The delights of The Education Racket, Duncan Graham’s memoirs, will have to wait until publication at the end of the month, but one story deserves immediate exposure.
The former senior depute director in Strathclyde, who went on via Suffolk and Humberside to head the National Curriculum Council, was asked to draft a paper on teacher appraisal for the Government.
Desperately rewriting the draft by his team of academic experts, Graham at last found a sentence without an academic reference in brackets. So he inserted: (Mills, The Overlap Method, 1981).
This passed unchallenged and one or two pundits even claimed to have read it. The reference was to Mick Mills, the Ipswich Town skipper and full-back whose overlapping runs down the wing had helped his team win the UEFA Cup. As Graham adds: “You have got to watch these academics.”
