Restorative Justice is an insult to teachers

A colleague slinks into the office. She sits quietly for a moment, deep in thought. She then begins to cry. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask. ‘Oh…bloody Restorative Conversations. I’ve just been torn to shreds by Sabrina and Tess.’ She’s sobbing now, uncontrollably. Being relatively new, though – I’ve only been at the school for a few months -, I feel a little too unfamiliar to offer a comforting hug, so put the kettle on instead.

 

‘Who’s Sabrina?’ I ask, half-expecting to discover that she’s yet another member of our oversized Senior Leadership Team. ‘She’s an extremely manipulative Year 9 student,’ she replies. Tess, believe it or not, is our headteacher. I’m speechless. ‘Tess was siding with Sabrina and blaming me for her behaviour,’ my colleague continues. ‘Apparently, her calling me a ‘F****** b****’ was my fault. I only asked her to remove her jacket, for Heaven’s sake. Okay, I raised my voice after my first two requests were ignored, but how does that make her abusive behaviour my fault?’ I feel like weeping with her.

 

It doesn’t matter how long I’ve worked in schools, I still can’t come to terms with the madness that stubbornly refuses to relent. Indeed, after 12 long years in the profession, and having experienced a number of different environments, I cannot help but conclude that to be a senior leader you must first be a misanthropic lunatic who naively believes in the infallibility of children and, I suspect, the tooth fairy, too. Why else would you institute something as ridiculous and counterproductive as Restorative Justice?

 

In its educational incarnation, it’s meant to resolve disputes between pupils and teachers. The antagonists are brought together by an intermediary (usually a member of the SLT), as if they’re both equally to blame for the impasse, and encouraged to air their differences before both offering their apologies, extending their little fingers and singing ‘make up ginger nuts, never do it again’. Okay, I concede that the singing was a slight embellishment, but you get my point: teachers are being treated like children; or to look at it from another perspective: children are being treated like adults. Either way, it’s incredibly damaging.  

 

The former insults the intelligence of the professional and leads to an infantilized and demoralized workforce (I wonder why there’s a retention crisis…); the latter gives the child a responsibility that he or she is likely to abuse. And if you think such practices are confined to secondary schools, you can think again: my wife, a Year 2 primary school teacher, had training in Restorative Justice just last week. Imagine being forced to listen to an eight-year-old say he misbehaves because your lessons are boring. How humiliating.

 

Like its discredited 1960s antecedents that saw, in some schools, pupils addressing their teachers by their first names, and the relatively recent approach to recruitment whereby job applicants are interviewed by a panel of kids, Restorative Justice directly challenges and undermines the authority of teachers and with it, the hitherto settled and accepted way of raising, teaching and socialising our children. With every meeting and every SLT-sanctioned opportunity to spit vitriol at a member of staff he or she doesn’t like, the child becomes less deferential and more contemptuous of the teachers trying to help them – with entirely predictable consequences for behaviour and learning.

 

Let’s pause for one moment and consider the logic of this now pervasive approach to behaviour management. If headteachers believe that adults should not hold dominion over children, then, taken to its logical conclusion, surely parents should be prohibited from sanctioning and making decisions on behalf of their kids, too.

 

When put in these terms, it really does underscore the policy’s vacuity and with it, the contradiction at the heart of our schools. Advocates of ‘Restorative Justice’ want teachers to be in loco perentis and, as such, responsible for the children in their care, both pastorally and academically – presumably because they rightly recognise that children, in the main, are too vulnerable and immature to make sensible decisions; but they are unwilling to give teachers the authority to adequately fulfil these duties. Instead, through such meetings, they encourage children to actively challenge their teachers’ authority. They really have got themselves into a terrible pickle.

 

And before you accuse me of being some cruel Gradgrindian monster who believes that children should be seen and not heard, I add this disclaimer: I am not against listening to a child’s concerns; neither am I against sitting down and explaining what he or she did to merit a sanction.

