1989: Professor Richard A Daugherty

Updated April 2023

After a first degree in geography at the University of Oxford and a Diploma in Education, Richard Daugherty taught geography at Manchester Grammar School before moving into academia.

He became Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at Swansea University and Dean of the Faculty of Educational Studies before becoming Professor of Education and Head of the Education Department at Aberystwyth University, providing a connection back to the early days of the GA, when H J Fleure moved to work there, and took the growing GA library and office with him.

Richard also became Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Aberystwyth where he is an Emeritus Professor.  In October 2010 he was appointed Director, of the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment (OUCEA). 

Richard writes: 

My working life in education was in two distinct parts. From the mid 1960s to the late 1980s I was very much involved in geography both as a teacher and through GA activities at national level. After teaching at Manchester Grammar School I moved to Swansea University as a Lecturer in Education. That brought me into fruitful contact with many geography teacher colleagues, through initial teacher training, in service courses, the Swansea GA branch and a term as Chief Examiner for WJEC A level Geography. I was learning from them about the day to day realities of teaching the subject that my own experiences at MGS had only partly prepared me for. 

Being appointed in 1987 to be a Council member of two Government advisory bodies, the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) and the Curriculum Council for Wales (CCW) took my career in a new direction. Since then my work has focussed, as an adviser and an academic researcher, on the school curriculum more broadly, educational assessment and education policy. Among publications from that period are those with colleagues in the U.K. based group of assessment researchers, the Assessment Reform Group, and policy papers commissioned by governments. Some of those papers date back to the early 90s when I chaired the CCW and others include the Daugherty Assessment Review Group’s report for the Welsh Government In 2004. More recently I have been contributing as an adviser to the Welsh Government and to Qualifications Wales on the radical school reforms currently under development following the 2015 report, Successful Futures. 

My life has, however, always been coloured, professionally and privately, by my love of geography. That goes back to an inspirational teacher at my grammar school in Birkenhead, George Willan, who later became an HMI. It was further fostered by two of my tutors at Oxford, Ian Scargill and Frank Emery. When I moved to Swansea I discovered that Frank Emery had been a much respected local landscape historian, in particular of the Gower peninsula, before he moved on to a distinguished academic career in historical geography. Returning in retirement to my own interest in landscape history, inspired originally by Frank Emery as my tutor, I have joined the ranks of local landscape historians myself with several articles in the two local history journals.

Richard has spent a lot of his career exploring curriculum and worked along with Eleanor Rawling on this sort of work, another former GA President, who was President three years after Richard.

‘The idea of progression is implicit in any discussion of the nature of the learning we hope students will engage in. If we did not hope that our students would, in some sense, progress we would have no foundation on which to construct a curriculum or to embark on the act of teaching’ 

(Daugherty, 1996).

Here, taken from an issue of GA News in 2005, is the news of the award of an OBE to Richard for his services to education in the New Year's Honours List that year.

1989, Richard's Presidential year was an important one for school Geography given the changes to the National Curriculum and the need to cover many attainment targets as they were called. I started teaching in 1987 when the National Curriculum was coming in, along with changes to other assessments. He wrote a book for Macmillan to help teachers prepare for the changes that were to come - this was at a time when I was just starting teaching, so I never actually taught the 'O' Level as the change to GCSE came in just as I started teaching.

Richard had already been working as Honorary Secretary of the GA from 1976-1981 and he has kindly provided more information on Presidents from that period from his own memories of the time, which saw quite a few important events. He also wrote a book for the GA, "Geography in the National Curriculum", published in 1989.

GA NC Book Cover 1989 by Alan Parkinson on Scribd

 

To a greater or lesser extent I knew all the GA presidents from 1971 (Bill Balchin) through to 1999 (Mike Bradford). I worked more closely over a longer period with some of them - Sheila Jones, Rex Walford, Graham Humphrys, Bryan Coates, Eleanor Rawling - and have a particular respect for how much certain others on the list, such as Michael Wise, Stan Gregory, Patrick Bailey and Denys Brunsden, gave to the Association.

I am grateful to Richard for his additional details on many of these Presidents that he worked with, but also for sending this biographical note which adds extra details to those I was able to discover from my own research. He has also reported on the GA's involvement in curriculum development.

"My involvement with the GA at national level was from the mid 1960s to the early 1990s, from the exciting prospect of a 'new geography' challenging what should be taught, and how, in schools to the near disaster of a poorly designed National Curriculum for Geography. 

