Ignorance

Sally Tomlinson is Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London and an Honorary Fellow in the Education Department at Oxford University. She has held professorial chairs at the universities of Lancaster and Swansea. Her most recent books are Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (with Danny Dorling) (2019) and Education and Race from Empire to Brexit (2019).

• 1. Introduction: ignorance evolves2. Breaking out of ignorance, 1945–803. Market forces and ignorance in the 1980s4. Redistributing ignorance in the 1990s5. Bog standard schools and academies, 2000–096. Weirdos and misfits, 2010–207. Ignorance in Covid/post-Covid schooling, 2020–218. Conclusion

Published to mark 80 years since William Beveridge’s report on impediments to social progress, this brisk history of English education charts eight dizzying decades of policy initiatives and events, from the 1944 Education Act to the “examinations shambles” of the Covid years. Tomlinson’s even-handed account and incisive analysis of where and how successive governments have failed in tackling inadequate schooling - or, as Beveridge had it, “ignorance” - is spliced with personal accounts from her remarkable career and family life. Written with authority and wit, it’s an expertly sharp and coherent diagnosis of the persistent problems that undermine education as much in 2024 as they did in Beveridge’s time.