Sandi Toksvig’s school warned father she wasn’t keeping up with lessons: ‘He laughed so much, he was crying in the office’

‘QI’ presenter went on to receive a First from Cambridge University

TV presenter Sandi Toksvig has recalled how a school she attended once warned her father she was not keeping up in lessons, and would be better off studying agriculture.

The Great British Bake Off and QI star is presenting a new Channel 4 competition series, titled Can I Improve My Memory?, in which celebrities use memory hacks to become “experts” in diverse subjects within a matter of weeks.

Speaking to the Press Association, the Cambridge graduate said she believes a problem with education is “we tend to think there’s only one way to teach everybody and everybody ought to learn in exactly the same way,” adding that this was “not the case”.

“Just because somebody lands in a particular way – you’re particularly good with faces – that’s fantastic, that doesn’t make you clever or stupid as somebody else,” she continued.

“I think we tend to value things that are learnt in a written form, and one of the things we do know is that that kind of learning, that kind of academic learning, on the whole – and it’s a big generalisation – rewards the male brain better than the female brain. We have a slightly different way of processing information.”

Toksvig remembered the moment a headteacher at a “school that shall remain nameless” suggested she wasn’t keeping up and “should maybe think about going into agricultural school”.

“My father laughed so much, he was crying in the office,” she said. “And then when I got my first from Cambridge, he made me write to her to say that the agricultural college hadn’t really worked out for me. You never know, do you?”

The 63-year-old said she felt “we need to be careful how we judge other people’s intelligence” and not base it on “what pieces of paper they were given out by various academic institutions”.

“That’s not a good way of deciding whether somebody is clever or not,” she said.

“It’s to do with opportunity. It\s to do with the chances you've had in life.”

Can I Improve My Memory? will return as a four-part series on Channel 4 this year, following the success of the one-off special that aired in 2019.

Additional reporting by Press Association.