Harry Hudson

Enough! Does no one have anything nice to say about our schools? If it’s not headlines about monstrous behaviour driving teachers out of the profession, or apparently rampant wokism colonising our classrooms, then it’s Bear Grylls opining that modern education is ‘boring’. The respective merits of these claims aside, if you listened only to these and many others similar, you’d soon succumb to the insidious narrative that there’s nothing good about our schools. And you’d be wrong. I’m no Pollyanna. I’m a full-time teacher in the state sector, and I’m all too aware of the long hours, the pressures of Ofsted, and the serious need for sustained investment in our schools.

This week marked 500 years since the beginning of the two-week festival of jousting, feasting and general splendour that came to be known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Henry VIII, accompanied by a retinue of more than 5,000, had set out across the Channel from Dover for the small town of Guînes. There he was to meet Francis I, king of France since 1515, 25 years old to Henry’s 29, and seen by Henry as a rival. On this occasion, however, Henry came to make peace, not war, at a meeting organised by Thomas Wolsey — Lord Chancellor and the rising power in England. The ostensible goal was to cement the goodwill so painstakingly established two years before in the Treaty of London. This too had been Wolsey’s brainchild.