Few aspects of the Labour government are more dispiriting than its unchanging ideological dogma in education. You would hope that, at the very least, a Secretary of State would seek to ensure that our schools achieve the very highest academic outcomes possible. Where excellence flourishes, politicians and their SPADs should seek to understand why it works, and whether its lessons can be applied elsewhere. The science of learning, articulated very clearly by, among others, Carl Hendrick, should be at the core of everything the Department for Education does.

Regrettably, this was not the case under Keir Starmer, and it remains distinctly absent under Andy Burnham. In certain areas Labour’s policies remain resistant to changing trends and demands. And no government department appears more thoroughly gripped by political ideology than the Department for Education. Indeed, in Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell, the department has seen two consecutive Secretaries of State who lack the ambition, curiosity, and intellectual heft you would think are essential to the office. It is not obvious that the recent occupants of the corner office in Sanctuary Buildings are at all interested in ideas that might challenge their essentially statist view of schooling. Take two obvious examples.

First, independent schools. Even the most severe critics of the sector would grudgingly admit that England has some of the finest schools in the world. We might debate funding per pupil, resources, or admissions policies, but these institutions consistently produce leaders in their fields. The economy, sport, and the creative arts all benefit from a pipeline of talented young people coming through these schools.

None of this seems to interest the Department for Education. At no point has any recent minister shown genuine curiosity about what these schools achieve and how they do it. What harm would there be in visiting, say, Wellington College or Dulwich College to understand how they have expanded so successfully overseas; or in examining how hundreds of independent schools work with local state schools; or in listening to school leaders on how they are innovating in technology, curriculum design, and pastoral care? All this expertise is ignored. I cannot think of another department so indifferent, if not outright hostile, to a leading part of its own brief.

Second, consider Michaela Community School, led by Katharine Birbalsingh. This year, once again, the school posted astonishing results, with nearly 70 per cent of A-level entries awarded A* or A grades, which is more than double the national average. Yet if you visit Michaela, you will not find the joyless exam factory its critics often claim it to be; instead, you will be struck by the pupils’ evident pride in their school and a palpable culture of optimism and ambition in every classroom. In a rational educational system, such life-changing achievement would be studied and celebrated. Instead, it is met with ambivalence, silence, or open hostility from officials at the DfE.

Why is this? Part of the answer, inevitably, is that Michaela exposes the fragility of the assumptions underpinning Labour’s current approach to schools. The scrapping of the Latin Excellence Programme, and the withdrawal of funding for schools offering the International Baccalaureate, suggest a government uncomfortable with anything that looks like academic rigour pursued for its own sake - as if they want to punish excellence rather than reward it.

Birbalsingh possesses a clear vision, formidable competence, and an uncompromising drive for standards. By contrast, ministers seem out of their depth, unable to cope with their new briefs (an inevitable consequence, no doubt, of the rapid turnover of Prime Ministers). As former Ofqual chief regulator Amanda Spielman pointed out in a withering critique, Powell appears to misunderstand both the mechanics of GCSE grading and the fundamental purpose of qualifications. Such misunderstandings produce bad policy and erode trust among professionals who expect a Secretary of State to be in command of her brief.

But there is more to it than that, because Michaela - its philosophy, its success, its explicit promotion of fundamental British values, knowledge-rich curricula, and strict rules consistently applied - is anathema to many who identify as liberal or progressive. It seems that the left (which once set great store by academic success and social mobility) has become the opposite of what it once was, captured, perhaps, by a desire to be “kind” and empathetic, rather than competitive and ambitious. This dislike of rules and high academic standards is deeply entrenched in the left: it was there in the 1990s in its opposition to Sir Michael Wilshaw’s tenure as head of Mossbourne Academy, and in the hostility shown to Sir Chris Woodhead during his time in charge of Ofsted.

As someone who teaches in both the state and independent sectors, I sense little hope or trust in the Department for Education as the new academic year begins, despite the Prime Minister’s regular talk of restoring hope to a country bereft of optimism. In place of intellectual curiosity, there remains a familiar suspicion of excellence and a dogmatic insistence that only one school model (the non-selective comprehensive) is morally qualified to teach the country’s children. Policy appears far more concerned with correcting perceived social grievances than with raising academic standards.

A genuinely ambitious government would be doing the reverse: it would search relentlessly for what works across academies, free schools, independent schools, further education, and the wider state sector. That does not mean assuming any single model can be uncritically replicated because context always matters. But it does require the intellectual self-confidence to learn from those with whom one might otherwise disagree, putting children’s prospects ahead of doctrine. Until Sanctuary Buildings embraces that mindset, genuine educational hope will remain elusive.

One day in 1973, my father, a former coal miner from Ebbw Vale, decided to buy a castle.

This was not a pumped-up neo-Georgian pile built by some Edwardian industrialist. No, this was Dynevor Castle (also known as Newton House), Llandeilo, completed in 1660 in rolling Welsh countryside, shaped into a deer park by Capability Brown.

It was beautiful, with over 40 rooms, including a working theatre and music room, a dovecote, walled gardens, four turrets, a church, a (dry) moat and courtyards, which had housed the many staff who served Lord Dynevor and his ancestors through the centuries.

