Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsSome Aspects of Education and Training’they attached themselves loosely to Balliol and rambled about theuniversity browsing here and there on such lecture-fodder as they couldfind palatable, or likely to meet their needs. Sometimes they looked in onlectures on political economy, or on English history, or on art, or even onGreek philosophy. They were encouraged to visit museums and artgalleries or to write essays and go on long walks with their patron or someother illumining pundit. This (Jowett) called giving them the flavour ofOxford life. ’11Professor John Churton Collins (1848-1908) was professor of English atBirmingham University and his first journalism syllabus contained echoes ofthese ideas, down to the ’visiting Museums’, and, even though thisproposed course never actually started, because of Collins’ death, hisideas were carried forward both by academics and journalists involved. 12While this might have been a peculiarly Balliol-inspired curriculum itwould appear that Oxford tutors commended the style of the essayists ofthe journalism found in The Spectator and the Saturday Review. 13Technical EducationSome studies have demonstrated how ’important the ideological elementis in our educational system which stresses the moral value of ’pure’ asopposed to ’practical thinking’, 14 and trace Britain’s failure to develop aneducational system ’essential to national efficiency ’15 as a contributoryfactor inimical to the country’s industrial progress. The inability to realizethe nature of the change in the competitive international system, as itdeveloped after 1870, meant that continental and American efficiencyoutstripped British efforts. At a time when British industrial pre-eminenceseemed assured British complacency formed the bedrock for futuredecline. 16This complacency can be seen operating in the painfully slowdevelopment of any comprehensive form of national education. Britain’shopes for an educated workforce contributing to national efficiency wereseriously hampered by having a school-leaving age of ten, from 1870 to1893, of twelve until 1922 and of fourteen after that and sixteen in 2009.17What education there was was extremely basic and various nineteenthcentury institutions developed to help meet the need, from Sunday schoolsto Mechanics Institutes, themselves the forerunners of several technicalcolleges which eventually became university colleges. 18 Introduction tooccupational roles was usually achieved by apprenticeship to a trade for afixed number of years for which, in return, the apprentice receivedinstruction in the secrets of his master’s trade. The implicit assumption ofthis method was that a coherent body of skills existed which could be’learnt in the course of watching somebody already proficient in them, andby imitating his example. ’19Even 19 th century critics realised that such schemes rarely fosteredinnovation, especially in a competitive market where fixed sets of skillsrapidly became obsolete. The Economist deplored the fact that, in 1868:’our manufacturing classes are at an unfair and dangerous advantagecompared with the trained and intelligent operators of continental22MOD100051193