5_03 Gary McCulloch - Brian Simon and the Struggle for Education

Professor Gary McCulloch joins Oliver Mumford to discuss the life and work of Brian Simon, following Professor McCulloch’s recent biography of Brian Simon, authored with Antonio F. Canales and Hsiao-Yuh Ku. The episode explores the life of Brian Simon through his family life and educational experiences, his political engagement and beliefs, campaigns for equal secondary opportunities through comprehensive schooling and his contribution to the study and understanding of the history of education in Britain.

Transcript

Oliver Mumford: 0:08

Hello. Welcome to passing notes, the podcast of the history of Education Society, UK. My name is Oliver Mumford, and I be hosting today's episode. Brian Simon remains today a monumental figure in the history of education, a leading Marxist intellectual. His numerous works examining the development of education in Britain remain seminal and relevant texts. His experiences as a student, teacher, soldier, academic, Communist Party activist and lifelong campaigner for equal secondary opportunities through comprehensive schooling, offering unique insight into the life politics, history and education of 20th century Britain, to discuss his life and work. I'm delighted to be joined today by Gary McCulloch, the inaugural Brian Simon Professor of the History of Education at the UCL Institute of Education. Professor McCulloch, welcome to the podcast.

Gary McCulloch: 1:02

Thank you very much, Oliver, and very pleased to be invited. And hello to all the colleagues and friends at the history of Education Society.

Oliver Mumford: 1:11

Thanks very much for joining us. Today. We're going to be talking about Brian Simon, the subject of your latest book, which is the first full biography of his life. It's titled Brian Simon and the struggle for education out with UCL press and authored by yourself, Antonio Canales and Su Yu Koo. It's an exciting work, and it covers a real broad range. And I'm very much looking forward to discussing the book and some of its themes with you, but perhaps you could give us, by way of an introduction, a bit of an insight into your relationship with Brian Simon and what brought you to write the book.

Gary McCulloch: 1:40

That's a very interesting question, and it's something which has been part of my professional life, especially now I guess I've been Professor, Brian Simon Professor now for 20 years or so, and it's an issue which has often come up, even when I was thinking of applying for the post and being seen as the as a named chair for Brian Simon, I was thinking then about my connections with him have been I knew Brian himself when he was a grand old man. And Joan his partner, very influential partner. And I think whenever we talk about Brian, we should never forget his very important partnership, which it really was with Joan. They were, you. Very, very close and supported each other's work, and Joan really defended Brian's work after, after he passed away. And so I knew them a little bit when they were quite elderly and really retired, but they were very, always very, very interested in new work that was going on. They encouraged my work when I was right writing work in the 1990s after I came back from New Zealand, where I've been working before, we used to go out for for meals, and so I consider them fairly well, and I respected their work very much indeed. We had some differences in our outlook, which is very healthy, I think, in looking at ways in which history of education had developed, the nature of the relationship between education and society, and that was always a very, very rich kind of point of departure. We used to talk about education and citizenship, which his father, Ernest, had been very interested in, and he became more and more interested in that relationship as he became older. And so when the Institute of Education decided to make the chair in history of education, a named chair after Brian, who'd been, after all, the leading historian of education in this country since, since the Second World War, one of the greatest around the world. It was a great honor to be invited to take that part. I was always clear, I think that while I was sympathetic to his commitment to education and his ideas about education, I wouldn't see myself as a Marxist, And so figuring how to develop that relationship, that I wasn't by any means, to clone of Brian, that I wasn't following on completely ideologically, but I was wanting to. Show how his work was nevertheless relevant to an understanding of education in the modern world in the 21st century, even though his own main work had been during the Cold War, when we had a welfare state, when Harold Macmillan was was prime minister, and when, when Stalin was was in charge in the USSR, things weren't like anymore, but still, many of his ideas, I thought, were very important, and understanding his role as a as a contributor to our own ideas about history and education. And history of education seem to be very important, and still seem to be to today. We had an advantage as well in that after Brian passed away in 2002 his widow, Joan got all of his papers together and very kindly donated the whole lot to the Institute of Education, and they are there still in the archive, beautifully preserved. Superb archivists at the Institute of Education who fully put it all together. There's an excellent online link to those papers, which goes through his whole life. There are notes by his parents about what he like was a baby running right to his final illness, when he was looking at his life and reflecting on things and many, many different things in between. So that's a fantastic documentary archival resource, which partly is also on his craft as a historian of education. So being there, being so close to this really was an added incentive to me to get to know him and what made him tick all the way through. And so that's that's been something which has been an ongoing interest over the all the time that I've been at the Institute, and getting to know more and more about it, and thinking increasingly that I also write a book about it, but I felt also that it wouldn't be quite right for me to really I was too close to be the only contributor to that work, and so some very, very good colleagues of mine, Tony Canales and Su Yu Koo Tony from Spain and Su Yu from Taiwan, the former PhD student, we agreed to write it together, And that we would be able to write on different aspects of his, of his life, at work. And that really worked. You know, we had different strengths, different interests, and it came together very, very well indeed. You know, I, I guess I coordinated it, but it was very easy job with very good colleagues.

