The Thirty Years War: My Life Reporting on Education, by Richard Garner (John Catt, £13)

BRITAIN’S education system is perhaps the thing our rulers are least prepared to leave to the experts.

This is, of course, nothing new. The genesis of mass schooling did not take place in a political vacuum and nor did the 1944 Education Act, nor still the introduction of comprehensives.

But Richard Garner’s new book looking back on his career as an education correspondent would convince anyone that the past 30 years has seen education become more of a political battleground than ever before.

Successive governments sought to give education their own brand through buzzword-clad initiatives. Some were successes, such as New Labour’s big literacy and numeracy push.

Others, like successive attempts to reform or replace GCSEs and A-levels, were dropped alarmingly quickly or pushed onto the back burner. Where, Garner ponders, does this leave the children and a profession regularly caught up in industrial strife?

Garner, who worked for the Times Educational Supplement and the Mirror before joining the Independent, takes us back to long-forgotten brouhahas during the reigns of 16 education secretaries.

Sometimes this chronological approach can be rather plodding and there are notable omissions. The hiving-off of universities to the new business department under Gordon Brown is barely remarked upon.

But Garner’s approach certainly drums home that few ministers learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. The slim volume is also peppered with amusing anecdotes and wry observations, one highlight being the story of how thousands of spiders were bought in to control greenfly in a hanging garden at John Patten’s Department of Education.

Garner repeatedly refers to the “education world,” grouping together the staff, heads, policy experts, governors and politicians who set the agenda for Britain’s schools, colleges and universities. That’s a world, of course, that can be at war, an instance being when teachers’ unions are accused of prioritising self-interest over the good of children by Ofsted chiefs.

But it can also unite against what it sees as an alien attack such as Theresa May’s expansion of grammar schools, which saw the NUT line up with Nicky Morgan and Sir Michael Wilshaw.

Specialist correspondents, as a tribe, are often accused of being too close to the inhabitants of their patch. Garner, for his part, says he “never considered that my job makes me part of the education world — merely an observer of it.”

This was evidently not how Michael Gove’s special adviser Dominic Cummings saw things. In a 3am email complaining about an Independent story, Cummings advised Garner to consult a colleague, the Financial Times’s Chris Cook, on seeking a “good therapist.”

Garner hints, but does not explicitly say, that Gove subsequently sought his removal as the Independent’s education editor.

It would have been a foolish move on a professional correspondent with undoubted left leanings on certain issues but a strong sense of duty to balanced coverage. Garner is perhaps too modest to make this book a compelling memoir but as both a history and a critical eye it will surely prove invaluable.

And when newspapers increasingly see specialists as an expensive indulgence, it should also remind us how expertise and passion can make journalism about more than just filling space.

CONRAD LANDIN