by Toby Payne-Cook

So, maths is everywhere at the moment: in the press and all over “edutwitter”, triggered by Rishi Sunak’s – Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – recent speech and his personal mission to make maths compulsory in schools until 18.

I have resisted the urge to respond and tweet on this matter myself as such tweets are inevitably laden with personal, unconscious bias and are often misinterpreted or reacted to in the wrong way, so I thought I’d cobble together my trademark meandering thoughts, observations and opinion on multifaceted matters of mathematics instead.

First of all, I was amused by the Sunak announcement, with my enthusiasm for the philosophy of Alain de Botton and the school of life ringing in my ears: “…Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects – and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.”

Sunak is clearly more worried than most about how good the next generation will be at maths. Why is he worried about this? Well, presumably it’s an economics thing. Employers, industry and commerce – the people who grow the economy – are dissatisfied with the numeracy and mathematical skills of the average school leaver, apprentice and / or graduate. Maybe it’s a global competition and ego thing too, with our global ranking in PISA maths somewhat lower than we’d like it to be. And perhaps it’s a statistics of the modern age thing: to be meaningfully engaged with modern technological and data rich culture we all need a far deeper grasp of numbers, data and their associated fudging in the fake news and propaganda politicians and the media are so inclined to bombard us with.

In many ways, Sunak is right about maths, our collective shoddiness at it and it being – arguably – the most important subject we can educate ourselves in. But the most reactionary, and least imaginative amongst us, look at the current system and think he’s mad: the ridiculous Gove GCSE reforms; the clunky, overly full curricula; the pupil disengagement with the subject from quite early on in school life; problems with recruitment, retention and quality of maths teachers at a national level and the fact that an awful lot of people struggle to attain a meaningful ‘pass’ at GCSE at 16. For me, those calling for fundamental 14-18 reform including the probable removal of GCSEs and those suggesting a fundamental review and re-design of the 5-16 (or 5-18, or 5-14 in partnership with the former) maths curriculum are on to something. If Sunak’s big idea is just another bolt on to an education system built on sand, to make us a bit more like Singapore, he’s deluded in the extreme.

The problem with people like Sunak and Gove tinkering deeply with our education system is that they are highly educated people, with astonishingly quick minds. The sort of people who would have been top of the class through school and university, the sort of people who maths comes easily to. I know people like Sunak. I have a nephew in law, in his early forties, with an engineering 1st from Cambridge, who then became an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, then worked for a hedge fund and now invests in crypto currency and other such unfathomable worlds. His mind is astonishing and he has used it to make, and continue making a lot of money.

Having worked in research and development in three major multinational science based companies I have also worked with some exceptional scientific and creative thinkers with quick mathematical and analytical minds. These are the sort of people who would attain grade 9 at GCSE with minimal effort, and A or A* at A level – without excessive tutoring, cramming or revision. They are exceptionally bright. They may be socially inept, lack common sense and be a little strange too (not always) and in the ‘real world’ are likely to need great communicators and collaborators to work alongside them to bring their ideas, knowledge and algorithms to life.

Our education system, and the concept of ‘an education’ was – and continues to be – designed for them, and us reading this too. Sunak and Gove and most politicians (not all), economists and political or economic commentators are likely in the school measured top 1-5% of all learners. Anyone interested in reading and thinking about this stuff – including you and me and all the prevalent edutweeters and commentators are likely in the top 20 – 30% of all learners too – using school, psychometric or IQ measures.

I once worked with a maths teacher, a former commodity broker in the city, who said that – for a competent mathematician – it doesn’t take 12 years (from Reception to Year 11) to learn GCSE maths. I have taught some exceptionally gifted young people (9-13 years old). With CATs scores of 135+ in both verbal and non-verbal reasoning. They could master the GCSE curricula in maths and the sciences by 14, perhaps younger in some cases. Their brains need feeding and they lap learning with considerable aplomb – albeit – potentially – annoying quite a few teachers along the way! Then I’ve taught a lot of children with CATs scores in the range 110 – 130 and they will have no trouble in excelling within our prescriptive and narrow academic subject based education system at GCSE and A level – if they chose to comply with a limiting system. Those with CAT scores in the 90-110 range may, if pushed and encouraged at school and home, embrace the school system and earn a seat at the table in the competition of modern economic life, if encouraged to do so. Those with CAT scores below 90, and certainly below 80 are going to feel like a constant failure throughout our education system. The flawed idea that gaining some grade 2s or 3s and possibly two or three 4s at GCSE is going to feel like a success – for them – is utterly ridiculous.

The vast majority of the population will have CATs scores in the 90-110 range. Some of them will have mastered enough maths to be mathematically competent and economically useful to society by 16. Others will have not ‘fulfilled their potential at 16’ – as will be true of a great many children across the whole 70 – 140+ CATs (cognitive ability tests) range. Because of the nature of adolescence, and lack of any adult perspective on life and work aged 12 -16, a great many children disengage with academic learning and consequently underachieve in the arbitrary and overly measured public exams we inflict upon them aged 16. But yet we continue to pummel them with heavy and abstract maths and science curricula (and overly prescriptive English and humanities curricula too). The Nuffield foundation did some research about a decade ago, showing that children found learning and attaining in GCSE maths far ‘easier’ aged 16-18 than aged 14-16. This resonates with me. For too many children for too long we rush to cram abstract concepts and excessive facts too soon into their minds. Yes, we know that new, deeper knowledge is hooked onto existing knowledge but so much of the (semantic – conceptual and factual) knowledge so many children are exposed to aged 8 – 16 is never deeply embedded, weakly held at best. Even the ‘greatest minds’ forget most of what they are taught at school if it is never applied in adult life, or thought about again. Sure, the brain of a ‘good mind’ is trained by bombarding it with information and application of that information but the efficiency or purpose of extrapolating this obvious fact to the whole cognitive ability range of all humans seems grossly inefficient, and consequently alienating. However, once we emerge from the deepest mire of adolescence and bat an eyelid towards the adult world, the benefits of ‘why are we learning this’ or ‘gaining a qualification’ and the increase in some sense of delayed gratification – may mean that teaching some version of GCSE maths aged 14 – 18, instead of aged 12 – 16 may well have some merit.

Obviously the mathematically or cognitively gifted can learn it faster than this and do not warrant being held back or slowed down, while there are others who will always benefit from a narrower, more functional maths curriculum.

Like science at school, the GCSE maths curriculum does not make you a mathematician or a scientist. And I would argue than much of the content is not a pre-requisite to becoming a competent mathematical, scientific, economic or statistical thinker. The breadth of the curriculum is particularly bonkers for those who really struggle to master it.

I have taught maths in year 5 and 6 before. Just as some concept of place value is weakly attained we’ll whizz off into some arithmetic, or shape. Shape?! At a deep, mathematical level, reasoning when a 2D shape is or isn’t a rhombus is some kind of fascinating but honestly shape, triangles, circles, blah – do these mathematically beguiling little beasties really need to be played with. Oh, but its fun! And it breaks up the mundanity of trying – and failing – to understand fractions or basic algebra again.

I don’t have the answers. But I would suggest number bonding to death, times tabling to death, number patterns and scales to death, measuring units to death and then later percentages and simple probability and statistics to death would be a good idea. When I say ‘to death’ I probably mean 3 x 20 minute bursts everyday from 5 – 7; 3 x 30 minute bursts everyday from 8 – 10 and 3 x 1 hour + 5 x 20 mins per week from 11-14.

We dig too deep into too many mathematical concepts before basic number is mastered.

Recently, I’ve become drawn into mental math Monday on Twitter. There was a question how would you do 48 + 49 in your head. I answered make both 50 and then take away 3, so 97. Using the nearest ten (or multiple thereof) to round numbers and adjust from there is – to me – a simple and logical mathematical trick. A lot of people liked this on the twits. But one person objected claiming it was too complicated stating that they did it in one move (96 + 1 = 97), not realising that this was two moves (at least) as they already mentally knew that 48 + 48 = 96. There were a lot of people who did it the “school way” of adding the tens, then adding the units, then adding the two (so, 40 + 40 = 80; 8 + 9 = 17; 80 + 17 = 97). Anyway, there is no right or wrong way to do these things; some have more number bonds stored in their head than others too but it is fair to say that some methods are more elegant or efficient than others. But doing an awful lot of this stuff, daily, in very short bursts, seems to me a really good way of improving our individual and collective mathematical functioning. And it is clearly more useful to all than pythagorus theorem; trigonometry; shape naming and reasoning; solving algebraic equations and long division.

On the topic of algebra. I love it. It explains how maths and number and problem solving works at a fundamental level. It underpins engineering, physics, physical chemistry, economics, cosmology and problem solving in any number of complex scenarios. But there is too much of it, too early, for too many in the GCSE maths curriculum. Hell, even quadratics is in the Grades 1-5 foundation GCSE maths specification that my youngest child is currently battling with (the elder two were fortunate to see the logic in it all with minimal effort). Before Dominic Cummings became the Downing Street devil he wrote some interesting and thoughtful blogs about maths education. One stated that there is too much algebra (as there is too much fundamental top down, onward application which most don’t do, too early in the mandatory science specification at GCSE too) but not enough probability in the national maths curriculum. He reasoned that probability is all about likelihood of occurrence and therefore is about risk analysis and therefore about decision making. We all, whatever we grow up to become, need to make better, more effective decisions. And learning lots of (simple) probability would enable us to do that better, in theory. This was sensible reasoning from Cummings and one I hope is applied if a coherent maths curriculum until 18 actually comes to fruition.

At the core of the debate triggered by Sunak’s speech / intent, in the education sphere, is what is the purpose of education and by extrapolation, what is the purpose of maths education? There are, of course a range of needs and purposes from the personal, to the fulfilling, to the brain / mind development, to the utilitarian and economically driven – the latter which, inevitably, dominates our world. Many purist educators, particularly a certain brand of powerful knowledge-rich education leaders, consultants and inspectors are scornful of the utilitarian, skills-based drivers on education policy. This is a problem that there needs to be more coherence of in government and Whitehall. The aims and needs and games of the DfE seem almost entirely juxtaposed from those of BEIS and probably DEFRA and the Department of Health too.

After 16 years in industry I was briefly a Director of a small STEM enrichment / brokerage charity where I saw the juxtaposition between then (in 2011/2012) BIS (dept of business, innovation and skills) and the DfE first hand. Let’s encourage and inspire the importance of the sciences and maths to the future economy with an exiting one day talk, lecture, workshop or competition and then bombard the minds of young people with three years of largely alien facts, concepts and abstraction! Then measure them in their ability to remember it. Then, mostly, run away from those beautiful, elegant, empowering, problem solving, open-minded “subjects” for life.

