Category Archives: Writings

A very English mess

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Nice try, Nicky. Despite official efforts to bury the bad news of the  government’s major volte face on forced academisation under rolling election coverage, Morgan’s climbdown late last week has been widely publicised and celebrated by what had turned into a formidable array of opponents stretching right across the political spectrum.

In the end, Morgan dared not defy a handful of powerful Tory backbenchers or shire leaders – according to one, the government had simply ‘gone bonkers’ – implacably opposed to having their local power over education destroyed.

But there was a different sort of retreat, just as significant in its way, also at the end of the week.   Free school founder Toby Young, now stepping down as CEO of the West London Free School he set up in 2011,  has expressed regrets at his ‘arrogance’ on school reform in a Schools Week interview, in particular his criticism of other teachers, heads and local authorities. ‘I hadn’t grasped how difficult it is to do better.’

It appears that Young (who now claims that his remarks were taken out of context) has finally caught up with some of the more complex social and political reasons why so many local schools can’t keep pace with the rich, socially selective independent sector that he so admires.

For anyone who has crossed Young over the years, this was a bitter sweet moment ( my phone was buzzing all afternoon).  Let’s not forget the huge part he played in undermining public and parental confidence in state education, particularly non-selective schools,  during the early years of the Coalition which led some commentators seriously to suggest that critics of free schools were ‘actively evil.’

It all feels like another age now. Both Morgan and Young’s retreats signal one more important staging post in the fast diminishing credibility of the school reforms unleashed by the Tories after 2010. If Gove brought an intellectual energy and spurious coherence to a fundamentally flawed project, Morgan embodies the rabbit-caught-in-headlights nervousness of someone placed in charge of a convoy of rackety vehicles that now threatens to veer out of control.

Huge change has been forced through our system at all levels on scant evidence and even less meaningful consultation. There is no substantive proof that academisation is the answer to improved school performance and I don’t know anyone who still argues that  free schools remain a vehicle for meaningful parental involvement.Young himself, an exceptionally well -networked figure in Tory circles, was always an outlier. …

How to think about forgiveness in daily life

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Marina Cantacuzino is telling me a story about two women, both of whom discovered that their partners were having affairs. For the first one – let’s call her Woman A – the infidelity, says Cantacuzino, “was seen as the act of ultimate betrayal, which not only ended her marriage but for the past 30 years has been the defining, obsessional, story of her life.”

As a result, her children, whom she had roped into the bitter, protracted war against her husband, more or less lost contact with their father.

Woman B was equally devastated to discover her husband’s affair, which came to light through text messages sent accidentally to one of their children.

But, over time, she decided that “These things happen, she was not going to let it ruin her life. The affair had to stop but it wasn’t going to be the big defining moment for her family.”

Some years later it was, says Cantacuzino, “as if it had never happened. There was no residue.”

Bitter marital breakdown. Estranged siblings. Adult children who “divorce” their parents. Friends who never speak again. Such all too common stories are a testament to the challenge of forgiveness in everyday life.

Extremes apart, almost everyone has a tale of an unthinking comment or unkind act (or several) by a family member or friend that can never quite be thrown off.

At the same time, none of us wants to be one of those slightly sad people with a long, knotted tale of deep resentment that is hauled out at every occasion, often over a string of seemingly minor incidents going back years: that person with a powerful investment in telling the story only one way – our way. Cantacuzino seems like an excellent adjudicator of such thorny issues. A former journalist with a calm, non-judging presence (she is a practising Buddhist), she set up the Forgiveness Project 10 years ago. A charitable enterprise, it has explored, largely through vivid storytelling, the many ways in which individuals deal with major trauma such as murder, sexual violence or acts of terrorism.

Her years as a journalist speaking to people about “the smaller injustices of their personal lives” meant that when she started collecting forgiveness stories she was ‘‘keen to avoid the ‘smaller’ and more personal narratives and concentrate instead on the more extreme stuff. I wanted to be more serious and engaged politically.”

