Friends, I have the task (which I feel very inadequate to discharge) of trying to bring together the strands of this celebration of 25 years of the work of the Comino Foundation. I knew Dimitri Comino towards the end of his life and much valued his friendship. Let us try to see where the idea of GRASP and the enormous scope of its potential in education, which you have been hearing about, might now possibly lead us.

I want to start with the proposition that teaching is a very subtle and complex process. It is not the simplistic activity which many of the polarities used in populist controversies (formal versus informal, traditional versus progressive, active versus passive etc.) all suggest. I want us to dismiss such impoverished thinking. On the one hand, teaching is not merely a matter of exposing pupils or students to experience and then "allowing them to learn"; that kind of view of a teacher as facilitator is not sufficient. But then those who reacted too strongly against it by creating rigid structures for curriculum, for assessment, and even for teaching method and organisation, fall into the other trap, because they might very well make teachers merely operators of machine. If that were to happen it would drain out, I suggest, all the insight, the experience and the individual touch of one person's mind on another's or one person's spirit on another's which is the essence of what we all remember as being marvellous moments which we had with our teachers. I recall James Thurbur saying once that it is just as bad to fall flat on your face as it is to lean too far over backwards! I hope that one of the things that will now happen, after the important restructuring of education that has occurred in the last 20 years or so, and the strengthening of its accountability and public connection is that we shall end with a more humanistic view of what it involves to teach than has been current during that period.

Teaching has at least five vital components. To start with you need to know a good deal about how a particular pupil or student learns best. For that you need to have some insight into their previous educational experiences and their nature. That gives you clues about appropriate teaching methods. You also need to be clear about what a student needs to learn, whether it is skills or knowledge, or understanding or attitudes or values. Next, you need to have a very clear picture of the nature of the subject itself, and this is the most intellectually challenging part of teaching and the part that is done least well, I think, even in universities. This is because each of the domains of knowledge which humankind has created has its own ways of investigating the world, its own tests for truth, its own language of discourse and its own language in which it reports that discourse. All that needs to be understood and used as part of the teaching process, being given to the student as skills and understanding and indeed as increased skill and understanding. Next, as you start the process of teaching and travel the road, you need to be able to assess whether the student is learning. You need to do that, just as you will have done everything else, with the student. It builds up motivation because the reason for the activity is made clear. This process is assessment in teaching and from teaching, as opposed to the summative assessment which will come at the end. By evaluating as you go, you become capable of building positive feedback into t he very process itself, so that improvement in learning occurs as you go along because the curriculum materials and teaching methods are adapted as necessary. Lastly, you need to be clear about the form of accreditation, the qualification that is being aimed for, because that itself will have its own language of discourse, its own demands and its own logic which the student must satisfy.

When I tell you that these are the five steps of teaching and are true of any stage or phase, whether it is with a very young child or with an adult, or whether it is with someone who has got little intellectual capability or may be suffering from a disability which affects their learning in some way, or is someone who is extremely intelligent, none the less all those steps are needed. That is what teaching has been like and will always be like (I submit), a very demanding and intellectually and emotionally challenging activity. Notice how very similar those steps are to what Eric Bates was telling us earlier about the steps that Dimitri Comino had suggested as the steps of GRASP. You need to know the nature of the persons involved, the purpose for which you are working, the nature of the material with which you are working, how you are going to evaluate and feed back, and how you will know when you have arrived. In this way, teaching is both rational and intuitive; it is both routine and opportunistic; active and reactive. And in saying teaching, I mean you will now appreciate, the whole range of activity that education requires and which you have heard about from our colleagues earlier. I am talking not only about the classroom but about the processes of management and organisational development of the teachers and the managers and of the system itself.

As you look at the education balance sheets in Britain at the moment, it is possible to describe it in very upbeat way. Participation rates are historically high and higher than they have ever been in further and higher education. When I went to university, fewer than three per cent of the age group participated. Now it is more than 30 per cent. That suggests a high level of motivation for further learning and also the ability to learn which are derived from the school system. Indeed, the inspection evidence shows that schools in general are ordinary places and offer students and pupils often the best and only experience of order and purpose that their lives have to offer them at that stage. Thirdly, it is clear that parental expectations of this country are enormously high and, again, historically higher than ever. And, fourthly, it is clear that the social and economic demands being made upon people are higher both personally and generally than before. More personal capacity is required and that will go on growing as we face more and more global competition and as personal worlds, our own worlds of ourselves, our families and our work become more complex and potentially more threatening and dangerous.

