Tim Brighouse talks to Navigate magazine about the role of the DCS

Sir Tim Brighouse retired as Chief Adviser for London Schools in 2007. Until 2002, he was Chief Education Officer in Birmingham and Oxfordshire and Deputy Education Officer at the ILEA

When I was a chief education officer the comment I always dreaded from colleagues was ‘You have an impossible job.’ Usually made in the aftermath of a difficult decision, what it really meant was that I had got it wrong.

This is not uncommon where the task of leadership is large, complex and involves many stakeholders but .just occasionally professionals will debate whether a particular job is theoretically possible to do, irrespective of who would do it. That has been happening with the job of director of children’s services which has incorporated child protection care duties with those held by the education officer. The implication is that the two tasks involve marching to professional tunes which are too different for one person to lead persuasively and that the range of critical responsibilities is too wide for one person to discharge. So are the people who say this right?

Any chief officer post in local government has four areas where it is essential to show competence. These are working with politicians; managing the daily business of a large and complex organisation; acting as an active team member with other chief officers and the chief executive; and – crucially – orchestrating and contributing to the professional lead for the disciplines which comprise the service for which you are responsible. Each aspect affects the other three. So failure in one area could easily cause failure in another.

Certainly I have known plenty of chief officers who couldn’t hack the political or corporate aspect of their job and/or run their department competently and paid the price. In a way though, these aspects are much easier to handle than the fourth – the need to provide an overall professional lead of those for whom you are responsible.

So it would be easy to conclude, especially in the wake of the spate of child protection failures in so many local authorities, that the director of children’s services task is indeed impossible for the simple reason that they cannot come from both an educational and a social services background and therefore one or the other has to suffer. But that is wrong on two counts. First, it is a short lived phenomenon in that while it has been impossible to find people with ‘across the board’ experience in the first tranche of appointments, as the years go by that won’t happen. Indeed Oxfordshire has just made an appointment of someone who is a social worker by background but who has led school improvement in another authority. Secondly, it has never been essential to have front line experience, for example as a teacher, to be a successful chief education officer. Lawyers, careers officers and administrators have been outstanding in the post. What matters is that you are seen to be an avid learner and that you ask good questions rather than always provide the answers. I admit I have relied on my own teaching background, but far more important is the leader’s keen willingness to learn more and set direction.

So why are people suggesting that the children’s services jobs are impossible?

It’s simple. There are two high profile accountability measurements. Fail on either vital school improvement statistics or on child protection cases like Baby P and you are vulnerable. But you can reduce the risk by emphasising moral purpose, working at the many relationships with the stakeholders who do the daily business, asking the right questions, making coherence with the various parts of the service and by tirelessly paying attention to detail and thinking ahead. Exhausting yes, impossible no – provided you have that elusive ingredient, luck. Just like being a headteacher, really.

It makes me wish I were 20 years younger and could have a go at it.