The Forgiveness Project has done some remarkable work, bringing together perpetrators and victims from just about every serious war zone and area of conflict in the world, including Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel.…

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH PRIVATE EDUCATION?

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Speech given at Westminster Abbey,  March 7 2016, to Westminster School.

 

Standing here in Westminster Abbey this morning, speaking to you, the pupils of Westminster School, it is only too easy to grasp the true meaning of educational privilege.

The beauty of these buildings, the dizzying proximity to power and real influence – just across the road!

An education at Westminster school will surely offer each of you myriad opportunities,  access to influential networks and significant career advantage  –   as the Sutton Trust report Leading People 2016 confirmed only last week.

I am also sure that you are all frequently reminded of how lucky you are – to be at a school where the amount spent on your individual education per year is near or well above what the average UK citizen earns in total.

But let’s reverse the accepted wisdom for a moment and imagine that what Westminster, and other schools like it, represent is a not an ideal or a model, to be replicated, but, in fact, a seemingly intractable problem.

For society

And possibly even for yourselves.

My father was educated here.  It was a very long time ago now.

But the path he followed, from Public School to Oxbridge to Parliament –  the classic establishment route –  has changed depressingly little over the past century.

As he got older, he came firmly to believe that not only did private education constitute a major barrier to a good schooling for all, but that it had in some ways limited his own social and intellectual understanding.

Indeed, he was intrigued by, and somewhat envious of,  the experience of those of his children and grandchildren who were educated, at local state schools,  alongside those of very different backgrounds.

There are many potential failings of a divided system –  even for its supposed beneficiaries:

To not recognise how much of one’s own achievements are down to good fortune rather than natural ability;

To learn how to mask, rather than grasp, our shared human vulnerability;

To develop unrealistic ambition or too narrow a definition of success;

To fail to understand the root motivations and meanings of the ‘lives of others’.

The writer and academic Lynsey Hanley, born on a council estate in Birmingham,  tell us how the educational divide looks from the other side,

how those from poorer backgrounds can be equally trapped by low expectations, few opportunities and a lack of networks.…

Our Kids reveals American class inequality – which has all-too-evident parallels here

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Robert D Putnam is that rare creature, a political scientist who has risen above specialism and skilful use of statistics to become the “poet laureate of civil society”. Since the publication in 2000 of Bowling Alone, which charted the weakening of social ties in modern America, he has been courted by civic and religious leaders, including Barack Obama. His latest book, Our Kids, has already inspired passionate essays by Francis Fukuyama, Ed Miliband and Tristram Hunt, each, tellingly, finding in Putnam’s research a subtly different message.

Our Kids is an absorbing sketch of the US in the 21st century, built on hundreds of ­interviews with families around the nation (most of which were conducted by Putnam’s research associate Jennifer M Silva) and employing a hefty range of empirical evidence. The book’s starting point is Putnam’s home town, Port Clinton in Ohio, which in the 1950s was a “passable embodiment of the American Dream”. Putnam is careful to acknowledge the racial and sexual prejudices of that era and to note: “Class differences were not absent . . . [but] those differences were muted.” For all that, Port Clinton was, he believes, a “site of extraordinary upward mobility . . . In the breadth and depth of the community support we enjoyed, we were rich, but we didn’t know it.”

Returning home more than half a century later, he finds the town to be a place of stark contrasts, a “poster child for the changes that have swept across America in the last several decades”. Our Kids charts the new divide, with the poor struggling to survive economically, educationally and emotionally, while the middle classes lead largely stable, prosperous lives.

Putnam touches on some striking features of the new inequality, from the rapid growth of a black and Latino middle class to how the better-off are more likely to be politically involved than their poor counterparts, who have become disengaged and distrusting. Although crime has fallen to near-record lows, there has been an exponential (and expensive) rise in imprisonment, particularly of black men, with catastrophic implications for the families left behind.

