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Chapter Two

The Piecemeal Revolution

Let’s get the most damaging myths out of the way. The move towards comprehensive education was not some rash act of anti-democratic statist zeal, nor was it, in the astonishing recent words of Tony Blair, ‘pretty close to academic vandalism’.¹ Far from it. Early comprehensive reform was bipartisan, slow and uneven in pace, with change occurring over many decades. The first comprehensive opened in Anglesey, Wales, in the late 1940s, while most of the transformation towards a comprehensive system occurred in the 1960s and 70s—and still the reform remains incomplete. A number of local authorities retain use of the eleven-plus to this day.

It may have been halting and fragmented, but it had a profound impact on post-war Britain. For to make real sense of the intense opposition that the comprehensive ideal provoked, we have to acknowledge the radicalism inherent in the idea of universal education; the idea that every child, of whatever background, is deserving of a serious education; that all the nation’s children might learn from a broadly common syllabus, enjoying matching resources and similarly high expectations; and, possibly the most threatening idea of all, the suggestion that at some points, in some places, the nation’s children—Muslim, Christian or Jewish, upper-class or impoverished, girl or boy, black or white—might actually be educated in the same classrooms together.

Here, then, were the key ingredients of what I call the piecemeal revolution, a moderate, rational plan for educational reform that still shakes us to our roots. As a nation, we are more connected to our pre-World War II and indeed nineteenth-century assumptions, prejudices and modes of social organisation, than perhaps we realise. Class stratification remains the default position, even in the twenty-first century.

That the British public has never developed the kind of affection for, and loyalty to, the idea of universal state education as it has to the National Health Service might in part be due to the crass divisions and base prejudices that shaped the 1944 Education Act. The Act was a Tory one, and so predated the reforming Labour administration elected in 1945 and led by Clement Atlee that set up the welfare state and created the NHS. Yet, in many ways, it anticipated and shared in that postwar spirit. For the first time in the history of England and Wales, the state underwrote a universal, compulsory free education system for all, which represented a tremendous leap forward. Yet written into this progress was an a-priori separation of the country’s children into winners and losers by the age of eleven—a division that predictably shaped itself along class lines.

Things could have been very different. The pre-war 1938 Spens Report had ‘considered carefully the possibility of multilateral schools … the provision of a good general education for two or three years for all pupils over eleven-plus in a given area, and the organisation of four or five “streams”, so that the pupils at the age of thirteen or fourteen years may follow courses that are suited to their individual needs and capacity. It is a policy which is very attractive: it would secure in the first place the close association, to their mutual advantage, of pupils of more varied ability, and with more varied interests and objectives, than are normally found in a school of any one type.’² Ultimately, however, the report rejected the option of multilateral—comprehensive—schooling.

After the Spens Report, the war years saw intense consultation and negotiation between politicians, civil servants, the churches and the private schools, as well as another report—the 1943 Norwood Committee on educational reorganisation—which recommended the establishment of three distinct types of secondary school. During this time, it became widely acknowledged that if Britain won the war it would be impossible to go back to the pre-1939 situation, when nearly 90 per cent of young people left school at fourteen, only 10 per cent achieved passes in public examination and fewer than 5 per cent went on to higher education. It was vital that the country educated more of its citizens and to a much higher level.

In many ways, education had not radically altered from the fragmented patchwork of nineteenth-century provision, particularly in its tendency to assume, in the words of Matthew Arnold, that ‘the education of each class in society has, or ought to have, its ideal, determined by the wants of that class and by its destination.’³ Although a number of pieces of legislation from the mid nineteenth century onward began to implement a national system of elementary and secondary schools, locally controlled, its administration was frequently deemed ‘chaotic’. While the upper classes tended to be shipped off to the great public schools or elite day schools, and the middle classes were educated in the competitive grammars—which based their curriculum upon the public school model—the working class received a wildly uneven elementary education, its quality dependent on which regional school board or church was in charge. These arrangements, more or less, continued up to 1939.

