When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  Mrs Sallis also objects to fee-paying schools on educational grounds because many of them work on the principle that ‘academic success is the only sort worth having.’ In 1986 the historian Corelli Barnett, who argues that public schools – by creating an out-of-date elite with a soul above industry and commerce – are responsible for our industrial decline, told members of the Headmasters’ Conference (the body that represents public-school headmasters): ‘For more than a century, your schools have done much to bring Britain down as a trading nation.’

  Certainly when I was at such a school, only those who ‘failed’ academically entered industry. One boy, interviewed by a small family firm, was asked almost exclusively about his golf. The owner wanted a congenial companion, not a whizz kid. The business went bust a few years later. Middle-class parents are still gravely embarrassed by children who ‘fail’ in the conventional sense. How often you get, as Mrs Sallis said, ‘a long spiel’ why Sarah is a hairdresser or Charles a decorator. No other country has these hang-ups: Americans would expect such children to win out in their chosen careers, and become millionaire hairdressers or decorators.

  Recently, I met a middle-aged architect, who in the fifties had been a pupil at Tulse Hill in south London, one of the first comprehensives. He was transferred there from a technical school and, in his own opinion, would today be a carpenter but for the stroke of luck of Tulse Hill opening on his doorstep. ‘For the first time,’ he says, ‘I was trusted with control over the design of what I was doing.’ That trust opened a new world to him. Thirty years later, we still agonize whether comprehensives can bring the best out of bright children. Now that 90 per cent of secondary-school children attend such schools, surely it is time to be positive. Even the few who are educated elsewhere must live amongst a majority who will go to comprehensives: private school alumni don’t travel in separate compartments on the Underground. Barbara Simons, a deputy head at Knutsford, said: ‘Every child has a birthright to go to a “good” school. If your child doesn’t feel it is a good school, you have taken that right away from him.’

  People who are sensible in all other respects fall prey to the endless propaganda pumped out about comprehensives. A well-spoken woman at a local action meeting on state education could hardly contain herself. ‘What does one do?’ she asked desperately, ‘with that amount of panic and fear? What does one say to the people who are not here, who are sending their children to private schools?’ A ‘Good Schools Guide’, published by Harpers and Queen, caught the tone of the social forces at work. ‘State school pupils are sloppy, spotty and louche,’ while ‘in private schools, manners are good and the pupils are clean and polite.’ Almost every action taken by Mrs Thatcher’s government, from the assisted-places scheme – which, even if one believed in its validity, would, in Dr Rae’s words, be like ‘trying to cure a famine by taking a few children to lunch at the Ritz’ – to the proposed Crown Technology Colleges, has been an assault on the resources and self-esteem of the comprehensive system.

  The head of an academically successful comprehensive was told by Sir Keith Joseph, then Education Secretary, that it was necessary to have ‘centres of excellence’. ‘Did he not realize that we’re sending scientists to Oxbridge? What happens to our standards? Didn’t he know of the academic achievements of comprehensives?’ the head asked in despair. He added: ‘The government indulges in massive bloodletting, and then expresses surprise that the patient is anaemic and lacking his usual energy.’ Measurable standards – passes at O and A level, for example – have risen gently, but consistently, since comprehensives were introduced. The total of successful Oxford candidates from state schools in absolute terms now matches that from independent private schools.

  Political pressures on what goes on in the classroom receive a massive amount of media space. In a minority of areas these pressures are real enough. One head teacher, who asked to remain anonymous so as to avoid retribution, told me: ‘I am attacked because I have a “grammar school” ethos, whatever that means. Is it because I fight to prevent standards collapsing? There is now an inverted value system. Anything that corresponds to what successful schools used to do must be bad. “Standards” are the encrusted imposition of bourgeois values, and we who pursue them are assailed for “betraying the system”. We are expected to apologize for pupils who do unusually well.’ He had even been attacked because his school was praised in print for standards of behaviour that might be found in a public school. His was not an area where one would have expected a political assault on good schools. Another head – responding to, rather than resisting, such pressures, but otherwise apparently sane – told me that he never advertised Oxbridge successes to the rest of his school, ‘lest we seem to value that student more than, say, the capable musician’.