 

I am against a systematized approach that, through ‘enlightened’ mediation conducted by some smug, condescending, self-congratulatory and self-righteous senior leader – which in itself assumes that the teacher can’t be trusted to be fair -, treats pupils and teachers as equals. When it comes to schooling, we are not equals – that’s why my pupils address me as Sir and, in theory at least, follow my instructions. As a professional, my word should not be gainsaid, but supported. If you happen to doubt my intentions, and insist on questioning my every decision through a disgruntled adolescent lacking the maturity to know what’s good for them, don’t employ me. It really is that simple.

 

Meanwhile, my colleague sips her tea, wipes a tear from her cheek and makes a promise. ‘I’m leaving at the end of the year,’ she says. ‘I can’t stay here.’ Another one bites the dust.

First published on www.conservativehome.com on 18th May 2016. Also published on www.conservativeeducation.org on 19th May 2016

Banning tag and rugby tackling is stopping boys being boys

A recent diktat issued by an over-cautious primary head prohibiting the playing of ‘tag’ at break time came hot on the heels of an open letter signed by over 70 doctors and health ‘experts’ urging the banning of tackling in schoolboy rugby. Both cases, in my view, reveal a long, barely noticed trend in society’s treatment of boys.

In short, masculinity has been the victim of sustained assault over the last several decades, and in no place has this assault been more prevalent, more zealously pursued and more enthusiastically executed, than in our schools.

Competitive sport has been the most obvious casualty – and not just because its benefits stubbornly refuse to be quantified, colour-coded and neatly recorded on some departmental spreadsheet in preparation for the next data-focused Ofsted visit. It’s been neglected and degraded because, according to our self-appointed, Guardian-reading consciences in the upper reaches of the education establishment and, of course, at the NUT, it crudely indulges the very masculine traits of risk-taking, aggression and competitiveness that we should be discouraging. These cause wars, after all.

Okay: so the aforementioned doctors and so-called health ‘experts’ claim that tackling in rugby should be banned to protect pupils from serious injury, as should ‘tag’ at playtime – at least according to the head of Christ the King School in Leeds.

But let’s be honest: reasoning of this kind is often simply a convenient excuse: these are just the latest offensives in a decades-long war being waged against maleness, the last bastion of which resides in a tiny minority of mainly independent schools, stoic in their refusal to deny their male pupils the obvious benefits of taking part in competitive contact sports and games.

Competition in most areas of state-school life is, if not strictly forbidden, then quietly discarded in favour of egalitarian approaches, subtly stripping young boys of a powerful motivational stimulant. Every child ‘must have prizes’, for example; mixed ability classes are widespread; in Key Stage Three, as a result of ‘life after levels’, refusing to grade pupils lest they become competitive and hurt the feelings of those less able is becoming more and more common.

In addition, Physical Education has gone from being a vital part of the school curriculum to an inconvenient add-on – something to combat obesity rather than nurture virtuous attributes like courage, the ability to work in a team, perseverance, competitiveness and resilience. Sadly, chivalry has become a concept to be embarrassed about and recoil from rather than a code to be followed. In most schools in which I’ve worked, games against other schools have been a rarity; as for weekend fixtures, they just don’t happen. Pupils aren’t even expected to do PE in the rain, for heaven’s sake.

Like the mad push to realize a communist utopia, this is yet another example of a fanciful left-wing attempt to change the very essence of human nature and deny reality. And like the push for Kallipolis, all kinds of unforeseen, malign implications arise as a consequence.

Boys, starved of the activities that quell their baser instincts, find other, less productive, less controlled means of fulfilling their needs. They become frustrated, more belligerent in class and, as a result, tend to underperform, especially when compared to girls who of course, in a comparative sense, benefit from the gradual feminisation of the system.

Last year, 73.1 per cent of girls’ GCSE entries were awarded at least a C grade, compared to 64.7 per cent of boys’. I am not for one moment suggesting that this gap is solely the result of boys not being able to pursue competitive and what were once deemed masculine activities. There are other factors involved – not least the long-fought-for emancipation of the fairer sex. But discriminating against boys by preventing them from playing and acting like boys can’t help, either academically, physically or in terms of building character and attributes one might consider virtuous.