World War II was an important turning point, as it confirmed concerns that Britain was producing an under-educated workforce unable to hold its own in wider markets. Many schools had been closed in preparation for evacuation, but one million children were not in fact sent away, causing scenes of delinquency and chaos as they roamed the streets. Ministers were criticised for their ignorance: ‘they did not know what had happened to state education because they educated their own children elsewhere.’ Even senior officials at the Board of Education admitted that full-time schooling for most of the country’s children was in many ways ‘seriously defective’, and that for 90 per cent of them, it ended too soon. ‘It is conducted in many cases in premises which are scandalously bad.’⁴

The 1944 Act, then, embraced two vitally important principles: free secondary education for all (some state schools had charged fees prior to the war), and a clear distinction, and path, between primary and secondary schools. A young Tory reformer, Quintin Hogg—later Lord Hailsham—thought the Act ‘an elementary piece of social justice’. Soon, however, it was clear that in many ways it reproduced the fragmented legacy of the earlier period.

Firstly, it wholly failed to address the problem of the private sector, which at that point was severely weakened both morally and financially, making it ripe for reform and possible incorporation into a new universal state system. But no action was taken to deal with the public schools, as we shall see in Chapter 6. Secondly, Rab Butler—appointed by Churchill to consider and draw up plans for education reform, despite his initial reluctance—and his junior minister, Chuter Ede, came under huge pressure from the Anglican and Catholic churches to retain their religious influence and involvement in the school system. At that time the churches ran half the schools in the UK. Although by the mid twentieth century England had become a less religious society, the idea still prevailed that this was a ‘Christian country’ and many thought that Christianity would temper a ‘peculiarly democratic bill’.⁵ A compromise was found in the conversion of church schools into two main types: ‘controlled’ or ‘aided’. In the case of controlled schools, the state would take over their costs, appoint staff and governors, etc., but the schools would follow an agreed religious syllabus. Voluntary-aided schools retained more independence and power. The state paid for their running costs, but the Church kept buildings under its control, with help from a government grant, and continued to appoint staff and governors. The third problem with the 1944 Act was its fatal flaw: the enabling of a pernicious three-tiered school system, based on the idea that children had very different talents and aptitudes and should therefore be educated separately. Both the 1938 Spens Report and the 1943 White Paper had considered the idea of multilateral education. In fact, the latter had explicitly declared: ‘There is nothing to be said in favour of a system which subjects children at the age of eleven to the strain of a competitive examination in which not only their future schooling but their future career may depend.’⁶ Butler himself was not hostile to the idea that all children should be educated in the same schools. But the 1944 Act was heavily influenced by what Caroline Benn and Brian Simon called the ‘wordy circumlocutions’ of Sir Cyril Norwood, the chair of the 1943 committee and a strong supporter of grammar schools—and, therefore, of the idea of selection. While the Act itself, permissive but not prescriptive, did not set down how schools should be organised, Norwood called upon a ‘general educational experience’ to support his recommendations that different types of children should be educated in different types of school.

Many of the assumptions underlying the setting up of the tripartite system were based on the IQ research of the 1920s and 30s. A prominent place was occupied by the work of Sir Cyril Burt, who drew heavily on the ideas of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Burt’s research and experimentation were later to be discredited once it was discovered that he had fabricated evidence to support his theories. His arguments, however, were taken very seriously indeed in the 1930s and 40s. Burt believed that social class correlated with intelligence: the higher up the social scale you were, the greater your natural fund of intelligence. Accordingly, environment—including education—had a negligible impact on a child’s intellectual development; it was what you were born with, or rather, what you were born into, that counted. Education thus became an exercise in ‘sorting’ pupils into the correct compartments, at any given age. As late as 1950 Burt would write, ‘Obviously in an ideal community, our aim should be to discover what ration of intelligence nature has given to each individual child at birth, then to provide him with the appropriate education, and finally to guide him into the career for which he seems to have been marked out.’⁷

Not everyone agreed. One civil servant of the period was later quoted as saying that Burt held ‘a general belief, I believe totally false, that children were divided into three kinds. It was sort of Platonic. There were golden children, silver children and iron children.’⁸ Golden children were, broadly speaking, interested in learning for its own sake and could grasp an argument; silver children were talented at applied science or art, but lacked subtlety in language construction; iron children could only handle concrete things, for abstractions were beyond them.

From 1944 onwards, local authorities were supposed to assign children to one of three kinds of schools. The more intellectual among them were to be sent to grammar schools; the more practical and vocationally inclined to the new technical schools, and the rest were to be educated in secondary moderns. In fact, the technical schools—the ideal destination of the so-called ‘silver’ caste—never seriously took off, and secondary education in the post-war period quickly became a matter of grammar or secondary modern, all decided by the eleven-plus exam. Thus did the crude eugenicism of Burt and his disciples unduly influence—and warp—the lives of countless children, as the state took on the arrogant task of dividing them into winners and losers before even the onset of puberty.