In industry I learnt to collaborate and communicate. And I learnt a load of new science. But the art of being a competent scientist (or a competent anything) is not knowing everything yourself but knowing who to ask or knowing how to find out. I saw this huge flaw in our individualistic, content heavy, memory-not-application-test examination system when interviewing undergraduate placement students and fresh graduates in Pfizer. Their shiny qualifications made many of them arrogant. They often thought reciting the second law of thermodynamics made them a scientist. They often couldn’t reason or analyse their way around a relatively simple or not previously encountered problem. They couldn’t think, they could only memorise or recite. Less is more in mathematical and scientific curricula. Let’s grossly narrow the content but spend much more time applying it, deepening it, grappling with problems, interpreting data, repeating challenging concepts, unpicking them and sticking them back together. Those capable of learning lots and remembering lots will always do well in school and university but these are not necessarily the skills or aptitudes which power much of life.

In school, two subjects dominate. Maths and English. I’ve often said that English makes you clever, but maths make you smart. Clever is reading lots and writing about it in carefully structured essays. Certainly useful in many careers but essential in mastering exam based curricula at school and university across the whole subject spectrum. Smart is thinking, problem solving and making quick – hopefully good – decisions. Smart is way more helpful in life and work than clever. Clever is remembering and applying formulae. Clever is writing an A* essay on anything. Clever is doing really well on Mastermind, University Challenge or the Chase. Clever is compliant in school. Clever is conscientious. Clever is engaged with and accepting of society’s conventions in education and politics.

Smart can become disillusioned or disruptive. Smart questions everything. Smart can look at a graph or chart and go, yeah but why, yeah but you’re choosing what data to present and what not to present; yeah, but you’ve massively expanding or shrunk the axes. Smart is how big was you sample size? Smart is does ALL THE EVIDENCE point in the same direction? Smart questions the validity of educational data with all its uncontrolled variables and conveniently fudged start and end points. Smart questions the clever game playing of politicians and SLT Newbie. Smart is cynical and sceptical. Smart is James Bond spotting Granchester Road among the data noise in Skyfall. Smart is quick to see trends and patterns where most others can’t. Smart is quick at mental maths. Smart probably finds quick ways of stimulating and exercising their mind. Smart is impatient in slow, clever conversations – and dull, bureacratic ones too. Smart wants to cut to the chase.

Smart is also knowing that correlation works both ways. Like global temperatures increase with increasing levels of atmospheric CO₂. But maybe, a rise in global temperature could cause a rise in global CO₂ – for example. Yes, burning fossil fuels clearly not good. But there’s lots of carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans. Loads. So, if something else is causing rising temperatures (sun cycle for example) then carbon dioxide would evaporate at a faster rate from the oceans thus increasing atmospheric CO₂. So the slow, long game of net zero and reducing emissions may not work, or may not reverse global warming, so the only thing to do is to suck and process and capture the excess CO₂ out of the atmosphere is we want to fix the climate crisis, isn’t it? I may be wrong on all this! I’m now keen to go down a rabbit hole on whether there is an inverse correlation between increasing atmospheric CO₂ and decreasing dissolved ocean CO₂!

I digress above, but in saying maths makes you smart, the real truth could be that those with the cognitive propensity to be smart are naturally “good at maths.” Can we make everyone good at maths? That is the question. And that is presumably the desire of our collective modern world and politicians. To make everyone ‘good’ at maths and consequently ‘good’ at employability and ‘good’ at growing the economy and bolstering the international ego of the dwindling global status of the UK.

So, to become collectively good at maths we need to do more of it, of course. But the smart amongst us know that mindlessly doing more of it won’t really help. What we need to do is do it smarter!

In comparison to the most able pupils I’ve taught and the most brilliant scientists I’ve worked with and the best maths teachers in the world, I’m not that great at maths. I learnt the early rudiments easily, practised my times tables and glided with minimal effort to an early A at GCSE in January 1989 (there were no A* in those days, nor 7/8/9) with no revision, minimal practice and just two months after my father died from terminal cancer (colon and liver). I thought I was a genius. I wasn’t. I did maths A level. I had to do Pure and Applied. I wanted to do Pure and Statistics. I always hated mechanics and school physics. I got an N (below an E and above a U). Killed my medical school aspirations. Fell into Chemistry (I got a B in that with minimal revision, for some reason it comes fairly naturally to me). I used and applied a lot of maths (place value, arithmetic, units of measurement, calculations, percentages, graphs, data analysis, statistics, statistical experimental design) as a product development and pharmaceutical materials scientist in industry for sixteen years. I would argue the only thing I did more of than maths in those sixteen years was go to meetings and drink coffee. Most of the science I did was really maths and problem solving. I exercised my maths brain.

Then in 2013, I trained as teacher, aged 41. PGCE 7-14. So I had primary maths lectures and workshops. Excellent. Loved it, thrived. Taught Y6 maths on placement. Then for first four years of teaching from 2014 – 2018 I taught year 5 and 6 maths. Sharpened up my mental arithmetic and time tables speed. Enjoyed teaching it but as with the science curriculum I was constantly frustrated by how I was obliged to teach fractions and decimals to children who hadn’t learnt their times tables or mastered basic number and arithmetic. Then I realised that the school day and timetable probably isn’t conducive to a great many children who find learning maths hard.

I think maths is beautiful and wonderful and useful and that it enables virtually all other subjects (chronology, time, human geography, dimension and perspective in art, comparison and description in language, design, science, economics, engineering etc). I think the history of maths is fascinating too. Astronomy. Egyptians. Babylonians. Ancient Greeks. All those brilliant mathematician philosophers: Descartes, Pascal, Russell. Base 60. Circles and time. Base 12. Base 10. Why don’t we use base 12, but with 12 becoming 10 and introducing two more integers / symbols for our current 10 and 11?

If you are “good at maths” and / or (though its probably and) “good at science” then when you have your degree the scientific, technological, business, banking or economic world is your oyster. So it’s rare for such an academic high flyer to think, oh, I know I’ll go and teach a clunky, ill thought out education for the sake of education box ticking curriculum to loads of children who find learning this stuff much much harder than I did for little pay, reward or value in society. When you could become an engineer, computer scientist or trader on the money markets instead.

Conversely if you’re “good at English or History, but maybe not quite so “good at maths” and you don’t make it into the relatively (economically) niche worlds of creative writing, journalism or political / humanities / social sciences research then English or Humanities teaching is your oyster.

This brings us back to where we started with Alain de Botton, in the chapter on Education in his book “religion for atheists.” The world of education (in Whitehall and Schools) is largely managed by English and Humanities graduates (which goes some way to explain the madness of educational data and the outmoded [but not dead] two sub-levels of linear progress each year bollocks) as strong maths and sciences graduates disproportionally don’t go into teaching – and if they do, they are gold dust in the classroom, so are less frequently promoted out of it.

So, to conclude, Maths makes you smart – or resonates more with ‘smart’ people. School and education is a clever centric place. Industry and commerce are smart-centric places. This is why the two don’t understand each other. Politics should combine smart and clever but generally, like education, veers towards clever (how many maths, engineering or science graduates – proportionally – are MPs? And, I suspect of those that are, haven’t spent that long in the science of engineering roots of industry). Sunak is certainly clever, but is he smart enough to realise that what maths education needs, and that of our whole education system, is a complete re-evaluation, and not just more, more, more.

Toby Payne-Cook, January 5th 2023.

by Toby Payne-Cook

We all have stories and perspectives and they all change over time. Frequently our stories become entrenched, influenced as they are by upbringing, politics, economics, religion, profession or work environment, groupthink, social media algorithms and populist zeitgesty grassroots movements. We get drawn in. I, too, am guilty of this. I’m pretty sure we all are to varying degrees. The pursuit of the truth often ends up being the defence of our truth. There is truth and sanctity in a mathematical proof. There is also truth in the valid (carefully controlled with only one variable changed) and reliable (much repeated) data from a relatively simple scientific experiment. But in matters of the human mind, psychology and education we can never be certain, there will always be doubt. Scientific research – and educational research should be no different – is driven by doubt. We can seek best practice and provide evidence for it. And this is made easier if we agree on a specific, measurable outcome. So, if our outcome is optimal GCSE exam results at 16, or optimal A level results at 18 then we can decide that is the ultimate measure of education and develop an education system which optimises results and the teaching to those results at 16 or 18, with the suboptimal resources at our disposal.

But no one will ever agree that this is the best measure of education, or the only measure of education, or what education is for; what is its purpose? Universal school education is a relatively new concept for humanity and the idea that we are anywhere near getting it right for the majority of the population seems entirely flawed to me. Politics, life and schooling are full of compromise. While I don’t like education being or becoming an entirely utilitarian thing, the idea that it is a stand alone and largely academic thing in its own right seems strange to me. Schools were created to provide a more educated, skilled and compliant workforce. They were not created with the explicit aim of strengthening university research departments or for creating a country full of curious, critical thinkers with a lifelong love of learning; bookclubs; debating societies and perpetual, cyclical discourse on Twitter.

Schools exist to enable the economy to function, to enable greater equality in society and to provide the next generation of functioning, useful adults for deployment within that society. Yes, a wonderfully culturally enriching education is desirable but it is not the reason universal schooling was conceived.

Before I attempt to weave together a polite, thoughtful discussion on Twitter with Alison Honeybone, two meetings yesterday – one with my lovely, now mostly retired, PGCE tutor from 2013-2014 and the second with my first boss, friend, co-scriptwriter and off the scale intellectual and uber-creative thinker from my time as a scientist with Pfizer, now a visiting Professor at Bath and Imperial and consultant in pharmaceutical technology, and the future of education report headlines issued by Labour today, I would like to place my background and take on all the Twitter furore in context.