That is the upbeat description, but there is nonetheless widespread unease about education in this country, not all the creation of the tabloid press (though much of it is). There is a good deal of fear expressed as an anxiety about what is seen as the collapse of the values of the traditional family, whether it is the stability offered by two parents or whether it is something as fundamental but simple as eating at a table together rather than separately in front of the television. It is clear that we have more unruly and disaffected pupils than we have had before. In 1990—91, for example, permanent exclusions from school were at a rate of less than 3,000 a year. This year they are at the rate of over 13,000 and still rising. Moreover, research has shown that of those excluded about three-quarters never return to a school. Recruitment into teaching (and I speak now as one who is much concerned with that) is in danger. It is not only that there is obvious shortage of recruits, particularly in the well-known ‘shortage subjects’ but there are hidden shortages. For example we know that fewer than 50 per cent of mathematics classes in our secondary schools are taught by people with a graduate qualification in maths. Then there are suppressed shortages, where the subjects just drops out of the curriculum because there is nobody to teach it and it does not look like a shortage because no-one tries to put it back.

So, how do you balance these two pictures? And what is happening to our young people in particular that we, the generation who have a care for them and who must teach them as parents, as employers and as teachers, must understand; and what can we do? Education takes place always in a social context and each new generation of young people face a very different world from their parents, and that rate of change is accelerating. Perpetual change we are coming to accept as the norm. Donald Schon announced it in his brilliant 1971 Reith lectures Beyond the Stable State and I think that it is now accepted that we will never again have the kind of stability people believe they see in the past. The consequences are, I think, something that we are only coming to understand and apply that understanding more slowly. I am going to use some material from Freedoms Children, a publication of the Demos think-tank. They looked at the generation under 35 across the whole of Europe. And the arresting thing is that they found that the changes in values which are going on are stable and similar across the whole of Europe and across all classes of society. It is not a phenomenon only of this country and it is not a phenomenon of an underclass, although an underclass may very well exist. Each generation this century seems to be moving further from the traditional family, from traditional religion and, most interestingly, from material security. They appear to be moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, away from the material end of security and safety and towards the more emotional and spiritual end of that hierarchy. That is something which I do not think we have quite understood well enough and it is consistent, I suggest, with the other argument that we have heard a great deal now, that this generation, about which we are so anxious, is the most moral and possibly more moral than we were when we were their age (and I speak as somebody well into their 60s). This generation cares about the environment, about the equality of the sexes and of opportunity, about racial equality of opportunity, about world poverty, and is highly internationalist rather than jingoistic in its outlook. Most tellingly, this is the first time for the 60 years in which the surveys have been done, in which we hear the under 24 yearolds telling us that they do not expect to be better off than their parents. And, indeed, all the economic forecasters, as you will know, predict a decline in real incomes for those who are now aged 18 to 30 compared with the present generation.

If we look at the data in a little more detail, colleagues, you will see that other very interesting things emerge. First of all, the values which you gain in childhood (and this is true across Europe), appear to last a lifetime. Secondly, the move from traditional religion is not a move away from religion but towards more intense and spiritual versions of religion. Thirdly, the traditional man/woman division of labour is disappearing at home and at work. Fourthly, there is a loss of respect across the whole of Europe in this age group for very large institutions. For example, the judiciary, parliament, the monarchy. (A much higher proportion of this age group do not vote in any of the countries of Europe compared with their predecessors.) And this of course at a time when in Britain at least we have been intensely centralising and enlarging our institutions. But, fifthly, individualbased institutions do seem to have retained a large measure of the respect of the young; the general practitioner, the priest in whatever form and the teacher — which may have created the other thing we all notice, namely that people often say their own school is good but the education system as a whole is bad.

As I have been speaking I hope that you have been translating the generalities into examples known to you personally and into the kind of situation we have had reported in our own country, for example by the National Youth Bureau, which is very concerned about the exclusion of young men under 30 from economic activity in the labour market, because that denies access to full adult status. In consequence, here and in America, this interesting term is beginning to emerge not “under-dog” but “under-wolf”, because that group having been excluded is beginning to bite back.

Now what are the messages for education in all this? What are the messages for us, who would try to give this generation as good an education as we believe they need? The first message is clearly that this is a generation in turmoil which will have very difficult lives to live. Let us be quite clear about that. We are preparing them for something which is tougher than, on the whole, we have experienced ourselves. Secondly, it is clear from what these young people tell us that the current emphasis on examinations and jobs is certainly not working for the excluded simply because they are excluded, and yet it is not fully satisfying the more privileged, who want to have their wider view of life and of the significance of life and humanity more clearly made a part of their formal education. Thirdly, it is clear that teachers are respected, and that the pupils themselves have a very high expectation of moral behaviour at school. Since schools are indeed places of order and purpose that is what we expect to find and usually do find. Fourthly, it is clear that the characteristics that employers require and ask for, besides those fundamental sets of knowledge and skill which are enshrined in the national curriculum for example, are character formation, the cultivation of multiple intelligences and capacities, and the ability to co-operate and work in teams as well as to act individually. The educational response to all this is something which I think is now on our agenda. It is what educationists in this country who are reflective and forward thinking are concerned about. They are trying to see how we can adapt from the strong platform we have created in order to be in this richer grain, since this appears to be the grain we should be in.