Oliver Mumford: 8:19

Yes, thank you so so much. Of your introduction there speaks to Brian Simon's role and indeed presence in 20th century history, and the number of strands and influences which are present throughout the book, which has relevance for so many fields, not just in the history of education, but also the history of the Communist Party in Great Britain, and these large global trends and patterns through the Cold War and British and international politics. There's so much there which will hopefully get on to unpack. It would be impossible to cover it all. Have to turn to the book for that. But perhaps now you mentioned quite a bit in the introduction about Brian Simon's personal life and the personal aspects to him as a figure, he was the youngest son of an English upper class ennobled family which had a long history of political engagement. In some ways, he was very much an establishment figure, but in other ways, he offered a counter towards that. Would you mind giving us an insight into Brian Simon's background, his personal life and his family life, as well as his educational experiences, all of which went into creating such a complex and influential figure in British history of education and in British history more generally.

Gary McCulloch: 9:23

Yes, splendid. Thank you for that as well. Well as you rightly say. Brian's own background was very much English upper class born into country estates. His parents, very well known upper class liberal intellectuals of the early 20th century. Ernest Simon, an industrialist, made his money through industry, but he's also a Liberal MP and. Well known in national national politics. Led society for educational citizenship in 1930s very keen on the latest educational ideas. Sheila, a very significant figure in local activism, but also national activism as well, particularly in education. Very strong figure in her day as well, and they formed a very exciting political partnership in their own generation prior. Brian, like his siblings, his sister, very Antonia, very, very sadly passed away, very, very young, seen as very promising future leader, but sadly, sadly passed when she was very young, but also Brian's older brother. They they were nurtured through prep schools and the public schools, that is, the private schools of the of England, chosen for their liberal reputation, although they didn't always experience them as being particularly liberal in their nature. In fact, such was their emphaisis on conformity that many of the students who went to those schools tended to rebel and and led them into Marxist politics, in a way, that's what happened with with Brian as well. Yeah, it is actually that that link John Tracy used to say that that the became a Communist because he was left out of Eton cricket 11, which I think said quite, quite a bit. But Brian also was influenced by the whole politics and scene of his own generation, growing up into the late 1920s early 30s, with the rise of fascism, authoritarianism in Europe, but also the survival of the Soviet Union, which cut through its revolution in 1917 and seemed to many young idealists of the Time to offer a great new alternative, a new civilization, creating new new visions of what people can do. If you read something like not even just younger people, Sydney and Beatrice Webb were very much taken up by the Soviet Union. Saw it as a new civilization. And so a lot of the young, younger people were were very much attracted to that as a contrast to both the Facism above of Europe and the older style politics and class politics of England at the time. And that was very much the flavor of the times in Cambridge, where, when Brian was went there, and he was drawn into the Communist Party at the time and became an activist and a student leader and very much a Marxist intellectual by the time he left Cambridge in the late, late 30s, and went on, in fact, to be a student at the Institute of Education where he was and then leader of the students of the National Union of Students by the end of the 1930s so and very strongly taken into that kind of, kind of, kind of seed that was identified with, I guess, both socially and politically by then. And Joan was also a member of the Communist Party, and when they met, it was a natural partnership between them.

Oliver Mumford: 14:25

Yes, thank you for that. And you mentioned just then the Brian Simons time at the Institute of Education. I think perhaps could pause there to look at what his engagement and his time at the Institute of Education, how that brought him into the sort of growing and certainly burgeoning field of education studies and the history of education in the UK, and how that led into and contributed to his later monumental works on the history of education in England and Britain.