I am a teacher of eight years, with a 7-14 PGCE specialising in Science. I teach in an independent prep school with some progressive tendencies but a largely traditional approach to subjects and pedagogy. I teach science from year 5 to year 8 and run science, astronomy, philosophy and young farmers clubs for children from year 3 upwards. I have been a year 5 pastoral tutor and taught national curriculum maths in year 5 and 6. Before teaching, I spent a brief period as Director of a small educational charity in Hertfordshire promoting STEM competitions, workshops and careers in schools. Before that, from 1995 to 2011, I was a product development scientist and pharmaceutical materials scientist with Zeneca and Pfizer, working on multi-disciplined project teams and part of various collaborations with British and European universities. Before that I acquired a chemistry degree, largely because I failed to make the grade for medical school, and only became inspired or interested in chemistry during my third year industrial placement with SmithKline Beecham pharmaceuticals in 1993 – 1994. I am an industrialist, not an academic. But I’m no pure, rational scientist. My mind meanders and flits and likes to connect seemingly disparate ideas and concepts. I like to consider things from the outside, to ask A LOT of questions and to bounce ideas around with quick-minded creative thinkers. I am wary of the domain specific expert. Their knowledge is frequently admirable and useful, but it often becomes sacrosanct and they cannot escape it, or move beyond it. I find this level of self-belief, this earnestness and this unshakeable certainty intimidating and obstructive. I fully accept that I do not have all the answers, but the institutionalised expert or expert group (the academic working in a small group of like minded academics in their ivory tower; or the diehard subject specialist secondary school teacher; or the diehard primary school teacher) cannot be the gatekeepers of all the truth either. It is an infuriatingly arrogant habit which leads to division, misappropriation and misunderstanding. It is so transparently self-preservationist and only ever tenuously, at best, about improving things for the greater good.

Before university, I had a traditional, private education. It was fine. It didn’t inspire me. It didn’t particularly turn me off either. While we are learning more and more about how the mind works and learns – which can go some way to inform us how we should teach novel abstract concepts like vocabulary, grammar, mathematics and the fundamentals of science – the alleged evidence for domain specific memory (and therefore learning) is far from concrete. Yes, of course we can’t think about complex problems before we have the requisite prior knowledge at our disposal, but what knowledge and how much of it? And why does all the knowledge have to be stored in all our individual brains? We are the most social of all animals and our success as a species is purely down to our ability to communicate with each other. It is grossly inefficient for all of us to have all the same stuff stored in our heads when we can bounce it around between us. Yes, yes, yes, there are entry level vocabulary, language and skill requirements in any field of expertise – be it car engine mechanics, brain surgery, computer programming, genome sequencing, electrical engineering, bricklaying, local journalism, educational research or early years teaching; but in each of those fields there will always be a colleague who has more knowledge and expertise than you – at least somewhere in the world – and you can learn from them (if you want to).

I totally understand that we cannot all discovery learn algebra or the second law of thermodynamics, or what an examiner’s expectation of your understanding Of Mice and Men is, by discovery learning and that unstructured project based learning can be messy and counter productive, but but but the current mainstream education mantra that we cannot think creatively or critically until our brains are full of domain specific knowledge in subjects – which are all neat little human constructs that only exist in schools and universities anyway – is so patently flawed.

The traditional purists will dismiss me as socially privileged, affluent and middle class. They will make a very compelling case that we need to improve GCSE grades for the poor and disadvantaged to pull them out of poverty and that people like me and my privileged kids will succeed whatever. They will construct a straw man version of progressive education to cement their correctness. And believe me, I get it. And I double get it when those more progressively inclined, like me, come out with nonsense statements about 21st century skills and jobs that haven’t yet been invented. Ever since we gravitated from the fields and villages and to the cities in the industrial revolution and ever since the inception of universal schooling we’ve been preparing people for jobs that haven’t been invented yet. It is the nature of cultural and technological progress. The Labour party and progressive education movements do themselves no favours with these trite, pernicious soundbites. If you search me on the internet there is an article penned by me in some unread independent education supplement but tweaked by my school’s super slick ex communications officer with this very phrase in it. I was livid because it completely devalues the important message about infusing a traditional education with more opportunities for creative and critical thinking; collaboration and communication skills to be developed. The misrepresentation of my words opened my mind to how good ideas can be miscommunicated in the media and pushed me towards a more traditionalist mindset.

I’ve recently visited the universities of Manchester and Leeds on open days with my middle child, and eldest daughter. I was blown away from the investment and changes to the environment and approach to lectures, seminars, tutorials, coursework and exams since my time at university in the early nineties. Talking about this with my former PGCE tutor who has been a teacher and educator since the early 1970s, we reflected on the impact that Blair’s 50% intent university influx and the subsequent tuition fees debacle has had on the university sector. They are a service sector now and need to persuade ‘customers’ to attend their steel and concrete towers. With far higher numbers attending university it is inevitable that most of their courses need to be industry and business facing. They have had to become more utilitarian. Most people attending university now are not prospective academics in waiting. They are in huge debt and either have a vocational driver or an improving employment opportunities and earning potential driver lurking beneath their attendance, rather than the romantic lure of knowledge acquisition for knowledge acquisition’s sake. The higher education sector and the transition from school into working life may be ripe for fundamental reform but its what we’ve got at the moment, so it is inevitable that utilitarian drivers are going to pass down from universities into school education.

Now, I understand that if you have a background in the arts, languages or humanities that you probably see this whole education thing very differently to those of us with a background in the sciences, maths, economics or business. Despite my sciencey A level, degree and industry background I am sceptical about the economically-driven, utilitarian STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) agenda particularly because of the harm it has done to arts and languages education. To become a great scientist or engineer, the ability to read and assimilate a lot of information and to look at problems from more than one perspective is better trained by a broad education in the arts and humanities than specialising too early in the abstract beauty of maths or chemistry. I think people would be more malleable and ready for science based careers at 18, 21 or 24 if they studied a bit less fundamental science at school and a bit more art, history or English.

Purely academic minded scientists and examiners might scoff at the suggestion above. But my old Pfizer boss and friend spoke about this yesterday. We’re both very bright, Eddie exceptionally so, but are both firmly of the belief and insight that we teach too many scientific fundamentals to too many too soon; even to future scientists, medics and engineers too soon. A smart, quick thinking mind can be trained in myriad ways; it is not the pumping in of early information which makes them smart rather the frequent exposure to, and grappling with, information by their genetically primed neurons. In conversation yesterday, we were both in full agreement that to be a successful scientist you don’t need to know loads of stuff, you just need to know how to find out, how to ask the right questions and how to find the right people who can answer your questions. Obviously this level of scientific thinking and questioning isn’t trivial, so some scientific knowledge is important, a common language if you like, but mastering every nugget of the GCSE, A level and degree specifications does not make you into a great thinker, it just proves you have above average mental processing capacity and good memory function. I strongly believe much of the KS4 and 5 treadmill could be bypassed, which is a shame because some great, creative minds are turned off the sciences – a joyful, prosperous playground for creatives – far too soon in our dull, specific, excessive, individualistic school curricula.

Which brings me back to creativity, the essence of my Twitter conversation with Alison and the focus of David Blunkett’s research paper for seeding future education policy. I’ve had twitter spats with teachers on this topic before and polite, thoughtful discussion with Alison most recently. I would suggest that the concept of creativity and creative thinking is a minefield of misrepresented misunderstanding in the most part. It was funny talking to Eddie about it, how some of his collaborators at Johnson and Johnson pharmaceuticals have described him of having ‘no box’ – not just an ‘out of the box’ thinker but someone who doesn’t even have a box to sit in! I feel a bit like this too but don’t have the multiple letters after my name that Eddie has. He said that J&J liked him as he doesn’t think like an academic. A pure academic is totally shackled by their knowledge and expertise. They can only think about problems or challenges based upon their existing knowledge and experience. Most really clever people are like this. Most teachers are like this. Most people are like this. The ‘out of the box’ or ‘no box’ or ‘creative thinker’ is different. There are always clever and certainly know lots of stuff but they don’t respect knowledge or domains or rules in the way that purely clever people and academics do. They are rebellious, irritating, impatient, disruptive and seriously annoying to work with. But it is them that initiate (they probably won’t complete it because they’ll get bored and move on to something else) step changes in understanding, technology, invention, innovation – whether it be in science, engineering, design, business or politics. A lot of the time there is a symbiosis between two or more people where this happens – the flitting and bouncing and collective exploration of ideas. The solitary, Einsteinian ‘genius’ or individual Archimedesian Eureka moment is extremely rare, creativity is often an exciting, collaborative pursuit.

Learning lots and lots of stuff at school and university makes you clever. Clever is an academic thing. Clever is extremely helpful in school and academia, and probably frontline politics and economics too. But this idea – that making people clever by teaching them loads of stuff they have no choice over learning or not, or opportunity to explore much beyond the curriculum suddenly explodes in a wave of creativity post school or university is fabricated bollocks.

Creativity and creative thinking comes from somewhere else. Creative people are invariably clever, but they are smart too. The thing about smart people is that they are often smart enough to subvert or rebel against the system and still succeed. They will get bored and either a) become disruptive in the conventional classroom or b) daydream their way through school.* They frequently infuriate teachers. Going back to my discussion with Alison about whether strict, rigid classrooms stifle and suppress creativity – they certainly constrain it, see above*, but I doubt they prevent it, but they almost certainly don’t promote it, encourage it or enable it.

I am not suggesting that these rare, smart, creative types shouldn’t be contained and constrained for part of the school day, for a school needs systems and rules to function for the benefit of the majority, but the suppression of such types for 14 years of five lessons a day, five days a week in conventional classroom education with a narrow, easily testable, highly specific curriculum isn’t a great look.

If creative thinking and creativity isn’t the consequence of years of domain specific knowledge acquisition then where does it come from? Well, I suspect that there is a genetic propensity for it. It may be a consequence of freedom and boredom and the deployment of imagination in early and mid childhood though I suspect a vivid imagination and restless mind will respond to freedom and boredom differently to a child’s mind which is slower to assimilate, understand or retain information.

I think truly creative minds are quite rare amongst the adult population. Some purebred progressives may suggest that this is because creativity is suppressed throughout school and that all young children are creative. Young children are certainly more open minded and curious than older children and most adults but this is a human instinct to learn and acquire skills and knowledge and not the same thing as advanced adult creative thinking. I do think it is a myth that if we just let children explore and play through childhood for longer before we sit them in rows – or group tables – and teach them stuff that we will harness the natural curiosity of young children and miraculously convert it into more creative thinkers later on. But conversely, if we don’t provide opportunities to think creatively, to make mistakes, to generate ideas, to play and explore and ask loads and loads of open, curious, questions throughout the majority of the school day and year then we may be suppressing or stifling that instinct for too long.

