It is a privilege of my job as the chief executive of the Education and Training Foundation that I meet a lot of influential people in and around the education world. Often, we share assumptions about our shared endeavour, but sometimes I encounter attitudes that draw me up short.

To hear sincere, knowledgeable, well-meaning people talk about children who have performed well academically at 16 grope around for a short-hand to describe them, and then be satisfied with the word “bright”, still takes me aback.

As if no one with bad GCSEs were “bright”. As if academic attainment and intelligence were synonymous. As if ability were fixed and not something that developed in a non-linear fashion through childhood and into adulthood. As if there even were an innate quality of “brightness”, let alone one that could be reliably identified by a set of specific written tasks performed at 16 - or, indeed, 11.

But while being confronted with this simplistic notion of who is bright is incredibly frustrating, I had another experience that was far more shocking.

I was in discussion with an extremely senior figure in a national education body. He was telling me, very confidently, that he didn’t believe the Ofsted data showing that the great majority of FE colleges were good or outstanding. He thought the majority would be shown - when the correct measures were applied - to be weak or inadequate.

But he went further, explaining that this was not at all surprising, and not really the colleges’ fault.

Here was his explanatory anecdote: “I went to an academy recently in a very tough inner-city area. They achieve fantastic results. I asked them how they did it. They said it was simple, that if a kid looked by the age of 14 as if they were not going to achieve, they kicked them out and sent them to the FE college down the road. So how can you expect the college to succeed if it’s full of rubbish kids?”

Rubbish kids. The first time he said it, I was so stunned I couldn’t even reply. A few minutes later he said it again. I knew I had to either respond or end the meeting prematurely, which would create a minor diplomatic incident.

Gathering the most coherence I could through my simmering rage, I said: “Of course, when we think about it, there isn’t really such a thing as a ‘rubbish kid’, is there? There are definitely kids who’ve had a rubbish experience; there are probably places we might call rubbish areas; there are even schools that might fairly be called rubbish schools. But there are no rubbish kids.”

He didn’t bat an eyelid, and he didn’t get it.

We can have all the subtle debates we like about classroom observation, or direct instruction versus discovery learning, or what makes for valid work-based assessment.

But as long as there are influential people looking at education through the lenses of “The Bright” and “The Rubbish”, we must keep shouting pretty loud about the fundamental messages: the moral imperatives of comprehensive education and equality of opportunity, and the importance of high expectations and high standards for every single young person and adult in our society.

Stephen Exley is away. David Russell is chief executive of the Education and Training Foundation
@DavidRussellETF