The 1944 Act was an undeniable improvement on the glaring pre-war gaps in provision. For some, it opened a window on a new future; but for the majority, once again, an education system ruled in which class divisions were, in Sally Tomlinson’s words, ‘created, legitimised and justified’. As Brian Simon writes, ‘Even under a Labour Government elected with a massive majority, the mediation of class relations was still seen as a major function of the education system.’⁹ A very similar charge would be laid at the door of a future Labour Government, also headed by a privately educated leader and elected with an equally impressive majority, some fifty years later.

Long after the 1944 Act, its chief political architect Rab Butler wrote of how important it was ‘to ensure that a stigma of inferiority did not attach itself to those secondary institutions … which lacked the facilities and academic prestige of the grammar schools’. But how could it possibly be otherwise? Grammar schools had, in general, three times more money spent on them; they had the best teachers, the best facilities, offered public examinations and a secure route into higher education. Secondary moderns—even the many which offered more academic courses—could offer none of these things.

Almost every family in the era of national selection was caught up in the drama of the eleven-plus exams. The crisis was intensified for one pair of twins, who sat the exam in the mid to late 1960s:

After my sister and I took the eleven-plus (along with the rest of my class at St Mark’s Primary School) nothing happened for several weeks. We forgot all about it and then, I remember, a teacher came into the classroom and read out a list of about eight names of boys and girls in the class. We had to go the Headmistress’s room. Miss Simpson was long and lean like Joyce Grenfell, with a bluey-green woollen suit, and flat shoes, and we knew it was important—either good or bad. We trooped out—including me but excluding my sister—to be congratulated and told that we had ‘passed the eleven-plus’. Thereafter all the attention was on me. Which school would I go to—the local grammar, or another selective grant-maintained school out of the borough? Would I wear box- or knife-pleat skirts? Blue or yellow shirts?

My poor sister meanwhile was to go to the local girls’ secondary modern school. No forms coming through the post and discussions about uniforms, books, travel. She took it very badly—she was the ‘failure’, I was the ‘success’, and she never recovered from that feeling. Even today, 48 years later, she refers to me as ‘the clever one’ and to herself as the ‘thick’ one. It was not true, of course, but the education system reinforced a sense of worthlessness from then on.

I completely squandered my grammar-school education, and took ages to settle into any job until my mid-twenties. She left school at fifteen and has worked ever since. Her education in fact wasn’t bad—and I am not sure which of us came off worse. The experience made my father ensure that my little sister went to a comprehensive, which were just being introduced. She really enjoyed school and it being co-ed meant she ‘got on with boys—as friends’ much better than her three older sisters. [Source: private communication.]

All of which meant that, as before the war, the twin threads of class anxiety and class ambition were woven right through the school organisation. According to the journalist Peter Laurie, ‘To have been consigned to the limbo of secondary modern is to have failed disastrously … and very early in life.’¹⁰ For middle-class parents, a grammar-school place was often a make or break matter: failure was not an option for children sitting the eleven-plus exam. But while to figures like Edward Heath and Alan Bennett the grammar schools were comparatively easy to get into, and offered a chance to compete with the privately educated elite at Oxbridge and other top universities, the genuinely poor had barely a chance of passing the eleven-plus. In the district of St Anne’s in Nottingham, for example, only 1.5 per cent of the district’s entire school population attended grammars; in neighbouring middle-class suburbs, 60 per cent of children did. There were wide regional variations too. Only 10 per cent of children in Gateshead and Sunderland were educated in grammars, compared to 40 per cent in the affluent county of Westmoreland.

More generally, the education system retained its hierarchical and differentiated character. In fact, there were five or six levels to the post-war set-up: the public schools; the direct grant grammars, which offered some free places; the grammars; the technical/trade schools; the secondary moderns; and the all-age elementary schools, pre-war relics that took twenty years to disappear. The complete lack of a national curriculum meant that teaching in many of the less resourced schools could still be of a poor or patchy standard. In many church schools, the curriculum was left entirely up to the discretion of the head teacher.

