Role-Models
Role-Models
Role-Models
My monthly column for the East Anglian Daily Times:
Whenever I am in London with an hour to spare between meetings, I make my way to the same location. It’s the National Portrait Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square. In particular, I always head for one room on the second floor.
It is home to the Tudor Collection, a truly mesmerising sequence of glowering portraits. Self-confident monarchs and power-brokers glare out at us from dark and brooding backgrounds. They exude a kind of inner authority, a knowingness that they alone run their world and no one should dare to change it.
These are portraits, pure and concentrated, that speak to us from another age.
They are the people who ran England with such mighty self-belief and who are now long gone, remembered through their deeds, their plotting, and these vivid images.
They are a reminder, in other words, of the fleeting nature of life – the way we have just one chance on Earth to make our mark.
Those Tudors certainly did that, and I peer with particular interest at the huge Holbein painting of the bloated Henry VIII and then across at his pale and introverted son, Edward.
These figures have a special resonance for me. Henry was desperate for a son, having abandoned his first two wives, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, when each failed to give him the male heir he craved.
Finally Jane Seymour gave birth to the sickly Edward in 1537 who, as a cold and austere child monarch, established a chain of grammar schools, ours among them. That was back in 1550.
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I was thinking of this sense of history the other day when listening to a speech by Education Secretary. Speaking to the Social Market Foundation he talked of his heroes, the people who have shaped his educational outlook.
Many commentators were surprised by who he cited.
The first name I have to confess I had never heard of. I had to resort to Wikipedia. It was Antonio Gramsci who, I learn, was an Italian economist committed to the basics of education, rather than fashionable progressive nonsense.
So far, so Gove.
But it was the second choice of hero that surprised us more: reality-TV celebrity Jade Goody. In his speech, the Secretary of State explains why he admires her so much:
There was no doubt that Jade was intelligent. But at a tragically early age she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Terminally ill, she had to make plans for her two beloved boys. She used her money to send them to the most traditional, academically demanding prep school she could find. So they could enjoy the best education reality TV could buy.
I suspect even the most snobbish critic of the Big Brother culture will share Michael Gove’s respect for the way Goody invested in her children’s future.
But I do think there’s something a bit odd about a Secretary of State for education holding up as an example to us someone who uses their new-found fortune to opt out of the state education system – the very system he is responsible for.
For all the gloomy headlines about education standards in Suffolk, the reality is that we have many great schools.
Reading some of the bile about complacency and poor teaching in one newspaper, a long-standing parent phoned me and said: “I don’t recognise what I’m reading about Suffolk schools. My children went through the local schools, learnt well, had great opportunities, and are now at university”.
That’s why if I was Secretary of State choosing a hero, I would want to celebrate the many thousands of parents who could afford to send their children through private education but choose, quite deliberately, not to.
They see the strengths, the inclusive values, the preparation for life, the sense of character we aim to give young people. Twelve of our students have been offered Oxbridge places in the past eighteen months. But I’m genuinely just as proud of the students heading off to apprenticeships or training as mechanics. It’s what state education should do.
And I’m especially proud of the parents who know all this and put their trust so firmly in us.
Geoff Barton
22 February 2013
17:15
Friday, 22 February 2013