I’ll be speaking to the Ruskin Fellowship this weekend, the independent association of Ruskin College alumni. Ruskin was established by people who saw education as the route, not only of personal fulfilment, but also the catalyst for social progress. Down the decades, it has provided a university education in Oxford for generations of social workers, campaigners, trade unionists and politicians. When Gandhi came to England, he insisted on paying Ruskin a visit. Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee was a tutor. Ruskin belongs to a family of institutions, from the Working Men’s Colleges, to the Workers’ Education Association, to the Open University, which were rooted in the idea that education is the surest way for the poorest and most disadvantaged people to get ahead. If you read the biographies of some of the Labour and trade union leaders of the early part of the last century, you can see the strong tradition of autodidacticism. Working men and women, who after long hours of manual labour, would read and discuss Dickens, Marx, Ruskin, and Carlyle with one another, attend public lectures, and contribute to public libraries.

Even today, the success of the Open University, which celebrates its sixtieth anniversary next year, shows that working class people, often those who were failed by the education system, are prepared to come back to learning later in life. When I visit Ruskin, I shall pay a small tribute to the men and women who put such faith in education as a liberator of human potential. But I shall also re-dedicate myself to an education system which gets it right first time, for every child, no matter where they live. And that includes the academies, which deliver a first-rate education to kids in placed where mainstream schools have sometimes failed to unlock their talents.