Yet sometimes I think the opposite is true: that schools do not get nearly enough attention on Britain’s £71m- per-year speech network. There is hardly an issue more vital, but it is not part of Radio 4’s regular output — which, as many listeners have noticed, covers the arts, books, consumer affairs, farming, business, finance and religion, week in, week out, but does not do that for education.
Almost as if to prove its neglect, Radio 4 has just killed off King Street Junior, a popular comedy-drama set in an LEA-maintained primary school of the sort so many of us know. Created and written by Jim Eldridge, a former teacher, and produced by a talented veteran called John Fawcett Wilson, this began in 1985 as plain King Street Junior. It later added the word Revisited to its title. It was a lovely series, good-humoured and perceptive on staff-room squabbles,dinner ladies, outings, the curriculum, bullying and the sad modernity of closed-circuit television in the playground. Big names in the cast included Peter Davison, Carolyn Pickles and Michael Cochrane (now Ambridge’s Oliver Sterling).
“I do find it very frustrating, with all this stuff going on in education at the moment,” Eldridge says. “John and I feel the same way: not only is there no King Street to put the current controversies into dramatic form, there is really nothing on Radio 4 that is dealing with any of it. We met Paul Schlesinger, the new head of radio entertainment, and he is sympathetic. But the problem is that Mark Damazer is the man in charge, and he has made his decision — to ‘rest’ it, a euphemism for ‘axe’. On reflection, we were lucky to survive so long, with our 14 series of 100 episodes over 20 years.” Just from his own point of view, incidentally, Radio 4’s controller would be better advised to announce he is getting rid of something (as he did with Home Truths and the UK Theme), as that sparks an open debate to which all are invited, rather than make the decision in secret and wait for it to be revealed here (as with Veg Talk and now King Street).
The argument might seem odd in the week that Libby Purves returns with her education series (on Tuesday at 4.30pm). But The Learning Curve traverses, as it says itself, “the wide world of learning”, not just our children’s often dire levels of numeracy, literacy and knowledge of British history, selection by ability or aptitude, inclusion, exam-board proliferation, classroom violence and so on. It is about “learners” rather than “pupils”. Too often, it takes its lead from those who think the problem in our schools is one of resources, not those who think it is about standards and expectations.
For a long time, Radio 4 had no obituary series, a strange omission that Damazer has now rectified with Last Word. The time has also come for him to give schools more prominence on the radar of Radio 4 and to ensure that it remains in a class of its own.