I went to secondary school from ’78 to ’85. In Enfield, where we lived, there was (and still is) one grammar school, Latymer. It would have been an option for me, and I probably would have got in, but my parents were very against selection at eleven and, frankly, I was very against the two buses that I would have had to have taken every morning – so instead, I ended up with a fifteen-minute walk to Southgate comprehensive, and I’m still delighted that I did, because I got a great education there. We had a fantastic head teacher, Mr Targett, who was quite a well known educational campaigner – he was opposed to corporal punishment (unlike the head of the primary school I went to, who would regularly threaten to cane children, although I don’t recall it ever actually happening), and an outspoken critic of the Thatcher government on things like education cuts. He was fairly political, then; but I was already politically engaged by the time I arrived at Southgate. It was inevitable, really. My parents were in the Communist party, so I had a very left wing family upbringing, and took part in demonstrations from before I could walk. In fact, when I joined the Labour party my mum, who has sadly died since, never really accepted it – to her, it was such a terribly right wing, sell-out thing to do! Dad was much more pragmatic about it.
I was a very academic student. I wasn’t into sport, or art, or things like that, but I was very good at remembering facts and passing exams. In other words, I’d have done well under the kind of system favoured by Michael Gove – and I often use my own experience to set out why I disagree with his approach. The classic example for me is physics; I took an O level in the subject, and got a grade A… yet I don’t think I ever properly understood it. So much of the exam was based on maths, which I was good at, that all I really needed to do was memorise the formulae and apply them correctly, without ever properly appreciating what it all meant. I’d probably have been better off carrying on with home economics, which I loved, but dropped as soon as it became a question of taking qualifications, because it wasn’t ‘scholarly’ enough.
There are so many false choices in discussions about education. Take the current focus on ‘knowledge versus skills’, for example. Clearly, it makes sense that there’s a core of knowledge – I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t think that – but it doesn’t need to be at the expense of a whole set of skills that young people need, like critical thinking, presentation, and speaking and listening. Of course numeracy and literacy are crucial, and I do think that it’s right that English and maths are given top billing in the curriculum – but beyond that, there should be choice and flexibility. The creative arts industries are big employers of today and will more than likely be even more so in the future, so if you have fewer young people taking D&T, or art, or music and drama for that matter, it’s not only culturally dreadful, but economically it’s a disaster as well. I suppose if I’d gone to Latymer, it probably wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference. I had great parental support, and as I say, I was handy at exams. But it’s not like that for everyone. I don’t have children, but I totally respect that parents want the best for their sons and daughters – and therefore, for policy makers, it’s got to be about making sure that all schools are good. I’m not dogmatic about the structure, but you have to have a level playing field in terms of funding and admissions, and there must be collaboration. No school, whether maintained or an academy, should be an island. I’m by nature an optimist, though. Certainly, I think a lot of what the government is doing at the moment is taking us in the wrong direction – it’s a very backward looking, ideological approach to the curriculum that sees a free market as the way to solve everything, despite no supporting evidence at all – but actually, I think a hell of a lot of good stuff is happening out there regardless. In the end, if you have good schools, and confident teachers, they’ll take the bits they want to take, and ignore the bits they want to ignore… and quite right, too.
