Michael Barber reviews a richly detailed history of education’s top seat of learning

The Institute of Education is by far the most important non-government educational institution in Britain. Its influence on the education service and policy thinking has been immense. Its centenary is undoubtedly worth marking with this history written by our leading educational historian. Richard Aldrich has a few faults - he’s a Charlton Athletic fan, for example - but his knowledge of educational history in the 20th century and of the institute are not among them. He has written a rich and excellent history.

The story he tells is one of sustained commitment to students, influence over teacher education, a growing contribution to policy thinking, international connections and, as ever with academic institutions, a bewildering array of buildings and locations. During the Second World War, for example, the institute was evacuated to Nottingham, where the director apparently urged the male students to “circulate among the girls . . . to take their minds off the war”.

More remarkable than the buildings, though, are the serious thinkers who have made the institute what it is. Sidney Webb was a founding father. He was present at the inaugural meeting, when John Adams, the institute’s first professor, proving that the good sound-bite is not a new invention, said: “There are two ways in which the public can pay for the training of its teachers: it can pay in money or it can pay in children.”

In the Twenties and Thirties, Cyril Burt, the most influential psychologist in British educational history, was the institute’s dominant research figure. His legacy may have been baleful - the idea that intelligence is general, inherited and fixed - but his impact is beyond question.

During the war, the great Fred Clarke led the institute. His contribution was to internationalise the organisation, setting it on a road to global influence from which it has never looked back. He also made a major contribution to the 1944 Education Act and the post-war settlement. Incidentally, it is a measure of the National Union of Teachers’s influence at that time that, following his spell as director of the institute, Fred Clarke became the union’s education officer.

In the past 30 years, the institute’s influence has been greater still. Its contribution to the sociology of education through Basil Bernstein and, more recently, Geoff Whitty is globally recognised. And a series of studies on school effectiveness and school improvement by people such as Harvey Goldstein, Desmond Nuttall, Pam Sammons, Louise Stoll, Barbara MacGilchrist and, pre-eminently, Peter Mortimore put the institute at the forefront of a field that has hugely influenced individual schools and education policy, not just here but in Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands, North America, Hong Kong and many other places. This relationship between academic research and ideas on the one hand and policy on the other is difficult, subtle and complex.

My only criticism of Richard Aldrich’s book is that it does not sufficiently explore the relationship between ideas and policy that is key to the institute’s most profound influence, sometimes to the alarm of those who work there and who generated the ideas in the first place. Academics often complain that policy people don’t take their ideas seriously; but they complain much more when they do. For, once an idea becomes policy, it has to be shaped, simplified and made practical; more frighteningly still, it has real-world consequences. Cyril Burt’s ideas, for example, brought us the 11-plus and influenced the future of millions of children in the 30 years after the war, sorting them into “grammar school types” and others.

Similarly, research on school effectiveness and improvement first influenced the thinking of many headteachers, then Gillian Shephard and finally and most powerfully David Blunkett and Estelle Morris. The result has been a set of reforms from the early Nineties that have brought about significant improvement in many schools and, indeed, the system as a whole. But unpopular policies, such as league tables and tough decisions in relation to school closures, starting with Hackney Downs in 1995, were a vital element of this success. There’s nothing as powerful as a good idea taken literally - and nothing as alarming.

I have been proud to be associated with the institute, first as an MA student, later as a professor. It has been an inspiration to work with its most recent directors, Peter Mortimore and Geoff Whitty. Both are leaders in their fields and each in a different way has strengthened the institute through challenging times. I was always struck when travelling in the United States, the Far East, Australia and Europe by the huge influence Peter and Geoff exercise as individuals and as leaders of the institute. As a result of their efforts, it can look forward to making an even greater contribution to education in the future than it has in the past.

Education will, after all, be at the centre of global change in a way that simply hasn’t been true for most of the past 100 years. In addition, the prospects for evidence-based policy certainly in the UK, but also elsewhere, are better than they have ever been. And the institute’s networks across the globe are second to none; it is common enough, when you meet an education minister or senior policy-maker, to be told they studied there.

As the institute’s global influence grows, though, it will surely also make a growing impact here. The Government’s drive to strengthen London’s secondary education will provide one major opportunity; the continuing quality of the institute’s initial training of teachers and the London Leadership Centre, inspired by Peter Mortimore and developed so ably by Pat Collarbone, will provide others.

In short, it will “think globally and act locally” and as a result teachers and learners everywhere will remain in its debt. Meanwhile, those of us interested in the institute’s history are in debt to Richard Aldrich.

Michael Barber is head of the Prime Minister’s delivery unit and a visiting professor at the Institute of Education, University of London