The Comprehensive school exists to develop a new conception of secondary education based on a positive moral philosophy – that it is right for all children (or at any rate a full cross-section) who will be the next generation’s adult society to spend their adolescent years together; that it is right for their education to be concerned not only with the brain, important though that is, but with the mind and character, the body, the spirit, the standards of judgment – both personal and to the community; that it is right for the individual to have the means to grow to his full stature and yet to discipline himself as a member of the society in which he will live, with its obligations, its rights and limitations.
Others onside included two tireless educationalists, Brian Simon and Robin Pedley, the latter writing the influential Comprehensive Education: A New Approach (1956) and declaring soon afterwards that the abolition of the 11-plus would be ‘a giant stride towards the achievement of national prosperity and individual happiness’; Professor Vernon and his fellow psychologists, arguing that ‘on psychological grounds there would seem to be more to be said in favour of comprehensive schools than against’ while not denying that ‘it would be unwise to ignore the strength of tradition and parental prejudice’; and of course Michael Young, so alert to the dangers of a meritocratic elite.
But what about the ladder for the working class? Raymond Williams did not specifically refer to grammar schools, yet – even though he had been to one himself – they were surely in his sights in a passage towards the end of Culture and Society. Arguing that the ladder was essentially a ‘bourgeois model’ that had ‘produced a real conflict of values within the working class itself’, he claimed that it was especially ‘objectionable’ because ‘it weakens the principle of common betterment, which ought to be an absolute value’ and ‘sweetens the poison of hierarchy’. Williams concluded with unshakable moral certainty: ‘In the end, on any reckoning, the ladder will never do; it is the product of a divided society, and will fall with it.’24
Increasingly the debate would be played out also at local level, nowhere more pertinently than in Leicestershire. There, a Conservative-controlled authority sanctioned in 1957 the ingenious, attention-attracting ‘Leicestershire experiment’, initially applied to two areas of the county and inspired at least in part by the Leicester-based Pedley. ‘It is the county’s boast,’ explained the educational journalist Dinah Brook, ‘that it is not only the first education authority to abolish eleven-plus but also the only one to give parents the freedom to choose a grammar school for their children if they want it.’ Essentially, it was a two-tier approach: ‘All children go from primary school at the age of eleven to a new version of the secondary modern school, called the high school. At fourteen, children whose parents undertake to keep them at school until they are sixteen can transfer to grammar school.’ The TES’s response to the announcement of the scheme was scathing – ‘a wholly needless abdication of leadership’ – but on the ground the early signs were positive, to judge by the reports of the headmaster (Rev. E.S.C. Coggins) of Oadby Gartree High School, one of the county’s new-style secondary moderns. ‘I have not received a single parental objection to the Scheme,’ he reported to his governors in September 1957. As for the open meetings held that term for parents, some of whose children might have been admitted directly to grammar school under the previous system, ‘I did not encounter any feelings of injustice or snobbery. The parents of children in the less academic streams were equally enthusiastic.’
Ironically, in Labour-controlled Leicester itself, selection and the traditional ladder-climbing 11-to-18 grammar remained the order of the day, though from 1959 the external 11-plus examination did give way to what the city’s director of education reassuringly called ‘a standardised junior school assessment of each child’s ability’.25
Passions ran higher in Bristol, and along somewhat more orthodox party lines. ‘If the babblement of confused voices demanding the destruction of grammar schools – and the latest one is that grammar schools breed Tory voters – showed less envy and prejudice and more hard thought about what is to replace them if they are destroyed, they might convince us that they care something about education and less about playing politics,’ declared the headmaster John Garrett at Bristol Grammar School’s prize-giving in October 1957. ‘At a time when trained minds are more than ever necessary to enable the nation to skirt the edge of the abyss of bankruptcy; at a time when men unafraid of doing a hard day’s work are desperately needed, is it wise to jerrymander with schools which have shown they can produce both?’ This was too much for Alderman St John Reade, before the war a teacher at the local public school (Clifton College) but now Labour chairman of Bristol Education Committee and pushing hard for comprehensivisation, including of Garrett’s 425-year-old grammar school: ‘We must, I suppose, expect that our future leaders, now being trained at Bristol Grammar School, will be stout supporters of the “separate but equal” principle advocated by Mr Garrett and Governor Faubus and Little Rock.’ Readers of the Western Daily Press would have picked up the allusion to American bigotry; even so, another letter-writer chose to distance himself from Reade’s structural ambitions. ‘Generalisations about a whole class of school are rash,’ reflected an anonymous Labour Party member who was also a teacher. ‘A really first-rate school of its kind, be it Grammar, Technical, Secondary or Comprehensive, is as different from most of its kind as from quite another kind of school. Where such a school exists, it should be cherished and preserved for the sake of the whole community.’
