Reflections on a London journey

The standing joke about travelling in my home country of Wales is that few people realise that we have a Welsh sub-continent, which takes up most of the middle of the country and consists mainly of two counties - Powys and Montgomeryshire - where rolling countryside gives way to small towns and country miles wind their way through hedgerow and field. All this bisected by the Welsh version of the M25, the A470 which runs north-south and is the major arterial route. Thousands of words have been expended on the inadequacies of this road in the form of reports, discsussions, debates, political manifestos. Plans come and go, elections are fought and lost, the talk goes on and still very little happens in the way of change to this enormous piece of tarmac which is literally at the centre of motor travelling life in Wales, apart from the highways in and out and surrounding Wales - the M4 and M5.

Travelling in and around London is a very different experience. Since I have been living in Kent I have cause to undertake journeys into the capital more and more. Yesterday was a case of car, tube and bus out to the East of London via the delights of a the Jubilee line and the DLR (docklands light railway) to Stratford (not the Warwickshire town and birthplace of Shakespeare although it would have been an interesting diversion) and thence to Leyton on the Central Line (did not feel that central at the time as the underground became the overground). The destination was as yet some way off and required a bus from tube station to somewhere near the road I had to walk down to arrive at the street which harboured the school I was visiting at its end. The school building was a revelation, all new architecural design and opened at the turn of this century by the then-Secretary of State for Education, Estelle Morris. Set in a borough of London that has been the recipient of government largesse and increased state funding for services such as education, the Lammas School at least has a modern building to serve the needs of a catchment area which reflects our modern wider community life: a high number of pupils with English as a second language; a sizeable provision of free school meals; special needs coverage (of all kinds).

The infrastructure of education is linked with public policy in a very direct way. In towns, cities and villages all over the UK there are school buildings which are still standing and in use from the 19th century, when the era of state involvement in the provision of public education began with the various Education Acts of the 1870s. Indeed, I had encountered a typical example of swhen I stopped for directions at a primary school bearing all the hallmarks of a 19th century school build: red bricks; iron railings and the separate exits and entrances for boys and girls. A very twenty-first century group of school children, filled with the faces and languages of a dozen countries, played in the yard built by the burghers of Leyton and Walthamstow who had been mindful of their public duty to encourage 'useful lives' among the citizenry when Victoria was Queen Empress of India and Britain had an Empire (run from Whitehall and managed by a few hundred servants of the Crown). If those same men of affairs took a walk past the school they financed they would find that the Empire had come home to the mother country in all its variety, colour and diversity. I crossed the road and travelled over a hundred years in a few hundred yards, to a shining new building proclaiming the same endeavour in pursuit of the virtues of public education of a century ago. A long way to travel in so short a time. The challenges may be different but the ideals of education for all are the same.