  The besieged head continued: ‘Ideologues love to see things in confrontational terms, as if high standards for some impoverish the rest. It is a dangerous notion that the English don’t need to compete and defeatist to think we should simply aim to be at peace with our own social engineering consciences. It is no good fudging the issue. Everyone has to know that he will only succeed the hard way, by being genuinely competitive. Precision is necessary to be a surgeon, a manufacturer of engineering equipment or a sports star. Alternative attitudes are a sad reflection on beliefs in the potential attainments of comprehensive children.’ The several heads of comprehensives and the educationalists I met – perhaps because not protected by anonymity – were not so forthright, but they subscribed to the same philosophy. The unnamed head always teaches at least one bottom ability group himself, and savours achievements like getting a semi-autistic child through one CSE. Education, he said, is bedevilled by having to fight the battles of twenty-five years ago. Parents, politicians, administrators look back to when they were at school, which was either a golden age, and therefore to be restored, or a nightmare, the last vestiges of which should be destroyed. Many of our most influential citizens were the successful products of grammar schools. Often they forget the failings of yesterday’s system – the high drop-out rate at sixteen of working-class pupils, the misery of the eleven-plus, the appalling provision for those who failed it. Even exam results were less shining than we remember: in 1960 research by the National Union of Teachers found that 25 per cent of grammar school pupils left with fewer than two O levels, and 50 per cent left with only four – yet these were the ‘selected’ academically bright children.

  A Knutsford parent from a small Welsh town recalled grammar school boys fighting secondary-modern boys on the common that divided their two schools. Each regarded the other group as foreign and hostile – as green men from another planet. The eleven-plus institutionalized two societies, separating children inefficiently and divisively at the age of eleven. The comprehensive pioneers rejected such divisions. Professor Tomlinson, of Warwick University, said: ‘If you mix people thoroughly, you will introduce the bright not only to an understanding of practical problem-solving, but also to appreciate that people who operate in that way make just as effective a contribution to society.’ His vision is of a better society: ‘The ideal is to develop people to the maximum of their capacities, and prepare them for a diverse culture in which all are valued and give service. “I am an individual with a personality and skills to develop, so are you.” So relationships are built on negotiation, not on power and aggression. Successful economies grow in societies with strong social cohesion, where management and shop-floor are not at one another’s throats. We do not have a generous view of each other. We believe in limited potential, especially of those who do not dress or speak well.’ I discovered a Japanese saying when I visited Japanese factories in Scotland: ‘It is better for one hundred men to take one step, than for one man to take a hundred.’ The English have long worked on the opposite thesis.

  Even the word ‘comprehensive’ is a liability, conjuring up a largely discredited era – tower blocks, Harold Wilson, new towns, plate-glass town halls and ‘white hot’ technology.
To the British, ‘equality’ instinctively means levelling down; the creation of a grey, uniform society along East German lines, not the dynamic release of potential, which American equality strives towards. Belatedly, we have tried to undo the terminological damage. Local authorities call their systems ‘all ability’ or ‘secondary’, and individual schools replace the word ‘comprehensive’ with ‘high’. If we had only called them ‘high schools’ from the beginning, maybe the name would have assuaged British snobbery, and we might have had a fighting chance to create community schools like those of our democratic rivals.

  We forget now, so extreme is the debate over comprehensives, that they were created to cater for enhanced public expectations, rather than to satisfy the whims of left-wing Utopians. George Walker, the head of The Cavendish School, Hemel Hempstead, and formerly a moving spirit behind the York-based Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools, is also one of twelve state heads co-opted to the Headmasters’ Conference. He said: ‘Twenty years ago people had colour televisions and enjoyed foreign holidays. The expectation of a better school went with that. It was unacceptable to have all that material advance, and still get a letter saying that your youngster was going to the secondary-modern down the road.’ The first stage, reorganizing schools, was widely accepted. In the play Gotcha, one part of the trilogy Gimme Shelter, written in 1976 by Barrie Keeffe, the anti-hero, a yob about to leave school with such an undistinguished record that not a single teacher appears to know his name, complains bitterly about ‘this lovely comprehensive’, where the head speaks Latin to the sixth-formers. ‘Great school – great school,’ reflects one character, ‘going around talking in Latin all day. Great – that’s the way to get your head smashed in the factory.’ For those who could make it, unlike Keeffe’s ‘Kid’, it was a more optimistic age: pop stars, sports players, television personalities were creating a new breed outside conventional class divisions. Comprehensives were part of this break with the past. State education, the faithful believed, would become so good that virtually everyone would opt for it.

  Wilson borrowed Hugh Gaitskell’s phrase ‘grammar schools for all’, which offended educationalists trying to create a new type of school, but reassured the middle classes. It was Mrs Thatcher, when Education Secretary, not the much reviled Shirley Williams, who signed the most comprehensive reorganization orders. In those early years, schools were trying to teach children of all abilities according to a syllabus created for the top 25 per cent. Schools within schools developed. The urgent need was to devise curricula to cope with schools that contained future Oxbridge scholars at the next desk to children destined for Youth Training Schemes. The best state schools began to move from the world of pure scholarship to one of democratic citizenship. Parents – and editorial writers – who had themselves been to selective schools became alarmed. Their children did not know who the Younger Pitt was, so they shot off to school meetings to find out what was going on. There they were assailed by jargon from teachers who seemed reluctant to let them get too close to the school. All professions, as Bernard Shaw said, are indeed a conspiracy against the laity. A second suspicion was added: not only had standards collapsed, but some form of unacceptable ideological manipulation was taking place. The system, it appeared, had been hijacked.