It really is time to face up to reality, reject the apprehensions and paternalistic lunacy of a self-important haggle of medical and childhood ‘experts’ and, once again, let boys be boys.

First published on www.conservativehome.com on 18th April 2016

We must halt the relentless march of the Thought Police

I was recently interviewed for a Channel 4 documentary on the gradual erosion of freedom of speech in modern Britain – to be aired this summer. In a dank, dark hallway I sat, silhouetted in an effort to conceal my identity, rambling on like a badly-prepared job applicant desperately trying to fend off the ferocious attacks of a Paxman-like interrogator.

In truth, my ‘interrogator’ was a kindly young woman who went to great pains to make me feel comfortable – notwithstanding the cold, rusty old chair I was asked to sit on. This didn’t stop my interminable, incoherent rambling, though. It really was desperately painful.

All this said, my interlocutor’s probing, and my efforts to search the darkest recesses of my cerebral cortex for anything like an intelligent response, contrived to help me explore some important issues. And in amongst the verbiage was indeed the odd gem of insight.

For me, this highlighted the fundamental importance of free and frank discussion to the development of ideas, the exploration of the possible and the pursuit of truth. Never before had I consciously realised the essentiality of this Socratic approach to effective teaching and, of course, ultimately, human development – if, that is, we actually want our pupils to engage in critical thinking and problem solving.

Without frank discussion, ideas stubbornly refuse to surface. They lie undiscovered in the hidden, labyrinthine recesses of our sedentary minds. It is therefore incumbent upon us teachers to encourage our pupils to engage in such exploratory activities, surely.

Unfortunately, though, free and frank discussion is strictly forbidden in today’s censorious climate. Pupils and teachers face ridicule and ostracism for so much as uttering a single word of support for the Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher’s name is particularly riven with toxicity. My niece, a sixth form economics student in a nominally excellent school, recently explained to me how her teacher and peers never miss an opportunity to decry and spit scorn at Thatcher’s ‘cruel’ reforms. Each lesson sounds like a competition in left-wing virtue-signalling – a veritable festival of Tory-baiting.  Just last week a colleague prefaced her support for one of Michael Gove’s education reforms with, ‘I don’t wish to sound like a Tory but…’

In such a censorious climate, children and teachers learn never to question the prevailing orthodoxies. Conservatuves are bad. Lefties are good, caring and, even if they occasionally cock up, generally do things with the best of intentions. Anthropogenic global warming is an indisputable fact. Mass immigration has been and will continue to be an unqualified success. The Government’s desire to stop the continued profiteering of people traffickers by refusing to welcome illegal immigrants and, among them, a smaller number of refugees is the very personification of evil. Nelson Mandela is the embodiment of virtue: so too is Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and anyone else who has challenged and thrown off the shackles of the white oppressor. These are just some of the ‘truths’ left unexplored and unquestioned in our schools.

In short, our children are being force fed a simplistic, dualistic, black and white view of a world neatly divided into good guys and bad guys. Such a one-sided take necessarily stifles the stimulation of each child’s critical faculties. In a place where they should be encouraged to challenge orthodoxy, they’re sadly being compelled passively to accept its veracity.

So all you progressives can forget this ‘child-centred approaches are necessary to develop critical thinkers’ guff. If our kids are being told what to think, and being actively prevented from questioning received wisdom, how can they possibly think critically and, more to the point, be creative? They can’t!

Another obstacle to free and frank discussion in an effort to stimulate critical thinking and creativity is the propensity of schools to conflate teacher-talk – or lecturing – with teacher-led discussion. Let’s not forget: teacher-talk is still strictly frowned upon, especially in the state sector. We are therefore discouraged from engaging our pupils in an invaluable exercise. If a discussion lasts more than five minutes, we begin to panic – paranoid that an overzealous senior leader could drop in at any moment and, horror of horrors, see us standing at the front of the class looking like a teacher rather than a benign facilitator – wrap it up quickly and initiate another, so-called child-centred task instead.