Death duties had done for many of the great estates left intact after the war, still bravely keeping a small number of staff in tiny rooms, with dust collecting behind ancient limousines in garages.

Richard Rhys, the then Lord Dynevor, had no choice but to sell up to pay the tax man. His loss was my family’s gain: they bought the estate, for the same price that it would cost to buy a one-bedroom flat in Surbiton today. Like some tragic, Welsh rewriting of a Chekhov play, Lord Dynevor lived on the periphery of his former estate, an outsider looking on as history discarded him.

It was a place of wonder. As a young boy, I spent too long looking up at the walls adorned with images of scantily dressed women that injured onanistic American servicemen had painted in the Second World War, as they recuperated in the sanatorium, wondering how they had found themselves such a long way from Kansas.

I ran down long, deserted corridors, as though in a scene from a Stephen Poliakoff drama. I walked among the strange, beautiful White Park cattle, and watched, fearfully, the stags rutting on the Capability Brown slopes.

It didn’t last long enough. We saved the castle from ruin, but sold it six years later to a Dutch family, who converted it into a Steiner school.

It was doomed to fail. They, like the Dynevors, struggled financially, and started stripping the lead from the roofs, ripping out Adam fireplaces and selling off various fixtures and fittings. No doubt they now adorn many living rooms in London, a diaspora of artefacts with forgotten provenances. The painted ladies, exposed to the rains of Wales, quickly melted away.

The estate was broken up – but in 1984 my brother bought the house back and saved it from destruction. By the 1990s it had found its way to the National Trust, with a new story to tell of its survival.

The Trust does many things well, including protecting ancient buildings from neglect. But they want to tell only one collective, uniform story, which has them as the heroic saviours: the protectors of a past, alone in understanding it, uniquely qualified to interpret it to a grateful membership and fee-paying nation.

It is history re-imagined. Like many other owners of Trust properties, our family has been written out of the castle’s story because we don’t fit with the prescribed view.

My father saved the estate from a fate other great houses suffered in the ’70s and ’80s. Yet his actions are now not even a footnote in the Trust’s airbrushed tale.

The same will be true for hundreds of properties owned by the Trust: the complex, messy, personal plots and chapters that do not cohere with their grand narrative are silenced, stripped away like the layers of paint and wallpaper that other, anonymised owners applied.

These stories need to be told if we are to understand that the cultures worth saving need to be salvaged from the pasts that others want to invent. The great buildings of our country are filled with forgotten voices lost to a corporate owner.

We need to hear them again.

But since this article was first published in The Oldie magazine in 2022, there has been no revision of the castle’s history, no attempt to tell the truth about how the building was saved. Of course, as I say, much of the work done by the Trust is valuable, and has ensured that the castle and its grounds are maintained to a very high standard, to be enjoyed by the many, not the few. But other actions sadden me: why, for example, erase a small pets’ graveyard and replace it with a staff car park? Why convert a really beautiful room into a café when there were many alternatives? Does the National Trust really have to promote scones and ice cream over aesthetics?

What remains frustrating, but also illuminating, is that the history visitors have of the castle is mediated through a distorted lens. In that sense it is a deliberate misrepresentation of history, a partial truth. For the real story of this wonderful building to be told, the Trust would have to bring in voices other than those approved by an organisation that has, increasingly, become resistant to criticism and increasingly censorious about views it feels contradict its own. A nation’s heritage is shaped by its messy, unscripted human truths, not corporate PR. Working people from all classes built and protected our heritage, rather more than committees made up of lanyard-wearing bureaucrats. Until the National Trust embraces those inconvenient chapters, it offers visitors little more than an airbrushed illusion.

Anyway, this gives you a sense of the article, and you can read the rest of it here (it’s not behind a paywall).

How will history judge Bridget Phillipson, if it bothers to judge her at all? Her time at the Department for Education was, like that of her friend and fellow ex-minister Rachel Reeves, marked by a fundamental lack of coherence. There was no overarching vision beyond a desire to improve the life chances of the country’s most disadvantaged children. That ambition is admirable in itself, yet leading a nation’s education system demands far more. Too often, Phillipson appeared indifferent to excellence, motivated less by fostering a culture of intellectual ambition than by pursuing social justice and settling scores with imagined enemies.

Phillipson’s two years in office will ultimately be remembered for the divisions she sowed rather than the solutions she found. Like the Prime Minister she supported to the end (and who defended her in one of his final PMQs), her tenure must, on balance, be judged a failure. Attempts to rewrite the record are already surfacing, but they are unlikely to survive for long.

‘After the Funeral’ is the perfect title for Tessa Hadley’s collection of short stories. It captures not just one of her main themes - loss, and the transience of life - but also her focus as well: she is not a writer to dwell at length on morbidity, or anything at all come to that; nor does she ever slip into sentimentality, preferring instead to glance elsewhere, at the prosaic details of life that frame the central tragedy of existence, those moments before and after a main event.

