Learning to see

Posted on 10/08/2026

Patrick Yarker remembers the scholar and educator Mary Jane Drummond

Mary Jane Drummond, who died in July, was an active member of the FORUM board for over 25 years. Her debut article, co-written with Fred Sedgwick and entitled: ‘Crimes against learning’,[1] was typically acute and authoritative. It examined – and excoriated – the approach to educational assessment which the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) originated with its myriad ‘statements of attainment’ and which presaged the high-stakes public-testing model that English schooling, to its great detriment, has laboured under for so long. ‘Swallow this, and you swallow the lot’, the co-authors warned as they took to task SEAC’s view that a set of pre-cast statements could serve to elucidate the qualities of a pupil’s writing, the better to rank it within a supposed order of merit.

When it came to assessment, Mary Jane knew better than to sup with SEAC. Her book, Assessing Children’s Learning, was published in 1993 and republished in a ‘classic edition’ by Routledge in 2011. An antidote to formal education’s toxic testing culture, it begins with an extraordinary case-study-in-little: an evaluation of seven-year-old Jason’s performance in an NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research) maths test from the mid-1980s. Jason answered all 36 questions on the test, and one of his answers was correct. This stark fact demonstrated for Mary Jane ‘the gap that yawns between what his teachers have taught [Jason] and what he has learned’,[2] and compelled her to explore the implications.

For Jason stands ‘as an example, and an awful warning’, she wrote, ‘of what can happen to all children whose learning is not, for whatever reason, the prime concern and central focus of their teacher’s attention’.[3] This learning is made visible to the teacher who looks closely and strives to understand. Looking closely at learning we must ask three questions, Mary Jane advised. What is there to see? How best can we understand what we see? How can we put our understanding to good use?[4] Careful, attentive, sustained and reflective observation by teachers of what it is pupils say and do (and don’t say and don’t do) as they work in class is ‘the only certain safeguard against children’s failure, the only certain guarantee of children’s progress and development’.[5] Teachers owe their first duty neither to the lesson-plan nor the curriculum nor to their school’s league-table position, but to whatever it takes to enable and sustain each pupil’s meaning-making so that ‘the world they invite Jason to inhabit as a pupil is one that makes sense to him as a child’.[6]

Ethics, rights, responsibilities

The principled commitments articulated in her case study of Jason underpin the two ‘Learning without Limits’ books which Mary Jane co-authored with Susan Hart, Donald McIntyre, Annabelle Dixon and Mandy Swann.[7] The ethic of ‘everybody’ which those books outline, and whose enacted consequences they consider, stemmed from a belief in human educability which all the authors shared; a belief in every child’s capacity to learn and go on learning. It was coupled with a commitment to try to see schooling from the point of view of the pupil as well as the teacher, and to do justice to ‘the interplay of the rights and responsibilities of teachers and learners’.[8]

In this, Mary Jane could draw on her experience as a practitioner. She taught in London’s East End in the last years of the 1960s before becoming head teacher of an infant school in Sheffield.[9] She worked subsequently on a Schools Council project directed by Dr Joan Tough, whom Mary Jane much admired and whose husband, she was delighted to learn, had fought Franco in Spain. Findings from this project appeared in a series of books at the end of the 1970s.[10]

In the mid-1980s, Mary Jane joined the Institute of Education in Cambridge, while continuing to teach for a day a week in Norfolk, first in King’s Lynn and then in Thetford. As well as helping to educate several generations of practitioners through her teaching and tutoring, she co-authored materials for professional use, notably in relation to inclusion, and wrote about aspects of early years practice. She served on the editorial board of the Cambridge Journal of Education, and helped influence early years education policy as far afield as New Zealand. She was drawn to Sightlines Initiative, the reference point in England for the work of the educators in Reggio Emilia. Her understanding of meaning-making as inherently creative and imaginative made her the ideal person to evaluate (for NESTA) the work of the pupil-led independent art studio, Room 13H, in Hareclive Primary School, Bristol, one of the international stable of rooms 13 at the time.

