Audio: Pob vs The Blob - Who is Winning the Hearts and Minds of England's Teachers?
Introduction given to the Academy of Ideas Education Forum, Monday 10th February 2014
In this audio recording I reflect on the quality of the educational debate that surrounded the introduction of the fifth version of the National Curriculum for England.
Nearly ten years on many on the educational left and educational right judge that this curriculum has been a failure.
My introduction to the Academy of Ideas Education Forum in 2014 could help us to understand why and how this curriculum has failed.
Today it seems nearly certain that the Labour Party will win the next UK General Election and that it will again rewrite the National Curriculum for England.
If this proves to be the case, I sincerely hope that we will have a better debate about the future of the compulsory school curriculum than we did back in 2014.
To do so, we must all try to raise the standard of our democratic discussions of education. Those that name call in the political discussion of education contribute to one of the key intellectual problems of our age. In England we urgently need to have a grown up debate about education and the school curriculum and to do so we must start taking each other more seriously.
Audio here: https://archive.org/details/EducationForumPodcastNo35