Meanwhile, our pupils are being deprived of taking part in an important, interesting and eminently enriching dialectic. Through these vacuous practices, moreover, society is also depriving its citizens of the intellectual wherewithal to spark creativity and ensure continued progress. Without wishing to sound too alarmist, we surely risk civilizational stagnation and eventual decline if we continue along this path.

Almost as damaging is our self-imposed reluctance to tell pupils the truth. God forbid we should ever shatter their fragile egos with unqualified criticism. Before berating a half-hearted, lazy, unsatisfactory non-attempt to complete a task, we must first tell them ‘what went well’ instead, even if the answer is sod all.

If a pupil is incessantly disruptive we dare not call him naughty – that would be far too honest. We must say that deep down he’s a nice lad but, at the moment, he’s making the wrong choices. So yet again the child is divested of responsibility as the teacher makes an erroneous distinction between him and his actions. He’s not naughty, his actions are. It’s as if his body’s been possessed by alien forces beyond his control. As a predictable consequence, and as kids are patronized and mollycoddled, bad behaviours continue unabated. It’s not their fault, after all.

During my confused responses under the mild scrutiny of my interviewer last week, some illuminating realisations struck me. Attacks on free speech, so prevalent in our schools, conspire to stifle the dialectic necessary for creativity and, no less alarming, encourage our children to indulge in fecklessness and wallow in their own self-pity as moral agency and free will are damagingly undermined. We must resist the relentless march of the thought police. The continued success of our civilization depends on it.

First published on ConservativeHome on 20th March 2016

'Independent learning' creates irresponsible excuse-makers entirely dependent on their teachers

It’s funny: the more independent we try to make our learners, the more dependent they seem to become.

After all, I suppose, at the heart of independent – or discovery – learning is the pupil’s right not to discover anything remotely valuable or, worse still, anything at all. They are masters of their own learning, encouraged to work at a pace that suits them and given the freedom to do as much or as little as they please. Unsurprisingly, given such options, many choose to do the bare minimum.

But instead of blaming the discredited teaching methods responsible, senior leaders stubbornly cling to the philosophy behind them and blame their staff for not satisfactorily engaging and motivating their charges.

So children are not only permitted to do nothing; they are also encouraged to blame their teachers for doing nothing – hardly conducive to the development of personal responsibility and independence.

Let’s take the profession’s longstanding obsession with group work, as an example. Apparently, group work cultivates ‘collaborative learning’ – another nauseating, meaningless term that sends the education establishment into paroxysms of joy every time it’s uttered by some self-satisfied university professor from the Institute of Education – and, by extension, and rather paradoxically, ‘independent learning’ through encouraging pupils to initiate their own investigations and work together on loosely defined projects. In short, group work is viewed as inherently beneficial to the development of pupils as independent, self-motivated learners.

In the real world though, and for the overwhelming majority of children, group work is absolutely useless as a method for encouraging independent learning. The most vocal kids invariably take control of the activity whilst the rest either demurely withdraw – too shy to take part – or take the opportunity to put their feet up and discuss the approaching weekend. It’s simply ludicrous to expect children to do anything else.

But in my experience and, I suspect, the experiences of many of my colleagues around the country, senior leaders stubbornly refuse to accept this reality – so wedded to progressivism they’ve become – and continue to insist upon a pedagogical approach that doesn’t work.

Frustrated at the dissonance between theory and practice, moreover, they lash out and blame us – the teachers at the chalk face. Apparently the frameworks we set aren’t fun, relevant and interesting enough. They therefore conclude that it’s nothing to do with the methods they themselves promote. The fault lies in their poor execution through badly designed, unimaginative lessons.

