Which of the following statements is true: (a) the Prime Minister's education policy is drawn up by a journalist, (b) four- and five-year-olds have to be assessed on a schedule consisting of 117 separate tick boxes, (c) primary school teachers are told exactly what to do every ten or 15 minutes?
Answer: all three. For these, as for so many extraordinary facts about our education system, I shall always be grateful to Ted Wragg, who died suddenly on 10 November. No one in education will need reminding of Ted's humanity and gift for satirising the successive attempts of government to impose yet more reforms on his battle-weary profession.
While his knowledge and experience were profound and his devotion to teaching deeply felt, his sense of the absurd made him a peerless guide through the complexities of government policy. Ted's articles were the kind of thing teachers would read under the desk when the kids weren't looking. One of his earliest contributions to Bremner, Bird and Fortune was a Ken Clarke version of the John Smith beer ad, substituting "budget" for "widget" in the chorus ("Budget! He's got a Budget! A Budget he has got!").
It was a constant source of dismay to Ted that proposals he put forward as satire had a habit of turning up a few years later as policy. Yet reality still managed to outdo even his attempts at parody: one of his favourite recent examples was how, as part of a drive to cut out duplication in education policy, both the Cabinet Office and the Department for Education created committees to look into the problem. Neither knew that the other existed.
In 1980 he wrote an article entitled "State-approved knowledge: ten steps down the slippery slope". It described how a government that was so minded could take over completely what was being taught. At that time only the first step existed. A senior civil servant described the article as "unnecessarily alarmist", because no government would ever dream of going beyond step three (decreeing which subjects should be taught). By the early 1990s all ten steps were in place. In 2004, Ted declined an invitation to set out the next ten steps, not wishing to provide another blueprint for ministers. Instead he illustrated how Labour policies already fitted his disaster scenario (literacy and numeracy hours spelling out what teachers had to do every ten or 15 minutes, for example).
Only last month he drew our attention to the fact that the examinations board Edexcel, not content with asking its own clerical staff to mark exam papers this summer, had been taken over by Pearson, publishers of school textbooks - to Ted's mind, a grotesque conflict of interest. He predicted overseas marking farms and multiple-choice questions (easy to mark by computer). Computers may yet replace human markers, but Ted Wragg was irreplaceable. I'll miss him very much.
This week I start a brief theatre tour, courtesy of some nice people at the Bailie Nicol Jarvie whisky company. When they approached me I wondered whether such an arrangement would unduly affect my performance, and decided that it wouldn't. (The whisky might, but not the sponsorship.) After all, comedy has been sponsored by drinks companies for as long as I can remember. It certainly doesn't rank on a par with the government's hypocrisy over drinking: expressing alarm on the one hand while texting young voters before the 2001 election the message "Couldn't give a XXXX for last orders? Vote Labour" on the other.
The next problem to overcome is fear, another good thing in moderation but a pain when it gets out of proportion. It's not a symptom which I imagine affects David Frost. In the Sixties he and his troupe performed a That Was The Week That Was revue at a White House gala. Unfortunately the show bombed, leaving the cast sitting in depressed silence in their dressing room. All except Frost. "You know what?" he declared. "I think the audience was overawed."
It seems Labour MPs now divide into three categories: those who believe it should be 14 days, those who are prepared to settle for 28 days and those who maintain it should be 90 days before Tony Blair goes.