But can we teach it? Creativity and creative thinking, that is. Of course we can, but we don’t because it is (allegedly) hard to measure. I am not an advocate of lessons in creative thinking instead of maths, English or art but I am an advocate of thinking more creatively about infusing our curricula with tasks and activities – both independent and collaborative – which promote or practice creative thinking. The same is true of collaboration and communication. Children don’t need to be left to their own devices but they can – in well designed, resourced and structured tasks by skilled practitioners – be given opportunities to develop and practice creative & critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills.

I can hear curriculum design experts and experienced trad-leaning teachers screaming in my ear, “But we already do that Toby! You’re creating a strawman.” This may well be true in some schools. In not sure it’s that prevalent in our current domain centric subject siloed world though. Just because a child is exposed to English, then history, then Science, then maths then art lessons with a variety of content and pedagogical styles this doesn’t automatically cement creativity into the mind, particularly if each subject is made so relentlessly testable and measurable.

There is also the conflation of being artistic or musical or a skilled craftsperson with being creative. Creating something, playing with something, reciting something or making something is not the same as thinking creatively.

The most important thing we can do in schools to develop creative thinking, is to provide more opportunities for open learning and connecting ideas and concepts across the curriculum. I don’t mean endless topic work. I mean looking at a problem, concept or big idea from a historical, artistic, mathematical and scientific perspective. Talking about it. Discussing it. Exploring it deeply. And not just relentlessly pursuing excellence in our pure subject specifications and playing the narrow, one dimensional, optimising progress 8 scores game.

So, while the most creative thinkers are invariably clever people too, they are not creative because they are clever. So, if we want a more creative and critical thinking society who can collaborate and communicate well, we need to practice and develop these attributes and dispositions throughout schooling, in parallel with our explicitly taught (and openly discussed) emotional, cognitive and cultural development. They do not magic themselves upon us in adulthood or in box tick CPD provided by our future employers.

For that, I welcome the broadening focus and purpose of the Blunkett / Labour report, despite some of its aggravating slogans regarding the jobs of the future.

by Toby Payne-Cook

We all have stories and perspectives and they all change over time. Frequently our stories become entrenched, influenced as they are by upbringing, politics, economics, religion, profession or work environment, groupthink, social media algorithms and populist zeitgesty grassroots movements. We get drawn in. I, too, am guilty of this. I’m pretty sure we all are to varying degrees. The pursuit of the truth often ends up being the defence of our truth. There is truth and sanctity in a mathematical proof. There is also truth in the valid (carefully controlled with only one variable changed) and reliable (much repeated) data from a relatively simple scientific experiment. But in matters of the human mind, psychology and education we can never be certain, there will always be doubt. Scientific research – and educational research should be no different – is driven by doubt. We can seek best practice and provide evidence for it. And this is made easier if we agree on a specific, measurable outcome. So, if our outcome is optimal GCSE exam results at 16, or optimal A level results at 18 then we can decide that is the ultimate measure of education and develop an education system which optimises results and the teaching to those results at 16 or 18, with the suboptimal resources at our disposal.

But no one will ever agree that this is the best measure of education, or the only measure of education, or what education is for; what is its purpose? Universal school education is a relatively new concept for humanity and the idea that we are anywhere near getting it right for the majority of the population seems entirely flawed to me. Politics, life and schooling are full of compromise. While I don’t like education being or becoming an entirely utilitarian thing, the idea that it is a stand alone and largely academic thing in its own right seems strange to me. Schools were created to provide a more educated, skilled and compliant workforce. They were not created with the explicit aim of strengthening university research departments or for creating a country full of curious, critical thinkers with a lifelong love of learning; bookclubs; debating societies and perpetual, cyclical discourse on Twitter.

Schools exist to enable the economy to function, to enable greater equality in society and to provide the next generation of functioning, useful adults for deployment within that society. Yes, a wonderfully culturally enriching education is desirable but it is not the reason universal schooling was conceived.

Before I attempt to weave together a polite, thoughtful discussion on Twitter with Alison Honeybone, two meetings yesterday – one with my lovely, now mostly retired, PGCE tutor from 2013-2014 and the second with my first boss, friend, co-scriptwriter and off the scale intellectual and uber-creative thinker from my time as a scientist with Pfizer, now a visiting Professor at Bath and Imperial and consultant in pharmaceutical technology, and the future of education report headlines issued by Labour today, I would like to place my background and take on all the Twitter furore in context.

I am a teacher of eight years, with a 7-14 PGCE specialising in Science. I teach in an independent prep school with some progressive tendencies but a largely traditional approach to subjects and pedagogy. I teach science from year 5 to year 8 and run science, astronomy, philosophy and young farmers clubs for children from year 3 upwards. I have been a year 5 pastoral tutor and taught national curriculum maths in year 5 and 6. Before teaching, I spent a brief period as Director of a small educational charity in Hertfordshire promoting STEM competitions, workshops and careers in schools. Before that, from 1995 to 2011, I was a product development scientist and pharmaceutical materials scientist with Zeneca and Pfizer, working on multi-disciplined project teams and part of various collaborations with British and European universities. Before that I acquired a chemistry degree, largely because I failed to make the grade for medical school, and only became inspired or interested in chemistry during my third year industrial placement with SmithKline Beecham pharmaceuticals in 1993 – 1994. I am an industrialist, not an academic. But I’m no pure, rational scientist. My mind meanders and flits and likes to connect seemingly disparate ideas and concepts. I like to consider things from the outside, to ask A LOT of questions and to bounce ideas around with quick-minded creative thinkers. I am wary of the domain specific expert. Their knowledge is frequently admirable and useful, but it often becomes sacrosanct and they cannot escape it, or move beyond it. I find this level of self-belief, this earnestness and this unshakeable certainty intimidating and obstructive. I fully accept that I do not have all the answers, but the institutionalised expert or expert group (the academic working in a small group of like minded academics in their ivory tower; or the diehard subject specialist secondary school teacher; or the diehard primary school teacher) cannot be the gatekeepers of all the truth either. It is an infuriatingly arrogant habit which leads to division, misappropriation and misunderstanding. It is so transparently self-preservationist and only ever tenuously, at best, about improving things for the greater good.

Before university, I had a traditional, private education. It was fine. It didn’t inspire me. It didn’t particularly turn me off either. While we are learning more and more about how the mind works and learns – which can go some way to inform us how we should teach novel abstract concepts like vocabulary, grammar, mathematics and the fundamentals of science – the alleged evidence for domain specific memory (and therefore learning) is far from concrete. Yes, of course we can’t think about complex problems before we have the requisite prior knowledge at our disposal, but what knowledge and how much of it? And why does all the knowledge have to be stored in all our individual brains? We are the most social of all animals and our success as a species is purely down to our ability to communicate with each other. It is grossly inefficient for all of us to have all the same stuff stored in our heads when we can bounce it around between us. Yes, yes, yes, there are entry level vocabulary, language and skill requirements in any field of expertise – be it car engine mechanics, brain surgery, computer programming, genome sequencing, electrical engineering, bricklaying, local journalism, educational research or early years teaching; but in each of those fields there will always be a colleague who has more knowledge and expertise than you – at least somewhere in the world – and you can learn from them (if you want to).

I totally understand that we cannot all discovery learn algebra or the second law of thermodynamics, or what an examiner’s expectation of your understanding Of Mice and Men is, by discovery learning and that unstructured project based learning can be messy and counter productive, but but but the current mainstream education mantra that we cannot think creatively or critically until our brains are full of domain specific knowledge in subjects – which are all neat little human constructs that only exist in schools and universities anyway – is so patently flawed.

The traditional purists will dismiss me as socially privileged, affluent and middle class. They will make a very compelling case that we need to improve GCSE grades for the poor and disadvantaged to pull them out of poverty and that people like me and my privileged kids will succeed whatever. They will construct a straw man version of progressive education to cement their correctness. And believe me, I get it. And I double get it when those more progressively inclined, like me, come out with nonsense statements about 21st century skills and jobs that haven’t yet been invented. Ever since we gravitated from the fields and villages and to the cities in the industrial revolution and ever since the inception of universal schooling we’ve been preparing people for jobs that haven’t been invented yet. It is the nature of cultural and technological progress. The Labour party and progressive education movements do themselves no favours with these trite, pernicious soundbites. If you search me on the internet there is an article penned by me in some unread independent education supplement but tweaked by my school’s super slick ex communications officer with this very phrase in it. I was livid because it completely devalues the important message about infusing a traditional education with more opportunities for creative and critical thinking; collaboration and communication skills to be developed. The misrepresentation of my words opened my mind to how good ideas can be miscommunicated in the media and pushed me towards a more traditionalist mindset.

I’ve recently visited the universities of Manchester and Leeds on open days with my middle child, and eldest daughter. I was blown away from the investment and changes to the environment and approach to lectures, seminars, tutorials, coursework and exams since my time at university in the early nineties. Talking about this with my former PGCE tutor who has been a teacher and educator since the early 1970s, we reflected on the impact that Blair’s 50% intent university influx and the subsequent tuition fees debacle has had on the university sector. They are a service sector now and need to persuade ‘customers’ to attend their steel and concrete towers. With far higher numbers attending university it is inevitable that most of their courses need to be industry and business facing. They have had to become more utilitarian. Most people attending university now are not prospective academics in waiting. They are in huge debt and either have a vocational driver or an improving employment opportunities and earning potential driver lurking beneath their attendance, rather than the romantic lure of knowledge acquisition for knowledge acquisition’s sake. The higher education sector and the transition from school into working life may be ripe for fundamental reform but its what we’ve got at the moment, so it is inevitable that utilitarian drivers are going to pass down from universities into school education.

Now, I understand that if you have a background in the arts, languages or humanities that you probably see this whole education thing very differently to those of us with a background in the sciences, maths, economics or business. Despite my sciencey A level, degree and industry background I am sceptical about the economically-driven, utilitarian STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) agenda particularly because of the harm it has done to arts and languages education. To become a great scientist or engineer, the ability to read and assimilate a lot of information and to look at problems from more than one perspective is better trained by a broad education in the arts and humanities than specialising too early in the abstract beauty of maths or chemistry. I think people would be more malleable and ready for science based careers at 18, 21 or 24 if they studied a bit less fundamental science at school and a bit more art, history or English.

by Toby Payne-Cook

I’ve been pondering the Twitter commentary on the latest progress 8 data. Some schools and teachers are justifiably celebrating their results while others are busy justifying their less than positive results. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds making above expected progress, enabling them to smash through glass ceilings and increase their chances for thriving in society must be a good thing. However, if the nationwide focus shifts towards purely optimising P8 data on a narrow diet of EBacc subjects this encourages a certain type of school, a certain type of school culture and a certain type of pedagogy and teaching professional, ultimately creating a bland, one dimensional educational landscape.