One thing for certain the young demand from us, and good teachers have always tried to create, is the experience of authenticity; that what you do with children should have relevance and value in itself and not be ersatz, not be bogus. Indeed the superficial and the time-servers have a hard time of it and rarely survive for long as teachers. You will remember Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. I always felt that he was the paradigm teenager because he could spot a phoney adult at forty yards; and of course, nearly all teenagers have that incisive quality, as we who have taught them well know.

Secondly, I think you have got to find ways of creating a choice which is genuine for youngsters as they go through school, but within a framework where those choices can be both rational and moral, so that those capacities are developed through the process. And the third thing we clearly ought to do and that educationists have always had to do is to attend both to the creation of the individual identity and wonderful flowering of the individual and all his or her capacities for good, along with a sense of the inter-dependence of humanity, the respect for others which is required because they are like me, and if I have a right to be individual then they must have it too. It is the creation of individuality within a framework of fraternity.

Now, if you have recognised the account I have given and accept that it may be a description, albeit brief and superficial, of our present condition in education and our need to think for the future, then from what my colleagues have been telling you tonight whatmight be the contribution that a process like GRASP could make? I hope it is clear beyond peradventure that none of us think that GRASP is a panacea, or that merely by applying it like a mantra we can solve all problems. Subtleties of both the problems themselves and of the GRASP process are far greater than that. But, in the situation I have described, concerning our youngsters within their social situation and their looming future (of which they are more aware than we), I think that being given the personal power, to think through a problem or process could be the key to your growth, to your self-confidence, and hence to all those capacities and developments which I mentioned as so desired. And of course it also allows you to improve enormously the learning of the basic parts of the curriculum. It applies to them all. I cannot think of a subject or skill or an element of understanding which could not have the GRASP process in some way applied to it with advantage, because of its relationship to the five stages of learning and hence of being a teacher and of being able to help people learn. GRASP can offer a way, I think, of creating the circumstances in which the capacities and capabilities of people, both individually and in groups, can be drawn out and developed. To succeed in using GRASP, and this has come out very strongly tonight, those using it need willingly to understand not only the individuals but also how groups work. So that, for example, group work is not dominated by ideas which may seem very bright at the beginning and could carry the day, but need more careful examination and so that slower perhaps more thorough thinkers in the same group are given their chance. All that we know from group theory and is an example of the sort of thing I mean when I say that GRASP interacts with the best kinds of professional development. GRASP is, at its best, a framework for analysis and control of both purpose and process. If you look at the study done at Warwick University by Viv Little and Val Brooks, of the work based on GRASP in Dudley, a very penetrating look with no holds barred, the title is significant: I’m still using GRASP. It is what a teacher said ten years into the process. I would like to quote one piece from this study because I think it is so significant:Indeed one or two individuals with a very long and full experience of GRASP spoke almost with awe and wonder of the sheer power of the approach the more fully one understood it and the more deeply one explored it. GRASP, they had found, was not a quick fix, but it was a potent one. It is the view of the current evaluators that the explanation for this potency lies in the second stage — the admission, nay conviction, that the most obvious route is not necessarily the shortest and the challenge to closed thinking that this represents. GRASP, while enjoining the rational, faces down the habitual and releases the intuitive — herein lies its creative energy.

Now, colleagues, surely that social and personal framework of teaching which I described earlier on and the imperatives it creates for new purposes and methods calls for that kind of potency? Where it is achieved the pupils respond and grow. It needs wider understanding and application. And that goes not only for teachers, but for those who have responsibility for the social and political framework of education and its resourcing.

I want to end with a quotation I am very fond of to wrap up the evening’s thinking. It is to wrap it up and carry us forward, to give us a realistic feeling of what is possible and what we have as our duty to do. I hope you will feel that tonight you have heard about a tool which is, more and more, being pressed into use in education.

In The Lord of the Rings this is what Gandalf, the magician, said when he handed over his stewardship of this earth to humankind, which is roughly the position the education system is in at the moment.

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world but to do what is in us for the succour of those years in which we are set, uprooting the evils in the field that we know so that those who live after us may have clear earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

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