Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  This theatrical trio is completed by a young teacher at Exeter Grammar School, telling his father in late 1949 about his experience at the chalkface. The school, he reported, was

  fairly expensive, has most of the mannerisms of a really good school, and is fundamentally sloppy. The boys are like other grammar school boys, the little ones are very brisk and blasé, and the older ones either earnest or faintly hysterical with unused energy and waiting for jobs or conscription. The Common Room was awful, with an invidious atmosphere of comfort and mock responsibility.

  The writer was Robert Bolt, who had just started a teaching diploma at Exeter University and whose vivid insights were admittedly the fruit of only a single day’s working visit. If he had been there longer, he would no doubt have highlighted also the snobbery that was so pervasive at grammar schools and was arguably their worst feature. It particularly took the form of aping public schools – not least on the playing fields, where rugby tended to be the socially acceptable, officially endorsed winter sport and football as often as not was accord-ed pariah status. ‘Have finished school until April 12th,’ noted a relieved Kenneth Preston at Keighley Grammar School, just before Easter 1951. ‘The School has had the usual exhortation from Head about not watching football matches.’8.

  If the unique selling proposition of the grammar schools was their adherence to traditional values, the secondary moderns (which in 1950 educated three times as many 13-year-olds) were supposed to be something entirely fresh and different. ‘In the idealistic period of the 1940s,’ recalled a leading educational sociologist two decades later, ‘it was hoped that in the new schools, freed from the constraint of external examinations, there would be the opportunity to develop a new type of education, enjoying parity of esteem with the academic and specialised curriculum of the grammar school, but of a completely different kind.’ A curriculum that was ‘essentially experimental rather than traditional, general rather than specialised, practical rather than academic’ – that was the ambitious aim. It did not work out. Even by the late 1940s, secondary moderns were under pressure to raise their academic game. The labour market was demanding higher levels of skill, and it was already apparent that the notion that the secondary moderns would achieve ‘parity of esteem’ by being somehow different yet equal cut little ice with the world in general, where the criteria of success turned on external examinations and the provision of specialised courses. ‘Before they can hope to attract children of higher ability they must produce results worthy of comparison with those obtained in grammar schools, and they must do this with the children available to the modern schools here and now,’ observed one educationist, John Mander, as early as 1948. Three years later, the introduction of the General Certificate of Education (GCE) O level for 16-year-olds – involving a pass standard set appreciably above the pass mark of the old School Certificate – made the chances of obtaining those results significantly less.9.

  Indeed, it was a contest that took place not only on grammar-school terms but on an almost systemically sloping playing field. The intake at secondary moderns comprised 11-plus failures from a predominantly working-class background, with an additional bias towards the semi-skilled and unskilled; the teachers were academically less well qualified than at grammars and were paid less; overall financial resources per pupil head were similarly inferior; the overwhelming majority of pupils left as soon as they could – ie at the end of the term in which they became 15; and the jobs they went to were in general of much lower socio-economic status than those to which grammar-school leavers went in due course. Bravely enough, not everyone threw in the towel. ‘There are now no limits of opportunity for the Secondary Modern School, given enough initiative and encouragement,’ declared one optimistic headmistress in 1951. ‘Prejudice does still remain, and the social value of the selective school is still uppermost in the minds of too many parents. Much has been done, however, to break down this prejudice, and before long it may completely disappear.’ John Prescott – five years in the top stream at the Grange Secondary Modern School in Ellesmere Port but leaving without any academic qualifications – would, for one, take some convincing.10

  In 1994, half a century after the Butler Act, John Hamilton evoked on television his teaching experience at another secondary modern in Cheshire:

  Well, I can well remember when we were taking the classes, some of which were not really interested in education at all. And we had in those days just after the war gardens and vegetable patches, because of food growing, and so we used to take these lads out and just tell them to go and plant things like rhubarb, rhubarb was the best, because they couldn’t do any damage to rhubarb. We were happy to let them get on with that quietly. The teacher would go off and have his quiet smoke, and not put too much pressure on them to work hard. They were filling in time, as it were, until the end of their school days.

  Children realised that they were failures, and that was embedded in their thinking . . . The teachers too had that sort of limited vision for their pupils. And all that produced a sort of defeatism.

  Another young teacher, the future Tory politician Rhodes Boyson (at this stage strongly pro-Labour), went in 1951 to teach English at Rams-bottom Secondary Modern School in Lancashire – ‘run-of-the-mill, healthy and cheerful, with no airs and graces and little idea of what it was supposed to achieve’. Several times a week he endured double periods with 4C in a dilapidated laboratory, which ‘contained more illiterates, semi-illiterates and lesson resisters than would normally have been found in a whole township’. In his first lesson he tried reading aloud the latest cricket report by Neville Cardus in the Manchester Guardian, but ‘within seconds, water and gas taps were turned on and all kinds of Olympic wrestling began to take place on the floor’. Eventually, he gained a measure of control, but at the same time he became increasingly depressed by what he saw as the unwillingness of the school – and indeed of politicians and education officers more generally – to make a real effort to raise academic standards and address the blight of low expectations. ‘The secondary modern schools were a government confidence trick which led inevitably to the campaign for comprehensive schools’ would be his conclusion some 40 years later. ‘They were so general that no one knew what their purpose was.’ Clearly, then, there were limits to the new academic zeal of the secondary moderns; just as clearly, there was a lack of focus about any alternative strategy.