During this period, a lot of school buildings were in bad repair and the raising of the leaving age meant that many teachers faced ‘huge classes, in crumbling, sometimes dangerous buildings’.¹¹ Whether in the grammars or in the secondary moderns, there were often low expectations of poor children. Discipline could be barbaric and there was little pastoral care or careers guidance, such as is common today. While the teaching in most schools was satisfactory, the percentage of poor teaching, in all sectors, was much higher than today. The curriculum was far narrower, opportunities for girls were very limited, maths teaching was often mediocre and there were vast tracts of uninspired, rote learning. Inspectors of the period had serious concerns about the quality of teaching of English, while a case study of science teaching in the post-war period in Swansea found it ‘unsatisfactory in all the town’s secondary moderns’. It was not just the secondary moderns; many grammar schools conducted ‘dull and arid’ lessons too.¹² Low standards were a widespread problem. According to the 1959 Crowther Report, on the education of fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds, 38 per cent of grammar-school pupils failed to achieve more than three passes at O level: so that of the entire cohort of sixteen-year-olds nationwide, only about 9 per cent achieved five or more O levels. In his careful study of exam papers of the period, Adrian Elliott has unearthed numerous examples of unchallenging English papers and examples of basic miscomprehension of questions in maths, evidence which successfully challenges the claims made so frequently today that the increase in the number of exam passes is solely the result of ‘dumbing down’. In 1961 the Ministry of Education even raised concerns about the deficiencies in general education of Oxbridge candidates.

There were of course exceptions, schools that challenged the conventions and constrictions of the time. One such phenomenon was St George’s-in-the-East, a post-war secondary modern run by the remarkable Alex Bloom, and the location for one of the most famous education-related narratives of the post-war period: To Sir With Love. While the film concentrates on the trials and tribulations of its protagonist, a black teacher played by Sidney Poitier, the original book put more emphasis on the innovations of the school itself.

Alex Bloom was, in the words of radical educator Michael Fielding, ‘arguably one of the greatest figures of radical state education in England’. He was certainly considered hugely significant by equally important figures such as A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill, one of the original free schools. Bloom opened St George’s-in-the-East Secondary Modern School in Cable Street, Stepney, on 1 October 1945. From the start he discarded many of the conventions, restrictions and taboos associated with schooling of the period, including corporal punishment, excessive regimentation and competition. He had a stated abhorrence of ‘marks, prizes and competition.’ He was dealing with children living in an area of extreme poverty, in bombed-out streets, with little hope for the future. Many were ‘lonely and bothered souls’, for whom school was their only experience of human warmth and structure. He also believed that most of the children emerged from primary school with the sense that they were failures. Two of his guiding principles were that the children should feel that they counted, and that the school community should mean something.

While most secondary moderns and their pupils suffered from the thin curricula, poor resources and consequent low self-esteem that usually accompanied the education of those who failed the eleven-plus, St George’s pioneered collaborative, student-centred learning, in which pupils were encouraged to make up their own curriculum, and to be involved in active debates about what they were going to learn and had learned. St George’s school council facilitated discussions between staff and students about the life of the school, and Bloom staunchly supported the right of students to say what they felt ‘without reprisals’. A range of pupil committees took responsibility for everything from midday dancing in the Hall, school meals and sports, to the appearance and social life of the school, including concerts, parties and visitors.¹³

Former pupil Abraham Wilson has written of his life at St George’s:

Our classes were introduced to the way democracy worked by having annual elections, when each class elected a boy and a girl to represent them at regular meetings, that were chaired by the head boy or head girl, where decisions were made concerning some aspects of running the school. It was from such meetings that we chose to have ballroom dancing during the lunch break, which was very popular with the pupils in their last year at school. It was also by a similar suggestion that we were able to have a canteen, with cakes bought from a local bakery.

Each morning the Headmaster, Mr Alexander Bloom addressed the school assembly with the head girl and boy seated each side of the headmaster. The assembly began with a piece of classical music being played. It was my first appreciation and introduction to composers such as Brahms, Beethoven, Strauss and many others. I still have very clear memories of our headmaster and remember his strong outlook and some of his views. He was a small man no more than 5’3”. He had a thing about noise and would often tell us to keep our foot on the ‘Soft Pedal’ when he thought the volume of noise throughout the school was too loud.¹⁴

To Sir with Love provides some brief, but deeply felt, sketches of life behind the closed doors of London’s East End at that time. The main character’s respect for the hardship he witnesses among the families of his students is very moving, as is the story of their growing attachment to him. To Sir with Love also gives us a unique insight into the pioneering educational methods of Bloom, and his ability to engage the students. Early on in the novel, Rickie, the main protagonist, describes an assembly in which the ‘Head read a poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The records which followed were Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu, and part of Vivaldi’s Concerto in C for two trumpets’. Watching it from the outside, the novel’s protagonist is struck by the sight of ‘those rough-looking, untidy children; every one of them sat still… and attentive, until the very echo of the last clear note had died away. Their silence was not the result of boredom or apathy, nor were they quiet because it was expected of them or through fear of consequences; but they were listening, actively, attentively listening to those records, with the same raptness they had shown in their jiving; their bodies were still, but I could feel that their minds and spirits were involved with the music.’¹⁵

