In defence of Angela Rayner

I’m going to defend Angela here. So what she struggled at exams. She is smart and well deserves her position. And if you took a minute to see what she overcame you’d be all the more impressed. We don’t always agree. But she has my respect. Shame on you. https://t.co/bA5zYAGEKV

— Layla Moran 🔶 🏳️‍🌈 (@LaylaMoran) September 23, 2019

I'm with Layla on this one.

Education and educational achievement are things to be celebrated, but how you do at school can be as much a measure of your home background as how bright you are.

That's one reason I am so pleased that Layla has placed such a strong emphasis on adult learning as Liberal Democrat education spokesperson.

And there comes an age (with most of us it is about 19) when we stop thinking how you do in school examinations matters much. Churchill used to exaggerate how hopeless he had been at Harrow because he thought it gave him kudos.

I had some small experience myself of home background affecting my performance at school. As I wrote back in 2005:

When I was in the early years of secondary school, geography lessons seemed to be dominated by middle-class girls whose families encouraged them to write to foreign embassies for information about the countries we were discussing. 

Being male and coming from a one-parent family with a busy working mother, I was never going to compete with them. (And if you want real street cred, I got free school dinners.)

One reason for recalling this today is that I discovered three years later that one of those middle-class girls was a young Allison Pearson.