Cridland said the education system should not be a barrier to great teaching but must support it. He acknowledges that the system being proposed from Government is not playing well with schools leaders. Those who heckled Education Secretary, Michael Gove, at the recent NAHT were not “union firebrands”, Cridland said. And Gove needs to carry school leaders with him.

The CBI chief welcomed some recent moves: slowing down “rushed age 16 exam reforms”; looking again at the draft D&T curriculum, focusing on developing “high quality vocational education” and changing performance measures to reflect each individual child’s performance.

But he warned that policy was changing rapidly on many different fronts and there was something lacking: a common thread which unites all these changes.

Cridland suggested three areas which needed to be addressed quickly:

Standards and accountability

High standards and expectations were important but education is “more than rigour”. The “exam treadmill” should be streamlined: “fewer but tougher tests in more relevant subjects”. This would free up time for schools to focus on “broader education”. And accountability systems need to keep pace.

“Exams are essential but are not sufficient in creating a great education system”.

Ofsted should become a “guarantor” and publish reports which position exam results in “a broader narrative”.  This would place achievement within the broader education framework.

The Curriculum

Achievement should be targeted at age 18. Cridland suggested a “refreshed, single curriculum from age 14 onwards” with differentiated pathways.

“Gold standard vocational A-levels” should be developed.

All pupils should have individual learning plans (ILPs) which map both academic and personal development.

Careers guidance

Schools were struggling with this (see thread here on this issue). Cridland feared Ministers didn’t appear to be prioritising it. He worried that the forthcoming impact assessment would reveal a negative picture. If it did then urgent action would be required. The Government, he said, “cannot now step back completely on careers advice”. Heads needed to be given “a clear steer” about this crucial issue.

Author’s comments:

It seems that John Cridland and I will hit the dance floor together. We agree about how education is more than just exams; graduation at 18; establishing parity between high-quality vocational qualifications and academic ones; the use of formative assessment via ILPs; an accountability system which recognises “broader education” and, crucially, raising the profile of those neglected subjects: careers education and impartial, accurate careers advice.

There’s just one area where the CBI chief and I are out-of-step. Cridland suggests an overhaul of the curriculum from age 14-19. But in most of the developed world upper secondary education begins at 16, not 14, and comprises two years not four. All pupils in these countries study a broad curriculum up to the end of lower secondary – that is, age 16.

The question is, however, how far is Michael Gove matching his music to our dance?

The recent initiatives promoted on LSN, by Compass and the NUT and by ASCL are evidence of the widely felt need to build a new framework for state schooling, going beyond merely criticism of what the government is doing.

It is for this reason that a number of organisations have come together to join this debate and to set out the principles that they believe will need to underpin “a better future for our schools”. The resulting document identifies ten areas where the government can clearly be shown to be failing. It then sets out key directions that could to be followed after 2015.

Underpinning our approach is the belief that that all aspects of the school system are connected and all contribute to the core aim of raising standards for all. So no part can be ignored – standards and structures both matter. The government appears wedded to the fragmentation of many aspects of the school system while enforcing rigid centralisation in others. We’ve given our campaign the title “Picking up the Pieces” because we believe that a new government will need to restore coherence as well as redefining the proper role of the many stakeholders in education.

Amongst the key messages we’ve identified are the need to:
• listen to the stakeholders who tell us that skills, qualities and values are as important as knowledge;
• stop the centralisation of power in Whitehall and restore it both to teachers and to local communities;
• stop wasting energy and resources in conflicts over how and by whom schools are governed;
• promote collaboration rather than competition;
• value every kind of achievement not just the narrowly academic;
• reassert the values of public service and prevent schooling being turned into a privatised business run for profit;

The full document can be found here.  We recognise that this is only the beginning of a process. There is much to do to develop these proposals into detailed action plans that can be implemented.

But the first stage is to develop a consensus about the direction of travel. Our hope is that this initiative will contribute to that process and that the debate around it will help to clarify what a new government should be aiming to achieve.

To this end, we are holding a launch meeting at the House of Commons on Wednesday 12th June from 6.30 to 8.30. It is open to anyone with an interest in debating and developing such a programme. Amongst the speakers will be Fiona Millar, Melissa Benn and Kevin Brennan MP (Shadow Schools Minister).