Up in the north-east in autumn 1958, educational ferment seized Darlington after the town council narrowly voted, despite a split in the ruling Labour group, to establish a comprehensive school at Branksome. ‘We believe every child in this town has the right to a proper education and proper standard,’ declared Councillor Whelan, while Councillor O’Brien was more emollient: ‘We want to absorb the Grammar Schools, not supplant them. We hope the best traditions of these schools will be carried over into the new.’ There ensued a flurry of mainly hostile letters to the Northern Despatch, typified by L. Davis writing sarcastically that ‘when Coun. Whelan has demolished our Queen Elizabeth Grammar School and our sons are receiving their diplomas for rock ’n’ roll at the comprehensive schools, he may turn his attention to other ways in which he can promote our community’s welfare’; that grammar’s Old Boys’ Association took out a half-page ad on ‘YOUR CHILD’S FUTURE’ (‘If Comprehensive Schools are set up in Darlington, no child will have the opportunity of the best education now available . . . Grammar School education requires special gifts and great application . . . It would be harmful to force it on children who are not really fitted for it’); early in 1959 both Macmillan and Gaitskell paid visits to Darlington, touring respectively the grammar and a secondary modern; and finally, in April, the minister, Lloyd, refused permission for the new school to go ahead as proposed, a decision confirmed in June largely on the basis of 2,500 local objections, mainly parental.26
Or take Bradford, whose City Council was bitterly divided during 1957–8 about a seemingly innocuous proposal from the controlling Labour group to build a new secondary school in Flockton Road in the south of the city, next to Bolling Girls’ Grammar School. ‘It must have a disturbing effect on the teachers of that school, knowing that they were going to be integrated into a comprehensive school,’ claimed Councillor J.E.B. Singleton for the Tories in December 1957. ‘What effect would it have on the pupils? They were going to lose the grammar school environment . . . It was all very well saying: “Put them under one roof” but it did not work out in education practice. They had to have a certain amount of environment and they could not bring the clever ones down to the level of the dull ones.’ This provoked, later in the meeting, a telling Tory–Labour exchange:
Coun. Audrey Firth said she did not want a comprehensive school in Bradford. There would be some sort of remote control and it would be a great barrack-like place where the child was not going to be an i
ndividual. It could not be with 2,000 children in the same building. Someone mentioned environment, and someone called ‘snobbery’. Surely there was nothing wrong in giving a child environment and background. They should be proud to provide it.
Coun. J. T. Tiernan said the mention of snobbery brought back memories to him. He went to an ordinary elementary school and had to pass a grammar school. The children there told them: ‘My mother has told me we haven’t to play with you.’
Almost a year later the issue was still unresolved, with Labour’s Alderman R. C. Ruth, leader of the anti-selection, pro-comprehensive lobby within the Labour group, giving the larger picture:
Ald. Ruth said it was proved over and over again that children with brains were being denied an opportunity to go to University because of the test made at the age of 11-plus. Was it suggested because they were building a Secondary School near a Grammar School that it was going to reduce the social status of the Grammar School because of the adjacency of boys and girls who fail to pass the 11-plus examination?
Singleton refused to yield ground. ‘Alderman Ruth appeared to have forgotten that in Bradford they had a transfer system between Secondary and Grammar Schools, and no pupil was denied the possibility of going forward to Grammar School and then to University,’ insisted the councillor. ‘It was known in educational circles that schools of a smaller population had a better opportunity of encouraging pupils than had the larger schools. Alderman Ruth had accepted the fact that all children had the same educational attainment. That was not so . . . They could not all be put in one school and attain the same standard at the end.’
Muriel Beadle, wife of the visiting professor of genetics at Oxford in 1958–9, despaired. This keen-eyed American came – after immersing herself in educational debates, visiting several schools of each type and following the ‘hot controversy’ in the spring of 1959 over whether north Oxford should get a comprehensive – to ‘the inescapable conclusion’ that ‘England’s educational problems are not likely to be solved as long as schooling and social status remain so inextricably entwined’. And, like the Bristol letter-writer, she drew a parallel between racial segregation in the USA and educational segregation (whether private/state or grammar/secondary modern) in England:
The sad thing is that secondary education, as education, is so much better overall than it was before 1944. A pity it had to get mixed up with social class, and the business of having a proper accent. That hopeful phrase, ‘parity of esteem’, is as hollow as our ‘separate but equal’. The main difference is that we discriminate against a minority and the English against a majority.27
Amidst the swirling controversies, Labour’s challenge by 1957 was to forge a coherent education policy ahead of the next general election. The Study Group on Education that met for the first time in March comprised mainly MPs, including two Wykehamists in Gaitskell and Crossman, Anthony Greenwood (Merchant Taylors) and Michael Stewart (Marlborough). Soon afterwards, Stewart was in public conversation with Edna Healey, who chaired the managers of a group of schools in London, and they touched on the issue of whether and how comprehensives needed to build a ‘tradition’ of good reputation in order to compete with established schools:
EH – It is true that we don’t want to create a mystique of tradition, but neither do we want to throw the baby out with the bath water. The grammar schools understandably take the view that since they are doing a good job already, why interfere with them . . .
