The Select Committee unearthed one nugget. The four dejected bankers they carpeted had not a single banking qualification between them. But we didn’t know that. And we trusted them.
Are the 30 men and women who have been Education Ministers/ Secretaries of State any more fit for purpose? Of the 16 Conservatives who have held this high office since 1944 Margaret Thatcher and Gillian Shepherd went to their local grammar school, Ken Baker’s school went independent, and poor John Patten went to a state funded Jesuit college. All the rest were educated privately. And twelve of the 16 went on to Oxford or Cambridge. Not much built in awareness here of what schools mean for the hoi polloi, the six in every seven among us who go to the local comprehensive.
The Labourites are slightly more in touch. Only seven of their 14 ministers were privately educated; only six went to Oxford or Cambridge. Edward Short was briefly head of a secondary school, and Estelle Morris taught in local community schools for 18 years before she took to full time politics. Some triumphed over huge obstacles. Fred Mulley took his first degrees while a Prisoner of War. David Blunkett was blind and fatherless, and Alan Johnson had to leave his grammar school at 15.
But perhaps the wisest of all was George Tomlinson, even though he left school and went to work at 12. “Minister”, he said 60 years ago, “knows nowt about t’curriculum”; that and how to teach were for the professionals. Would that his successors were as aware of their own limitations.
Diogenes
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