  Boyson’s experiences were mild compared with those of Edward Blishen, who in 1950 started teaching at Archway Secondary Modern School in north London, where he became art master on account of his long hair. Five years later, he published an unflinchingly realistic autobiographical novel, Roaring Boys – ‘the story,’ as the paperback blurb put it, ‘of a young teacher who finds himself plunged into a maelstrom of adolescent violence – a naïve idealist shocked by the brutality around him and finally forced to compromise his beliefs.’ During Blishen’s barely survivable first term, Class 5 were the worst:

  They were a backward third-year class who inhabited a room peculiarly difficult to teach in. The desks were long ones, rising in tiers. This had the effect that most boys were higher than the teacher, who prowled about in a pit below them. It also meant that the larger part of the class was inaccessible, being cosily tucked away in the hinterland of the long desks. Never was the torment of a raw teacher made more possible. I had them for an odd period of English: ‘Spelling, perhaps,’ the headmaster had said with hurried vagueness. I would stand before them aware only that I had to secure their interest in an accomplishment that plainly was the last in the world they wanted to acquire . . . I would stand before them. That, on the whole, was all I ever did. I taught nothing. It was always half an hour of crazy fury.

  My grasp of what was going on was even weaker than with Class 2. All I knew was that when I came through the door they rose and dreadful remarks filled the air.

  ‘Hiya, mister!’

  ‘Here he is, boys. Give him the works!’

  ‘What�
��s this? A teacher?’

  ‘Let’s give the bloke a song!’

  Then would follow a dizziness of howls and improbable acts.

  ‘All right,’ I would shriek, ‘I’ll give you some very hard arithmetic’.

  Boys would rush to the front. ‘You’ll want paper, sir.’ ‘Get Mr What’s-’is-name some paper.’ ‘Blackboard, sir?’ ‘Up with the blackboard for Mr What-d’ye-call-’im.’ And I would watch, fulminating uselessly, while a dozen self-selected blackboard erectors struggled with the easel in an ecstasy of mischief that left the Marx Brothers standing. The rest would be at the cupboard, gleefully flinging its contents into mad confusion, snatching at paper until it flew in a snowstorm through the air. ‘All stand!’ I would yell. And, cheering, they would struggle to their feet; then, shouting ‘All sit!’ they would crash their bottoms down again on the benches. There were times when I could hardly believe the evidence of my eyes. Were the Police, the Armed Forces, the Government itself, aware that events of this nature could occur in one of the country’s schools before a trained teacher on probation?

  Remarkably, Blishen stuck it out as a secondary modern teacher until 1959. ‘The battle had already been lost outside the school’ began his bleak but humane assessment more than three decades later. ‘They’d come already hugely discouraged – so discouraged that most of them had not even entertained the idea of making any use of schooling of any ambitious kind at all. Many of them had become by the age of eleven or twelve so tired of the whole grind of schooling. They’d seen so much teaching which seemed to them to be grudging.’ Or, as he concluded: ‘Most of the boys knew that the system didn’t really care about them and wasn’t really bothered if they did badly.’11

  As for parental attitudes, the first systematic study of their preferences in secondary education was undertaken in 1952 by F. M. Martin in south-west Hertfordshire, in effect Watford and its environs. Printing and precision engineering characterised the local economy, with little heavy industry; manual workers made up two-thirds of Martin’s sample of 1,446 parents of children eligible for that year’s 11-plus. There emerged a clear correlation between class and attitude:

  When it came to preferred types of secondary school, the percentages were also predictable, with 81.7 per cent of parents from the professional category expressing a preference for a grammar school but only 43.4 per cent from the unskilled group; similarly, 70.2 per cent of professionals thought that the move to secondary school would ‘make a lot of difference’ in their child’s life, compared with 40.8 per cent of unskilled parents. Tellingly, of those parents expressing a preference for a grammar school, only 43.5 per cent of professionals were willing to accept a place in a secondary modern, compared with 75.5, 89.4 and 94.7 per cent of supervisory, skilled and unskilled workers respectively.12

