There’s a new man about Whitehall. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appointed Oli de Botton – ex-adviser to David Miliband and the husband of former No. 10 communications chief Amber de Botton – as his Expert Adviser on Education and Skills. The role of the new skills guru will be to advise ministers on the government’s education vision but Mr S is more than a little sceptical of de Botton’s track record in the field. Not least because the adviser also happens to be the co-founder of School 21 – a progressive free school that has produced some rather underwhelming results…
Working with ex-Tony Blair SpAd Peter Hyman, the government’s new education expert set up the radical education project in 2012 to deliver a programme of teaching that focused on ‘head, heart and hand’. The dynamic duo pushed a programme of oracy-based education that currently includes ‘mastery lessons’, problem-based learning scenarios and creativity to ‘develop students who create beautiful work which makes a difference to the world’.
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