Gary McCulloch: 14:51

I think it did. Yes, there actually are some quite intriguing student essays which he which he wrote so. Om even before he went to the Institute, which showed his interest in educational society. But I think his interests were further developed through the Institute and often quite accidental contacts, not necessarily his own formal training, but people whose lectures he went to, among which were those of the then director Fred Clark, who whose work on society and education had a strongly historical approach to them which which appealed to Brian. Fred cloud wasn't himself by any means a Marxist. He was a liberal Anglican, but his critical approach to understanding education was something which is quite different from from other approaches at the time and really appealed to Brian, and he was able to use that as a springboard, if you like, for his own work later on, which he always acknowledged and was was interested in trying to develop further.

Oliver Mumford: 16:15

One of the things that comes through, particularly in the book, is just how Brian Simon's political life and his experiences and worldview was so intertwined and enmeshed with his academic life and his academic work, and we'll perhaps get on to his political work, but at the moment, how did Brian Simon impact the study and approach to the history of education In the UK?

Gary McCulloch: 16:40

Well, I think that really starting from his interest in Clark's very different approach. Clark himself was a sociologist, really more than a historian. But Simon could, Brian. Simon could, could see how he could be used to to inform a perspective on the history of education, which really hadn't been taken up at all until then, more or less, all work on English history of education, at any rate, was very liberal, progressive, I think one would want to describe it, seeing the development of educational institutions and ideas as one of gradual progress based on discussion and rationality, no sense of social class, of differences, of conflict in the development, all being very smooth and idealized. And Brian was very discontented with that always and wanted to find a very different way of approaching or understanding history of education, he found that partly deserved Marxist politics, which he saw as be based on class differences, class antagonisms. And so wanted to try to find out the origins of those in the education system which had developed in the 19th century, partly in his own experience, which he developed as a teacher in the 1940s in Manchester. So these things came together, although he never had any formal training in history his subjects at Cambridge were English, and then economics, and then Manchester University did a Master's course in psychology. So really self taught in history, as some of our best historians of education have been not that kind of formal training, which sometimes one would expect, but always very rigorous in his approach to sources. And by the 1950s he felt when he was getting on for being in his 30s and 40s, and he went on to be a lecturer at Leicester University College. By that time, he felt able to, at start to publish his own rights in history, while at the same time he was contributing to the Communist Party and their kind of historical approaches themselves. And so he had kind of, if you like, a dual role different kind of audiences that he was applying his ideas to.

Oliver Mumford: 19:44

What do you think his legacy and impact has been subsequently, going forwards? I think the book charts this quite well that it it his his approaches and his studies that you've outlined shifted the narrative and shifted the direction of history of education in the UK.

Gary McCulloch: 20:01

Yes, I think in particular, I think he was especially interested in the relationship between education and society. I think that that was his really most important contribution, not that he's been the only person. I think more in more general terms, one could say that modern approaches to history of education are also based sort of generally on that. So he's contributing to that newer view of what history of education is about, that that relationship between education om society, he had a particular view about what that relationship entailed. That's certainly the case. He based it on social class, excluded really, either almost completely, any idea about, for example, gender differences or other kinds of inequality. And many, many people come into to look at different kind of approaches to those things, but but certainly in terms of social class, he was, was a forerunner of that kind of area, and something which in some ways has been lost or at least partially diminished by quite right, understanding, kind of approaches to understanding educational inequality in the 21st century. So he would always have said that social class came first as a as an instrument of inequality, certainly in terms of 19th and 20th, 20th Century England, or more, more widely, Britain.

Oliver Mumford: 21:50

and thinking about the alternative approaches and perspectives, which, as you say, have been subsequently developed and continue to be developed today. I'd be interested in your understanding in what role did transnational histories and processes play in Brian Simon's work, it certainly plays a role in his political thinking and his links with the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Great Britain. But perhaps it could be said colonial and post colonial networks appear somewhat infrequently in the book. He does write that the Institute of Education emerged in the interwar years as the leading university based center in the Commonwealth for the study of education and the training of teachers. But was there any more engagement through his work and through his perspectives in Britain's transnational Imperial global position, or were those transnational perspectives limited, perhaps more to his communist and Soviet Union links.

