With Liam Fox gone, Michael Gove will also be weakened

With the retirement last year of The Vaughan’s popular headmaster, the diocese saw the chance to find a successor who would change the attitudes of the staff and so neutralise the staff governors. The foundation governors held pre-meetings to concert their line in advance. It was made clear – though never explicitly stated – that they would not select either of the admired internal candidates from the school. Both men are the sort of old-fashioned people who refer to the “headmaster” rather than the “headteacher”: the diocesan people don’t like the cut of their jib. When these two candidates applied, the foundation governors said that the field was “not strong enough”, and delayed the selection process. Although the job description stipulated that the appointee must have “sustained” experience of sixth forms, the foundation governors shortlisted the deputy head of a school with no sixth form; he had had no sixth-form experience for 16 years.

Almost all the parents protested at what was happening. At one meeting of 400 or so of them, a vote showed all but two parents supporting the school against the diocese. Such is the diocese’s dislike of parental opinion that one of the only two who voted the other way was promptly made a foundation parent governor.

At the beginning of this week, the parents told me they were heading for defeat. The selection process of the governors was showing all foundation governors determined to oppose the total of parent governors, staff governors and education authority representative, which they always outnumber. A diocesan stooge would be appointed by Wednesday, I was assured.

Then something extraordinary happened. On Wednesday, the attitude of the foundation governors suddenly changed. They remained unanimous, but now they were unanimous in the other direction. All of them said that they wanted the younger of the two internal candidates, Paul Stubbings, to be the new headmaster. The other governors could not believe what they were hearing, but rejoiced. Mr Stubbings was appointed.

What had happened? Why this Pauline conversion? It seems that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, was so struck by the strength of the parental protest that he looked into the matter. He did not like what he found. Under the 1996 Education Act, he has the power to order an investigation of whether a governing body has behaved unreasonably. On Monday or Tuesday, he telephoned the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, and told him that he was minded to do so in this case.

It seems that the archbishop was displeased with Mr Gove, but also alarmed at the prospect of an investigation: processes would be inspected and minutes unearthed. In the past, the foundation governors have always appeared to do whatever the diocese wanted. Now the diocese did not want an investigation. No one is saying exactly what happened next, but on Wednesday, Mr Stubbings was appointed. With a bit of luck, he will achieve his ambition of turning The Vaughan into an academy.

So here is a situation very characteristic of our education system. A school which has what most schools would die for – the almost unanimous satisfaction of its parents – has to fight and fight and fight for the survival of its ethos. Its opponents are education authorities, whether secular or church, which are supposed to have the care of schools, but which tend to prefer their own power to that of parents and teachers. They long to enforce the egalitarian educational theories (such as no “setting”) which have dominated, and failed, for half a century.

By an apparent paradox, the only means by which such little platoons can be upheld is by central government intervention – in this case, by Mr Gove. Every “free school” and every academy, every bid for greater autonomy, has to battle its way into existence against officials who detest such ideas. Only with the help of the minister can bureaucracy be defeated. In the long term, such methods could not work. No Secretary of State could fight each case everywhere. But this is a transition. Once academies and free schools and the rights of parents really take root, once head teachers can really hire and fire whom they want, Mr Gove and his successors can become no more than a distant court of appeal. Independence will be entrenched by law. It will seem incomprehensible to future generations that any school which was full and thriving ever faced the wrath of the authorities. But just now, the political battle rages. The bureaucrats, like trade union leaders in the early 1980s, fight to maintain their unanswerable power. Maximum political pressure needs to be massed against them.

Which brings me, oddly, to the demise of Dr Liam Fox. The Defence Secretary allowed his informal adviser Adam Werritty to get tangled in a web of lobbying interests. This was wrong. But it is the bureaucrats, not the public interest, who will do well out of this fiasco. By our constitution, ministers are supposed to be in charge of them. Nowadays, empowered to investigate their own ministers, the civil servants are in charge of their masters’ conduct. They will make sure that Dr Fox’s successor has even less political freedom to operate than he did.

Mr Gove has no Fox-y problem with commercial interests. But if you look at his valiant efforts to achieve permanent change in British schools, you will see that he could get little done through strictly official channels alone. He needs to have political outriders with him, clever young special advisers who can work out quickly when an anxious parents’ group needs support or when an archbishop needs telephoning. Such advisers are anathema to the regular Whitehall apparatus.

Now that Dr Fox has gone, watch as the emboldened established powers turn their fire on Mr Gove – or on whichever secretary of state is trying most actively to take power from the bureaucracy which has misruled us for so long.