Yet when our pupils begin their GCSEs, if we don’t begin to actually teach them, make clear the need to work hard and keep pace with the content and timing stipulated in the course specification, they’ll fail their exams. We simply can’t afford to use the inefficient and unproductive methods central to discovery learning.

After ten years of progressive, so-called child-centred education though, and with senior leaders still insisting that pupils, even in Years 10 and 11, learn through discovery, they are completely unprepared for the demands of their courses and, as such, are destined to underperform. We are being forced to teach them using methods that don't work. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Incidentally, like consumers purchasing theatre tickets, pupils demand that their lessons are fun and amusing, as they’ve been led to expect throughout their school careers. And lest I forget: if these expectations aren’t met, many complain that their lessons are boring and bad behaviour ensues.

So there is a huge contradiction at the heart of independent – or discovery – learning. Children, largely left to their own devices, often choose not to learn and teachers invariably and often willingly take responsibility for such failures.

As the exam season approaches, we give up weekends, evenings and even holidays in an effort to make up for the inadequacy of our classroom provision. This evening I’ve spent over two hours organising intervention time for my underprepared Year 11 pupils. I’ve spent weeks chasing non-attenders, phoning homes and setting detentions. I’ve even drawn up spreadsheets to track the efficacy of this exhausting – eminently avoidable – strategy.

Now you tell me: how on earth does this encourage independent learning? Put simply, far from nurturing independence, progressive approaches cultivate passive, irresponsible excuse-makers entirely dependent on their teachers. It’s about time the powers-that-be woke up and accepted reality.

Teachers are doing ISIL's work for them

Just last week I overheard three colleagues discussing the evils of the British Empire. ‘I despise it,’ one snarled. ‘Me too! Look at Amritsar, what we did to the Native American Indians and our involvement in the Middle East,’ another opined, shaking his head in disapproval. ‘I really can’t think of anything positive to say about it,’ the third lamented.

I work in an academy with a large Muslim population. To be more precise, over 80 per cent of the school’s children are Islamic, some, of course, more devout than others, all from varying traditions.

Now, one might be forgiven for thinking that this very demographic is the one most susceptible to radicalisation. That doesn’t mean they’re all potential terrorists. Of course not. But let’s be honest with ourselves: they are more at risk of being radicalised than pupils in, say, a Church of England school.

So surely, as teachers, we should be aware of this fact and act accordingly, as the Government’s Prevent strategy urges us to do through the promotion of British values.

But in my school, as demonstrated in my opening paragraph, many of my colleagues – particularly in the history department – are actively encouraging our most vulnerable children to hate their own country.

They were discussing a unit provocatively entitled, ‘Should we be proud of the British empire?’ As you can probably gauge from their rather one-sided conversation - and the simplistic, reductive scheme of work that supports it - it is a loaded question devised with only one answer in mind: No! We should be ashamed of it.

They have irresponsibly and outrageously sacrificed neutrality, historical accuracy and considered objectivity on the high altar of unthinking subjectivism and banal sentimentalism driven by feelings of post-colonial guilt.

How on earth can these dangerous individuals, so willing to do ISIL’s work for them, be allowed to teach our children?

That is not to say that we shouldn’t make our pupils aware of the misdeeds committed by ‘Perfidious Albion’ in its quest for world domination. But we should also be encouraging the children to explore the benign gifts bestowed upon the world by Britain’s two-hundred-year hegemony.

The spread of capitalism, the world’s first and only lingua franca, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law; the propagation of ideas, literature, technological and medical advances; the abolition of the slave trade and its global enforcement by British naval power during the period known as Pax Britannica; and finally, its assault upon the forces of fascism and militarism during the Second World War.

Now how can my colleagues not think of any positive consequences of Britain’s imperial domination? They are either grossly ignorant, blinded by their own bias or being deliberately deceitful.

Even the concept of empire – a concept that we rightly reject wholesale today – should be contextualised. From the Umayyad dynasty to the Ottomans, the Romans to the great seaborne empires of France and Britain, until recently, imperialism and colonialism were staple features of global geopolitics, as was slavery. You cannot therefore properly analyse and evaluate the British empire without placing it within this contextual framework.