MS – The question that matters is: what is the whole education system turning out? Is it doing the best for the average as well as the clever pupil? History gives no instance of a civilization collapsing because it neglected its élite; but it tells of many which perished because they paid insufficient attention to the mass and allowed a gap to yawn between the élite and the ordinary citizen. Is there not a lesson here for modern England?
Throwing the baby out with the bath water: Healey’s understandable fear reflected a party still deeply conflicted about the grammars, though ultimately it would be Stewart’s take-no-prisoners line that spoke the loudest.
Over the rest of the year the Study Group considered a series of memos and submissions. ‘Our real enemy is, surely, not the examination of children but the separation of them at 11,’ argued Stewart in tandem with Margaret Cole, while on the other key front, it was ‘an illusion’ that ‘if the Labour Party leaves the public schools alone and concentrates on creating comprehensive schools, these latter will become “Everyman’s Eton”, and the special advantages enjoyed by those parents who can pay public school fees will disappear’. For his part, Crossman did not deny the socially pernicious consequences of the old boy network, but warned against policy ‘actuated by motives of envy’ and was adamant about the need to recognise ‘one basic human right – the right of the parent to pay twice for the child’s education’. The great historian and radical R. H. Tawney advocated ‘establishing not a small percentage of free places at a large number of schools, as the Fleming Committee recommended [in 1944], but a large percentage of free places at a smaller number of schools’, claiming that ‘nothing would do more to knock on the head the boarding school social snobbery of today than the existence, side by side with the one-clan Eton, Harrow and the rest, of equally successful boarding schools recruited from all sections of the nation’. And, in another memo, Eric James solemnly stated that grammars had been ‘the strongest solvents of class divisions’, given that ‘Manchester Grammar School, and a few others like it, represent probably a wider social cross-section than almost any other schools, not in England alone, but in the whole Western world (this is literally true), and an academic standard which challenges the very best independent schools.’
The Study Group also heard evidence in December from Mark Abrams, commissioned to survey parental attitudes to education. In terms of working-class parents and the maintained sector, a predictable enough set of findings emerged: that most were ‘quite happy to leave things as they are’; that ‘while emphatic that children with good brains should be given every chance to develop, most parents seemed convinced that their own children were unlikely to obtain this opportunity because of lack of ability’; that ‘they did not feel that their own children were likely to benefit particularly from any improvements in education’; and that ‘the idea of the comprehensive school had made practically no impact upon them’. As for private education, Abrams noted that his survey had revealed ‘an overwhelming majority of parents’, including working-class ones, ‘in favour of private spending on education’, with ‘the general feeling’ being that ‘if parents wanted to send children to private schools there was no reason why they should not do so’. Accordingly, concluded Abrams, ‘any attempt’ to abolish private education ‘or even to stir up hostility against private education would probably only seem curious to the electorate’.
In February 1958 the Study Group decamped to Clacton-on-Sea for a weekend conference, listening to the views of some 18 outside experts. ‘There was no criticism of Labour’s proposals for reorganisation of secondary education on comprehensive lines,’ recorded the official summary of the proceedings, ‘provided that these were submitted in terms of a 15/20-year plan and full provision was made for flexibility in implementing the new system.’ Crossman, however, privately recorded that ‘everybody emphasised how impossible it was to go too fast towards a comprehensive system’.
Gaitskell looked in on the Sunday session and expressed his preference for ‘Flemingism’, in effect the extension of free places, chosen by intellectual ability, in about 30 public schools, but this was dismissed by Crossman as ‘totally impractical’, an opinion that most of the Study Group apparently shared. Altogether, noted the official summary of the session, ‘the discussions were largely inconclusive but seemed to indicate the view that under present circumstances the public schools were best left alone’. Next day, writing up his diary, Crossman reflected wryly how ‘at the conference there was almost universal bewilderment and amazement at th
e idea, and all for the right reasons – that to attack Manchester Grammar School, while leaving Eton, is the act of a zanie’.28 The syntax was confusing, but the sense was dismayingly clear.
Learning to Live, Labour’s policy document on education (largely drafted by Stewart), was published in mid-June. Under a future Labour government, all local authorities would be required to produce plans ending selection at 11; but at the same time, there was an acceptance that, in terms of the precise mechanics, local circumstances would demand a degree of flexibility. What about the public schools? The document yielded nothing in its ferocious denunciation of the current system – ‘damages national efficiency and offends the sense of justice . . . all who desire equality of opportunity and social justice will agree that the existence of this privileged sector of education is undesirable’ – but the nub, it insisted, was the question of priorities:
There is a risk that argument over this question may give it an importance which, in proportion to the whole field of education, it does not possess. Compare, today, the free national system of education and the private fee-paying system. It is the national system which provides the greater variety and attempts the most difficult tasks. Despite all its present inadequacies, it is vigorous and capable of great advances. To make the nation’s schools fully worthy of the nation will be an immense achievement. Smaller classes, better-qualified teachers, better equipment and a higher proportion of sixth formers in our own schools will open the door of opportunity and steadily reduce the influence of the privileged fee-paying schools in public life. We believe that the next Labour Government should concentrate its educational endeavours on this work.
Modernity Britain Page 29