So, I want to ask a few open questions about how progress 8 works, and how I perceive the data upon which it is based – like so much edudata – to be shrouded in uncontrolled variables at best, and completely gamed at worst.

So far as I understand, the starting point for progress 8 is end of Year 6 SATs data in English and Maths with the end point being GCSE results in 8 subjects at the end of Year 11. Schools with high EAL cohorts often score highly as their end of Y6 data is low with end of Y11 data being high, having mastered English through KS3 and 4. This makes sense. But learning is not linear for ALL children, regardless of their language or working memory or long-term memory barriers.

I work in the independent sector, in a 13+ prep school. One of the arguments for senior boys private schools starting at 13+ while the traditional senior girls private schools start at 11+ is the enormous progress boys can make between 11 and 13 whereas they frequently lag behind girls at 11+. This is also one of the many arguments against selection for grammar school entry aged 10, as some children make rapid progress pre-10 while others make rapid progress post 10. It is a rare child who makes consistent progress through all years of their education. It is a bumpy journey for most, caused by a wide array of factors: quality of classroom instruction and relationship with teachers being only two of them.

Apart from the lack of linearity of learning and therefore progress, another thing I don’t understand about P8 is that the tests at the end are not the same as the tests at the beginning, so I struggle to understand how scores in SATs at 11 can be accurately extrapolated to GCSE results at 16. I understand that there will be an average trend when the whole national cohort is compared. But correlating that national trend to the value added by specific teachers in specific schools seems to negate a lot of other factors. But, broadly speaking, I see how studying this may be useful to schools and governments and parenting decisions while not being particularly useful to the individual children and their future adulthood.

My wider concern with the prevalence of this measure, as the effectiveness of our national education system, is the nuttiness of distilling education into progress made between 11 and 16 (or between 7 and 11 in primary schools). We are not a blank canvas at 11, or 7 and well over half of us are still deep in the adolescent mire aged 16 and very far from complete (though of course we are never truly complete). This divides the teaching profession and our hugely varied beliefs in the purpose of schooling. Our current educational zeitgeist is driven towards optimising outcomes (GCSE exam grades) at 16, but this narrows our educational focus and the type of child, and the indeed the type of teacher, who thrives in our schools. And there is no evidence that such a narrow approach is good for society in the long run.

There is an elephant in the room too. That of IQ or CAT scores. Children with high IQ are likely to be ‘under-taught’ for much of their primary education while children with low IQ may be ‘over-taught’, thus floundering with the cognitive demands of the classroom and excessive curriculum. I teach science to children from Year 5 to year 8. The children with >>120 CAT scores in Year 5 could be taught and master the Year 8 curriculum while the children with <90 CAT scores in Year 8 would not outscore the top performing Year 5 children in the Year 5 curriculum.

Our approach to standardisation and national averages and tracking of progress means that some children are not taught fast enough and become bored or disinterested, or seek education elsewhere while others are exposed to an excess of information and moved on too fast before core fundamentals are fully mastered. This is stifling on both fronts.

By relentlessly focussing on great progress 8 data from age 11 to 16 (and progress from age 7 to 11 in primary), I believe we are narrowing the purpose of education. Some children make great progress early on in primary education and become bored with the relentless exam treadmill in secondary, some make great progress much later on – after school and the mire of adolescence – and some could make great progress in a broader, more vocational, more creative, more varied curriculum. So, while a great progress 8 score is worthy of celebration, I would have grave concerns of this being the only measure of the success of our school education system, particularly if it leads to a narrowing of curriculum and the reduced freedom of teachers to share their enthusiasm, knowledge and experience of their subject above and beyond its oft uninspiring, closed GCSE exam specification.

Let’s get back to providing the pig a rich and varied diet rather than drip feeding it only whey, and weighing it daily.

21. The Accidental Scientist

In 1993, I started my third and final season of summer work on a pig and arable farm close to home in Devon.  It was hard physical labour and the only pure job I’ve ever had, where I was only doing it for the money.  As I write this, in summer 2022, I look back on that time fondly, there’s something more honest and less mentally corrupting about doing a job purely for the money, with social life, enjoyment and those slightly bollocks modern concepts of ‘self-improvement’ and ‘networking’ completely separate from the day job.   After the summer, before embarking upon my 1 year long industrial placement as part of my four year ‘sandwich’ degree course, I had no career plans; no idea of what I wanted to do and no real sense of what my future had in store.

In September 1993, except for my summers working on the farm, I had spent most of the previous two years ridiculously drunk.  And I’d not done enough work.  I had coasted through my course prioritising parties, socialising, drinking and exploding from my sadder, posher and more isolated teenage years.  If Dad hadn’t died, I may not have become obsessed with becoming a 1950s GP and consequently may not have chosen chemistry, biology and maths A levels, and may not have ended up studying chemistry (with a bit of business) at university.  I enjoyed the chemistry part of the course much more than the business part.  I found the business content rather vacuous and lacking in substance.  My mind wanted feeding with academic meat and detail.   But, arguably, there was too much meat.  I was drawn towards physical, analytical and environmental chemistry and both befuddled and disinterested in the interminable curly arrows of organic (carbon based) chemistry and the multicoloured magic of inorganic chemistry; but none of the endless dissemination of facts and concepts, nor the never-ending illustrative practical work filled me with incandescent joy.

Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline) had visited Kingston (now – in my second year – a new University, I think I preferred the Polytechnic moniker) to do some preliminary interviews for third year placements earlier in the year.  Mine went well, I remember discussing the concept of polarity as the means of separation in liquid chromatography.  This led to an invite to Ware in Hertfordshire for a second interview, and my first experience of the stultifying hell of the technical interview.  I crumbled.  Someone else was offered a place and I was put on hold and not rejected.  I was holding out for an offer, when my tutor suggested that I went for an interview with SmithKline Beecham (now also GlaxoSmithKline) in Tonbridge, Kent.  I was very relaxed, as I was still hoping to hear back from Glaxo.  I had a great day and still remember my three interviewers, Dr Mike Webb, Brian Stockton and Mike Kingswood.  Mike Webb was a real character and a huge Rolling Stones fan, which somehow came out in my interview.  I had a good feeling about the day and wasn’t surprised when I was offered a position the next day. 

On my first day, in early September 1993, I was assigned to the mass spectrometry section of the Analytical Sciences department within the Chemical Development division.  Initially, and momentarily, I was disappointed not to be in the chromatography section, having excelled in that part of the interview, but once I met my supervisor and the brand new, carpeted mass spectrometry laboratory it was clear that I had landed on my feet.

The whole site housed only about one hundred people: about thirty analytical chemists; about thirty synthetic organic chemists; about ten chemical process engineers; some HR, finance, maintenance, catering and support staff and eight undergraduate placement students, including me.  On my first morning coffee break in the canteen, there was a real buzz.  The previous year’s students overlapped with us for a week and there were a few summer students and CASE (sponsored PhD) students kicking about, so the room was filled with a younger and cooler crowd than I was expecting.

At coffee, sitting around a low table, the cool kids assembled.  I’d met Marion, (who hailed from Omagh in Northern Ireland) from the NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) lab next door, but all the other early twentysomething faces were new to me.  There was very friendly Neil, from Sheffield, who was the IT (information technology) student, but it was a tall, dark-haired girl from Nenagh, in Co. Tipperary who caught my eye.  Cathriona had twinkling blue eyes, a pale complexion and was dressed all in black, including a pair of black leggings accentuating the slender, sinewy anatomy of her legs.  They were crossed tightly, the top one rocking gently as she demurely uttered sparse, dry comments in a soft, southern Irish accent to die for.  I fell in love instantly.

Three weeks later Cathriona, Marion, Neil and I were living together in grotty student digs on Goldsmid road in Tonbridge, the girls on the top floor, Neil and me on the ground floor and the kitchen and living space on the first floor.  Cathriona finished her brief summer fling with a departing student from the year before.  She worked in one of the upstairs chromatography labs and we flirted via MSDOS email whilst controlling our respective scientific instruments via computer software.  We got together on a drunken night in October, my first proper girlfriend of more than one month.  She was lovely and beautiful and my first true love.  But I was a twat.  I was still a playful, drunken, exuberant puppy and not emitting serious relationship vibes.  I really, really liked her but getting pissed, talking bollocks and not ‘settling down’ seemed more important at the time so, in late January, I finished with her.  A regret, as I type this, but not back then. 

Outside the lab, there were some riotous house parties and lots of drunken Friday nights in Tonbridge, or back in Kingston, less than an hour to the West.  Two weeks into my tenure, and before Cathriona happened, I managed to get myself onto the Tonbridge and Walton Oaks ‘It’s a knockout’ team at the annual SmithKline Beecham R&D fun day.  This was a huge, heavily subsidised event, in the grounds of a stately home in Kent – I think – which hosted employees and their families from the seven R&D sites dotted around the M25.  The merger of American company SmithKline & French and British Beecham’s only occurred in 1989 so, SKB was still relatively fresh in 1993 and still trying to unite its research and development scientists across their legacy sites by sponsoring them to get drunk and behave like idiots, all compered by Stuart Hall, long before he was convicted of multiple sexual assault crimes.

My superviser, Dr Duncan Bryant – a pretty good party animal himself, was both astonished and amused by my antics.  It was the late, great Duncan who properly turned me on to Science.  Before meeting him and others that year, I had presumed the stereotype – of most scientists being socially inept nerds who listened to heavy metal and attended Star Trek conventions – to be true.  It was this pernicious stereotype, and the onerous curriculum content of GCSE, A level and undergraduate Science courses which rather put me off the idea of science as a career, but Duncan and a few others completely changed that.

Duncan was only seven years older than me, and had only started working as a mass spectrometrist the previous December.  He had a chemistry degree from Imperial college, where he started a PhD (3 year full time post graduate degree) studying the chemistry of Nitric oxide (NO, sometimes called Nitrogen oxide) which he finished at the Open university in Milton Keynes, as his supervisor moved.  Then he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.  He was a seriously bright guy and highly respected by the entire Analytical Sciences department, across many sites and the synthetic organic chemists too.  But he wasn’t just a brilliant scientist, he had a broad, deep intellect across many fields – almost a polymath!  He was a keen pub quizzer with deep knowledge of geography, music, literature, art and sport who’d appeared on University Challenge.  We used to do a weekly Sunday and Wednesday night quiz together.  Culturally he was an oxymoron – a huge fan of The Jam and Queen, deeply into dub reggae – especially Scientist and King Tubby but also a keen purveyor of the great 20^th century symphony composers of Sibelius and Shostakovich.  Apart from Queen and The Jam, he introduced me to all these things.  He was funny and silly too, very tall and bendy with an elastic face – frequently impersonating John Cleese’s Ministry of Funny Walks and Alexei Sayle’s stand up act. 