From the turn of the millennium, Mary Jane was closely involved in the pioneering charity Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, whose innovative approach gathers artists, writers, practitioners and researchers to work with children and communities in the city and its surroundings.[11] In 2004, the charity helped bring to Cambridge the influential exhibition, 100 Languages of Children, which presents aspects of the educational philosophy of Reggio Emilia educators.

With Diane Rich and Cathy Myer, Mary Jane published First Hand Experience: what matters to children and learning: what matters to children, texts which distil decades of informed thinking about the education of the young.[12] Brilliantly conceived and formally inventive, they are aimed at early years and primary practitioners, but teachers at any level will gain much from them, for they constitute a rich and wise professional development course in themselves.

Unwaveringly principled

Mary Jane wrote regularly for FORUM. Her moral and intellectual clarity, and unwaveringly principled conviction, helped steer the journal, and no one had a sharper eye as a copy editor. In her last article she wrote about one of the many women educators undeservedly overlooked and forgotten. But ‘Mabel Baker, unknown heroine’[13] also reprises the argument about the damage done to learning when a great gap opens between school and life beyond school: between curriculum and meaningful experience, and between what matters to teachers and what matters to children.

The US edition of Assessing Children’s Learning is entitled Learning to See. That phrase acknowledges what too much current education policy and popular debate is content to set aside: that learning is complicated, tentative, takes time, and requires trust and patience. It goes to the heart of teachers’ work in relation to assessment: the need to look, listen and think sustainedly about every aspect of the ways in which pupils and students present, and then decide how best to use this work of observation in order to better the conditions for learning.

Because it sets its face against all this and privileges testing over assessment (in effect, as Michael Armstrong noted, the denial of learning), an educational approach geared to ‘efficiency’ is impermissible. It is at odds with a conception of education as the enhancement of human faculties, and foremost ‘the human thirst for love, beauty and truth’, which is how Mary Jane describes that vision of education set out by Edmond Holmes, chief inspector of elementary schools, in his book, What Is and What Might Be, published in 1911. Mary Jane believed Holmes’ book articulated much that is still of value. Her own work reminds us neither to belittle nor deny our human thirst, for attempting to slake it is the proper work of a teacher.

Notes

[1]Mary Jane Drummond and Fred Sedgwick, ‘Crimes against learning’, FORUM, 33 (1), 1990, pp8-10.

[2] Mary Jane Drummond, Assessing Children’s Learning, London, David Fulton, 1993.

[3] Ibid., p9.

[4] Ibid., p187.

[5] Ibid., p10.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Susan Hart, Annabelle Dixon, Mary Jane Drummond and Donald McIntyre, Learning Without Limits, Maidenhead, Open University Press, 2004; Mandy Swann, Susan Hart, Annabelle Dixon and Mary Jane Drummond, Creating Learning Without Limits, Maidenhead, Open University Press, 2012.

[8] Drummond, 1993, op. cit., p1.

[9]  See: https://www.aru.ac.uk/graduation-and-alumni/honorary-award-holders2/mary-jane-drummond

[10] Joan Tough, Listening to Children Talking: a guide to the appraisal of children’s use of language, London, Ward Lock Educational 1976; Joan Tough, Talking and Learning: a guide to fostering communication skills in nursery and infant schools, London, Ward Lock Educational, 1977; Joan Tough, Talk for Teaching and Learning, London, Ward Lock Educational, 1979.

[11] https://cambridgecandi.org.uk/about-us

[12] https://sightlines-initiative.com/eshop/media/books/first-hand-experience-what-matters-to-children; https://www.waterstones.com/book/learning-what-matters-to-children/diane-rich/mary-jane-drummond/9780954968311

[13] Mary Jane Drummond, ‘Mabel Baker, unknown heroine’, FORUM, 59 (3), 2017,pp471-476.