There is even a striking new divide in family relations. Among the middle classes, the 1950s model of stay-at-home mother and wage-earner father has given way to two graduate working parents, both highly involved with their children. Middle-class children enjoy every advantage: access to good schools, a broader range of extra-curricular activities, a wide net of parental contacts and even the social benefits of family dinners.…

Under the hammer and sickle: David Aaronovitch’s Party Animals

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Anyone brought up in a left-wing family gets used to a particular joshing, voyeuristic line of questioning (“I expect you spent your whole childhood on political marches”, “Did you call each other comrade?”). This is not just an everyday nosiness about an unconventional upbringing; at its worst, it can feel like a discomfiting, albeit disguised form of spite. The question is, in other words: what’s it like to have been raised in a family that had the idiocy or courage (take your pick) to believe it might be able to change the world?

So, one can imagine the glimmer in the publisher’s eye when the idea for this book was first mooted: an authentic portrait of a much-diminished species, the British communist, through the eyes of a red-diaper baby who grew up to be a Times columnist; a tale of quaint habits with serious questions at its heart (despite that corny subtitle echoing Gerald Durrell). According to Aaronovitch, Danny Finkelstein, the Tory peer and his colleague at the Times, keeps asking him when the book is going to be out, because “I want to understand why they did it”. There it goes again – that end-of-history smugness, that needling curiosity.

The trouble is that Aaronovitch knows too much and is, in his intelligent, irritable way, too interested in the multiple backstories involved to reduce his tale to one that will satisfy sceptical, bemused Middle England. Any half-decent account of British communism and the people who made it is bound to yield a long, tortuous, multilayered narrative, and this one is no exception, although it’s a story Aaronovitch never feels fully in charge of, in either theme or tone, for reasons that become clearer by the end.

As a result, Party Animals reads more like a series of extended columns on a number of loosely connected topics. No bad thing. There is a great deal of fascinating material along the way. So we are treated, inter alia, to an early set piece on the visit of Yuri Gagarin to England in 1961, one of the few times when communists were “once again, the people of the future . . . [and] briefly touched the golden face of fashion”; a short history of the rise of the Communist Party in Britain; an account of its relationship to Soviet communism; an anthropological look at the life and habits of CP activists; a long, excoriating feature on show trials of the 1950s; an intriguing case history of domestic political surveillance; and some highly entertaining stories about Aaronovitch’s early political and romantic adventures.…

The slow revolution that makes learning fun

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It’s hard to feel like a covert revolutionary when hovering around a reception class on a chilly Thursday morning. But within minutes of arriving at St Silas’ Church of England Primary School in Blackburn, it is clear that I have stepped into a bold educational experiment that daringly flies in the face of much current accepted thinking. All around, four- and five-year-olds are playing energetically with water, building things or writing stories. So far, so normal, except that – compulsory phonics instruction apart – pupils are allowed to concentrate on one activity all day if they want to. Equally, they are free to wander from task to task.

I am not often in touch with my inner Nick Gibb but at first this “free play” approach leaves me feeling a little at sea. Don’t children need structure? I mean, what’s the plan here? Moving up through the school, my Hirschian jaw begins to relax. All parts of the national curriculum are being covered, in depth and, apparently, with huge enthusiasm. Some nine-year-olds show me the Anderson shelters they have built before reading from their spirited reimaginings of aspects of the Second World War. It is abundantly clear that by Year 6, St Silas’ has created a room full of independent learners, deeply engaged in what they are doing.

This is reflected in steadily improving Sats scores, despite the school losing many high achievers to two newly opened local free schools. This year’s cohort are the first to have spent their entire primary school life using the Slow Education approach.

Over at Matthew Moss High School in Rochdale, an 11-16 comprehensive, a similar revolution is in progress. A mix of independent project work, detailed feedback and group work, and an emphasis on genuine research skills, produces 12-year-olds who can talk articulately about whether we are at risk of running out of electricity, while sharing details of their ongoing correspondence with postgraduates from the University of Manchester.