The funeral the title refers to is for Philip Lyons, a British airline pilot for BOAC (several of the stories are set in the 1970s), who dies, suddenly and possibly salaciously, in New York. We are left to guess at what he was doing in that anonymous hotel room. Hadley quickly sets the tone of the piece by writing that his two young daughters, rather than mourning him, ‘hadn’t known their father very well, and hadn’t enormously liked him’. Instead, their attention is on their mother, Marlene, a suburban Dietrich who, having never attended a funeral before, wears dark glasses and ‘Sugar Date lipstick’ at the graveside. It is a beautifully observed opener to the collection, capturing as it does another favourite theme of Hadley’s: the fragility of female independence threatened, inevitably, not just by the ‘frank antagonism’ of men, but also by other women with their ‘winding approaches to one another’.

This reluctance to idealise the female world that so dominates the book is one of its many strengths. In ‘The Bunty Club’ three sisters return to the family home to look after their dying mother. And although the story begins, rather like one of those dream sequences from a Poliakoff drama, with Serena dancing in the ‘blond powder’ of the morning light, inside the house we read of her sister Gillian ‘shuddering’ in the bathroom ‘at dubious flecks and stains and gritty surfaces’, the toilet brush ‘clogged with paper, the packet of laxatives and Tena lady-pads out on unapologetic show’. As readers we fully inhabit this female world, filled as it is with ‘intimate smells…slippery, screaming games…secret longings…behind the locked door’. There are no skeletons hidden away in these rooms, nothing so dramatic, only ‘cardboard boxes, piled up on the carpet and on the bare mattress…filled with pairs of shoes and empty coat-hangers, jazz vinyl from the sixties and seventies, unwanted gifts of hand lotion and scented candles still wrapped in dusty cellophane.’ Nothing more terrible, nothing more true, than this absent-minded accrual of the mundane.

Her style is so assured, so pitch-perfect that she can reveal, momentarily, the quiet desperation of ordinary people’s lives in a single sentence: the room a young girl practises her violin in after school, watched by her ‘intimidated and gratified’ parents, ‘smelled of hot plastic from the lights, and of sweat from the Zumba class that came before Suzuki’. Those two outwardly arcane activities become prosaic when located in such a municipal space. The collection is suffused with such constrained observations, sometimes pointed, other times gently mocking: in ‘Coda’ there is Margot ‘riding upstairs with aplomb on her Stannah stairlift’, while her daughter reads an old copy of ‘Madame Bovary’, its pages, like her own life, coming apart as the spine’s glue crumbles, falling into her lonely bed.

‘Coda’ is one of the strongest stories in the collection: its narrator, Diane, resolves to ‘keep my inner life out of my mother’s sight’, whilst admitting to herself that she was ‘never the one who caught the ball. I was never in the right place at the right time’. Very often great short story writers - Mansfield, Cheever, Carver - elevate the everyday to something sublime by rooting those insights in the language used by ordinary people who struggle to make sense of what they are feeling. Hadley does the same, rendering complex, messy lives in their almost-tragic familiarity. But she never patronises her characters, nor dismiss their concerns as something unworthy of serious literature. She knows the words she writes will have been lived by her readers’ too.

Perhaps there are narrative weaknesses: in two of her stories (‘The Other One’ and ‘Dido’s Lament’) there are coincidences that stretch credibility to the limit. But, then again, coincidences do happen in life, and it is only when we see them described in print, or acted out on screen, that we raise our eyes and tut, and then enjoy their consequences. After all, literature is artifice and it would be churlish to single out something seemingly more forced than all the other words artfully placed around them.

And perhaps other readers will be frustrated by the suddenness of some of the stories’ endings: they feel, occasionally, truncated, their characters left with too little understanding of what we have just witnessed: and we are being asked to fill in rather too many gaps when another paragraph (or two) would have been more satisfying and with no less artistic integrity. A small quibble, and perhaps just another way of saying that I wished that these stories, and the lives they explore, had continued a little longer, even though, like the lives themselves, I knew they had to pass away.

This week Colin Hughes, who as CEO of AQA oversees Britain’s largest exam board, said that there are “almost no downsides” to exams moving online. I wrote this article in UnHerd to argue that, on the contrary, there are only downsides to moving away from paper, pen and pencil, and the pupils who will lose most are the most disadvantaged.

When Labour first announced its intention to impose VAT on independent school fees in July 2024, the rhetoric from various politicians, including the current Secretary of State for Education and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was predictably righteous. We were told this was a necessary ‘fiscal correction’ which would allow the state to raise vital funds for the state sector. The boldest, and most frequently heard boast, was that this money would fund the recruitment of 6500 new teachers. Many questioned not only how they were going to do this, but also by when; furthermore, such a number sounds impressive, but it would actually only work out at around 1.8 teachers per school in England. Now, as the policy’s consequences continue to unfold, we are witnessing not the promised improvement of state education, but a textbook case of ideological dogma colliding violently, and predictably, with reality.

The timeline of this disruption is as swift as it is stark. Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledged that it would remove the VAT exemption that applies to private school fees. By 29 July 2024, the government confirmed that a 20 per cent VAT rate would be applied to fees from 1 January 2025. Many were shocked at the unnecessary speed that this was done: it had been assumed by many working in independent schools that it would come into effect for the next academic year. By bringing it in half-way through the year it hit parents who had been unable to plan for this; worse, for those middle-income parents of Y11 and Y13 students they were left with the terrible choice of having to either take the considerable financial hit, or remove their children just before they took their exams in the Summer. Added to the financial pressures on independent schools in England, from 1 April 2025, charitable business rates relief was removed.