  This was the agonized scene to which we returned from the United States – a lot of very concerned people fed nothing more solid than scraps of local gossip and blatantly prejudiced newspaper headlines. George Walker complained of the ‘lack of serious intellectual discussion’ about comprehensives, and that there had never been a Dimbleby or Reith Lecture on the subject, for example. The schools never won the hearts and minds of the people, and the concept never caught the imagination of the intellectuals.

  My visit to Knutsford was an attempt to give classroom reality to some of these concerns. I was at the school for a week, far longer than any parent would be before making up his mind about whether to send a child, but not long enough fully to penetrate the hidden agenda that tells you what an institution is really like. The school fosters an obvious esprit de corps. Staff and pupils are proud and offer a visitor a positive image. I was very aware of the dangers of misreading the school: a former teacher had told me how his very poor school had always successfully closed ranks when an inspection was due. If any teachers, mainly themselves the products of grammar schools, had doubts about the practicality of the comprehensive ideal, they hid them. Many had experience in other forms of school – grammar and fee-paying – yet said persuasively they were totally convinced by the strengths of comprehensive teaching. Frank Walmsley, the senior deputy head, said: ‘Comprehensives are vastly superior for most, if not all, pupils. I am very clear about it. The more able are not at a disadvantage: they do as well, if not better, as in grammar schools. The world has changed. A good comprehensive will broaden their horizons and widen their later opportunities.’

  Knutsford teachers were cautious about trumpeting the school’s academic record, though most acknowledged that ‘unfortunately’ the school’s reputation was largely based on university and A level successes. Seventy per cent of the children leave with at least one O level, 46 per cent achieve four or more, and 17 per cent – of the original ‘mixed ability’ intake – leave with three or more A levels. The school has 165 in its sixth form, 135 of whom are studying A levels. Each year it sends a handful to Oxbridge.

  I met a group of six sixth-formers – four girls, two boys – three of whom were to try for Oxbridge. They were articulate, self-confident, ambitious. The school, they said, mixed well socially, though there was some bullying in the early days. They claimed they had more confidence than if they had gone to private schools. One said she might be a teacher because of the inspiration of her English teacher, which made the others laugh. Most had concrete career plans – one to be an economic geographer at the United Nations. A teacher told me later that the sixth was very left-wing – much as his contemporaries had been in the late sixties – but the pupils claimed to be a mixed bunch. One did say: ‘They just sit there groaning about Mrs Thatcher: it’s really boring.’

  They were egalitarian in their own behaviour, rejecting the notion of prefects, for example. At a parents’ evening there was voluble concern at this lack of pupil structures. Many thought prefects could supervise lunch hours and cut down on litter and smoking. Feelings grew heated. The cry ‘why can’t they be like we were’ was taken up enthusiastically. The sixth-formers were aware of the shortage of resources – ‘outdated history books with pages missing,’ said one – and argued that the government ought to reorder its priorities: money for schools, not defence. They were also censorious of their less diligent contemporaries – ‘some go through the school wasting their own and their teachers’ time and the taxpayers’ money: it makes you mad.’

  ‘Carol’, a problem child, never made the sixth: in her early days at Knutsford she was frequently truant. Her father (Manchester overspill) draws a disability pension, and hasn’t worked for many years. When I visited the family, he was stripped to the waist, exhibiting a fine torso and some elaborate tattoos. Occasionally, he was shaken by paroxysms of coughing. His wife said she missed the cosiness of inner Manchester, but he was all for the wide open spaces. If he could, he said somewhat unconvincingly, he’d be a sheep-farmer in the Falklands. ‘Teachers are not old enough, and there’s not enough corporal punishment,’ was his view of Britain’s educational ills. Carol twice tried to kill herself. In her fourth year she was enrolled in a school programme known as the Knutsford Community Certificate, which involves attending college half a day a week and working in the community. She blossomed, taking a responsible role on a residential week away from school – younger children thanked her for her help, the first time she had been thanked for an achievement in her life, working hard for six months at a local hotel, and qualifying for a three-year catering course. She knew what she wanted to do – work for an airline – and, against considerable odds, looked set fair.


  The next night I met ‘John’s’ mother in her modern ‘executive-style’ house. She and her husband are both graduates who went to private/public schools, and sent their children to Knutsford with some trepidation. John left with four good A levels to spend a year in industry sponsored by a multinational corporation before university. A primary-school friend of John’s – said to have been of equal ability – who went to a local fee-paying secondary school with a strong academic record, dropped out of the sixth form after one year and took a non-degree course at a college. ‘I haven’t heard of anyone at a private school who did better than John,’ said his mother, whose daughter got three A levels at Knutsford and also went to university. ‘I would tell anyone to use that school. If I had another child and could afford fees, I’d still send him there.’