  The obvious alternative was a private, fee-paying school outside the state system. Here Martin found that whereas 49.4 per cent of professionals for whom a grammar school was the first choice were if necessary willing and able to countenance that route, such a course potentially applied to only 1.5 per cent of unskilled workers. By the early 1950s most private schools were fully subscribed – educating some 180,000 out of a total of 5.5 million children – and as ever there was a mixture of motives involved, including socio-cultural as well as economic and educational ones. ‘Yafflesmead is rather like home on a larger scale,’ Mrs J. R. Luff (living in Haslemere and married to a businessman) explained to Picture Post in 1950 about why they had chosen a private school in Kingsley Green, Sussex. ‘It is cosy, no long corridors, no bleak classrooms. The children whom Helen [eight] and Andrew [five] meet there, all have the same kind of background and do not have constantly to adjust themselves to different standards.’ For the Rev. J. W. Hubbard, who lived in South Walsham near Norwich, sending his 13-year-old son to a boarding school in Harpenden was all about exercising freedom of choice in the best possible cause: ‘I want my children to have a “good” education. Not only proper teaching, but also to learn good language, nice manners. As the Junior State schools are run at present, with their overcrowded classrooms, I do not think they can offer a suitable training in all ways as a private school. I’m sure Laurence has a better chance of getting to the university and of becoming a fully developed person if he is educated at St George’s.’13

  Even setting aside the question of private education – obviously feasible only if it could be afforded – the Hertfordshire survey does suggest an appreciably more fatalistic working-class approach to education: taking what was on offer, and in many cases not even contemplating the possibility of anything better. Clearly there were exceptions, perhaps exemplified by Tom Courtenay’s mother, who was keenly aware of the advantages – intellectual as much as material – that a grammar-school education potentially offered. Yet at least as typical in the early 1950s may have been the hostile attitude of the bricklayer father of Bill Perks (later Wyman), who abruptly pulled his son out of Beckenham Grammar School shortly before O levels. ‘He’d found me a job working for a London bookmaker,’ recalled Wyman. ‘There was a big future for me there he said, and eventually, with my expertise at figures, he could open his own betting company. I was dumbfounded, but had no say in the matter.’ The headmaster tried to get Wyman’s father to change his mind, but he was unbending. Having to leave school ‘was a bitter blow to my confidence’.

  Among most working-class parents of children at secondary moderns, the impatience with education was far more pronounced – an impatience fully shared by their offspring. ‘The school-leaving age had been raised to fifteen two years before,’ noted Blishen’s narrator of his first term’s teaching:

  This was still a raw issue with most of the boys and their parents. They felt that it amounted to a year’s malicious, and probably illegal, detention. Nothing in the syllabus as yet appeared to justify that extra year. And to justify it to some of these boys would have required some scarcely imaginable feat of seduction. We teachers were nothing short of robbers. We had snatched a year’s earnings from their pockets. We had humiliated them by detaining them in the child’s world of school when they should have been outside, smoking, taking the girls out, leading a man’s life . . .

  Preventing any further postponement to raising the school-leaving age (specifically envisaged in the Butler Act) had been Ellen Wilkinson’s great achievement shortly before her death in February 1947, an achievement that had owed much to her impassioned appeal to fellow-ministers that it was the ‘children of working-class parents’ who most needed that extra year of education after the interruptions of wartime. But for those actual children and their parents, the cheering was – and remained – strictly muted.14

  The pioneering survey of how the 1944 Education Act was playing out in socio-economic practice was conducted by Hilde Himmelweit in 1951. Her sample comprised more than 700 13- to 14-year-old boys at grammar and secondary-modern schools in four different districts of Greater London. In the four grammars, she found that whereas ‘the number of children from upper working-class homes’ had ‘increased considerably’ since 1944, ‘children from lower working-class homes, despite their numerical superiority in the population as a whole, continued to be seriously under-represented’ – constituting ‘only 15 per cent of the grammar school as against 42 per cent of the modern school sample’. In those grammars, the middle class as a whole took on average 48 per cent of the places and the working class as a whole 52 per cent (more than two-thirds by the upper working class). In the four secondary moderns, by contrast, the middle class averaged 20 per cent of the places, the working class the other 80 per cent.

  Himmelweit then demonstrated how the apparent parity between the middle and working classes at the grammar schools was deceptive – not only in the obvious sense that the middle class comprised far fewer than 48 per cent of the overall population and the working class far more than 52 per cent but also in terms of how the middle-class boys consistently outperformed the working-class boys academically. ‘The
results show that, in the teacher’s view, the middle-class boy, taken all round, proves a more satisfactory and rewarding pupil. He appears to be better mannered, more industrious, more mature and even more popular with the other boys than his working-class co-pupil.’ Furthermore, as a correlation, ‘Parents’ visits [ie to the schools] increased with the social level of the family and decreased with the number of siblings. Middle-class parents were found more frequently to watch plays and sports.’ Unsurprisingly, in these grammar schools far more working-class than middle-class boys expressed the wish to leave before going on to the sixth form, often adding that this was what their parents wanted. Yet simultaneously, 78 per cent of the working-class grammar boys, compared with 65 per cent of the middle-class boys, ‘regarded their chances of getting on in the world as better than those their fathers had had’.15There was, in other words, a marked discrepancy between aspirations and daily conduct. Himmelweit herself refrained from drawing out any ambitious conclusions from her survey, but it was clear that there was still a long way to go before the existing system of secondary education significantly dissolved entrenched class divisions and very different life chances.