Until education ceases to be nothing more than a posh word for “babysitting”, society is unlikely to value teachers, according to actor and TV presenter Sir Tony Robinson.

“I remember, in the early 1960s, there was a radical bishop called John Robinson who said that, if you wanted to get a purchase on faith, you’d ban the word ‘God’ for 50 years,” Sir Tony said.

“I think it would help if we used a different vocabulary for education from the one we’ve got now. We really want to think of education outside the narrow strictures of exams.

“And, if education was really much more integrated into the whole of society - if it stopped being a posh word for ‘babysitting’ - we’d value teachers more.”

Tony Robinson: education is ‘integral to life’

Sir Tony is best known for playing Baldrick, the hapless hatcher of cunning plans, in the BBC series Blackadder. He will be speaking as part of the annual educational-technology Bett Show, held in London next week, where he will discuss his own education, as well as his love of history and discovery.

In an interview with TES, he expressed his belief that we are unlikely to value teachers until we see education as something integral to life - something that permeates it - rather than as something that is done to children between the ages of 4 and 18.

“Education is something that these people - teachers - do to our children,” he says. “If they do it well, they’re doing it properly. “And if they do it badly, then we put them and the children they teach under a series of microscopic slides, and force them to do exams at 7, 11 and 16.”

A full interview with Tony Robinson appears in the 20 January edition of TES magazine. Subscribers can access it here. The magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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