There were some quite good teachers at school and the odd lecturer at university who didn’t make me yawn but Duncan was in a different league.  The single most inspirational, brightest, and down to Earth scientist, nay human, I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.  We became good friends, he came to my stag do and wedding in 2000 but his life was cut tragically short in 2005, from a recurring heart condition.  He was only 40 when he died, leaving a second wife and two very young boys, the second born after his death.  I miss his wisdom.  And his humour.   Before the end, he was chair of the Molecular Spectroscopy group at the Royal Society of Chemistry and The Duncan Bryant Award in Molecular Spectroscopy for a novel research paper for a promising young scientist was set up in his honour.

If I hadn’t met or worked with Duncan, I may not have pursued science as a career.  The respect was mutual – I was his first industrial supervisee, and the first student to be trained to operate the Sciex-API-III atmospheric ionisation, triple quadrapole mass spectrometer.  This state-of-the-art instrument cost £330,000 in 1993 and looked like a small jet engine mounted on top of the WOPR computer from the cult 1980s film, War Games starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.   I realised from early on what a privilege it was to work with Duncan, and use such pioneering technology.  Having coasted through my second year of university, on for a third, and been perpetually pissed in my first year, distracted by head of house and extra-curricular activities, not studying hard enough and still grieving Dad leading to suboptimal A levels I was starting to believe that I wasn’t particularly bright academically.  Duncan changed all that, he made me realise that I was sharp and communicative and quick to learn and that I understood perhaps more than my grades and efforts inferred.  He made me realise that I was, or could be a scientist. 

The experience of doing science was so much more fulfilling than learning science.  All those endless derivation of equations from first principles in physical chemistry lectures; all those curly arrowed reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry lectures; all those befuddling complexes and oxidation states in inorganic chemistry and the never ending illustrative, procedural chemistry practical sessions never filled me with joy.  But I found preparing an unknown sample for characterisation by mass spectrometry, using the data to elucidate the molecular structure and reporting the results back to the synthetic chemists (not manmade people, rather people specialising in the chemical synthesis and chemical process development of organic drug molecules and intermediates) – face to face – immensely satisfying.  Sometimes it was routine, but often there was problem solving and discussion and deep thinking with Duncan, or the group leader Brian, or one of the chemists. 

It was an exciting and very casual environment to work in too.  Most people were a little quirky, with a story to tell.  Duncan wasn’t the only inspirational colleague.  Mike Webb, Kingston alma mater and head of the wider spectroscopy group, was great fun…he went on to become head of Chemical Development in GlaxoSmithKline at Stevenage.  Dave Lathbury, one of the more senior chemists moved to Astra while I was there, to head up their Chemical Development group.  Soon after he poached Dave Ennis, then a young post doc chemist who I learnt a lot from, who has since climbed the ladder within AstraZeneca, now heading up their Chemical Development group, who my ex-Pfizer friend and colleague Dr Stefan Taylor now reports into.  Some great, internationally renowned, synthetic and analytical chemists coalesced at SKB Tonbridge in the early 1990s and it felt good to be a part of.  

As well as being a fully integrated member of the mass spec team, under Duncan’s tutorage, working on real world projects and problems, I got to carry out a two month mini research project, which provided the data and inspirational for my final year dissertation.  Duncan modified the Sciex ion source, introducing ND₃ gas (deuterated ammonia – normal chemical formula NH₃, with each hydrogen atom replaced with a deuterium atom).  Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen which contains 1 proton and 1 neutron in its atomic nucleus, meaning that it still has the chemical properties of hydrogen but instead of a relative atomic mass of 1, it has a relative atomic mass of 2.  So the [M+D]⁺  molecular ions entering the mass spectrometer have a mass 1 unit greater than an [M+H]⁺ ion.  We used toggled the ionisation gas from ammonia to deuterated ammonia to collect spectra ionised with both hydrogen and deuterium and used it to study labile (easily exchanged) protons (hydrogen ions) in organic molecules, peptides (short chains of amino acids which constitute larger proteins) and proteins.  The most exciting data came from comparing the relatively few labile protons in native (folded in its natural state) bovine Myoglobin (the protein which stores oxygen in muscle cells) with the far greater number found in denatured (unfolded, like cooked egg white in comparison with raw egg white) Myoglobin.  I found this immensely exciting.  Analysing and interpreting new data that no one, knowingly, anywhere in the world had seen before was immensely exciting.

I didn’t find it exciting enough to study for a PhD in mass spectrometry, partly because after graduating I was keen to earn some money and rather bored with university life.  Is this a regret today?  Not really, I think I’ve learnt that I’m a storyteller with broad interests; easily distracted too – so dedicating myself to a niche field of research for three years wouldn’t have suited me, but I learned from Duncan that I was more than capable of it and that I had the intellect, the curiosity, and the capability to become a research scientist in industry.  I also learnt that I needed to go back to university for my final year and work my socks off to get a good degree, to renounce the coasting demons of my first and second years, cut back on partying and drinking and turn up for lectures on time, as multinational science companies only employ graduates with PhD’s, 1^st class or upper second class (2:1) degrees.

My year in Tonbridge was more than the year that I accidentally became a scientist, it was the year I grew up and became an independent adult.  I enjoyed earning money and spending it all on gigs, CDs, beer and stereo equipment.  It enabled my first life enhancing trip to the Glastonbury festival.  I found love for the first time.  And I had a brilliant time – working hard and playing hard.  Looking back, as a science teacher who’s rather anti our GCSE system and sceptical of the excessive conceptual, factual and theoretical content of Science GCSEs, A levels and degrees, I wonder how necessary all that rote knowledge is.  And how indicative grades at GCSE and A level of in our potential in specialist careers.  I’m obviously blessed with a high capacity for facts and their recall from memory, but I genuinely didn’t learn a huge amount at university.  What I could do, and still can, was learn fast, ask questions and engage with experts.  I find the idea that to become skilled or capable or expert or creative in anything, we first have to become a walking encyclopaedia in that discipline – deeply flawed.  I don’t believe you can teach anyone to do anything, but providing that you are competent in maths, English and most of all interested in finding out then I believe – and I’m good evidence of this – that you can become a scientist if you want to.  Unfortunately, our current education system alienates too many people from this possibility with our ever-increasing obsession with exam grades at 16 and 18, and the excessive amounts of prescriptive content in the school and university science curricula.  Also, my year in industry taught me, that knowing stuff and studying stuff and being interested in stuff isn’t always enough.  We need to be inspired, we need to be enlightened and have our minds opened to the wonders of science, of life, of art, music or whatever.  And for me, that person was the late great Dr Duncan Bryant.  R.I.P. you wonderful, brilliant, funny big wonder of a human.  And thank you.  

The Vale of Avalon – memories of Glastonbury 1994

I think I first heard of Glastonbury festival in the very late 1980s, in my mid-teens.  It was a niche, underground and alternative affair back then.  Some of my peers were proper music scenesters who read the NME or Melody Maker religiously.  I was a little more middle of the road at the time, more Q magazine, all U2, Simple Minds and retro rock outfits like the Rolling Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin.  There was a boy at school, nicknamed Mully, a stoner and dreamer and lovely guy who was into the hippy scene: Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Fairport Convention, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.  He lived on the Somerset / Wiltshire border and may well have attended Glastonbury in 1990, before our last year at school.  Back then, not long after Dad had died, I was sensible and grieving and not keen on the idea of being silent for long enough so that everyone could get stoned, inanely grinning in their delusional appreciation of the first Pink Floyd album, whilst repeatedly stroking their beardy bumfluff!

Then summer 1992, the end of my first year at university, still largely a retro-head, with the exception of the Friday night nosebleed at the bottom of the student bar moshpit, perpetually soundtracked by Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’  I was skint from nine months and ninety gallons of snakebite and black and heading back to Devon to work on the pig and arable farm again.  I didn’t scarper until early July, late enough to witness the state that friend Nathan was in after four days comatose in a field in Somerset.  I was still a bit scared of the tales of hedonism and debauchery, clean living heavy drinker that I was. 

In Spring 1994, with several bands I was into on the bill and earning decent money (I never had the balls to jump the fence) – as an undergrad placement student in industry – I decided it was time to go to Glastonbury.  I rang the ticket line, got through first time, and bought a ticket for about 80 quid.  I didn’t know much more about it then than I did in the late eighties.  But I loved Blur’s new Parklife album, had a bizarre and thankfully passing obsession with The Spin Doctors and sometimes pretended to be an acid jazzer to a bit of Galliano, and they were all playing.  It hadn’t – yet – been televised and it rarely made the national press, unless something negative had occurred.  Outside the music weeklies (NME, Melody maker) which I still didn’t read, it was barely mentioned gaining only scant column inches in the glossier music monthlies of which Q magazine, my then bible, was the leader.  But it had gained momentum amongst indie kids, illegal ravers and undergraduate hedonists, beyond its antiquarian reputation of new age travellers and ageing hippies.  Some of my friends resisted its hippy charms, sticking to the ‘meat and two spuds know what I like and know what I’m getting’ Reading Festival.

Friend Ben and his younger brother Simon and his friends took my tent down and pitched it for me on the Wednesday.  I drove down with Neil, a fellow placement student at SmithKline Beecham; stopped in Fleet on the M3, to pick up friend Jo and her French pen pal.  Driving down the M3 and A303 from Kent or London was already engrained upon my Devon soul, but on that Thursday in late June 1994 there was a different vibe to the journey.   There were a lot of old style VW camper vans travelling west.  And a lot of beaten up, third or fourth hand cars full of camping gear and ruck sacks with students and young people squeezed amongst them.  We were all very obviously heading to the same place.  Horns were honked, waves were exchanged and grins were ecstatic. 

