BEACHCOMBER 105 YEARS OLD AND STILL LEARNING LESSONS...

LOOKING through the parliamentary records in Hansard the other day, I was somewhat alarmed to see how bad we have been at learning lessons.

In the first three months of this year, our legislators in the House of Commons and House of Lords referred to “lessons to be learned” or said “lessons must be learned” no fewer than 34 times. Yet they only said “lessons have been learned” nine times.

More encouragingly, “lessons have not been learned” or “no lessons have been learned” was only used once, so we can say that of the 34 lessons we must learn, one has definitely not been learned, but we are still waiting for action on another 24.

Of course, it takes time to learn a lesson, so perhaps it is unfair to expect immediate results. I therefore examined recent years to see how successful we have been at learning lessons.

The yearly results may be seen below, where the first number is for MBL (lessons that Must Be Learned), followed by L (numbers Learned) and lastly NL (numbers Not Learned).

2021 87 35 5; 2020 57 54 6; 2019 42 20 6; 2018 86 42 3;

2017 75 10 3 and 2016 149 37

Adding up these numbers and those of 2022 reveals that since 2016, we have identified 530 lessons that we must learn, of which we have learned only 207 and definitely not learned 27. That leaves a backlog of 296 lessons that have neither been learned nor not learned. That works out at a lessons learned rate of only 39 per cent which is worrying. I naturally phoned Sir Hardleigh Bothad, the UnderSecretary at the Department of Lesson Learning and he agreed the figures were disappointing. “There are lessons to be learned about lesson-learning,” he said, but he pointed out that Learning Lessons was not strictly the DLL’s responsibility.

“Our priority is identifying what must be learned,” he said. “Actually learning it comes under the auspices of Education.”

He did praise the work done in 2020 when the combined figure for learned and not learned was higher than the number identified as having to be learned. “This shows that we are capable of tackling more questions than we are identifying. I am sure there is a lesson that can be learned from that, though I am unsure what it is.”

I thanked Sir Hardleigh for his insights.