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Geoffrey Court began teaching in 1973, and worked for twelve years in inner-city primary schools, for most of that time in senior management positions. He also has considerable experience as an adult education tutor, in particular in a psychiatric social club. In 1985 he established what was to become The Circle Works, an educational charity offering children and adults in east London opportunities to "learn through reflective dialogue". In practice, this means providing sessions in school where children, especially those who are troubled, can explore their lives through talk, play and arts activities, and offering time and space where teachers and others can think purposefully about their work and its meaning. The Circle Works sees the group, including the community of the school class, as a rich source of learning in its own right, and plays a part in the nationwide web of organisations and individuals working with the connections between personal and interpersonal experience and learning.
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These words come from a speech made in the autumn of 1976 by James Callaghan, then Prime Minister. The occasion was a stone-laying ceremony at Ruskin College, Oxford, but the foundations were being laid of much more than a building. The event is widely seen as marking the threshold of a new era in British education: an era whose defining characteristic is accountability. The school curriculum was no longer to be a 'secret garden', hidden behind high walls and tended solely by educational professionals. Callaghan wanted to draw the whole nation into a 'Great Debate' about the very nature and purpose of education.
Whether that debate has ever really taken place is itself a matter of argument; but what is beyond dispute is that from the mid-70s on, scrutiny of the education system, and political intervention in its management, increased to unprecedented levels. As a result, the landscape of the "secret garden" was to be bulldozed beyond recognition, as the old haphazard arrangements were replaced by far more formal structures. The most prominent of these was the establishment under the 1988 Education Reform Act of a National Curriculum, divided into four 'Key Stages' with testing at the end of each. The Education (Schools) Act of 1992 introduced a rigorous national school inspection regime, managed by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). Later in the same year the first national performance tables, designed to increase parental choice, were published for secondary schools, to be followed in 1996 by 'league tables' for primary schools as well.
All these measures had been put in place by Conservative administrations, but as the 1997 general election approached, the Opposition too were promising that 'education, education, education' would be at the top of their agenda in government. New Labour brought fresh vigour to the centralisation process, and the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, placing emphasis on performance targets and prescribing the detail of what was to happen at certain points of the primary school day, were introduced in England in 1998-9. (Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own, different systems.) The time for debate was over: schools must direct all their efforts towards the raising of educational standards, and those standards were to be defined by central government.
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