In fact, bearing this in mind, the question of whether it was a force for good is far too simplistic. But that’s another story.

Again, though, I must reiterate that I am not calling for a sanitized account of Britain’s imperial past, just a balanced one, firmly rooted in reality.

At the moment, in my school at least, predominantly Muslim children are being force-fed a diet of anti-British propaganda – a diet both inaccurate and, more importantly, one which plays into the hands of those who wish to do us harm.

With the recent attacks in Paris being committed by mainly home grown terrorists, this ought to give us pause for thought.

Also published on Breitbart 1st December 2015

How education jargon hurts children

‘Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn’t we keep the PC on the QT? ’Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we’d all be put out in KP.’

How I cheered when Airman Adrian Cronauer mocked Lt Steven Hauk’s fondness for acronyms in Good Morning, Vietnam. Using jargon is an act of unconscionable self-indulgence. It is designed to make the user feel superior while saying not much, and Adrian, played by the late Robin Williams, spoke for millions of cheesed-off employees when he attacked it.

Jargon, acronyms and corporate-speak — all too common in offices — should be banned from schools. But to my horror (I am a teacher in an east London state school) over the decade I’ve been teaching, I’ve seen all sorts of horrible acronyms become common in both the staffroom and the classroom.

SEN, Progress 8, value added, IEP, EBD, FSM, ADD, ADHD, flight paths, EP and EAL. Unless you’ve studied the weird new education language, you haven’t a hope of understanding what teachers — or other people in the education business — are on about, and I sometimes think this is the point. It means baffled parents, who don’t know an FSM from an IEP, can’t hold teachers to account. It’s a far cry from the government’s expressed aim of empowering parents and giving them choice.

But there’s another, more alarming problem with jargon in education. It means complex problems are pigeonholed and oversimplified and, in the process, misdiagnosed. Take attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). If this isn’t a case of the concept leading the response, I don’t know what is. Teachers, teaching assistants (TAs) and pastoral staff are forever stuffing children into the box marked ADHD. We tell the parents, who call the doctor, who prescribes the drugs. But children can be inattentive for a hundred more complicated reasons. If ADHD weren’t available as a catch-all diagnosis, we’d have to try harder to understand each child.

English as an additional language (EAL) is another concept that drives practice. In my experience, many so-called EAL pupils speak excellent English, but now that there’s a handy label, teachers are forever applying it to pupils. Once you’re EAL, you’ll be forced to have an IEP (individual education plan) and if you fall a bit below your designated FP (flight path) you could end up in the humiliating SEN (special educational needs) category.

Just the existence of the phrase ‘flight path’ in schools is dangerous; it creates the false impression that pupils progress in a linear fashion. This can have unforeseen and deeply troubling consequences. If a pupil’s making EP (expected progress) in, say, chemistry, or, better still, EP+1 (better progress than EP), he’s on or above his designated FP (which is based on KS2 data — exhausting, isn’t it?). When a teacher sees ‘EP+1’ he knows he no longer has to push the pupil. EP+1 means the child has exceeded his target. That he may be capable of getting an A grade becomes largely irrelevant. If his FP states an expected C, and the pupil received a B, the teacher has ‘added value’ and the school’s statistics have benefited. So why push him any further? According to the law of the jargon it’s unnecessary. Everyone’s happy, aren’t they?

No they’re not. I’ve seen more than one instance of a pupil deciding, two years down the line, that he wants to aim higher. He wants to train as a doctor, say, but he can’t because he needed that A in chemistry — and nobody pushed him. Management-speak and fancy-sounding acronyms create a world of false targets, when the real target should be the needs and desires of children.

My personal favourite is the word ‘innovation’. Schools, in particular their ‘senior leaders’, have become obsessed with innovation. They demand innovation constantly, for the sake of innovating — so as to be seen to be ‘thinking outside the box’. This means they alter anything and everything on a whim. In my last school, the length of the school day, the lesson times and the lunch break were all changed for no reason, just so as to innovate. You can imagine the chaos and confusion.

