Francis Beckett honoured at the CIPR Education Journalist of the Year Awards

Wins coveted Ted Wragg Award

Date: 2009-11-18

Francis Beckett, who has written biographies of Bevan and Macmillan in Haus’s Prime Ministers series, for which he was also the commissioning editor, and most recently, a biography of Gordon Brown, has been awarded the coveted Ted Wragg Award for sustained contribution to education reporting. Sue Rossiter, chief executive of the National Foundation for Educational Research, stated when presenting Francis with his award that ‘Not only is he an excellent journalist, but he is also an author and an active campaigner on education issues, and his commitment to everything that is best in education shines through all his work.’  Justin Shaw, director of the education practice at Communications Management added: ‘Francis Beckett is a worthy winner of this award, following his many years of dedication to education journalism.  His work is always incisive and interesting and he deserves this high level of recognition for his outstanding talent.’

Previous winners of the award also congratulated Francis, with Richard Garner, education editor at the Independent, calling him ‘a brilliant writer’, and Donald MacLeod, former education editor of the Guardian, adding ‘You may not always agree with him, but you can't help reading him to the end, bowled along by the warmth of his enthusiasm or, more likely, the heat of his indignation!’ This reflects earlier praise for Francis’s biographies, with Oliver Rowe of Public Service Magazine calling his biography of Gordon Brown a ‘must-read’,  while David McLaurin in The Tablet referred to his biography of Olivier as ‘an irresistible picture of the man himself… Beckett sticks the knife in at every opportunity, but does it so elegantly that one can quite forgive him.’