This document has been developed and is endorsed by the Campaign for State Education, the Socialist Educational Association and Information for School and College Governors. It will be published in the summer edition of the journal Forum.

If you want to come to the House of Commons meeting on 12th June, please let us know by writing to launch@pickingupthepieces.org.uk

It is because all his work is based on his assertion that humans have two discrete modes of thinking that he refers to as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is a result of human evolution and to a major extent is written into the human genome. It is the ‘fast thinking’ that is linked to survival in evolutionary terms. It is very good at solving certain kinds of problems very rapidly but frequently fails spectacularly with complex problems associated with scientific and mathematical concepts that millions of years of evolution have not prepared us for, other than giving us large brains with a highly flexible cerebral cortex. Kahneman describes System 1 as ‘a machine for jumping to conclusions’, which is the title of Chapter 7 in his book.

This is precisely the theme of Lewis Wolpert’s ‘The Unnatural Nature of Science’ (1992). Kahneman would surely agree with the former 1997 Economics Laureate James Meade about the limitations and dangers of common sense.

I first came across Daniel Kahneman by accident on listening to BBC Radio 4 in June 2012, when he was being interviewed about his new book. He repeated the following puzzle and the programme presenter asked the audience to phone in their solutions.

A bat and ball costs £1.10 in total.
The bat costs one pound more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

System 1 provides the almost instant answer of 10p, which is, of course, wrong. The correct solution requires the conscious slow thinking of the cerebral cortex that Kahneman refers to as System 2.

Everybody has a System 1, primed for action. System 2 is a product of developmental education. Although Kahneman does not consider the educational implications of the ‘bat and ball’ problem they are profound. System 1 can also be developed by teaching and learning designed to produce ‘fast thinking’. For example we can all respond instantly to, ‘What is two add two?’, and even, ‘What is two times two?’, because familiarity and repetition have burned these responses onto our genetically inherited and incredibly efficient System 1.

The educational theory of behaviourism was based on the principle that all learning was about extending System 1 through repetition, punishment and reward. Most modern mainstream theories of learning are based on the developmental models of Piaget, Vygotsky and many others. The following quotation from Vygotsky is so important it is worth repeating.

As we know from investigations of concept formation, a concept is more than the sum of certain associative bonds formed by memory, more than a mere mental habit; it is a genuine and complex act of thought that cannot be taught by drilling, but can only be accomplished when the child’s mental development has itself reached the requisite level.

Not only are such concepts a feature requiring Kahneman’s System 2, but so also is the process of building the sophistication and power of the internalised individual concept structure that allows access to the higher Bloom levels of thinking.

Marketisation of the education system has driven English classroom practice back towards System 1 behaviourism and away from the System 2 approaches that can make children more intelligent as they progress through a cognitively aware education system.

So what is the answer to the ‘bat and ball’ problem and why do even the best System 2 educated mathematicians and others often get it wrong?

Kahneman states that even if you possess sufficient System 2 capability, you still get it wrong because System 2 is lazy. Firing up System 2 takes effort and if System 1 jumps to a convincing conclusion quickly enough, as it nearly always does, then System 2 is not even deployed even by the brightest and most expert.

Effective education is therefore not just about developing System 2 so it is able to cope with complex problems but also making us sufficiently mentally resilient that we routinely make the conscious effort of actually ‘using our brains’.

Johnston-Wilder and Lee’s term, ‘Developing Mathematical Resilience’ is therefore well chosen and highly applicable to engaging our brain’s System 2 capability.

Johnston-Wilder S & Lee C (2010), Developing mathematical resilience, in: BERA Annual Conference 2010, 1-4 Sep 2010, University of Warwick
Have you worked out the correct solution to the ‘bat and ball’ problem yet? No mathematical expertise is needed, just the resilience to test your System 1 answer.

If the ball costs 10p and the bat costs £1.00 more than the ball, then the bat and the ball together must cost £1.20, not £1.10. Not difficult is it? So how do you get the answer? Try trial and error. The ball must cost less than 10p so try 5p. The bat now costs £1.05 giving a total of £1.10. So you have it: the ball costs 5p.

Before the GCSE C grade in maths became so grossly degraded, every holder of this qualification, and many with lower grades, should have been able to apply the following simple algebraic solution to the problem rather than resort to trial and error.

