Who the hell are you? And what are you doing?

... I wonder as strange and unattractively behaved boys lope into my classroom, 45 minutes into an hour long lesson. I imagine that they'd be asking the same about me, except that we all know who I am - I'm Supply.

The question hovers in my mind as I read about the ministers for education. Who the fuck are they, eh? Didn't go to my school. Did they go to state schools at all, the people who decide what becomes of them? Have they ever even set foot in one? I want to know.

Here is my survey for all MPs, thinktank members and QUANGO directors involved in evolving education policy:

1. Were you educated in a state or private school?

2. If you have children, are they educated in a state or private school?

3. Have you ever taught under 16s? If so, what age group and during what era?

4. If the answers to the above run private, private, no, what do you know about education?

BONUS QUESTION 5. Were you actually elected? And if the answer to this one is no, perhaps you'd like to answer the question in the title of this blog.

Interesting things are afoot in Bristol Education. The famous new Redland Green School is oversubscribed and now has a shrinking catchment area - smaller than it was designed to have, as apparently the entire middle class of Bristol with secondary school age children has moved into the area to get their kids into a middle class state school - the only one the city has, so a radical new departure.

You'd think this resounding success would send the council scurrying into their burrows to plan another school, so that yet more middle class pupils could be clawed back from South Gloucestershire and improve the Bristol League Tables. Not a bit of it. Bristol City Council is made of sterner stuff. A reputation for incompetence like theirs is not acquired overnight, you know.

In any case, they are already heavily committed elsewhere. Both Withywood and Hengrove - in the poverty-stricken south - are being turned into academies. Oo - ooh. (I can tell you right now that no child from Stokey Bish or any other of those northern suburbs will be going anywhere near either of them).

Withywood is a fascinating school; a third of the kids who leave in Year 11 didn't start in Year 7, and another third have special educational needs; the same proportion have free school lunches. It is nearly 100% white, and many of the kids come from homes where nobody has the faintest notion of what employment is like. 1999 statistics showed 42% of families in receipt of means-tested benefits, and as recently as 2006 second-generation unemployment was cited as a major issue in the challenge of regeneration of the area. There isn't any local employment, and the children emerging from Withywood School have not the skills to get the plentiful jobs available - and certainly not the gritty determination to compete with the migrant community to get them.

Kids in the area are poorly motivated to attend school, or to behave when they get there. It is the school with the highest proportion of supply teaching I have ever been part of. There was one particular subject we all dreaded; it was known that there had been no citizenship teacher in post for the whole academic year, and that nobody had taken responsibility for the curriculum or its delivery. When you arrived for a lesson, you had 30 children with no support, or assistance, or habits of work, and no lesson either. It was an object lesson in pointlessness, and the only time I summoned support I was told I had to focus on one or two disruptive children. When everybody is behaving like an extra from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, it seems so unfair to pick on one or two.

It was illustrative of the rather nutty approach to behaviour management though - they also gave out lottery tickets for good behaviour and you could win over £100 (and a free taxi home so the other kids didn't rob you and your mother got it intact.) Or nothing. So important not to fix relationships between good behaviour and measurable reward.

The thing that intrigues me currently, however, is that both the putative academies have two head teachers - one still running the current school, and one living in the furthest wing, who is a "Principal Designate". In the case of Withywood, this is an alumnus of the school who has run a very successful school in Devon for some years, while Withywood has been worsening away like a festering wound.

Hengrove have appointed a head who has been in situ in a school in Cannock since 2004. This is a tenure of a mere three years, in a school whose Ofsted in December 2003 mentioned a different head whose leadership was specifically praised, and who had already turned the school around. It is a school (Blake Valley Technology School) about two thirds size of Hengrove, which today appeared to have no working website - unusual for a Technology School. The current head of Hengrove, whose leadership fished the school out of special measures two years ago and who has kept it on track since, making it one of SSAT's most improved, has been passed over. The new academy will be run by OASIS, who are a Christian group whose declared specialision is the promotion of justice. We will wait and see what this produces, from the various distant wings of the various schools they brood and plan in. Whoever the hell they are, and what they are doing.