ABSTRACT
We treasure fresh thinking, right? Even if it is potentially slightly mad? If we want to clear the way for blue-sky reforms we surely have to allow a bit of battiness? So I felt a bit sorry for poor old Martin Stephen, of St Paul’s, calling down odium on his head with the suggestion that academically brilliant teachers should be given special contracts, with their work focused entirely on top-set groups, and that the poor dears should be ‘reassured that they will not be asked to teach groups for whom they have no understanding’.