Let the price of the ball be x pence
Then the price of the bat must be x + 100
If the total price of bat and ball is 110 pence then:

x + (x +100) = 110
2x + 100 = 110
2x = 10
Therefore x = 5

Slow thinking wins, and our education system needs much more of it.

Isn’t it obvious that children with Special Needs are best catered for in Special Schools, and mainstream children benefit from not having their time wasted by the extra attention needed by their less fortunate peers? And it goes without saying that children that are insufficiently able to get an A*-C grade in academic subjects like history, French, English literature and pure sciences are much better off, and will cause less trouble, doing easy vocational alternatives.

If school pupils are so badly behaved that they disrupt lessons and ignore their teachers then it is also obvious that more rigid discipline is needed with zero-tolerance punishments for the miscreants and more rewards for the compliant.

According to Michael Gove’s Free School model, all that is needed to improve schools is to take power from professionals and give it to parents demanding ‘common sense’ school policies.

This further strengthens the market-based approach and extends it to how subjects should be taught as well as to how pupils should be dressed, grouped and managed. By such means ‘common sense’ should reign supreme and standards will rise as a result of the universal power of market forces.

The 1977 Nobel laureate economist James Meade who died in 1995 wanted the following epitaph inscribed on his tombstone: “He tried to understand economics all his life but common sense kept getting in the way”. As for economics, so for education, and no more so than in England in the Michael Gove era.

There is no educational issue where this is truer than that of mixed ability teaching, which has been extensively researched over the last 40 years. There is no consensus on the effects of mixed ability grouping on the attainment of the most able, but there is conclusive evidence that all pupils benefit when taught alongside more able peers.

The Cognitive Acceleration approaches of Shayer and Adey and others stress the importance of the social context of learning, and especially peer-peer interactions. This does not rule out setting by ability but CA and other developmental approaches do not involve pupils sitting in silence, in isolated rows, absorbing information.

The English education system has for some time been in the grip of fear of indiscipline in schools, for which common sense dictates ever more severe punishments and authoritarian control. Early on in my headship school, when we abandoned a rigid disciplinary regime based on punishment and rewards, replacing it with a programme of planned teaching of the skills of inter-personal relationships, on the Bloom affective taxonomy model, behaviour improved and both fixed term and permanent exclusions dropped to zero. This was sustained over many years.

T H Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog, that great Victorian defender and advocate of Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, believed that science was ‘merely the application of Common Sense’. No scientists believe this today. I like to think that Huxley was just confusing ‘common sense’ with logic. We now know that science teaches us that the truth is frequently profoundly counter-intuitive.

Lewis Wolpert’s excellent 1992 book ‘The Unnatural Nature of Science’, contains many examples of the ‘common sense’ fallacy, some of which feature in the following list.

If a piece of string was to be tightly fitted around the 25,000 mile circumference of a smooth globe the size of the earth and then lengthened by a yard, how far from the surface of the globe would the string then stand out? (Answer: about 6 inches).

What happens to the pressure in a balloon as you inflate it? (Answer: it gets less).

If you fire a bullet from a gun horizontally across a flat field and simultaneously drop an identical bullet from the same height, which will hit the ground first? (Answer: they will both hit the ground at the same time).

If you empty a glass of water into the sea and allow it to mix with all the oceans in the world then after this mixing has taken place, dip it in again to refill it what are the chances of retrieving some of your original molecules? (Answer: very high).

When you burn a piece of magnesium ribbon ending up with a pile of white ash how does the weight of the ash compare with the weight of the original piece of magnesium? (Answer: it is heavier).

If you toss a coin five times and it falls on heads each time what is the chance that it will fall on tails on the next toss? (Answer: 50:50)

If you add some ice cubes to a tumbler of water what happens to the water level in the tumbler as the ice melts? (Answer: it stays the same)

Adey and Dillon’s ‘Bad Education’ (2012) contains many more examples on this theme. I fear that misplaced ‘common sense’ populism is threatening to do great damage to the English education system.

Second, what happens in classrooms is critical for learning, so support teachers, time for lesson preparation and continuous professional development are vital.

Third, formative assessment rather than SATS and GCSEs: if possible, abolish arbitrary external assessment and support effective school-based assessment.

Fourth, cooperative citizenship schools could become the foundations for a democratic learning society in which all our children can flourish. Get rid of standardised external inspection, but develop critical friends to interrogate school self-inspection.

