Learning to Write in Britain

The industrial dispute could mean UK university students’ hard-crafted final dissertations go unmarked, even graduations delayed. It’s a deep shame.

I’ve just read my daughter Maxine’s final history paper for Warwick, a fictionalised Roma Holocaust memoir – detailed, structured, moving. Previously, our eldest, Stefanie, penned a fascinating honours maths dissertation for St Andrews, a barnstorming history of a non-proof.

And our youngest, Daniel, with exams still to sit, just got top marks for his final A-level history paper for Dame Alice Owens School on the 19th century Balkans, featuring Misha Glenny, who wrote for IWPR in 1992. Imagine! (I’ve had naught to do with any of this.)

The point is, amid the ongoing dispute, as well as the UK’s endless argument over education, British teachers are amazing. In its systematic way, British schooling really teaches kids how to write. The evidence, on the occasions I get to see them, is around the dinner table.

Special thanks and huge love to the extraordinary history faculty of Owens School, and equally to the dedicated university professors (history, maths, politics, philosophy) – all have inculcated skills of thorough research, dispassionate analysis and thoughtful expression.

It’s very moving as a writer and editor to see your children able to think and argue and craft a sentence so well. I will always be profoundly grateful to my adoptive country for this.

Now, powers-that-be, please sort this mess out! If Britain can overcome Covid and lead on Ukraine (just don’t mention the B-word), surely we can figure out how to treat our own teachers right so everyone can get on with doing what they do best – building a brilliant Next Gen.