Retirement brings great joys of reminisce, as Gordon Kirk also recoils (sorry recalls). Noting that the job of civil servants on national committees has often been to protect ministers by acting as “assessors” (surely not - Ed), he observes: “In the early days of the 5-14 programme, a subgroup of what was then the Consultative Committee on the Curriculum developed a number of aims for education.
“First on the list was ‘to enable pupils to enjoy learning’. The civil servant assessor took some exception to this aim, on the grounds that the minister of the day did not believe that education had anything to do with enjoyment.”
Those were the days - we hope.