Not much of a story: I went to a Steiner school, studied maths and history of ideas, refused to take exams at university on principle and worked in adult/community education for many years, was a local authority adviser/inspector, Ofsted accredited and wrote or edited a few books on education. Mainly taught adults and youth, but had a weekly Y4 class doing ‘philosophy with children’ and circle time for a year (with a teacher present).

But has Mr Gove boobed again by attacking a history lesson plan which featured the Mr Men?

Gove faced questions yesterday by the Commons Education Select Committee about his condemnation of the resource. He told MPs he had personally done the research for his Brighton College speech after being alerted to the “Mr Men history site” by a Labour-supporting teacher described as a “very informative voice in the education debate”.

But the site is not named the “Mr Men history site”. It’s Active History, a popular site which contains hundreds of lesson plans for secondary age pupils. Teachers from all over the world subscribe so they can access them.

Mr Gove’s defence of his ridicule rested on this statement:

“The striking thing about it is that while there have been some people who’ve been offended, or who’ve disagreed with the thrust of the argument, no-one has disputed that it’s a popular resource, no-one’s disputed that it was material that was aimed at 15- to 16-year-olds, and opinion divides on whether or not it’s appropriate.”

The striking thing about Gove’s comment is that he seems to expect someone to say that this resource was unpopular. But that can’t be answered. Unless Russel Tarr, the website’s author, keeps a record of how often each resource is accessed then there’s nothing which will dispute or prove its popularity.

The second striking thing is that Mr Gove seems to expect someone to say the revision lesson wasn’t aimed at 15-16 year-olds when the rubric clearly says it was.  Perhaps Mr StruckDumb will step forward to claim that iGCSE candidates are not aged 15-16 but are really in Year 1 so any lesson plan designed for iGCSE can be used with 5 year-olds who are, of course, familiar with the Weimar Republic.

The popularity of the resource is actually irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether only a tiny number of teachers downloaded it or there were thousands. The teachers who chose to download it obviously thought it might work with their pupils. And that’s the point – they are professionals. They should be able to use their autonomy to choose activities they might find useful without the possibility of being sneered at by politicians or, worse, other professionals. Equally, they should be free to reject any plan they think is not appropriate.

What is also striking is that Mr Gove picked on one resource among thousands on a well-used and much-praised website to “prove” that the teaching of history had been infantilised.

But Russel Tarr quotes Einsten:

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Explaining something simply is not infantilising. And if explaining something simply means recruiting the Mr Men then so be it.

Orwell used animals to explain how revolutions can turn sour and how dictatorships manipulate and control. That wasn’t infantilising either.

These are anecdotes but are offered to show that Middlemarch is difficult. Michael Gove suggests that parents should be impressed if their 17 year-old daughter (sic) was reading Middlemarch. But literature isn’t about impressing other people. If someone picks up Middlemarch it should be because they expect to enjoy it not because they regard reading the book as intellectual one-upmanship.

However, if wily teenagers (or anyone else) pick up Eliot to impress then that can easily be achieved by tucking a copy of an easy read into the covers of Middlemarch and googling a summary which would probably be something like this:

“Middlemarch: set in provincial town during coming of railways. Passionate Dorothea marries bookworm Casaubon. Casaubon dies. His will prevents Dorothea from marrying handsome but penniless artist, Will Ladislaw. But Will was cheated out of inheritance by Bulstrode, now a Middlemarch banker (hiss!) and respected pillar of society. Meanwhile, marriage of idealistic Dr Lydgate to materialistic airhead Rosamond ends in tears. Spoiler alert: Bulstrode disgraced when drunken ghost from past returns. Dorothea marries Will. Brother-in-law, Sir James, once in love with Dorothea, is not happy. But Dorothea does good things and the world is a better place for her being there.”

Of course, this doesn’t do the novel justice and certainly not the moving ending. Here is Eliot describing Dorothea in the final paragraph:

‘. . . the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

It took me three attempts to reach that ending. My advice: don’t read Middlemarch just because it might impress others. Read it because you genuinely want to. If you find it hard going then leave it. Return to it later.  There’s a lifetime to enjoy literature – you don’t have to ingest the whole lot while you’re at school.  Life would be poorer if great books were abandoned at the classroom door.