The results have been devastating. Since the policy was introduced, 33,231 pupils have left the independent school sector. This rate of departure is considerably faster than the government had expected: they stated that 37,000 pupils will leave the sector in total. To put it another way, these numbers show a 5.6 per cent decline in numbers; the Office for Budget Responsibility had previously estimated that numbers would fall by 6 per cent in the long term. As a direct result, more than 100 private schools have either announced their closure or a merger with another school. These institutions are taking with them an inestimable store of educational knowledge and history, specialist expertise, as well as the quiet, subsidised relief they provided to the state system by educating children who would otherwise require a desk in an already overburdened classroom elsewhere. The number of children leaving the independent sector is well known, but what is less frequently discussed is the number of jobs that have disappeared when a school closes: many of the teachers will struggle to find jobs, but there are also support staff who have lost their income, not to mention the many businesses that relied on those schools to keep going. Every school that closes is a tragedy. As Emma Park wrote recently in The Spectator:

There is something particularly poignant about the closure of a school. The sound of instruments being played, the cheerful pictures on classroom walls, the life given to a street by children milling about, all that can suddenly disappear.

We were promised that this raid on private education would bring material benefits to maintained schools. Indeed, this is probably why the policy was popular at the time of the election: who could argue against finding more money for the 94% of pupils who attend state schools? Instead, the latest figures from the annual School Workforce in England report, reveal that there are 1,900 fewer teachers in state schools than there were last year.

This is an astonishing failure. The government has managed to create a totally unnecessary and chaotic displacement of pupils, shattered the financial viability of hundreds of independent schools (many of them with specialisms in SEND education), and caused profound anxiety for thousands of families, but has also failed to arrest the decline in the very workforce the policy was meant to support.

The rationale for this policy was always thin, predicated on the simplistic, static assumption that independent schools are mere playgrounds for the super-rich. It disregarded the thousands of middle-income families making extraordinary personal sacrifices to opt out of the state system, and it also ignored the economic reality that an independent school closing its doors is a net cost, not a gain, to the public purse. None of this matters to the government because the political gains on the left of the party are deemed to be worth it. Indeed, it is questionable whether the Labour leadership really believed that they were going to fund state schools from this money: the Prime Minister admitted on X that much of the funds would go towards social housing.

If the aim was to improve state education, the strategy has failed on every measurable metric. Instead of a flourishing, better-funded state system, we are witnessing a contraction. The VAT policy has proven to be a blunt instrument, wielded with a reckless disregard for the delicate ecosystem of British education. It is, in the truest sense, a disastrous experiment: an act not of fiscal correction, but fiscal vandalism that has successfully made the entire system poorer, more crowded, and, ironically, more elitist. The super-wealthy will continue to send their children to boarding schools charging close to £60K per year; but the parents struggling to pay for their child to go to an independent school because, very often, they will get the support they need there that the local school cannot offer, will suffer. The Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Laura Trott, has rightly referred to this legislation as ‘vindictive ideology’ that will damage all schools. Good laws are rarely founded on envy and spite, but this was, and unfortunately it is children who will suffer the most. The Secretary of State, Bridget Phillipson has, ultimately, a duty of care to all children who attend schools in England. Her record shows that she is not fit for this responsibility, nor her position.

I wrote the following article for the UK magazine The Critic. I wrote in response to a new report, published by University College London, on the apparent inequities built into bursaries awarded by independent schools. The report, though, is fundamentally flawed, and the fact that its principal author is a writer and academic who has written extensively about independent schools being ‘engines of privilege’ only adds to the sense that this was never going to be an objective study of an important topic. Here is the first paragraph of the piece, and the rest is, I think, available to read online if you follow the link.

The Labour Party’s policies on education have always been distorted by its obsession with independent schools. There are many senior figures, including the Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, who loathe the sector and would abolish it tomorrow if they could. They simply cannot see the benefits such schools — many of which are genuinely world-class by any objective measure — bring to British society. For them, the sector is Eton, all entitlement and arrogance, although the reality is, of course, very different. Nuance has no place in this particular form of class envy. For those on the left there is only one acceptable school model and it is non-selective, co-educational, and paid for by the state.

Link.

Sometimes the past comes back to you, fully formed and in iambic pentameter. Ever since I learned Portia’s speech from Act 4, Scene 1 of ‘The Merchant of Venice’, it resurfaces when I see an abuse of power or a misunderstanding of justice. I learned it for homework when I was fifteen; forty years later, it is still with me:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Because I also studied Books IV and IX of Paradise Lost, random lines rise to the surface of my consciousness at unexpected times, and I have images in my mind that are as vivid as real memories from my childhood. I still teach Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and one or two sonnets by him; thankfully, William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ is still available for GCSE students to study, and its greatness remains undimmed by time and technology. I learned many of these poems by heart for my English Literature O level and A level courses. When I think of the sheer volume of lines we had to learn for these examinations, it astonishes me that we were not just able to do so, but that we were so unquestioning in our acceptance that this was not just advisable but also possible. But these were in the days before mobile phones.

