October 18th 2006 marked the 30th anniversary of Prime Minister James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech which famously launched a national debate about education in this country.

Read the reflections of Mervyn Benford, one of our Leading Thinkers:

Take your partners for the Ruskin Waltz
Mervyn Benford

Click here for a print version of this article.

Thirty years ago in a famous speech at Ruskin College, Prime Minister Callaghan expressed growing concern about educational standards. Not long afterwards Education Secretary Shirley Williams said we spent too much on unfilled school places. She also acted to prevent LEAs spending grant money ear-marked for Government initiatives, like improving mathematics teaching, being spent on any other local need, regularly done hitherto.

Eight years earlier, ‘All our Futures’ reported 30,000 pupils leaving school with no qualifications, identifying an under-achieving underclass within society. Thirty years on, five per cent still leave without qualifications and Government considers anti-social behaviour orders on families for letting their children fail. We still have a mathematics teaching crisis, and an obsession with empty places risks closing down swathes of small schools, the very sector producing some of today’s best results.

The validity and reliability of examination grades is annually questioned, with some universities planning to limit the subjects accepted for entry, while employers argue that for all the paper qualifications flying about we still produce students unable to think for themselves. We still hallow LEA local autonomy whereby some children are denied fairly fundamental things others get of right. We still have selection. Have we moved so little since Callaghan and Williams?

Yet there has been action a-plenty. Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI), astutely sensing the risk of political intrusion into the professional domain, responded in a rather unseemly panic. Recognising the absence of systematic guidance for schools as to what they should teach, their ‘Raspberry Ripple’  solution - ‘5-16’ booklets for every subject, including Classics - succumbed to the arrival of a whip-cracking Thatcher Government starting with a proper National Curriculum and dedicated to competition between schools.

Margaret Thatcher knew a thing or two having been Ted Heath’s Education Secretary. She had commissioned the Bullock Report on reading. She knew professional in-service training languished. Baker Days were one antidote but also the shrewd observation they should be whole-school based. National testing in core subjects across the age range arrived along with OFSTED inspection under the openly published principle of ‘weeding out bad teachers.’ The Press even published ten signs of bad teaching as a parents’ guide! So the hope of self-evaluation through systematic lesson observation and constructive feedback was retarded.

Reports, the latest this year, continue to show literacy and numeracy deficiencies. Thus, even with an obligatory, clearly progressive National Curriculum, government imposed literacy and numeracy hours not only telling teachers what to teach but for the first time how to teach it. Like SATs, and inspection, these have to a degree restored standards to reasonable expectations but seem also on a plateau with little more potential. Government remains beset with anxiety, having set pupil attainment targets which turn the normal curve of distribution of ability on its head.

The overwhelming success and community worth of small schools, and their high return on investment, a sorely unsung  educational good, is suppressed by the persistent false economics of large scale which continue to close these beacons of excellence where families and teachers need no ASBOs to help the less privileged succeed academically.

SURESTART represents essential investment in the vital years of early brain development. However, the billions still flood the barren wildernesses of secondary and higher education where the system bleeds. But education is a slow-burning process and the bandage is needed earlier. Small scale is human scale. We need small schools in our large conurbations.

By now someone might suppose there was something wrong with the education system. Research argues this, notably the work of such as Maurice Galton, based heavily and perceptively on classroom observation of what makes teaching and learning effective. It turns out to be a process almost the opposite of what our children experience.

Meanwhile we still debate those yesterday issues, phonics or not, streaming or not, nursery or not, small classes or not, when the future rushes at us so fast we can barely imagine the lives facing today’s reception children. Three decades on, hard reality argues not enough progress since Ruskin. We urgently need a radical new perspective, new vision laced with pedagogic realities rather than political or other ideology. Politicians, parents and employers must join this consensus to forge a distinctively collaborative approach, rich in joined-up thinking to identify and share best practice.

The slow, slow, quick, quick, slow of three decades of stalemate needs a more relevant step and tempo.

Mervyn Benford has worked for more than 45 years in education as teacher, small school headteacher, LEA and OFSTED inspector, and most recently advising Swedish schools on school-based self-evaluation using lesson observation and feedback. His work has consistently involved being in schools and classrooms.

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