The well-resourced music department is full of pink- and blue-haired teenagers playing loudly in studios, mixing tracks or creating promotional material for upcoming concerts. Senior leaders at Matthew Moss, under a new headteacher since 2013, are currently wrestling with the implications of the English Baccalaureate, reluctant to force students into taking subjects that don’t engage them. The school, in the top quintile for measures of deprivation, is keen to improve on its 2014 GCSE headline results (49 per cent of pupils achieved a C or above in five or more subjects, including English and maths).…

Vivian Gornick: one of the most significant writers you have probably never heard of

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Vivian Gornick is one of the most significant writers you have probably never heard of. A biographer, journalist and memoirist, she is among the supreme essayists of the past 50 years, a writer who bridges the worlds of Joan Didion and Meghan Daum, Susan Sontag and Leslie Jamison, without ever having achieved the cultural glamour or worldly success of any of these figures.

In a recent interview in the Paris Review, Gornick, now aged 80, was candid about her marginal status for a large part of her writing life and how often she longed to be part of “the uptown parties, the New York Review parties . . . And then I’d have to recover from that nonsense and forget about it – really forget about it. And I did – over and over again.” These last emphatic admissions are typical of Gornick, redolent of the frank self-examination and literary and professional toughness that run through all her work, her ongoing dedication to the only thing that matters: the writing life, the process of turning “neurotic necessity into literary virtue”.

For all these reasons, perhaps, we Gornick enthusiasts are a distinct, fierce tribe, each with our own favourite well-thumbed books and essays, proselytising to anyone who will listen about her brilliance. Recently, making contact with some other devotees through Twitter, I even discovered a couple of new books, recognising from the first page Gornick’s distinctive approach to her craft, her determination “to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say”.

Raised in the Bronx by Jewish, communist, immigrant parents, Gornick began her writing life as a reporter on the Village Voice, where she worked from 1969 to 1977. Her early books, such as The Romance of American Communism (1977), chart the emotional dynamics of left-wing politics and she has more recently produced a biography of the great anarchist Emma Goldman.

But it was Fierce Attachments, a more personal work of non-fiction, first published in 1987 and now reissued by Daunt Books, that made her name. The personal essay was not then the ubiquitous form it is today but Gornick – even though she emerged from such a political background – was one of its early pathfinders, developing, in unique fashion, the less formal narrative voice pioneered by the “new journalism” of the Sixties and Seventies.

The book tells of her growing up in the Bronx, a childhood dominated by “Ma”, her frustrated and hypercritical mother, plunged by sudden widowhood into years of histrionic mourning.…

Grammar school plan makes Kent a national battleground

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Sevenoaks in Kent, a quiet, affluent commuter town, is the most unlikely site for a teeming political drama. But as the county – and the country – waits for Nicky Morgan to make a final decision on whether to open the first “satellite” grammar school in 50 years, the profound political implications, either way, are beginning to sink in.

The original proposal, for a new co-educational annexe to the Weald of Kent girls’ grammar school in Tonbridge, a full 10 miles away, was rejected by Michael Gove in 2013 and a revised single-sex proposal submitted in November 2014. No one was surprised that the Conservative party fudged the issue in the runup to the general election. But nearly four months on, with no decision forthcoming, there is impatience on both sides, although Roger Gough, cabinet member for education at Kent county council, which is backing the plan, declares himself “hopeful”.

A government insider says: “The department knows it’s not watertight legally. They know it’s going to be subject to judicial review. My soundings suggest that they think they have, say, a 60% chance of winning. Essentially the decision is political.”

If the annexe is approved, it will open the floodgates to similar expansion plans from grammars from around the country. It will also mark a significant retreat from the Gove years, when there was a strong commitment to the principle of non-selective education and rejection of old-style Tory claims that grammar schools promote social mobility.