Gary McCulloch: 22:42

That's a very interesting point, and I agree that that's well worth exploring. I think he was well aware of the links between the growth of the education system and the nature of colonialism and the British Empire that comes out, certainly in the second volume of his great four volume history of education on the late 19th century. And you can see in his notes on that, on that work, that he was interested in, in trying to bring out the the role of imperialism. So it wouldn't be fair to say that he had no, conception of that. But although in some of his later work, one might not see that so much, he was always very interested in trying to develop intellectual networks, informal and formal, and those were partly International, as well transnational, as you say. And very, very keen to develop those and those came to fruition later on in his leadership of education societies, history of Education Society, which he helped found in 1967 the British Educational Research Association. He was a leader of that and President in the late 1970s and also the European history of education, which he supported very much and took a great deal of supporting the development of international societies, particularly is linked with Eastern Europe and and the Soviet Union is supported there. But also more broadly, and when he retired, he went, invited to different countries and supported the development of their role there, he might have developed his ideas still further. And. Is very interesting. For example, how far his ideas chimed to certain extent later on in his career with Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, and that he came close at some stages in developing a kind of Gramsci kind of view. But I don't think he only quite developed that in any in any full detail, part because of his distractions elsewhere in politics and other things, but some very interesting links which one can point to. And his brother, what was a popularizer of Gramsci in England, so and also Gramsci had to Brian's minds quite, quite a positive approach to an understanding what education could do. Unlike other sociologists, particularly like Bourdieu, for example, and the new sociology of education, because he felt that they were too negative, too pessimistic about the possibilities of education for developing educational change. So he's always very much an optimist in his views about education and about the possibilities of individuals, human potential, and wherever it was, he'd like to support that kind of positive approach, rather than what he saw as a negative approach, saying no, education can't do anything about society.

Oliver Mumford: 26:39

If we could go back, as you mentioned, to his political identity, we've already covered how Brian Simon's Marxist beliefs and membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed through his experience, his backgrounds and his intellectual position. Particularly interesting is the fact that he remained a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain following the mass schism and exodus in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which saw many of his contemporaries and peers leave the party and go on to form the New Left. Brian Simon remained a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and justified his process in doing so, but later said he came to regret those actions. What were the contexts and reasons behind Simon staying in the party and remaining committed to the Communist Party of Great Britain at this time?

Gary McCulloch: 27:34

Yes, Brian's continued links with with the Communist Party certainly a matter of great interest, not only an understanding here, but also the nature of political loyalties in general, trying to understand what it is that draws the adherence to particular groups. I think in Brian's case, I think you can understand it, especially in terms of the relationship he had built up with the party in the 1930s when he was at Cambridge, which wasn't only a matter of links with the key individuals, and he knew, you know, many, many of the people who were leaders of the party then, but also his support for the Republicans in Spain, the Spanish Civil War and the really rather well, the elemental struggle that was going on there between different kinds of political forces, which could easily be characterized as between communism and fascism. And he took the very much the kind of Soviet side of what was going on there, and now that was really the parts of his continued loyalty. I think that really whatever they revolted, he could see he could see some something positive enough, and and the the, on the other hand, what they were actually fighting against as being very much Something which, which he wanted to to identify with. Not that he was uncritical of the Soviet Union behind the scenes, as he was in the case of Hungary. He was very critical indeed, as I showed in the book. But. But publicly, he refused to take the route of criticizing either the party or the Soviet Union in public, because he felt that that was undermining, the party itself, and was was against the kind of spirit of the whole thing, and so it's very difficult line to tread and and cost him, in many ways, a great deal in his public standing, he could often be identified simply as a spokesman of the of the Communist Party, which wasn't really fair, but that that was what he we what he chose to do. And so others, such as Hobsbawm and others, as you say, had been, had been involved at the party and left to go, go the different ways, but Brian stayed, stayed involved and trying to build a new way of thinking about an approach to being immersed in intellectual life, which would heighten the influence of the party in English society. And he found that through the cultural Committee of the Communist Party, which he took the leadership of, and in that he was very optimistic about the ways in which, in different spheres, Marxist ideas could could take the lead in understanding particular kinds of institutions. It's society. History was one of these, but many, many others as well, and that the cultural committee could be an instrument towards trying to support that. And so that that was the way in which is his ideas really developed. So his view about adult education had really mutated from from one which was based on working class head identification through workers Education Association, which had been very interested in still was interested in through a view of intellectuals, more broadly, middle class intellectuals, having an influence in social and political thinking, and that was where his real interest started to gravitate towards.