When I was doing the second part of my PGCE in the 1990s, I sat at the back of a classroom in a (prestigious) independent school in Oxfordshire. The teacher, who had a raffish air and a wing-commander’s moustache, had set for homework an extraordinary number of lines from Milton for the pupils (all boys) to learn. As he called out their surnames (no first names then), a boy stood up and, sometimes hesitatingly, began… ‘Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell...’

If they got it absolutely correct they could sit down, but if they slipped up in any way they were hit on the head by the teacher with the complete works of John Milton (a very different physical proposition than the complete works of John Keats). Again, no one complained; indeed, some of the boys thought it hilarious when it happened to them or, even better, if it happened to a friend. None questioned the value of learning lots of lines of complex seventeenth-century poetry. It was simply what you did in English Literature lessons. They did the same in Classics, only in Latin and Greek.

How often do we do that now in our secondary schools (the learning of lines, not the hitting of heads)? Probably not very often now that poems are published in question papers, but I wonder what we have lost by not being more demanding of our pupils’ innate ability to learn, and often learn quickly. I must have resented having to learn so many lines, but that bitterness has long gone, and they are now such a part of me that I cannot disentangle them from my own view of myself. They are me and, as I say, are more perfectly constructed than the sub-linguistic memories dredged up from some insalubrious corner of my past. More than that, though, I feel they are a finer part of me, a clear gift from a writer, via a teacher, to my childhood self, and one which I still try to pass on.

Every year, when I teach Year 9, I ask them to learn a number of poems by heart. I give them an end-point in sight (both in terms of time and task). This year the class has been able to give a choral reading of ‘To be or not to be’, and last week I gave them four poems to study: Ozymandias by Percy Shelley, The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling, Meeting at Night by Robert Browning, Mirror by Sylvia Plath and this, the first lines of Burnt Norton by TS Eliot:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Before I asked them to memorise some of these poems, the class had to analyse them: I told them to write about which poem they found the most difficult and why, and also to write about which lines were clear and understandable, and which were deeply complex and ambiguous. I asked: what were the main themes in these poems? Could they write about form and structure (how did rhyme affect their understanding of a poem when it occurred)? What else did they notice?

In the last thirty minutes of a double lesson, I asked them to choose to learn either Shelley’s poem or the extract from Burnt Norton; the majority of the pupils went for Ozymandias, and some were able to recite it word-perfect after eighteen minutes. Quite an accomplishment. Others took longer, and I set it for homework, a task that AI could not possibly help them with in any way.

When they returned for the next lesson they had all learned the poems, and nobody made mistakes. Some of the pupils talked about how the task had opened up conversations with parents and other relatives about the poems they had learned when they were in school: Shelley was there, Shakespeare too, and other names mentioned. I have no doubt that the memories, and lines of poetry recited over those dinner tables will have brought much pride to those parents who could still complete the poems without a single error. And their children also took great pride in getting their recitations completely word-perfect. There was much cheering when each was completed.

But the real test, I said to them, will be in the weeks to come when I ask, without notice, for them to recite the poems they’ve learned; that strain of recall will successfully interrupt the ‘forgetting curve’ and will, hopefully, embed the words, and their meaning, still further, and push them deep into their long-term memory, perhaps to be recited over a dinner party with their own children, in several decades’ time. As a final task, I gave them The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost and asked them to annotate it. We then went through each stanza and explored why it is not simply about a path not taken (if it is about that at all). The written work I have asked for is a little difficult, but sometimes pupils will surprise you if you set them something that is probably suited for older students. I asked them to imagine Shelley, Eliot, and Frost in a room together and answer this question: ‘Which of these writers do you think has the most hope, and also which has a view of time that is the most valid?’ I’m intrigued to find out what they write in response to this.

I wrote this piece on the decline of British comedy for The Critic. It is free to read.

Here’s the opening…

If you want a perfect illustration of the dismal state of British comedy today, tune in to the second series of Last One Laughing. The concept is simple: get a bunch of comedians in a room for six hours and tell them to make each other laugh. The twist is that they all have to remain stony-faced throughout; if they so much as grin, they are expelled by Jimmy Carr, the ubiquitous host for programmes that involve forced fun (look no further than The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, which has become as predictable and unloved as Jools Holland’s ghastly Hootenanny). Eventually, in episode six, the final two comedians have to go “head-to-head” and the first one to laugh loses. This year, nobody laughed, probably because the final two, David Mitchell and Sam Campbell, didn’t say anything funny. It was a suitably mirthless end.

To read on click here.

Is the page finally beginning to turn on children and screens? For the first time since the advent of social media, we are seeing a burgeoning alliance across all political divides to protect children from digital harm. In 2024 Jonathan Haidt delivered an urgent manifesto for change in The Anxious Generation, and at the beginning of this year Australia responded with a ban on social media for under-16s. Now even Britain is finally recognising the scale of the problem. Despite this week’s decision by MPs to consult rather than enforce, the fight will rage on. Deliberation doesn’t work in the arena of addictive substances.