At Mere, on the Wiltshire / Somerset border we were siphoned off the 3-oh-3 into a police cordon.  There was nothing to find in our innocent car, but there were other less roadworthy vehicles packed to the rafters with crusties, having their stash confiscated.  Then back on the road, up past Castle Cary station towards Shepton Mallet and through Pilton village, then left across some dusty fields and into a car park.  1994 was back in the good old days, pre-mobile phones, so there was a flag, or pair of pants on a pole to look out for.  The walk from the car park, lugging a lot of glass bottles of Kronenbourg 1664 (I have no idea why I carried so much glass but I was a sub 22 year old idiot) was torturous, in hot, sticky weather.  Car after car, then tent after tent, then turning a corner and the whole city in the fields opening up afore me.  I’d never seen a picture of the site before, never imagined its enormity and never expected a huge wind turbine next to the main stage.  It was magnificent.  I’m so glad that I had that element of surprise.  It’s gone now, there are posters and wall to wall TV coverage, so everyone knows what it looks like before they first attend now.  We can look up setlists online before watching our favourite band and decide on baby names and nursery wall colour before the baby is born today.  The world hasn’t got better with all this media and TV and technology.  It’s not necessarily got worse, but surprise is a gift we’ve pilfered from the Earth.

Upon arrival at base camp – up the hill, above the Pyramid (that wasn’t a Pyramid 1994 to 1999 due to a fire a few weeks before the 1994 festival) towards the farm, overlooking the Vale of Avalon below – introductions were made.  There were a lot of us.  I knew Neil and Jo and Ben and his girlfriend Vicky.  We were all 21 or 22.  I didn’t know Simon or Shades (also Simon but best mates with other Simon and worked in a lamp shade factory that I assumed was a sunglasses factory for several years hence nickname Shades) or Kev or Sally or any of the other five or ten approximately seventeen or eighteen year old members of the Meopham / Istead Rise / Gravesend contingent.  While I’d largely renounced much of my public school roots through university and industrial placement life, I was still undeniably a posh public school boy with a chronic affliction of floppy hair and semi-drunken verbosity.  The Gravesend crew, all connected to Ben’s younger brother Simon, were quite different to me but we hit it off like a house on fire.

Neil and I went for a walk, through the market areas, the meeting place and past the main stages.  It was all brilliant, like Paul Whitehouse’s Fast Show character, according to Neil.  He was right but I was trying to be cool.  I obviously failed at that when I chose, with Neil – a fan of excessively noodly guitar (Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen) – to watch the funky grooves of the Spin Doctors instead of the Beastie Boys.  I would definitely NOT make such a terrible error now, and partially made up for it by watching the Beasties at Reading festival in 1998. 

Looking back from my eclectic live music fan and snobby, awkward musicologist’s perspective today – via my late nineties festivals (& beyond) where I gorged on as much music as possible – I feel embarrassed by how little music I actually watched in 1994.  And I look back at the programme and think, oh man – why oh why did I not go and see them, or that: Manics (with Richey); Pretenders; Oasis at 1pm on the NME stage before they turned into formulaic, stodgy pub rock; Elvis Costello; The Cure;  Jah Wobble;  Julian Cope; the pure, squeaking joy of Bjork; agit-punk-rappers Senser and the aforementioned and glorious stew of hip hop, punk and chaos that were the Beastie Boys. 

No, it was all about the campfire vibes.  I drank half my body mass in warm lager.  Kev drank his entire body mass in John Smiths.  Shades and sexy Sally and most of the Gravesend massive got off their head on whatever it was they got off their head on back then.  Simon had a little Lee Scratch Perry pipe and got deliciously stoned from dawn to dusk, leading astray little Jo’s French pen pal who was un-affectionately nicknamed French Fucker on account of her perpetually stoned stick drumming on empty Kronenbourg bottles strewn around the edge of the edge of the smouldering campfire.   Jo’s brother was nicknamed the master of ceremonies, I was nicknamed Satan due to the precarious positioning of two giant candles / flares outside my tent.  We laughed.  We talked a lot of shit.  I think the campfire banter, escapism and downright ridiculousness at Glastonbury 1994, 1995 and Phoenix 1996 are some of the funniest and happiest moments of my life.  There’s a part of me still burning inside, wishing I lived like that all the time.  A nomadic, hippy, anti-establishment new age traveller.  It’s hard to take corporate scientific life, the compliance of mainstream education and politics and economics seriously after experiencing that collectivism and community coherence.

Our commune was large and we often invited passers by to join us.  Typically they were stoned wastrels, or pissed crusties, who sometimes fell asleep with their feet in the camp fire.  My greatest ever Glastonbury achievement was on the Saturday night in 1994, with Elvis Costello’s Attractions pumping out some frenetic and percussive rhythms on the main stage in the distance:  a young lad, wearing Orbital rave glasses walked through the middle of our circle, “Where are you going?” I asked.

“To see Orbital, my favourite ‘band’”

“You don’t want to do that.  You want to stay here and drink beer with me.”

“Okay, I’ll just have one then…”

Three hours later he was still with us, pissed, stoned, laughing and very confused.  Shame he missed one of the most seminal dance gigs at Glastonbury EVER…. It was the presence of Orbital in 1994 which brought in the Dance Tent in 1995, a belated reaction to the well established rave and dance scene by Michael Eavis – who was never really into the more hedonistic aspects of the festival, though he turned a blind eye to it all.

Despite not watching much music, I did manage a groove to Galliano, some boredom watching Paul Weller, a little bit of Peter Gabriel and some deliciously scuzzy guitars from L7 but it was the Sunday afternoon on the NME stage (now twice the size and called the Other Stage) where my music world exploded.  Ben dragged me to see a band he’d liked for ages who I’d never heard of called Pulp.  Jarvis Cocker was and remains unique for his between song wordsmithery and I was hooked.  This was after the release of His n Hers but before they recorded Different Class.  Whenever I play or hear Babies by Pulp, I’m transported back to that sleep deprived, hot, dusty Sunday evening in Somerset and everything is good with the world.  A year later in 1995, they were back, fortuitously headlining the Pyramid after the Stone Roses dropped out and I was there, singing and grinning inanely along, as Jarvis and Pulp went stratospheric.   

In 1994, after Pulp came the Inspiral Carpets.  Okay.  But I needed some food and lie down.  Then back for a betwixt Pablo Honey and The Bends Radiohead.  I’d seen them in the student bar in 1993 and always loved, still do, Jonny Greenwood guitar.  They played a lot of new songs from The Bends.  It was good, but they hadn’t become the legendary outfit of 1997 yore quite yet.  I was there for their seminal Pyramid headline in 1997 too.  But I was too far back (then still naïve in how to strategically position oneself in prime, if not quite front, position for a big Pyramid crowd) and the sound was awful, so I went to see David Byrne (ex Talking Heads) on the Jazz World stage (now West Holts) and he blew my mind.

In 1994, after Radiohead, with the Sunday sun going down behind me, I eagerly anticipated my predicted high point of the festival.  I’d stayed up all night on Saturday, dancing around the stone circle at dawn, and not really napped in the day, so I was dead on my feet and in my bones but then…

The closing soundtrack music from the Italian Job blasted through the PA, ‘We are the self-preservation society…’, a snyth rhythm and drumbeat followed, it was Lot 105 and those cheeky Blur boys bounced exuberantly on to stage and the crowd went nuts.  “It’s Sunday” screamed Damon before launching into Sunday Sunday from Modern Life is rubbish, then a punkier, edgier, dirtier Tracy Jacks than the Parklife version caused much movement in the crowd, a wobbling of tectonic plates and alignment of lay lines.  Ben bolted, his meagre frame not built for the moshy, sweaty, stinky armpit euphoria; while I fucking loved it.  I really liked music.  Really liked it.  But over the course of their 70 minute set, I fell in love with it.  And I fell in love with Blur, especially Blur live, too.

Glastonbury 1994 was probably as pivotal as any other moment in my life.  It opened my mind to the possibilities and pure joy of live music.  It changed me: politically, and socially.  Over the ensuing years I’ve discovered a love of liberal, libertarian, left leaning politics; of gigs and live music of many styles; of wild jazz and afrobeat rhythms; of noisy, scuzzy, punky guitars; of euphoric anthems rinsing through a joyous, connected, peaceful, tide of humanity.  After the wild, timeless coast of Hartland in North Devon; a festival crowd is where I feel happiest, most attuned to this thing called humanity and most life-affirmingly joyful to be alive.

I’m pasting these posts in from Word and something weird is going on…have to paste them in short blocks…maybe wordpress is trying to tell me, “Toby, too many, too, too many words!” *oh sort of fixed this now…

Sorry, and thank you small, yet beautifully formed readership! Things are going to get more emotional, personal and soul searching in the next couple of posts after this one, so stick with me…then the joys of a very benign yet confused adolescence! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

My son compiled a wonderfully creative A level photography portfolio throughout 2020 and 2021 using the digital technology of his smartphone and photoshop. Just twenty-three years earlier, in April 1997, I attended the Spring school in colloid science at Bristol University, as a fresh-faced young graduate two years into my career as a formulation chemist with Zeneca Agrochemicals. A friend and colleague of mine had a friend at the university who was researching polymeric film coatings of colloidal silver nitrate, for a doctorate sponsored by Kodak. Kodak once employed over 100,000 people globally and had one of the largest research budgets of all science-based companies. It was huge. It had grown to one of the largest chemical companies in the world, built upon humans twentieth century fascination with taking photographs of each other. Yet by the time Ollie chose to study photography in 2019, Kodak was no longer a household name. It had failed to adapt, failed to foresee the coming digital revolution and stuck resolutely to the mysterious chemistry of silver compounds upon which its world changing technology was based.

Back in 1982, when I turned ten, the internet hadn’t been invented, the personal computer (PC) hadn’t entered the home, let alone the digital camera, and a smartphone wasn’t even on the radar of the most imaginative computer scientist. There was a computer room at school but very few of us were particularly excited by the mighty Sinclair ZX81 with its 8KB memory and natty little silver papered printer. Admittedly, computers started to enter the mainstream a year later in 1983, when most of us went mad for Chuckie Egg on the ZX Spectrum. While I briefly enjoyed my handheld Crazy Kong and mini-Pacman computer games, I was never, and I’m still not, particularly swayed by the rapid advances in computer and computer gaming technology. It is all the product of someone else’s imagination; all about them luring you into a multicoloured, high octane dopamine rush. Not for me.

Computers and photographic film technology both store memories. A photograph taken during our childhood, or at our wedding, or of us collapsed in a drunken stupor at the end of an undergraduate party becomes the trigger of a memory stored in the mystery of the human mind, whether we recall the precise moment of the photograph or not.

