(He hasn't yet, but when he does – and he's not the most equanimous of ex-footballers, so give him time – there's a ready made bon mot. You're welcome.)
Earlier this week, listening to the latest The Rest is Politics, I had the satisfaction of foreseeing a reference to a bit of old news (vintage 2004).
<autobiographical-note>
In September 2004, retraining as a teacher...<tangent>
(because the skinflints* at HP had got rid of me a few months before they'd've had to shell out for my 20 years' service award)* You heard, skinflints. They are among the very few companies who choose not to index-link pre-1999 pensions. As a result the pension accruing from the first ⅔ of my service is a minuscule fraction of what I get for the last ⅓. For a longer whinge about this, see the last screenful of this, and for a fuller analysis of my erstwhile employer's penny-pinching skulduggery see here (a YouTube channel run by the HPPA).
</tangent>
... I was expected to have read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested everything the then education minister did (and in some cases ignored). In this case what Ruth Kelly ignored was the report on the future of education, commissioned by one of her predecessors.
</autobiographical-note>
In a comment about his hopes for the Burnham government...
<tangent.
On Burnham's first day in office, incidentally, the BBC Radio 4's 6 o'clock news started as usual with a number of headlines, and then continued 'Returning to our st... top story'. A close shave. It would have done nothing for the Beeb's alleged lefty leanings if the newsreader had persisted in the Spoonerism and greeted the arrival of a proper socialist in No 10 with the words
'stop Tory'.
</tangent>...Alastair Campbell said he hoped Burham's new education minister would dust off and update (of course – for one thing it was pre-AI) 'a 22 year-old report' about the future of education. Aha, I thought, Tomlinson.
- Provide courses which stretch children.
- Ensure that children have basic literacy and numeracy skills.
- Raise the status of vocational qualifications.
- Reduce the amount of assessment and the number of exams.
- Simplify the system - make it easier to carry over achievements from one course of study to the next.
- 14–19 diploma to replace GCSEs, A- and AS-Levels, BTECs and AVCEs.
But as Campbell said in that podcast, the Labour government were running out of steam, and the environment (and 'events, dear boy') were not such as might favour the upturning of so many vested interests, nor at such expense. The proposals were watered down ....
<parenthesis>
(Ruth Kelly's fanfare must take the biscuit for mealy-mouthed timidity:"For the first time we are going to take on and tackle the intellectual snobbery which has relegated vocational education to a second class, second best education," said Education Secretary Ruth Kelly, as she prepared to publish a White Paper responding to the Tomlinson report.)
</parenthesis>
...and surfaced, almost unrecognizably, as a bit of tinkering (Wikipedia again):
The Government's response, led by newly appointed (December 2004) Secretary of State Ruth Kelly, was to largely reject these proposals. Most notably absent from the government's white paper was the Working Group's suggestion for an overarching diploma system. In the run up to a General Election, and in the face of strong resistance from the Confederation of British Industry, they chose to reform existing qualifications by making them harder, and more clearly tied to basic skills.
Tomlinson dismissed this at the time as a missed chance. Meanwhile NEETs mount up (another TRIP+ podcast has one such saying that she would prefer 'LEETs' – LOOKING for Employment Education or Training.
L'Envoi
That spike last September was the record, more than in the heyday of Harmless Drudgery (when the progress of dictionary work justified the reference to Samuel Johnson:
'Lexicographer: a harmless drudge'
) And the most recent 12 months have included all 6 of the peaks greater than 20,000.
Not an overnight success; over-decade, perhaps.
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