And before you pick up Middlemarch – watch the BBC adaptation. And look out for the dress shop.

*This is not a representative sample. It cannot, therefore, be regarded as an accurate survey.

Note: Read the reviews first if you buy Middlemarch on Amazon. Some of the editions are not, as one reviewer put it, “Middlemarch-as-she-was-wrote”.  Yes, I know that’s not grammatically correct but it makes the point succinctly.  Some editions contain American spellings and one edition had pages missing.  And perhaps the time is right for the BBC to broadcast a repeat of the dramatisation.

Gove’s “survey after survey” implies more than one. So the DfE has dug deeper. What “survey’s” (sic) did it find?

First up is Lord Ashcroft’s poll (2012) which found a lack of factual knowledge about WW2 among 11-17 year-olds but showed that young people appreciated the human cost of war.

So far, then, one survey seems to support Gove. But what about the rest?

The DfE provided no link to its next citation: A survey of 2000 11-16 year-olds undertaken by Premier Inn. An internet search found that three newspapers, the Mail, Independent and Metro, had reproduced “shock-horror” articles citing the survey. The articles were remarkably similar which suggests the papers churned a press release without considering the reliability of the research. Premier Inn’s Facebook page (scroll down to 22 March) claimed the survey showed British teenagers were “clueless” about history and urged parents to explore historic sites. But the ridiculous answers suggest that a large number of teenagers were having a joke at Premier Inn’s expense. These included Delia Smith being one of Henry VIII’s wives and the plague being a heavy metal band.

Next up was a survey by Professor Robert Tombs for the think tank Politeia. Again, there was no link. An internet search found a Politeia study co-authored by Professor Tombs but nothing about a survey. The study could, of course, have contained a survey but no details were given in the press release and the study itself is not freely available.

An article in London Mums Magazine was the next source. This was based on research by an exam revision service.

The final survey was, again, not a survey but a 2010 Telegraph article about a poll done by Sea Cadets to discover the extent of knowledge about England’s maritime past.

So, the DfE “survey’s” included only one, Lord Ashcroft’s, which could be described as a properly-conducted poll. One was a marketing exercise taken at face value by gullible journalists. One wasn’t a survey and the final two were articles about surveys. An internet search found no details of either so we don’t know whether there was a representative sample, what the questions were or how the survey was conducted.

Gove says he is in favour of “evidence-based” policies. However, it’s unclear what value there is in “evidence” which includes surveys of dubious reliability – unless, of course, they’re chosen simply because they support Gove’s point-of-view.

*Freedom of Information request via WhatDoTheyKnow.com.  Download here.

UPDATE 13 May 2013

The original post contained a typo: WhatDoTheyKnolw.Com.  This should have read WhatDoTheyKnow.com.  It has been corrected.  My thanks to Simon for pointing out the error.

UPDATE 14 May 2013

1  Nick, commenting below on 13 May (1.10pm and 2.08pm) told us that OnePoll did the Premier Inn survey.  OnePoll provides a panel which comprises different demographics (eg teenagers, although parental consent is required for those under 18).  The surveys are posted on OnePoll’s website and panellists can choose which questionnaires to complete.  They are paid for each completed questionnaire.  OnePoll does not write the questions – that is done by the group commissioning the survey.  The New Statesman has discovered that OnePoll also did the Sea Cadets and UK TV Gold surveys.

2  Kathy Bramley has left an annotation at the foot of the FoI response which says the survey cited on the London Mums website had not been found on the Education Quizzes site but had been sent in a press release pack to London Mums.

UPDATE 24 May 2013

Radio 4’s More or Less discussed the surveys on 17 May.  It confirmed they were “non-rigorous polls … with the aim of turning the results into press releases designed to create publicity”.  The programme’s presenter, Tim Harford, spoke to Michael Marshall  (Merseyside Skeptics Society, BadPR) who explained how the PR survey industry operated:

1      These lightweight surveys are commissioned by companies to generate media stories.

2      The firms doing the surveys post them online for registered users to complete.

3      Registered users are paid for each completed survey.

4      There’s no monitoring of who is completing the surveys.

5      Those who answer the questions don’t necessarily care too much about accuracy.

The clip can be heard here at 11.36 mins.

Concentrating on a “limited range of accountability measures skews what is taught” wrote Joan Sjøvoll, Head of Framellgate School, Durham*.