Once again, my school was responding to a fashion rather than the needs of the children. The jargon has become a tyranny rather than a tool. This must change. Oh for Airman Adrian Cronauer to teach us all to speak English again.

Also published in The Spectator on 14th November 2015

All you left-wing traditionalists: you really should be Conservatives

I recently read an incredibly thought-provoking article on Labour Teachers by Greg Ashman, a practising teacher, entitled, 'Do lefties have to love inquiry learning?' In short, he concludes that they don't, and I tend to agree with him; but I do take issue with several of his assumptions and would add a caveat to his main contention: they don't, but most of them do.

First, let's look at some of his assumptions. According to Greg, the Right 'no longer' opposes change; instead, the 'new' Right embraces innovation and new models for delivering public services. In contrast, rather than intent on overturning the status quo, the Left now aims to conserve it, he asserts, maintaining its beloved NHS and calling for the continuation of state spending on welfare and education. In simple terms, according to this view the Right is now the agent of change whilst the Left advocates the maintenance of many aspects of the post-war settlement.

But in his laudable attempts to embrace nuance and complexity, Greg misses some important points. He initially misinterprets the historic meaning of Conservatism and its approach to government, for example. This, I am sure, is through simple misunderstanding rather than deliberate misrepresentation - a very common error made by Leftists. He implies that historically, the Right was a reactionary movement opposed to change. This is a fallacious caricature.

The Victorian poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, neatly articulates the true nature of Conservatism in his poem 'Hands all Round' (1882): 'That man's the true Conservative/Who lops the mouldered branch away.' 'But', he later added in a conversation with the philosopher William Angus Knight, 'the branch must be a mouldered one, before we should venture to lop it off.' In other words, as Edmund Burke, the father of modern Conservatism himself contended, we must embrace change where necessary and conservation where no evidence exists to support what might, in theory alone, work better.

The 1867 Reform Act, Robert Peel's Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and Benjamin Disraeli's social reforms all point to a party that has throughout its history been ready and willing to enact change where warranted.

Furthermore, in arguing that the Left now seeks to conserve, he fails to spot the fact that it only seeks to conserve the radical changes wrought by various post-war Labour administrations. This doesn't make it a movement protective of the nation's political, socioeconomic and cultural inheritance, circumspect in its approach to reform. Of course not. It is as passionate for change as ever and, if eager to conserve, only does so in an effort to maintain its post-war gains.

So, in my view, Greg misunderstands the essence of both political parties. Conservatives have always been wary of change, but not unambiguously against it whereas those on the left, on the other hand, and in the main, view the nation's traditions as antiquated and inimical to social justice. Sorry, Greg, but they categorically do not seek to conserve. As a consequence, lefties tend to support any change which attacks traditional social, economic, political and cultural structures. Multiculturalism, mass immigration, House of Lords reform, gay marriage, state control of the means of production and, of course, progressive education are all assaults upon traditionalism supported by the Left.

That said, and here I agree with Greg, lefties can of course reject inquiry-based, progressive educational theory and practice. Such an approach conspires to thwart social mobility and harm the working-class, after all. But the fact remains: most do not take this view for the reasons outlined. Progressivism maybe old, but, until relatively recently, it's been a revolutionary theory with little evidential backing designed to reject authority and overturn existing societal structures - a classic left-wing objective. The fact that these would stand a better chance of being overturned through traditional methods is beside the point. The Left's propensity to shout 'change' without considering the unforeseen implications renders it deaf to such commonsensical arguments. It simply sees a tradition and immediately seeks its destruction - just look at House of Lords reform or the foxhunting ban.

The advantage of Conservatism is in its circumspection. This gives its advocates time to think and apply rigour when considering the most effective course of action. All you left-wing traditionalists: you really should be Conservatives.