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Troubador Publishing Ltd - Derek Esp

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69 pages

English

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Derek Esp didn't set out to forge a career in education: but, after enrolling in an Education course at university, he discovered a love for learning and a passion for teaching.Appointed as the Youth Officer for Central Shropshire in 1959, Derek found that he had a talent for leadership. He later worked in three counties as an education officer, moving on to various other roles in which he led a number of education initiatives and helped to develop new schools. His final role in public education was that of Director of Education in Lincolnshire.Derek retired early from local government and became an education consultant. He went on to lead national projects, became a county politician and chaired an education committee. In An Adventure in Education, he explains how education transformed between 1960 and 1990 outlining important initiatives of the time and their relevance to current issues in education. He simultaneously entertains readers with humorous anecdotes.

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Education

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 octobre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838599881
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Derek Esp

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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This book is dedicated to my wife Gill, my fellow adventurer for almost fifty years. As well as being described as ‘a wonderful wife, mother and granny’ Gill was the inspirational leader of our growing family and a caring and active initiator of developments in our lovely Somerset village. She was a constant and loving support in the highs and lows of our adventures in education.
Contents
introduction
1
early years
2
education otherwise – outside school
3
wider horizons – sixth form, university and extended national service
4
home county – new challenge and youth work
5
local government – at work and play
6
the audit commission and other ‘excursions’
7
from public to private – lincolnshire to consultancy
8
the emmanuel college project
9
foreign fields – going international
10
learning from international studies – the creation of the instant expert
11
inspection and other performance measures
12
untrodden career paths – music and politics

in conclusion
reflections on an accidental career in education

introduction
This book is the result of a suggestion from the University of Exeter education department. In 2012, I had completed an MA in the history department. When I asked the education department if I could follow up my seventeenth-century historical research their response was: ‘we don’t do the seventeenth century’. Instead they invited me to write about my life in education. I was intrigued to think that I now qualified as a part of education history so I agreed.
Autobiography has now become fashionable as a valid source of historical evidence. Historical evidence is not value free. This is particularly the case when history is written by the winners. The ‘cultural turn’ in history has legitimised subjectivity to some degree and social sciences now encourage autobiography and other new approaches which are meant to stimulate debate and influence contemporary thought.
This ‘adventure in education’ is an opportunity to examine the influences on my learning as well as my work in education. It has been fun to explore my own experiences.
I have taken the liberty of commenting on current educational plans and preoccupations but it is not to be taken to heart. It is no surprise that we keep on reorganising ourselves. A Danish poet put it this way, ‘man is an animal that draws lines and then falls over them’. This is true for us all, especially educators and politicians. Many of our decisions are ad hoc ones to address immediate crises and sometimes put expediency before good sense. One chair of education I worked with always spoke of a ‘haddock’ (ad hoc) solution, and such solutions are always around in politics and the busy and ever-changing world of education.
1
early years
My Shropshire home town, Bridgnorth, sits on two banks of the River Severn. It is an historical market town with some light industry. On the west bank is High Town set on a cliff above the river, containing the two parish churches of St Mary’s and St Leonard’s. Low Town once housed many of the workforce of the carpet factory and other manufacturing businesses. It also had several pubs and cafés serving the tourists. A funicular railway still links the High Town and Low Town. My mother was once stuck on the funicular railway when it broke down. She was the sole passenger and had to be escorted to safety by the fire service. This was big news and made the front page of the Bridgnorth Journal . Most of Low Town is on the left bank of the River Severn is crossed by means of our historic bridge.
The town was called ‘the Venice of the North’ by some visitors when it was a popular day trip for West Midland fishermen and tourists. When I was a child there was a local, possibly apocryphal, story that a town councillor proposed that our town should have a gondola on the river as an additional enhancement to the two fleets of rowing boats hired out to day trippers. Another councillor thought this was a good idea but suggested that they should buy two gondolas and breed them.
High Town has a lovely park and the leaning ruins of the castle keep which was destroyed by Cromwell’s forces. This was supposedly a borough loyal to the King but, as they retreated, the garrison was pelted with vegetables by the townspeople. To make matters worse for royalists the curate at St Leonard’s was Richard Baxter, a future leader of the Puritans, who refused the offer of a bishopric on the return of Charles II in 1660. Baxter had moved to Kidderminster in Cromwell’s time where he built up a large independent church. He was glad to get out of Bridgnorth where he found that our ‘hearts were harder than the sandstone rock of which the church was built’.
My maternal grandmother, ‘Granny’, had returned as a widow from New Zealand to England in 1904 with two children, my mother, Dorothy, and her brother, George. She bought a temperance hotel and sweet shop and soon married again bearing another daughter and three more sons. At the time of my birth in 1934 my parents Edward (Ted) and Dorothy rented a small cottage halfway up a very long flight of steps between High Town and Low Town. This meant that I started life in a neutral position and like the grand old Duke of York I was ‘neither up nor down’.
My father was the eldest of seven children from a farming family at Easthope on the Wenlock Edge. In the 1930s times were hard for hill farmers. My father wanted to go to Argentina but my grandfather, Richard, refused to let him go so my father left the farm and travelled east to Bridgnorth where he sold seeds to farmers. That is where he met my mother, Dorothy.
After my birth, seven years into their marriage, we moved to a council house on the northern edge of High Town. Our road, The Innage, was very close to the countryside. The adjacent stream and woods offered exciting adventures for a child. I am told I was a somewhat assertive toddler. Each morning I used to visit a kind old lady dressed in black who was our neighbour. I used to knock loudly on her door and demand ‘bickets’. I remember my first experience of the hard realities of life at the age of three. A six-year-old boy, Tony, was teaching me to play marbles one day and won all of mine. I was very much upset and I think his mother ordered him to return my best ones to me. Another pre-Second World War memory is being in the ‘dicky’ seat of someone’s blue sports car as we sped under the sandstone Northgate of Bridgnorth with the wind whistling past my ears.
During the Second World War my father, as a seed salesman, was in a reserved occupation. He joined the Home Guard rising to the rank of sergeant. I remember him bringing me a flattened halfpenny which he had placed on the railway line when on guard duty. The Home Guard had very little to do, although people were fearful in 1940 of an immediate German invasion. Apparently, one moonlit winter night someone reported a parachute in a field near Bridgnorth and the Home Guard were called out. They surrounded the field which contained a farm building. Nothing happened for two hours. Eventually the farmer who needed his sleep went into the farm building thrashing around with his stick and quickly discovered there was nobody there. The Home Guard soon realised that the ‘white parachute silk’ seen in the field was a white cow.
I remember making my way with my mother to the sandstone cave in Low Town which served as an air raid shelter. Our town only received two or three bombs from German Luftwaffe pilots intent on shedding their remaining bomb load after a Birmingham or Wolverhampton raid. One bomb completely destroyed The Squirrel, one of our sixty pubs. Fortunately no one was in the building at the time. Another nearly scored a direct hit on my Granny. She lived in a narrow street of terraced houses by St Leonard’s Church. A bomb completely destroyed a house opposite killing the lady who lived there. My Granny, who was sheltering in her cellar, emerged unhurt but wi