Oliver Mumford: 32:36

I think that aspect is really interesting for a number of reasons, and not least his ambitious programs involving hopeful programs, which involved the likes of E. H. Carr C. P. Snow, Ramond Williams, Bertrand Russell, and so many other major figures to come together and foreground the role of the public intellectual, a role which he himself occupied. And perhaps we can come on to that later. But first you spoke about his transformation in focus towards adult education and the role of middle class public intellectuals in his academic work, Brian Simon's focus was upon schooling, comprehensive, elementary and secondary schooling. But it's interesting, I think, to look at his engagement with higher education. You note early on that in his diaries, he wrote, I believe, to his sister, saying, quote, I would like to plan new universities for new needs, which was a sentiment driven by the idealism of the age. And he went on to take an academic professorial chair at the new University of Leicester, and was active in a period of great expansion in higher education. Yet it seems his engagement with this expansion and the creation of new universities was less prominent than other intellectuals and historians such as E P Thompson or Asa Briggs. He welcomed the Robins report, but he was not involved in the new universities to the same extent as his contemporaries. Was it his focus on elementary and secondary education that took his attention, or was there something else behind this?

Gary McCulloch: 34:06

Well, it's an interesting question. I don't think it would be fair to say that he had no interest in university education. In fact, his first book was about universities which he researched when he was still leader of the National Union of Students and was published during the war, very, very slight work, which I've got, I've got here, actually, and later on, he was interested in the development of Educational Studies itself as as a university discipline. Indeed, he moved to work in university. I think when he became frustrated as a teacher, felt that he wasn't getting anywhere in scores of the, in developing his ideas in schools, and felt that universities were were much more likely to be receptive to his approach. So universities, you know, certainly were part puzzle of his, of his thinking. But I think he particularly saw elementary schools and secondary schools as being the ways of understanding the class basis of the English educational system from from the late 18th century onwards, that it was by seeing the struggle, as he put it, of the organized working class for education as happening at a grassroots kind of level, and higher education came into it, but it's finding a means for mass education the revealed struggles was going on, if you look at his fall volume work as as I'm sure you've done, you can see how, in the first volume, it's mainly the Elementary Education and different kinds of approaches to elementary education which take the front seat, although, you know, also talks there about the development of, for example, UCL in the 1820s and 1830s and sees that as very much a middle class perspective practice in education. But again, I get it. He comes back to these, these basic things. That's so in the fourth volume, I think the fourth volume becomes more and more a general text, which more than the previous ones have been, and there's more scope for other kinds of areas of education to come into it. But I think by and large, in his, in his in his main work, he sees the main action going taking place in mass education involving the organized working class. That's where his interest was.

Oliver Mumford: 37:42

Brian Simon's time at Cambridge University brought him into contact with many of the Cambridge spy ring who received much public attention. And as we have covered, his time at Cambridge was a very formative period for a number of reasons. But from this point, Brian Simon's career, like many academics and intellectuals of the periods, such as Eric Hobsbawm, was then followed very closely by British intelligence throughout his student days, throughout his national service, even when a serving member of the British Army during the Second World War, military intelligence was monitoring him closely, compiling reports on his actions, beliefs and politics. And this topic remains relevant in the current climate with the monitoring of academics and their politics and work. Brian Simon occupied a very unique position here. He was prepared from a very young age in the hopes of his father to become a figure of the British political establishment, but was then monitored and surveilled upon by the British state, and he occupies a space between the two influencing policy as an ardent campaigner for comprehensive education in the UK, but also at the same time, very much outside of the British state and establishment. Would you mind unpacking some of the details and some of these complexities in his character and relationship between these two very interwoven strands of his personal and political life.

