Jane Miller

Late in July, well into the schools’ summer holidays, two copies of a consultation document entitled ‘The National Curriculum 5-16’ were delivered at the offices of the education department in a London borough large enough to sport three MPs. Slack and irresponsible as ever, the borough’s three thousand or so teachers were, in some cases, actually away. No doubt some of the borough’s parents (currently the nation’s darlings – provided, of course, that they are not teachers themselves, or black or unemployed) were away too. Schools have been back since the first week of September. By the last week of the month the consultation proceedings had been completed, and a national curriculum is making its way through the legislative machinery in some haste. ‘As soon as possible,’ the document insists.’

I have been reading the Twentieth Century’s special number on women, which is pink with a palely gleaming Mona Lisa on its cover. It’s odd that I’ve not read it before, since it came out in August 1958 and contains what could be described as my first appearance in print. The actual copy I have belonged to Betty Miller, and it is in her article, which is called ‘Amazons and Afterwards’, that I appear, anonymously and representatively, as Afterwards. The journal’s editorial includes me too, as one of the pony-tailed generation of young women, clones of Francoise Sagan and Brigitte Bardot, who showed no interest in ‘women’s civic rights’.

Working-class children do less well at school than middle-class children, and exceptions must not be allowed to interfere with that truth. Notions of linguistic or cultural ‘deprivation’ imply lacks or absences in relation to other people and to what schools are and offer, and, by squeamishly skirting the connections between social class and children’s experiences, chances and expectations, schools have turned to forms of ‘topping-up’ and remediation, which derive from rudimentary and distorting views of the realities of culture and language in people’s lives. For years, studies of school failure looked at what certain children and their families lacked which made them impervious to schooling, unwilling or unable to profit from it. Then, during what can now seem like a golden age, between 1966 and 1976, teachers, researchers and even, occasionally, educational policymakers started to ask different questions. These were about the difference between school knowledge and everyday knowledge, about learning as well as pedagogy, and about forms of assessment and the curriculum. Teachers would need to become as sophisticated and sensitive about the culture of their pupils as they were about the culture represented by the school. People who have good jobs, money and power often attribute these things to the success of their education; they are able to persuade their children that the strange rituals of schooling, that material and activities dull or meaningless in themselves, pay off in the end. It takes more imagination for the black daughter of an unmarried hospital cleaner to believe in the advantages of learning the chemistry needed to get an O level than it does for the white son of a doctor.

Sir Keith Joseph has chosen a good moment to kill off the Schools Council. It seems that it is a good moment to kill off all sorts of things. While thousands of young men are exposed unnecessarily to violence, and to its infliction – supposedly on our behalf, more probably to satisfy the vanity of a few unjust men and women, who want to go on running this country for a bit – a whole generation of young people faces a future of unemployment. That other jingoism, which asserts that effort is rewarded and that you have only yourself to blame, will ring out as they slink off to collect their dole money. Lesser cynicisms will melt into larger ones. And besides, few people will be prepared unequivocally to defend the record of the Schools Council. It was set up in 1964, a gentler time, by Sir Edward Boyle, and its brief was then, and has, in a variety of manifestations, remained, the combining of examination reform with curriculum development. These were areas traditionally kept apart, for the soundest political reasons and with dire consequences for children and teachers and schools. That brief, it should be remembered, included neither the control and determination of curriculum content nor a consideration of what a common system of schooling might look like. The present dismantling of the Schools Council could be seen as the latest in a series of government moves since Callaghan’s ‘Great Debate’ of 1976, which have been intended to divert attention from the paring down of educational provision. Reductive talk about a ‘core’ curriculum, initiated by that debate, has served since then as a means of channelling limited expenditure away from the question of what curriculum into a particular set of pressing short-term concerns.

‘Oh, come on now! It won’t be such a tragedy if you’re a little late! They’ll manage very nicely without you, you know.’ Moving closer to her he’d started to nibble her ear and then, with mounting passion, to kiss her neck. But she hadn’t responded. His words had stung her and she thought of all the other occasions when he’d referred so disparagingly to her work for the Party – their Party; she wondered if he’d ever understand that it was only out of a sense of total commitment to her political work that she derived the strength to endure their separation for good.