I've been reading three letters sent recently to Teach the Future. Two came from the DfE (one from the office of the secretary of state himself, and the other from some obscure Baroness), and the third was from a bloke in the Scottish government's Directorate for Learning (sic): Workforce, Infrastructure and Reform. All, of course, were actually written by civil servants.
They were, as far as I could judge factually accurate (it's not always the case) and all gave a good impression of trying to address the issues raised by Teach the Future. The key word in that last sentence was "impression". They all reminded me of a story I heard some 30 years ago. This was part of civil servant lore – the sort of thing that gets trotted out in junior civil service training. It went like this:
A keen (if somewhat wet round the ears) civil service trainee was asked by his boss to look over a letter that she had drafted in response to a query from a member of the public. The junior approached this task with commendable diligence and went back to her the following day saying: 'I've made a few changes as you didn't quite answer all the questions, and there were a few ambiguities".
He got the cold stare from a furious supervisor who said: "How long do you think it took for me to get it to the requisite level of ambiguity?"
Just so. As for the 3 letters, since you ask: No. They don't advance the cause of environmental education one iota, and can be added to the long list of ministerial fobbings off. I have a good collection of such missives, but Sotherbys is unlikely ever to be selling them.
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