I was a newly appointed teacher in 1965 for whom a sleepy and unchallenging degree course at Oxford had told me nothing about the way the academic subject was transforming itself (at Cambridge, amongst other places). The chance in 1966 of a GA weekend course in Sheffield, led by Professor Stan Gregory, was too good to miss. Much to my surprise I then found myself invited ("we need young classroom teachers") to join a newly formed GA committee. It must still surely lay claim to have had the longest GA committee title ever - 'Standing Committee on the Role of Models and Quantitative Techniques in Geography Teaching'. I was thus fortunate to find myself learning from an exceptional group - including Rex Walford, John Everson, Brian Fitzgerald and Vincent Tidswell (my own PGCE tutor at Hull University) - who were seeking to translate the academic 'new geography' into approaches appropriate to school level learning. 

My own first book, 'Science in Geography: Data Collection' (OUP 1974), would not have happened if Brian Fitzgerald had not been series editor. That period was also the beginning of a longer term collaboration with another schoolteacher and future GA President, Sheila Jones (see recent post on Sheila by Richard). 

By the early 1970s I was Chair of what had thankfully become known more snappily as 'M&QT' and I was also therefore a GA Council member. I picked up on a general recognition that the GA's committee structure was in need of reform which led to a working party chaired by another future President, Denys Brunsden. The proposed reforms would prove to be vital in that they ensured the Association was much better able than most subject teacher associations to respond when the 'secret garden' of the school curriculum was opened up to wider scrutiny following Prime Minister Callaghan's Ruskin College speech in 1976.

Concurrently with the GA's committee structure reforms the Association also responded to pressure from a group of younger teachers, including myself, to establish a second journal, 'Teaching Geography'. Although the initiative had come from others, Patrick Bailey, as its first editor, was to provide the shrewdness and energy to ensure that the new journal was an immediate success (see article in Teaching Geography, October 2003). 

From 1976 until 1981 I was the GA's joint honorary secretary, a role initially shared with Malcolm Lewis and then with Bryan Coates. The new committee structure meant that the Association now had two main policy committees, one dealing with Publications & Communications and the other with Education. As secretary to the latter I shared responsibility for responding to radical changes to the school curriculum being proposed in England with its Chair, Rex Walford, plus a committed group of committee members. The national developments led to lively internal debates about justifying geography as a school subject, policy papers and presenting our case to a House of Commons Committee.

Richard told me:

"My term as President coincided with the turbulent period when the way the subject should be defined in the new Natonal Curriculum was being hotly debated. A delegation from the GA made representation to the Government's Working Group and I found myself involved in the case made to the Group by the Curriculum Council for Wales. Even when I turned up at the Group a third time, as the then Chair of the Assessment Council's (SEAC) Geography Committtee it was to no avail. In spite of the valiant efforts of some Working Group members, notably Eleanor Rawling, it was determined to define what later emerged, a deeply flawed blueprint for geography in the schools of England and Wales."

More to come on this area in the years ahead...

Richard was also present at the 125th Anniversary of the GA dinner. The image above was taken by Bryan Ledgard at this event, and shows Richard with a number of other former Presidents.

References
GA News - Summer 2005 - OBE announcement

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1989/may/05/geography - involvement in curriculum development

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/DaughertyR

Images: Richard Daugherty and Derek Spooner (GA President 2000) at the 125th Anniversary Celebration of the GA and other former Presidents group - copyright Bryan Ledgard / Geographical Association

If anyone has other details on Richard's time as GA President, please get in touch.

Update: December 2020

In 2003, Chris Kington asked a number of former Presidents what had sparked their passion for geography. He lent me the letters and here is the response that Richard sent:

He talks about being a new Scholarship boy arriving at Birkenhead School at the age of 10 and enjoying and achieving in geography. He talks about his teacher: George Willan, who was then HoD at Birkenhead and subsequently an HMI before retiring to the Lake District being a great influence on him.

He describes George generously as being:

"an exceptionally efficient and endlessly enthusiastic teacher who was able to embrance the full range of geography syllabus content from the regional geography that was then in vogue to the recent developments in geomorphology. His field trips were classic experiences in the best tradition of Wooldridge. It is some measure of his success with my year group that at least two of my exact contemporaries: Ian Evans and Glen Norcliffe went on to careers in academic geography".

George Willan apparently went to Tbilisi in the 1970s and helped formulate an important environmental declaration.

https://naee.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/NAEE-TRUSTEES-ANNUAL-REVIEW-2016-17_Compressed.pdf - PDF download from NAEE

Many thanks to Chris Kington for the loan of the letters.

Update April 2022

What a real pleasure to meet Richard for the first time at the GA Conference 2022. Thanks once again for all your help with the blog Richard, and for attending the Long Standing Members' meal. I hope to see you again next year.

Lovely to meet up with Richard once again in April 2023 at the GA Conference in Sheffield.