However, the war on classroom screentime has yet to be properly waged, let alone won. Schools have embraced online learning with an almost evangelical fervour, urged on by billion-dollar businesses and bedazzled education secretaries.

Overwhelmingly the lure of ‘one-to-one devices’ has gripped schools and, in a blitz of blue light, children across the country are gazing distractedly at screens instead of their teachers’ faces and their books.

Pupils often go unmonitored online as the teacher attempts to keep the class ‘on task’. Flitting ceaselessly between a proliferation of tabs – some educational, some not – a lot of swiping and scrolling take place. But learning? Not so much. Research has shown that students learning online spend as much as 39 minutes out of every hour off task.

The principal casualty of the digitalisation of education is the textbook. Leading publishers such as Pearson have moved online, ruthlessly killing off these reliable anchors of learning. Textbooks, damned by tech zealots as ‘analogue’, are slandered as boring compared with online resources, which offer video clips, audio, 3D modelling and other seductive 21st-century ‘essentials’.

We would beg to differ. For ‘boring’, substitute calming, reputable and blessedly undistracting. Pearson owns Edexcel, one of the biggest examination boards and currently spearheading the transition to online GCSEs and A-levels. Pearson should take a long hard look at its own educational principles.

Of course moving everything online makes things much cheaper, but schools must hold such powerful businesses to account. Pearson et al have a moral duty to research the impact of transferring education online. So much is lost in the process.

John Jerrim, a UCL-based educational researcher, conducted an experiment where 3,000 pupils took PISA tests in maths, science and reading. Over three months, half the group did all their work on paper and half on a computer. At the end, the paper-based group scored 20 points higher than the one working on screens – the equivalent of half a year’s extra schooling.

Nearly 100 per cent of ten-year-olds in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are issued with standardised textbooks in core subjects, compared with 10 per cent here. These countries, unsurprisingly, all vastly outperform us in these subjects, according to the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.

Sadly, British schools often have no choice but to buy digital resources because publishers like Pearson have killed off the textbooks they once printed. Such a policy is a sunk-cost fallacy. The real cost – to our children’s ability to concentrate and learn – is immeasurable. A healthy, thoughtful, productive society is not a realistic expectation if children are not learning properly.

In contrast to a screenful of apps, Power-Points and gamified platforms, a chunky textbook provides a stable source of information. A linear repository for knowledge, it offers a tactile sanctuary for prolonged study. Online alternatives, designed for bite-sized consumption, cannot compete with the textbook’s ability to serve as a distraction-free companion to a pupil’s intellectual growth.

Textbooks also beat screens in that they don’t damage eyesight, disrupt hormones, delay sleep, trigger headaches, affect spinal formation and exacerbate symptoms of ADHD and autism, as screens do. That’s quite the list of harms for a medium which is less effective than its forerunner.

Textbooks are deliberately condemned by many in the ed tech industry as ‘inert’, ‘primitive’, and ‘outdated’, but the reality is very different. Leaving aside that they are less prone to crashing or running out of battery, they are far easier to navigate than multiple apps, enable longer and calmer periods of focus, help develop essential skills (such as notetaking) and, because pupils read from a physical page, are far more conducive to delivering knowledge that sticks.

If you talk to many teenage pupils, whether they are studying Latin or chemistry, psychology or economics, those who have an excellent, well-edited textbook prefer it to endless handouts, links and websites. They fully acknowledge that the latter methodology fragments their learning, and impairs how they access and decipher knowledge.

In education, the tools given to children should be as simple and clear as possible so that they uncover the beauty of a subject without unwanted distractions.

Sadly, the medium has become the subject. Screens have their (limited) place in this process of discovery, but too often they are a barrier; a backlit, noisy, crowded space designed for distraction, not absorption. In comparison, a textbook offers a quiet, authoritative voice that promotes sequential, linear learning.

If we wish for children to master the complexities of a subject, we must first grant them the simplicity of a medium that knows when to be silent. Ultimately, the textbook provides the one crucial thing the digital world cannot: a finite horizon, within which a child can find the peace to think.

Technology education? Of course! Education technology? An oxymoron that needs to be exposed. Bring back the textbook.

I wrote a piece for UnHerd on Reform UK’s recent attacks on Bangor University. Here is the opening part:

Over the past decade, British universities have eagerly imported the American culture wars. Now, the UK seems to be in danger of importing the Trumpian “cure”. Earlier this week, Reform UK’s Head of Policy, Zia Yusuf, warned Bangor University that it would lose funding under a Nigel Farage-led government if its Debating and Political Society continued to ban speakers from the populist party.

“Bangor University have banned Reform and called us ‘racist, transphobic and homophobic’,” he posted on X. “I am sure they won’t mind losing every penny of that state funding under a Reform government. After all, they wouldn’t want a racist’s money would they?”

It is, of course, the height of irony that a debating society is unwilling to debate the political ideas of a now-mainstream party. But quite apart from the university’s attempts to distance itself from the society’s decision, Yusuf’s threat raises a broader question: to what extent would a Reform government emulate the Trump administration’s punitive approach to higher education?

You can read the rest of it here; it’s currently open to subscribers only. I’ll post the entire piece here in due course.

