What we suspected was a Dr Strangelove scenario involving anonymous operatives in a Whitehall basement where huge old-fashioned tape recorders turned through the small hours of the night. One woman I knew claimed to have heard, through some malfunction of the eavesdropping system, a recording of a conversation she’d had earlier the same day. THERE was a time in the early 1980s when people in top positions at CND routinely assumed that their telephones were tapped. But it is hard to see where he goes after that; right-wing friends and outspoken criticisms of teachers are not the best qualifications for jobs in education. Woodhead himself says vaguely that he would be quite happy to potter about the Lake District doing a bit of rock climbing and supply teaching. Most teachers would advise him to avoid the staffrooms and stick to rock climbing..

Some colleagues think he could survive the early years of a Labour government; his pronouncements on standards are not, after all, so far removed from Tony Blair’s. This is true and many political factions in this country, not least the Labour Party, have swung away from progressive educational ideals in recent years. To stand still is to atrophy, he says, and in any case the supposed split between traditionalists and progressives is a false one. He is reputed to be close to the Prime Minister’s policy advisers.Woodhead’s political friends say he is doing a job which needed to be done, that it was about time someone called for higher standards in the teaching profession Others think he may be playing a dangerous game. Eric Bolton, chief inspector from 1983 until 1991, says: “As I saw the job and as my predecessor saw it, it was the absolute kiss of death to get too close to any political interest.”Woodhead hotly denies that his pronouncements have been political, or that his views have shifted to fit the prevailing ideology. I don’t dispute that.”He has also made some powerful friends.

He is rumoured to have dined with Prince Charles at Highgrove. “I think I must be an ambitious person,” he says, “but not in such a way as to have structured my career from day one I suppose I have seized the moment.. I think there have been a lot of enemies. He was never, by all accounts, a very comfortable man to have as a deputy. His rise continued inexorably: an appointment as one of “three wise men” chosen by Clarke to look into primary education; head of a new body when the curriculum authority was merged with the testing council; and, finally, chief inspector, the job he says he has always coveted.Woodhead is often accused of ambition – a motive that is still regarded as faintly disreputable in the teaching profession. A year later, Graham was sacked by Kenneth Clarke, then Secretary of State for Education, and Woodhead had his job.

The locals repaired to the inn and celebrated the routing of the men in grey suits until the small hours.He was rescued from this ignominy by a phone call from Duncan Graham, chief executive designate of the new National Curriculum Council; he became Graham’s deputy in 1991. He and his colleagues had to withdraw in haste from Bolventor, near Jamaica Inn, after the local farmers turned out with their muck-spreaders to protest. In Cornwall he was detailed to close a number of small rural schools – a venture which in his own words, “failed dismally”. One of his suggestions for an English lesson, she recalls, involved handing round a box of apples and using them to inspire creative writing “They ate the apples and threw the cores at each other.

He was a very nice guy but he knew very little about what it really means to be a teacher.”After leaving Oxford in 1982, he became an English adviser and then chief inspector in Shropshire and later deputy chief education officer in Cornwall and Devon. one felt one should hold his hand as he crossed the road.” Conversely, another former acquaintance recalls him as “rakish and attractive, an extremely dashing kind of teacher”.Fenella Strange was taught again by Woodhead when she trained as a teacher at Oxford. Fenella Strange, then a sixth-former, recalls “this charming, sweet, other-worldly bloke. The word I would use more than any other would be ‘idealistic’ We considered ourselves years older than him… “He was very much influenced by the notion that individual excellence comes from confidence, comes from self-esteem and comes from feeling that you are worthwhile. That’s a fairly liberal concept in many ways.”After three years at a traditional grammar in Shrewsbury, he became deputy head of English at Newent, a Gloucestershire comprehensive. His French master’s view was monosyllabic: “Wild,” he wrote.Woodhead read English at Bristol University before taking a teacher-training course.