The above is all a rather meandering digression. My mother liked taking photographs. And I quite enjoyed taking them too. Collecting some freshly developed prints from the local chemist is one of the lost thrills of a bygone, pre-digital age. In 1982, I wanted to go one stage further: I wanted to develop my own photographs.

Mr Cowgill, an affable and very traditional prep school master (same tweed jacket every day, shiny bald head, over fifty, weathered face, engaging timbre, perfect elocution, smoked a pipe), ran the photography club at Buckland House School. It was a niche group, just two of us, I think. My newfound enthusiasm for the art and science of black and white photography culminated in my best, and most expensive (I think it cost £50 at the time) childhood Christmas present – a Praktica single lens reflex (SLR) camera.

It was a special Christmas because we went for a family walk on Boxing Day with my new camera, fitted with an Ilford ISO 125(?) black and white film. We walked around grey sands at the Appledore end of Northam burrows and I remember talking a photograph of an old, decaying, wooden boat and a family photograph of my parents and sister. Dad rarely walked, in fact this is the only walk I remember him joining us. I remember him fondly as a solid, upright, warm and playful presence that day.

I took a lot of photographs, playing with shutter speed and aperture, centring the line in the middle of the circle while depressing the button on the in-built light meter. At school, I remember talking photographs of the gnarly contours of a rotting tree trunk, of boys playing on the lake in canoes and topper sailing boats; of pastoral scenes and of the imposing, F-shaped, southern façade of Buckland Filleigh manor house.

Then to the dark room, to spool the film into its special developing box in complete, fumbling darkness. I loved the chemicals. Were they made by Agfa? Or Ilford? I don’t recall. I remember them being stored in small, rectangular, opaque grey plastic containers with red labels and white lids. Opening a new one was super exciting, breaking the foil heat seal and diluting an accurate measure of the chemical fixer with its distinctive and pungent odour into water; using a plastic measuring cylinder and then pouring the solution into a tray, turning on the red light, extracting a large piece of photographic paper, projecting the image from the enlarger onto it and then slipping it into the fixer solution and miraculously watching the image appear. I loved the applied science of it, and sometimes wonder if my brief dalliance in the art of analogue photography did more to inspire my future career in science than anything that occurred in a school chemistry lab or textbook.

Photography wasn’t my only extra-curricular pass time at Buckland House, but it was the most enduring. I picked it up again at my senior school and still greatly enjoy the art of composition, with my memories of the art and science of the dark room indelibly etched upon my mind.
Photography – whether digital or in its original, world changing chemical form – is all about memories; about capturing important moments, people or places in our lives. The memories captured by a photograph are episodic: memories which are deeply infused with emotions and readily evoked. Yet, most of school is about developing our semantic memories – the nuts and bolts of language, grammar, number or the fundamentals of science, history or geography. We have become increasingly obsessed with the development of memory, rather than the development of memories. And yet, it is photography club, carpentry club, building dams, swinging from the flexi-branch or playing with friends in the Avalanches which I most treasure from those more innocent and relatively care-free times. I think we underestimate the importance of time to play, explore and discover things for ourselves within the confines of schooling. Yes, the rudiments of maths and grammar and the perfect sentence matter, but not at the expense of the pure undiluted joy of pre-adolescent childhood, arguably the best days of our lives.

I spent a lot of time alone.  I don’t recall being lonely, as it was all I knew.  My imaginary world in the Chocolate Factory and our other disused barns, in the beech tree or on the farm next door consumed me.  Sometimes my younger sister joined me as we played make believe, to my rules.  Dad was in the kitchen garden, potting shed, feeding the chickens – perpetually feeding the chickens, watching the one o’clock news, having an afternoon nap, or watching Grandstand on Saturdays.  Sometimes he was standing at the kitchen sink, looking up the yard, forever peeling potatoes.  I remember him saying, if we had risotto or Spaghetti Bolognese for supper, ‘that was very good, but we will have potatoes again tomorrow, won’t we?’

We came together as a family in the evenings, invariably in front of the television in the snug.  Thursdays were my favourite: Top of the Pops followed by Tomorrow’s World.  Most of our food was home cooked, tasty and relatively simple.  I remember Findus crispy pancakes, boil in the bag cod in parsley sauce and toad in the hole with mash and gravy.  On Tuesdays and Saturdays, Mr Bromfield the butcher delivered – so there was liver and kidneys on Tuesdays which my father refused to eat, claiming no self-respecting farmer ate offal!  The Sunday roast was a more formal affair.  If it was just the four of us, we ate in the kitchen, always in fixed places.  If Granddad came, or my Aunt and cousins; or some family friends called the Bollands, we’d eat in the dining room with all its attendant rituals.  I’d often help lay the table, and it was always my job to fill the ice box and cut the lemon for the adults’ pre-lunch gin and tonic or Cinzano.  Granddad always had sherry.  Does anyone still drink sherry?

On typical home days or evenings, Mum was normally in the kitchen, or mowing the grass while Lucy and I roamed around our happy home, garden, barns and neighbouring farm.  But there was a peculiar ritual on a warm sunny, summer day.  My mother would rummage through the discarded remnants of my parents’ past, stored in the cavernous and terrifying TARDIS of the understairs cupboard.  After various expletives and shoving of fallen coats, hats and other paraphernalia she would appear in the kitchen clasping her navy blue tote bag, with its rigid, white plastic lining. 

The tote bag would then be stuffed with towels, blankets and factor 2 suntan oil (sun cream with high SPF screen had either not been invented in the late seventies, or my mother renounced its cautious nature, gloating that we should be lucky to be greased up with suntan oil, as her sister – my aunt – used olive oil)! and we’d jump in whatever old jalopy we’d bought for £100 or £200 from Norman and Len at Monkleigh garage (I fondly remember a Ford Anglia, a Ford Cortina mk1 estate and a Cortina mk2 estate, a Vauxhall Victor estate [my mother called these shooting brakes, though we never went shooting] and a particularly stylish, white Vauxhall Viva with a black vinyl roof).

We’d turn right out the driveway, down a narrow country lane past the farm and then fork onto the A388 Holsworthy-Bideford road next to two lavatory brick, flat roof houses.  The road is fast from Wonders corner, past Hollamoor farm, then the hamlet of Frithlestock Stone where John and Millie Toogood’s grocery store was, a sharp left hander, up over the blind summit and then a couple of miles of twists and turns onto Monkleigh, with a patchwork quilt of green fields, hedgerows and relatively few trees, rolling east down towards the Torridge valley.  In Monkleigh, the road kinks left and meanders through Saltrens with the countryside opening up ahead as one descends down the hill to Landcross, where the A388 merges with the A386 Torrington – Bideford road.  The road then follows the brief tidal section of the River Yeo and then runs alongside the River Torridge into Bideford.  I could probably drive this eight mile long journey from Withacott to the twenty-four different sized arches of Bideford’s long medieval bridge with my eyes closed: every twist, turn and precarious overtaking stretch indelibly imprinted on my mind.

Along the picturesque Bideford quayside, which, if it were located in the more affluent south east of England would be full of antique shops, restaurants, gastro pubs, bookshops and fashion boutiques, but – perhaps endearingly and romantically – it was not, and is still not corrupted by such fickle and vacuous wealth.  Up the hill into Northam, past my great grandfather’s Doctor’s surgery and past the rectory and church of my father’s childhood, through the tiny village square and then a steep kink right and then left on to Golf Links Road which does what it says on the tin.  Then the sea and a million acres of blue sky.

A brief stop at the wooden hut to pay for a daily car pass and along the private road across the golf course on Northam Burrows country park, avoiding being hit by golf balls approaching the 17^th green and then off the third tee; or running over a gormless, nonchalant sheep.  We’d pull up in the car park on the Eastern side of the two miles long stretch of naturally occurring pebble ridge which obscured the sea.

There was no manmade concrete path over the ridge back in the seventies, or the early eighties, so the first challenge was scrambling over a three metre high and about ten metres wide triangular wall of smooth, rounded, grey pebbles with an average diameter between 20 and 30 cm.  The eastern side was typically scaled in low wind but by the top there was invariably a strong westerly breeze battering one’s senses.  At the lowest tides, the sea projected a distant roar almost half a mile away.  At the highest tides, there was no beach at all, with the roar of four feet tall Atlantic rollers crashing onto the pebbles and reclining with a hypnotic cacophony of pebbles attritting against other pebbles.

Memories of my earliest visits to Westward Ho! beach in the mid to late seventies have faded.  But I know that we went there a lot.  There is countless photographic evidence of the summer procession of my mother’s old London friends and their young children.  I don’t recall loving it.  Sometimes we played cricket on the sand or played in the sand dunes between the pebble ridge and golf course.  I only paddled, as I was a non-swimmer until I was eleven.  It was undoubtedly a place of great significance to my mother, perhaps an escape from the monotony of parenthood, perhaps a bit of social stimulus away from the contented, hermit-like nature of my sixty-year old father.  With the exception of an annual, (or biannual?) trip in May half-term to family friends in Wiltshire it was the only change of scene my mother experienced throughout my childhood and early adolescence.  There were no family holidays, but there was always Westward Ho!, just twelve miles from home, on tap.

In the mid-eighties, the BBC Radio 1 Roadshow rolled into town, normally on a cloudy, cool day and then in summer 1990, once I had wheels, I spent a lot of time there with friends.  I loved the sea by then.  Diving into the waves, body surfing and grappling with the force of three thousand miles of Atlantic waves crashing against two miles of Devon sand.  The obligatory, rich, creamy local Hockings ice cream after a breathtaking, wild swim; sometimes a cheeseburger from the Cheffles van too.  Once into my twenties, and adult life beyond Devon, I got my Devon coastal kicks elsewhere, perhaps popping to the beach at Westward Ho! for a quick swim occasionally, whereas my mother and sister worshipped at the vast church of the place all day long, perennially working on their windswept Devon tans.

I prefer it as a winter walk now, perhaps from Appledore and then along the Torridge estuary and around the wide open skies of the mouth of the Taw and Torridge onto the beach, all the way into the recently smartened up, and previously rather unloved British seaside town of Westward Ho!, the name taken from a Charles Kingsley (who wrote The Water Babies) novel.

So much family history and childhood nostalgia clings to this great sweeping bay, and its sprawling holiday village, with Northam church and its numerous dead relatives looking over us; a Rothko-esque canvas of grey pebbles fusing with beige sand, deep blue ocean and light azure sky.