News that the National Education Union (NEU) is about to expand its membershipto school support staff should concern everyone who cares about the education of British children. The union currently adheres to an agreement made in 2017, to not allow membership to the 500,000 support staff who may be members of other unions. If this changes, then headteachers could be faced with everyone from teachers to school secretaries walking out due to disputes over pay.

The election of Daniel Kebede as general secretary of the NEU in 2023 was always going to increase political activism by the nation’s largest teaching union. Kebede makes his predecessors, Corbynites Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, look like moderates. For those watching from the chalkface, the trajectory has been clear: the NEU is no longer merely a professional body representing the modern-day Mr Chips. Instead, it is a vehicle for an abrasive brand of ideological activism. This latest move is, potentially, the clearest statement so far that British schools are set for a difficult and disrupted 2026.

Kebede is relentless in his desire to obtain higher salaries for NEU members. He has referred to proposed pay increases which amount to 17% over the course of this parliament as, effectively, a pay cut. Worse, he claims that “Austerity Labour is paving the way for a Reform government.” It is a telling statement, suggesting that the NEU wants to widen its membership base for political reasons rather than to ensure school dinner ladies have better working conditions.

If the NEU succeeds in unionising the majority of a school’s workforce, from the department heads to the teaching assistants, the office staff to the site managers, it will gain the power to flick a switch and shut the school down entirely. Currently, if teachers strike, schools often manage to stay open for vulnerable children or exam cohorts using support staff and teachers who are members of other, much smaller unions. By swallowing these roles into the NEU’s radical orbit, Kebede ensures that any industrial action becomes a total blockade.

Imagine the damage that could be done if support staff and the majority of teachers walk out during the summer examination season. Schools can invigilate GCSEs and A-levels without a collection of geography or history teachers, but they shut down immediately if there are no security staff, IT support or electricians on site.

On the surface, this move is pitched as “sector-wide solidarity”, but really it’s a power grab. It is also a declaration of war within the trade union movement. By encroaching on the territory of unions such as GMB and Unison, which traditionally represent support staff, the NEU is fracturing the Trades Union Congress. It will be able to operate free of wider, collective responsibility.

Kebede has written to the union’s members that these proposed changes are necessary in order to “mount a successful defence of education”, but the reality is that any future action will be an assault on the learning experience of children, that overlooked constituency with no say in their future. If recent history has shown usanything about disputes involving schools, it is that any disruption to teaching has lasting and hugely damaging consequences. For the children, yes, but also for the society they go on to shape.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/uks-largest-teaching-union-is-attempting-a-power-grab/ (£)

I will publish the whole piece here in due course.

By David James

Swansea in the 1970s was a cultural blastzone: long gone were the days when the likes of Dylan Thomas, Alfred Janes, Mervyn Levy, and Vernon Watkins met at the Antelope pub to recite poems to each other. If you did that at a pub like the Terminus (built on a roundabout and filled with characters who were either eyeing up their own ends or fantasising about yours) you’d risk being bottled for being ‘bent’. The glamour of the 1980s, when you could drink bacardi and cokes, singing along to Bonnie Tyler in Barron’s Nightclub until 2am, was set in the unknown future. No, in the 1970s Swansea was anti-cultural then—a grim, grey place dominated by drink and despair. If you were into music then there was no scene to attach yourself to: there were only three record shops (Derrick’s, HMV and Virgin) that deracinated teens like me could move between to build our own, pre-digital playlists. Together with the John Peel Show they were our algorithms.

The coolest place to be was Virgin records in Union Street. Here the staff were a combination of the cool and the curious: now, they’d all be on some sort of spectrum, but then we (literally) looked up to them as they ignored requests to listen to the new Supertramp single and, instead, pass down something infinitely more interesting and (we thought) subversive: Swell Maps, the Slits, 999, The Fall, the names go on, some of them, like the Nipple Erectors or Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, seemingly thought-up by crazed and dangerous criminals you would hope to never meet. It was an education of sorts.

One day the sole female ‘shop assistant’ working there handed me a single that had just come in. She played it, and the sound, the lyrics, the image on the cover (an ice cream with a razor blade stuck in it instead of a flake), instantly impressed upon me a world that contained a different sort of threat than I was used to in the piss-strewn streets of Dylan’s ‘ugly’ (he got that right) ‘lovely’ (he got that wrong) ‘town’. ‘Killing Time’ by the Softies was fast and growling, and the lead singer (who I later discovered to be Big Mick) sang about ‘waiting on a street called Death, turn left at Soho Square’. Where was Soho Square, I asked myself, and what street would you go down if you turned left on to it?

When I moved to London many years later I discovered that this hell could have been (eventually, and accurately) Oxford Street or (depending where you were in the Square) Frith Street, Dean Street or Greek Street, each of them offering you different glimpses of an afterlife in the late 1970s, and not all of them heavenly.

And who were the Softies? From the back of the black and white paper cover you can see four men, badly dressed (even for the time), standing in an insalubrious doorway beneath a sign stating ‘No Dumping of Rubbish by order of GLC’. They look older than their music suggests they should be, but frequenting Soho in the 70s did that to you I thought then (and still do). Why did they seemingly disappear soon after this single was released? You will search for the track without much luck on Spotify. Was it because they split up? Had they all died? Were they pursued by their own demons or more earthly threats? Or was it simply because they were not very good? Like a lost letter to another time, and place, ‘Killing Time in Soho’ has ceased to exist.

