QUENTIN LETTS: Lucy Powell's speech was 20 minutes of patronising banality. You could have set it in an A-level English paper, asking: 'What, if anything, is this person trying to say?'
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Lucy Powell, Education Secretary, gave a speech about the importance of clear communication. She was as clear as public-lavatory glass. The speech was a blizzard of cliches. It was as if there had been an explosion at a platitudes factory.
The Confederation of School Trusts had gathered in Birmingham for its annual conference. The chap who spoke before Ms Powell gave it some oratorical welly. Sir Hamid Patel, in white robes, imamah hat and spindly beard, squeakily enthused about the transformative possibilities of good schooling. This is not to say that Sir Hamid was above speaking rubbish. His speech mentioned ‘relational practices’, ‘wellbeing indicators’ and ‘hubs of well being’. But at least he delivered it with verve. He became so animated that one feared his little turban might whizz off its moorings.
Then he introduced Ms Powell. The sluice gates of mediocrity opened. Before long the audience were up to their beaks in it, like chickens in a flash flood.
‘Wow!’ bellowed lame Lucy as the mystical figure of Sir Hamid retreated to his seat. ‘How do I follow that?’ We soon learned that she intended to follow it with 20 minutes of patronising banality. Blandness yielded to truism. Commonplace was followed by meaningless word-nimbus. It was as if someone had loaded a farmer’s muck spreader with mashed potato. You could have set this speech as a devilish question in an A-level English paper, asking candidates: ‘What, if anything, is this person trying to say?’
Ms Powell said she wished to promote ‘oracy’. This word was once popular with Blairite policy wonks but it never quite caught on as an educational imperative. It describes the ability to express yourself in a grammatical, confident fashion.
'As a work of political performance the speech was under-cooked,' writes QUENTIN LETTS. Pictured: Lucy Powell speaking at the Confederation of School Trusts annual conference
'She trundled through the paragraphs, reading them not terribly well off an autocue. Phrases flew out of her with little variety of pace or tone'
The trouble with grammar (which is best learned from Latin) is that it entails intellectual rigour, and Ms Powell’s philosophy on education is not hot on scholastic discipline. Her speech signalled a move away from competition among schools. Instead she wanted ‘collaboration’.
She also complained that only 14 per cent of GCSE pupils passed their maths exam resits. The rest, she complained with much moping and angst, were ‘branded a failure’. Well, yes. That’s what happens if you bog up an exam. In a maths O-level I once scored a ‘U’ grade. It stood for ‘unspeakeable’. I talk to my psychoanalyst about it weekly.
Ms Powell’s speech, duly hailed by her spin doctors as ‘a bold vision to imagine childhood for a new era’, contained numerous political phrases that have become as bald as old vultures: ‘Every child matters; the disadvantage gap; one size fits all; spreading excellence to every corner; a two-tier system.’ She pushed out her gnashers as she fluted these jaded constructions, a strand of hair falling over her right eye.
As a work of political performance the speech was under-cooked. Her tone was perfunctory, low-energy, matey. At one point she told the teachers, ‘yeah, give yerselves a clap.' She trundled through the paragraphs, reading them not terribly well off an autocue. Phrases flew out of her with little variety of pace or tone.
‘Outcomes and the process need to be better,’ she jabbered. ‘Passports to success are a process.’ She intended to ‘end the silos’ and vouchsafed the insight that education was ‘one holistic journey’. It is a reliable rule of politics that any minister who says ‘holistic’ is spouting nonsense. The same goes for Anglican bishops and homeopathic doctors.
She also spoke of her Whitehall department as ‘The Department of Hope’. In a speech that appeared – so far as one could gather – to indicate a dilution of academic standards, that one at least raised a bark of laughter.
Having completed her remarks she clopped across the stage to be interviewed briefly by one of the organisers. Fussing with her hairdo, she sighed: ‘I feel like Madonna.’ Her interlocutor perjured herself by praising the minister for her ‘powerful words’.
Of all the Education Secretaries I have watched, this one may be the dimmest.
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