It is given to very few senior education officials to be both universally respected and admired by teachers, but Tim Brighouse, who has died aged 83, was one of that rare breed. He did it not only by respecting the profession and encouraging its members, but also by showing them pragmatically how their lessons and thus their schools could be – and were – improved, without the threats and coercion offered by successive secretaries of state and his adversary, the former chief inspector Chris Woodhead.
He was in turn a classroom teacher, deputy head – at 24 – then, climbing the administrative ladder, chief education officer for Oxfordshire, then Birmingham, then schools commissioner for London from 2003 to 2007, leading the London Challenge to improve education in the capital. In a career also interspersed with professorships of education, he not only earned respect but had done the jobs and secured improvements in ethos and results in the areas he touched.