Or so I thought, but then I started turning left down streets like Discogs, various Facebook groups, a blog written by someone who had a name like someone from a Thomas Pynchon novel, and found an implausible story around this band that included George Harrison’s chauffeur, Captain Sensible, a sex empire, drugs, drink and death and, improbably, a long-forgotten (and easily-affordable) album that you can still purchase from intense men who talk earnestly about bands who make The Softies seem high profile.

Like the Soho of the 1970s, there isn’t much left of the band, either physically or reputationally. They have become, to quote another line from the song, ‘captives of obscurity’. Forty-seven years after it was released I returned to the single, and wondered if I could bring them out of the shadows of that street of death (or, more prosaically), from the outer reaches of online second-hand record shops. There is just enough evidence out there to compose a second - and final - blog on this forgotten band, but whether there is the time to write remains to be decided.

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and I wrote this piece for The Critic this week. There are extremes on both sides of this argument: those who wish to reject all AI and tech in the classroom, and those who wish to embrace ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini et al whenever, and wherever, they can in schools. We need a balance, and a sense of perspective.

What is not in doubt is that reading is in decline, and attention spans are shortening (in adults and children). This article articulates some of our concerns. It is possible that there will be a more constructive future for AI in schools, but it is more likely that progress will be uneven, with casualties including coursework and homework and, possibly, we will see a growing inability to think and write creatively among those who overuse AI.

Training teachers to make the most of what AI can offer them (and their pupils) will be a huge challenge for schools, and with limited budgets they will have to look carefully at how they distribute their resources (and that includes staffing, training, and time). Anyway, here is the article: let me know what you think. It’s free to read. https://thecritic.co.uk/ai-will-make-our-children-stupid/?logged_in=1

You can find out more about ‘Schools of Thought: Lessons to learn from schools doing things differently’ here.

The Curriculum and Assessment Review was published last week. It promises to be the most important review of what is taught, and how it is assessed, in England’s schools since 2014. This is my response to it, published today in The Critic. It’s free to view. Click here.

The new Government document prosaically named “Suspensions and permanent exclusions in England” hardly sounds like a riveting read. And yet it is the most up-to-date document telling us what is really going on in the country’s schools. From it, we can gauge not only behaviour but also see how opinions around education can be shaped by deliberate misrepresentations of data.

Reporting on the figures this week, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror suggested that pupils in junior schools are becoming increasingly racist. When you look at the statistics it does, initially, seem to support such a conclusion: there has been a 220% increase in suspensions for racist behaviour in primary schools over the last three years. But the alarmist headlines, emphasising that children “as young as four” are being suspended for racism, are pure clickbait. In reality, only five reception-age pupils in the country were logged as using racist language.

That doesn’t stop groups such as the Campaign for Real Education (CRE) claiming that “our anti-racism teaching strategies are clearly failing”, which is, to say the least, highly debatable. For those of us who work in schools today, they are incomparably more tolerant places than they were several decades ago. The Mirror refers to two shocking videos of black children being bullied and concludes with the unfounded claim that “experts fear children isolated during the pandemic may have developed racist views.”

One of these self-styled “experts” is Maryam Javaid who, perhaps inevitably, is on a “journey” of motherhood and homeschooling. She likes to “share her ramblings”, and one of these is the claim that a pupil being called a name “creates shame, fear and a message that they don’t belong”. She calls for “clear policies, swift accountability and staff trained to […] challenge racism”.

But contrary to the experts, what these statistics actually show is that, in many ways, schools are doing all that Javaid and others like her are calling for. Teachers are regularly trained in issues relating to equity, diversity and inclusion. Safeguarding training is mandatory. Every school will have publicly available policies on bullying which will include action taken for racist behaviour. No profession is perfect, but if there is one that is committed to treating everyone equally, and being under huge scrutiny to do so, teaching is just that profession.

Schools are often a reflection of society’s ills. If racist language is ubiquitous online, if once-taboo words become used in everyday conversation at home, they will be heard in the playground. Inevitably, our youngest pupils, lacking the ability to edit themselves, or use words in a suitably sensitive way, may repeat what they have heard. But the truth is that children are no more racist than they have been in the past, and much good work is being done in schools to ensure that they remain overwhelmingly tolerant places.

We have to strike a balance between being too zealous in our desire to accuse young children of beliefs they imitate and don’t understand, and seeing our schools as broken places which can only be fixed if we pursue one agenda. For a four-year-old to be excluded from school for using racist language isn’t just a damning statistic: it is a national tragedy that will, almost inevitably, ultimately harm the society that has been so severe in the first place. Many people — primarily the parents — will have failed that pupil, but the school will not be the main influence.

Accusing a whole school system of failing to combat racism and intolerance is self-defeating. We ought to have more faith in our young people and those who teach them. It must not become another theatre in the culture wars.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/englands-schools-are-not-becoming-more-racist/