More widely, challenges were beginning to emerge to the insidious eleven-plus divide. Education researchers Brian Jackson and Olive Banks revealed the sham of claims by grammar-school supporters that there was ‘parity of esteem’ between the grammars and secondary moderns. Jackson’s work forensically analysed how children were sorted into different streams, along class lines, early in primary school. Teachers were already deciding who was potential grammar-school material. As one teacher told Jackson, ‘In the training of racehorses and athletes, we are most careful to cream and train; why not with children?’ This same teacher held that ‘streaming gives middle-class children the chance their parents had in private or prep schools, now that state schools are more widely used’, an argument that has echoed down the years.¹⁶ Jackson’s research also examined in detail how different social groups fared within the grammar system. Very often, upper-working-class and lower-middle-class children languished in these schools and left as soon as they could, while upper-middle-class children prospered.¹⁷

According to Ross McKibbin, the working class lost out to the middle class in the competition for grammar-school places, which tended to go ‘to the sons and daughters of professional business men/women’.¹⁸ Those working-class children that did win places often left school much earlier, and didn’t progress to further education. Grammar-school life often disrupted family routines: a new ‘posh’ accent and uniform was ridiculed at home; it was hard to do homework. For some, says McKibbin, ‘The deliberate adherence to a local accent often meant wholesale rejection of the grammar school and its values; cultivation of BBC English represented an acceptance of those values and preceded a sometimes heartfelt adieu to class and neighbourhood.’¹⁹

A series of official reports, published in the late 1950s and early 60s, built up a powerful argument against selection. In a 1957 report, the British Psychological Society criticised intelligence testing and streaming; in the same year the NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research) came out against selection. It argued that the eleven-plus contained serious errors, a claim backed up by the increasing numbers of children who were achieving academically in some of the secondary moderns. The 1959 Crowther Report on education of fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds argued that ‘it is not only at the top but almost to the bottom of the pyramid that the scientific revolution of our times needs to be reflected in a longer educational process.’²⁰ Four years later the Robbins Report on higher education concurred, rejecting the idea that only a select number of children had talent worth cultivating; the Newsom Report of the same year, looking at the education of children of ‘average’ intelligence, was bold enough to declare that ‘intellectual talent is not a fixed quantity with which we have to work, but a variable that can be modified by social policy and educational approaches … The kind of intelligence which is measured by the test so far applied is largely an acquired characteristic.’²¹ Even Rhodes Boyson, Tory, headmaster, and champion of the grammars, later acknowledged that the eleven-plus ‘makes considerable mistakes’.²²

In the end, though, it was parental opposition that politically defeated selection. Particularly vocal were protests from middle-class families who found their children rejected by the grammars. The NFER report of 1957 claimed that ‘politicians [were] beginning to find that to defend selection was a sure means of losing support.’ Simon Jenkins recalls:

At political meetings at the end of the 1960s, the then education spokesman, Edward Boyle, was torn limb from limb by Conservative voters infuriated at their children who had ‘failed’ the eleven-plus being sent to secondary moderns, along with 70–80 per cent of each age group. They had regarded the grammars as ‘their schools’. The eleven-plus, they said, lost them the 1964 election and would lose them every one until it was abolished. Margaret Thatcher recognised this as education secretary after 1970, as has the Tory party in practice ever since.²³

The grammar/secondary modern divide may have defined the post-war education settlement, but there were signs of change from early on. Britain’s first purpose-built comprehensive, in Anglesey, opened in 1949 although it owed its existence to practicality rather than politics; it was simply impossible to sustain a two- or three-tier structure in an outlying rural area. While, according to Benn and Simon, the Tory government in power from 1951 to 1964 never said anything positive about comprehensives, it was prepared to sanction such schools in poor or outlying areas—but not in more affluent areas, where a comprehensive might detract from the status of a grammar school. Some local authorities, such as Coventry and London, pioneered the introduction of comprehensive schools, and, as popular disillusion with the selective system grew, evidence of their success was beginning to filter through.