Search results

SHIRLEY WILLIAMS rounds the corner of the narrow country lane looking like someone in that TV advertisement for drinking chocolate; chin tucked into a yellow roll‐neck sweater, and the rest of her face pinched and red from chill winds and sporadic drizzle.

Replying to a debate on students grants, the Minister of State, Department of Education and Science, Mrs Shirley Williams, said that the present grant system had a recent birth. It dated back only to 1962 and since that time there had been a sharp increase in the overall cost of student awards. Whereas in 1963–64 the total value of all student awards was £71·3 million, in 1967–68 it had jumped to £129·6 million and next year, after the Brown recommendations were carried out, it was expected that the total sum would be £155·4 million. That was an increase of 118 per cent over only five years.

Question such as these are typical of the debate currently sweeping the whole area of 16 + assessement and certification both in England and Scotland. The Schools Council, for example, have put forward a proposal for a common system of examining at 16 + to replace the GCE and CSE. This proposal has been rejected for the moment by the Minister of State for Education, Mrs Shirley Williams. In Scotland, a large and influential committee set up by the Secretary of State for Scotland under the Chairmanship of Mr J Dunning has been deliberating for many months on the form assessment and certification at 16 + should take. This article describes a contribution to this debate in outlining a way in which some of the problems in usefully assessing the young school‐leaver may be overcome.

The voluntary policing of advertisements by the industry's own watchdogs, the Advertising Standards Authority, has come under heavy fire from Shirley Williams, Secretary for Prices and Consumer Protection, and John Methven, Director General of Fair Trading. So once again it faces the threat of statutory control. The Advertising Association has responded by increasing its levy on members in order to strengthen its control system. Alec Snobel reports…

As befits a former contributor to these columns Mr W. Easton, the new ATTI President, delivered two unusually literate and digestible addresses at the Association's Harrogate conference. His inaugural address on the theme of student power tailed off slightly into impatient paternalism but faithfully reflected the concern for student interests and the constructive approach to student militancy which is currently shown by many FE college teachers. He became genially avuncular in his reply to Mrs Shirley Williams after dinner. Sir Ronald Gould was more brilliant than usual and reminded us that the NUT has had an appalling problem on its hands in finding a worthy successor to him. Rarely has the ATTI conference been so little bored by its set speeches.

A new Education Act is now being actively prepared by the Department of Education and Science and will probably be tabled during the 1969–70 parliamentary session. Preparations for the Bill are being overseen by Mrs Shirley Williams, Minister of State at the Department.

The General Election is over, with the predicted result. Margaret Thatcher is in Downing Street/and Mark Carlisle (and Rhodes Boyson, from whom may the good Lord preserve us) in Elizabeth House. With them is Janet, the Baroness Young, as Minister of State; as far as I know her principal educational qualification, apart from her own degree, is to have been born the daughter of the Bursar of Jesus College, Oxford. Perhaps that is symbolic: the present Government shows every sign of being strong on finance — in the sense of cutting it — and weak on the content of education. Meanwhile Shirley Williams has departed from the scene, as have Margaret Jackson, Bryan Davies (a former FE teacher), Mike Noble (once chairman of Burnley LEA), and myself. We shall dispense with expertise: prejudices to the fore¡

Quis docebit ipsos doctores? Who will teach the teachers themselves? — as Juvenal might have written. Even more important, what shall we teach them? The questions arise in an acute form from Shirley Williams's announcement that the Government has at last agreed that there shall be a general system of maintenance allowances for those remaining in full‐time education after the age of compulsory schooling. The object of the scheme will be to encourage more young people to stay on, and at last it is recognised that we have in Britain the lowest staying‐on‐rate in Western Europe, outside the predominantly rural countries of Portugal and the Republic of Ireland. If more 16 to 19s remain in full‐time education, someone will have to teach them.

Current needs for the teaching of modern languages are greater than ever before because of the importance of direct communications with other countries, and the fact that we still had a language education problem should merely heighten our determination to analyse and overcome the difficulties. It may well be that the euphoria generated by the movement towards reform in the early 1960s foundered on trying to do too much; that however generous the impulse, schools could not successfully cope at one and the same time with a massive expansion in the numbers of pupils learning a foreign language and with a revolution in teaching methods. We must now try to decide what we can realistically attempt — and above all do it well.