Gary McCulloch: 39:03

Again a very rich relationship there. I think one could say that they fed off each other. Those symbiotic one could say is its relationship to wider politics and his relationship to history. They both informed each other, and they they grew from it, from each other. Who knows what came first. They really supported each other. They could get in the way of each other as well. In the 1980s when when he'd retired and was wanting to get on with his history, he found himself in a struggle against the Conservative government's education reforms, which took a lot of his remaining energy in a fairly futile attempt to try to prevent the education reforms developing into the Education Reform Act of 1988 so they it wasn't always a fruitful partnership, and in that sense that they could get in the way of each other, and also even in his developing his social ideas, I mentioned Gramsci, that he often didn't have the the space to be able to develop new ideas the way that it might have done so in that in that context, could often fall back on tried and tested ideas which had developed in the 40s and 50s, which could happen. But even given that, given the the limitations and the the way in which these could obstruct each other, in some ways, they're very important in providing what was, in many ways, a unique perspective on education, that education was itself political, but so was history, and so it was understanding that the political dynamics At the heart of things which really helps you to get a grasp of what was going on. Now, in his case, as I say, that that that was was rooted in a sense of working class conflict, but he also had a view about the state as being dominated by the middle class. Which one could say I said, I said this to myself. I was cheeky enough to say, well, you know, I thought maybe his view about the state was was rather over uniform, that there was a lot more going on there than he perhaps allowed for. And he was always willing to debate that and to argue that, which is great thing. He didn't mind me sort of chipping in that sort of way, as with other people, but, but he would always come back, would always want to defend, in the end, his basic kind of principles, about, about about things which were, he had very, very strong and he he held to, held to these principles about education and politics and and history, long after, I think his faith in The Soviet Union had wained.

Oliver Mumford: 43:01

Staying with these political beliefs and views supported and developed through his research and work. Brian Simon remained throughout his life, an ardent supporter and campaigner for comprehensive schooling. And he came to this position from a background in education in one of Britain's elite independent schools, albeit a school from a more liberal tradition or an ostensibly liberal tradition, what did his educational background and experiences bring to his understanding and belief in the importance and role of comprehensive education in the UK?

Gary McCulloch: 43:37

That's an interesting question, and one could easily say that he is his elite education itself meant that he idealized working class education. He didn't really have very much contact with it himself, you could say, until he went into the Army in 1940 and found himself with a wide range of other walks of walks of life, and so perhaps he could be said to have had quite an idealized view about working class education and working classes, instead of from his own social background. I guess that could be said about him, and leading, leading to his particular view about comrades of education. But I think his his involvement in the Labor Party, his involvement in Cambridge certainly would have allowed him the view that there were there were different streams, different strata in English society, whichmeant which, which strengthened the class divide, and that this is something that even even Clark was, was conscious of, as I say, but by no means a Marxist, and that the the natural coronary. That was that if you could do something about the educational divisions between grammar schools and elementary schools, then that that might might help you to do something in the longer term, but social divisions. Not that he was willing to say that if you develop comprehensive schools, you would have an equal society. He didn't fall into that he could see what had happened in the United States, for example, where you had similarly sort of high schools, where you had a wide range of population. And that didn't necessarily lead to a socialist society, by any means. But he argued at a longer term that was something that would lead to at least a more a more egalitarian society. That was, that was present. You know, he didn't go any further than that, I think. And I think he always, always looked at the longer term, rather than something which could work inside a couple of years or so, the development of new ideas could, if one were very lucky, really provide changes over a regeneration is very good. I'll just mention because one work that would be, if anyone is watching this and may be interested in finding out more after they read our book. Of course, it might be a bit too much to go straight into the full volume history of education, but I think his best single volume worked as an introduction to bright would be his book, Does Eucation Matter? If you could see that Does Education Matter, which is, I think his best book of essays, a very varied set of essays about all sorts of things. And the first essay that can education change society? I think, is a very interesting introduction to his ideas. Perhaps is his most influential essay, which a lot of people tell me that they still use in all sorts of educational classes. Why no pedagogy in England, is one of his best known essays, and that's also quoted in that very, very useful volume of Does Education Matter?

Oliver Mumford: 48:27

There is so much within the book and in Brian Simon's work in life, which could prompt discussion for hours. But I think as time is pressing on us, we may have to end the episode there in mind that many of the subjects, from comprehensive education to the role of public intellectuals in British society, means that Brian Simon's title, does education matter? Is still clearly a question that is in the forefront of British political and public life. So first. Gary McCullough, thank you very much for joining me for a fantastic discussion. Thank you. Thank

Gary McCulloch: 49:01

you so much for inviting me. It's enjoyed it a lot. Oliver, thank you. And if it stimulates more into reading and thinking about Brian's contribution, that's all. That's all very worthwhile. Thank you very much.

Oliver Mumford: 49:18

Passing notes is a production of the history of Education Society UK. Our executive producers are Heather Ellis and Tom Woodin. This episode was written and produced by me Oliver Mumford. You can find the transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences at our website, historyofeducation.org.uk.