Joan Sjøvoll concentrated particularly on science education but the points apply more widely. Some aspects of science (and all subjects by extension) are hard to measure, she said. These include: fostering curiosity, independence and innovation through exploratory learning and developing research and analytical skills.

An emphasis on teaching facts and reaching government targets neglects the role of education in enriching and deepening pupils’ learning. Sjøvoll criticises league tables for focussing on a narrow range of statistics which give little information about the quality of education in a school.

Accountability through a limited range of easily measured targets has negative effects:

1 It encourages teaching to the test (the OECD voiced this concern in 2011).

2 Schools judged successful in hitting these “limited and limiting targets” become more popular and expand while those less successful will be forced to conform to the same narrow focus on targets. This is at the expense of the “broader aspects of learning”.

Sjøvoll is concerned that EBacc’s concentration of academic subjects will push pupils away from other subjects and more practical qualifications. In turn, this is likely to encourage more pupils to take academic degrees at university when apprenticeships and practical degrees may be a better option. (This is likely to be worsened by the Government’s promotion of Oxbridge and Russell Group universities as the only places of higher education worth attending).

The best accountability measures should be sophisticated enough to drive curriculum development and improvement in learning. A narrow range of accountability targets does the opposite – it restricts education to what can easily be measured.

Note: This is the second in a series of summaries of essays which appear in the Wellcome report, “Effects from Accountabilities”.   A summary of the report’s conclusions is here.

*The Wellcome Trust added this postscript to Sjøvoll’s essay: “This article was drafted by Joan Sjøvoll, who sadly died before its publication; the final revisions were made by Martin Post [Head, Watford Grammar School for Boys]. Joan Sjøvoll made outstanding contributions to science education, not only as Headteacher of Framwellgate School in Durham, a science specialist school and home of the Science Learning Centre North East, but also as an adviser to government, the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust. She was a visionary with her feet firmly on the ground, and she is a great loss to science education.”

1 Who said, “Ich bin ein Berliner”?

(a) Adolf Hitler (b) John F Kennedy (c) A character in the musical “Cabaret”

2 What was the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour?

3 Who said, “We are more popular than Jesus”?

(a) The Manson family (b) The Tory party after its 1959 victory (c) The Beatles

4 In what year was the Abortion Act passed?

5 What was the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial about?

(a) Whether a book was so obscene it should not be published;

(b) Lady Chatterley was accused of causing her maid actual bodily harm;

(c) A Government minister was accused of passing secrets to his lover, a Russian spy codenamed “Lady Chatterley”.

6 Which of these characters is a real person? Tick all that apply:

(a) Lady Chatterley (b) Lord Profumo (c) “Screaming” Lord Sutch, 3rd Lord of Harrow

How well did you do? (Check with Google. I’m not giving answers – it might encourage cheating.) Whatever the result, what conclusions could I make if you failed to answer all six questions correctly?

1 Your history teaching was woefully bad.

2 It’s a sign of “dumbing down”.

3 Trendy teaching methods caused you to be a “numbskull”.

4 None of these.

The correct answer is (4) None of these. It would be unreliable to make assertions about how you were taught history based on your performance in six questions chosen by me. They all relate to significant events so I could argue that knowledge of these is essential for understanding modern life. But my opinion of significant events may not chime with yours.

Of course, people need historical knowledge before they can understand events. But when Education Secretary Michael Gove berates teenagers for not knowing what he considers are basic historical facts then he is judging history education by the lowest common denominator: acquisition of facts alone.

Hector, the teacher in Alan Bennett’s play, The History Boys, speaks about the best moments in reading words from the past. He says,

“…it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours. “

This is what history is, when someone long dead speaks to you as if in the same room. It’s when you read a soldier’s letter from the front line after Ypres.  It’s when you struggle to transcribe the plea to Queen Mary from Elizabeth when she was suspected of treason. It’s when you study burial records and find the Parish Clerk wrote:

*1609 Nov 15 PARKS Henry “my son”.

This little entry tells in a few simple words the sorrow of a plague year.

Judging history teaching on how well pupils perform in a test of names and dates is crude. And when the test itself contains errors as did the one by UKTV Gold cited by Michael Gove then such simplistic conclusions deserve to be mocked.

*Entry in burial records for the village of Whiteparish, Wiltshire.