Gove’s departure, the regrouping of some backbench Tory MPs in defence of grammar education, and the fact that local MP Michael Fallon is in the cabinet, have shifted the balance of power within the party. It’s possible, says one policy expert, that a “few new grammars” are to be offered as a sop to rightwing backbenchers in the long-rumbling row over the European referendum. “Six months ago I’d have said that Gove settled the question of the grammars inside the Tory party and it wouldn’t come back. I was wrong”. However, if Morgan stays firm and rejects the proposal, it will “probably settle the question of the grammars for a generation. The government will make noises about legislation to allow new grammars but it will probably be like foxhunting. It will never happen.”

[wp-svg-icons icon=”camera-3″ wrap=”i”]  Mary Boyle, above, head of Knole academy, Sevenoaks, says: ‘An annexe is an outbuilding or a shed on the school property.…

What would Keir Hardie Say?

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If a week is a long time in politics, a century can seem surprisingly short. With uncanny timing, the centenary of the death of Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader and arguably its most towering figure, falls at the end of this month, on the very weekend that Labour delegates will gather in Brighton for this year’s annual conference, the first under the party’s new leader.

Hardie has long been claimed by all wings of the party. Possibly the most unlikely endorsement came from Peter Mandelson who suggested, back in 1992, that Hardie would have felt “rather pleased” with New Labour’s changes. In his failed bid for the Labour leadership in 2010, David Miliband made a far more cerebral case for Hardie as a self-help, rather than a statist, socialist. And earlier this summer, in this paper, Alan Johnson invoked the “pragmatism” of Labour’s first leader in support of the candidature of Yvette Cooper and New Labour’s record in office.

Read the rest of the piece here.

NB I am about to launch a new website later this month – please watch out for it. …

Harry’s Last Stand by Harry Leslie Smith and Austerity Bites by Mary O’Hara – reviews

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Big Society? More like Battered Society. Melissa Benn on two books that expose the ‘war on the weakest’ in Cameron’s Britain

In a manner suggestive of Ken Loach’s magisterial 2013 film The Spirit of ’45, Smith sees the postwar era as Britain’s finest moment destroyed a half-century or more later by neo­liberal economics and unrestrained finance capital.

Right now, some inventive literary festival programmer is probably trying to set up a staged discussion between Harry Leslie Smith and Mary O’Hara. If not, they should – it would be fascinating. Smith, a mere 91 years of age, is boiling with anger at what he sees as the UK’s return to the indignities of his Great Depression childhood. O’Hara, an experienced reporter, brings a cool head to her story of the impact of the cuts over the last four years.

Yet for all the difference in age, experience and literary voice, these writers, both of whom began their lives in poverty, speak of remarkably similar things. And both books add to a mounting body of work on the growing economic divide in modern Britain: “an emergency”, according to Smith, “as dire as the economic crisis of 1933”.

Only a few pages in, I decided that the best way to read his unusually structured book was to approach it as a kind of epic poem, one that moves in circular fashion from passionate denunciation to intense autobiographical reflection. Smith’s early childhood – he grew up in Yorkshire in the 1930s – was one of almost Dickensian deprivation: his older sister Marion died aged 10 of tuberculosis in Barnsley’s old workhouse, and his unemployed miner father of alcoholism and loneliness. Wartime service in the RAF at least brought Smith regular meals and a reliable wage, and he met his German wife, Friede, in the ravages of postwar Berlin. The couple moved to Canada where moderate economic prosperity and ordinary family contentment rescued him from the bitterness of his early years.

In a manner suggestive of Ken Loach’s magisterial 2013 film The Spirit of ’45, Smith sees the postwar era, in particular the creation of the welfare state, as Britain’s finest moment, a compact between industry and labour, the middle and working classes, destroyed a half-century or more later by neoliberal economics and unrestrained finance capital. (Unlike Loach, he also puts a bit of the blame on what he sees as the over-mighty trade unionism of the 70s.)…

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THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

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The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

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A Cold War Tragedy

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Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

 …

Melissa Benn