News of the sudden death of Ted Wragg – “teachers’ champion” and Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Exeter – in November 2005 inspired many warm published tributes.  Teachers often knew Ted mainly through his hilariously satirical writing for the Times Educational Supplement.  In Ted’s words: “there are two choices when things go badly in education: laugh or cry.  I prefer to laugh...”  But Ted was also a distinguished researcher, thinker and teacher. What is his legacy to music teachers?  Here I briefly consider this through the lens of two of his most recent books:  Education, Education, Education – a collection of his satirical writing since 1998 – and The Art and Science of Teaching and Learning, which is a collection of his broader writing in the World Library of Educationalists series.

Ted’s own music education was positive.   As a child he wanted to be a professional musician (as well as train driver!), and he continued to enjoy music throughout his life.  He had a broad understanding of curricular music education that perhaps began with his lessons from Norman Barnes at King Edward VII Grammar School in Sheffield.  Ted wrote, in 2000, that Norman Barnes would not have sympathised with any “official government-prescribed Music Hour (10 minutes for counting quavers, three minutes to sing Jerusalem and bang a drum)”.   As a young modern languages teacher, Ted taught at the same school as Keith Swanwick, and participated in Keith’s masters research.  They took turns to present exactly the same recording of an orchestral piece to several classes.  Keith (correctly) told the classes that the performers were one of the greatest orchestras in the world, whereas Ted said they were the Wigan Society of Music Lovers.   Students consistently rated Keith’s recording as better than Ted’s.

There are occasional further references to music in both books.  A chapter on ‘explaining’ (in the  ‘serious’ volume) respectfully lists the ever-astonishing (to me) range of skills that secondary music teachers are expected to possess.  And a satirical test paper, written in response to a Tony Zoffis proposal to assess 7-year-olds for Level 3*, includes the deeply thought-provoking:

Explain your parents’ reasoning for weekly violin lessons, when you hate them, refuse to practise, and sound like a strangled cat

alongside:

Compare and contrast Tinky Winky and Dipsy as late-twentieth-century icons, commenting in particular on the semiotics of the Teletubbies landscape

and:

Hothousing – if you are the plant, what is the fertiliser?

Ted once told me that he allocated only an early morning weekly session of 90 minutes to writing each of his satirical pieces: impressive stuff!

But three – not only musical – points particularly struck me about these volumes.  The first is that some of the satirical pieces appear also in the ‘serious’ volume.  Ted was deadly serious about his satirical writing, which he intended to influence national policy, and not only to generate a few laughs at the end of a long week – although that was important too.  The second is the accessibility of his research writing in the ‘serious’ volume, in particular his use of description to bring classrooms alive.  The third is the extent to which Ted’s pre-Ofsted research, much of it based on classroom observation, reports valuable messages about teaching and learning that inspectors – who often also spend much time in classrooms – generally leave unsaid.  The opening ‘serious’ chapter is a riveting account of teachers’ and student teachers’ (not always successful) first encounters with secondary classes.  The next reports secondary students’ appraisals of their teachers, and graphically relates these to classroom observations of their (not always successful) teaching.  The book continues in similar vein.  No wonder that Ted coined the phrase ‘re-inspected to destruction’, claimed facetiously to have invented Chris Woodhead, and defined ‘homograph’ as:

A word which has the same spelling as another, but a different meaning: ‘Ofsted tries to give a lead, but the prose in its school reports is like lead.’

I commend Ted Wragg’s ‘serious’, and not only satirical, writing to you.  Ted was far more than a comedian, and the undoubtedly hilarious qualities of his satirical writing will, I suspect, stand the test of time rather better if its deadly serious roots, too, are not forgotten.

JANET MILLS (RESEARCH FELLOW, ROYAL COLLEGE OF MUSIC)

Wragg, E. C. (2004). Education, education, education: the best bits of Ted Wragg. London: RoutledgeFalmer.  0-415-33551-5    £12.99

Wragg, E. C. (2005). The art and science of teaching and learning. London: Routledge.  0-415-35222-3    £22.99