Let’s hear it for Richard Pring! The Oxford University professor was cheered at a education conference earlier this month when he called for an end to the ‘Orwellian’ language often used in education.
The public sector is renowned for its love of jargon-tastic ’strategies’, convoluted policy phrasing and incomprehensible sentences. It’s not just annoying, it betrays a worrying lack of engagement with the reader - which can be a dangerous a thing when you consider that it’s us, the readers, that public servants are supposed to be ’serving’.
In sectors such as education, the risks are even greater, turning something that should be about effective communication and clarity and sharing knowledge, into a confusing, opaque world that replaces the simple, basic tenets of education with jargon and management-speak.
Pring calls for an end to delivery and a return to teaching. No more new providers, but plenty more new schools. Enough of performance indicators, how about the quality of teaching?
Oxford professors aren’t generally renowned for their straight-talking , but Professor Pring is right on the button. Let’s hope the policy wonks at the education department (and elsewhere) were listening.
