest one. When these reforms land, they will ask every school in the country to build three things almost overnight: a living connection to local employers, a curriculum coherent enough to carry technical learning without narrowing, and a way of guiding children into different routes without writing anyone off at fourteen. Most schools will start from nothing.

We will not. Not because we are cleverer, but because we have spent eighteen unglamorous months building exactly those foundations while nobody was watching — sequencing a curriculum, protecting reading, disciplining how we read data, holding our groupings steady when it would have been easier to keep moving children around. None of it made a headline. None of it drew applause. That is rather the point.

Because here is what the reforms actually do for a school like ours: they restore the evidence of invisible work. Success has a way of erasing the trace of the effort that created it. A school where the systems function produces something deceptively undramatic — normality — and normality never gets a headline. But when the country suddenly asks every school to produce what you quietly built years ago, your ordinary maintenance is revealed, for a moment, as advantage.

And the advantage here is real, not rhetorical. When national policy talks about “technical education linked to the jobs available in your area”, it is describing, for our children, a set of employers within a bus ride of the school gate: a 400-acre green innovation quarter, a hydrogen bus pilot, a knowledge quarter for health and technology, a live digital model of the neighbourhood’s own energy and transport. Elsewhere this is a policy aspiration. Here it is the view from the window.

I could stop there, and this could be a comfortable piece about a school that finds itself, pleasingly, ahead. But comfortable pieces are brochures, and I have never had much time for those.

So let me tell you what keeps me honest. The same reform that rewards a broad, technical, ambitious curriculum has arrived at precisely the moment many of us have been trimming ours, a closed course here, a subject under pressure there. It is no good claiming to lead on technical education while your own technical offer quietly contracts. That contradiction is ours to resolve, in the open, before 2028, and I would rather name it than have it named for me.

And there is a deeper trap, the one I think about most. It would be the easiest thing in the world to implement “pathways at fourteen” by simply sorting children; the academic here, the technical there, decided early, on data we have always insisted describes a starting point and not a destiny. That is not parity of esteem. That is the old tripartite system in a new suit, and it would fall hardest on exactly the children we serve. The harder, better thing, the thing I believe a school like ours is uniquely placed to prove, is that technical education can be an enrichment of a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum rather than a substitute for it. A child does not have to choose between knowing and making. Done well, the curriculum holds both.

There is a reason I keep returning to the image of infrastructure. A bridge asks for no gratitude from the people who cross it. Its success lies in being reliable enough to be forgotten — so that travellers can stop thinking about the bridge and get on with their journey. That is what I want the coming years of work to build for the children of East Birmingham: not a spectacle that proves we are leading, but something so solid beneath them that they never have to think about it at all.

Over the coming months I will share more about how we intend to do this, the opportunities, the specific things we must build, and the pitfalls we are determined to avoid. For now I will leave it here, with the thought I cannot shake: that the measure of leadership was never whether people notice the leader. It is whether people thrive because the work was done; quietly, early, and well, before the moment ever arrived.