When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  How can one school get the best out of both Carol and John? Are they exceptions? Do pupils in the middle without any obvious special needs get equally stretched? Is there a trick to teaching ‘mixed ability’ classes, which, if only those educated in narrow peer groups could understand it, would set the national mind at rest over comprehensive schooling? I spent much of my time at Knutsford trying to find answers to these questions, sitting in on ‘mixed ability’ classes and talking with teachers. The aim is clear and laudable, and the problem simply stated. At one end of the ability range is the stock English figure of the professor who cannot change a light bulb: at the other, thousands of children leave school branded as ‘failures’ because the traditional academic courses offer them nothing. Michael Duffy, head of King Edward VI School, Morpeth, and a former president of the Secondary Heads’ Association, told me: ‘By being taught in the same environment, children have equality of esteem, opportunity and provision. It is not a question of levelling down: clever children are entitled to good teachers, but so are the others. By teaching high flyers and low attainers in the same context, we are equipping them for adult life in all its dimensions. Within the school walls we are hard-headed and realistic about different children’s abilities to learn. The key is the right lesson correctly delivered.’

  Looking back on a ‘traditional’ education, it is clear that, as well as much first-rate teaching, there was a great deal of boredom involved in learning things that were either rapidly forgotten – whither has fled all that maths and Latin? – or redundant. Most of us also had hidden experience of ‘mixed ability’ teaching in such subjects as woodwork. I was extremely bad at it, and chiselled away ham-fistedly while some others turned perfect lamp standards on lathes. It never occurred to any of us that we were suffering because of the wide range of abilities in that group. So long as the instructor had time to get round us all, and attend to our needs, we were learning. Recently, I coached a ‘mixed ability’ soccer team, whose players ranged from kids who could kick the ball into the net with either foot from the edge of the penalty area to those born with the proverbial two left feet. It was fun, watching the children develop week by week, with no obvious disadvantages to either extreme.

  At Knutsford all children start in the first year in totally mixed classes, gradually being ‘set’ in ability groups according to the nature of the subject. I attended a first-year French lesson. It was the last period of the day, the sun was shining, and rugby was being played outside the window. The teacher, Gary Frost, engaged the children individually, prowling the classroom. ‘Tu habites une ville? Oui ou non?’ This darting technique kept everyone’s attention, even those I had marked down as reluctant scholars. Everyone made a stab at one or two answers, or read words in French. The written exercise was to copy some statements – one girl had finished while a boy was painfully writing the first sentence – and then to use the same phrases to write about their own families. No one noticeably flagged. It would obviously become harder to give everyone the sense of being in the same race as the year progressed and the bright began to accumulate knowledge. But French is one subject that is set by the second year according to ability. I would not have been unhappy to have my child start in that class. In fact, one was then in a similar group in his own school.

  History is cited as a subject in which new teaching methods allow pupils not only to go at their own pace, but also to learn techniques of far greater value than the ‘Plato to Nato’ string of dates. The aim is to teach children to handle evidence – primary and secondary – and to apply that skill in, for example, testing the accuracy of what they read in the newspapers. John Cloake, a history teacher about to take a class of fourteen-year-old GCSE students, said: ‘Our greatest asset is a child’s natural curiosity. So much of education works against that. We are not here to provide the answers. If I did, they would simply be chasing my version of the right answer.’ In his lesson, the children were studying the development of medicine. He wrote an open chart on the board, with spaces for explaining who treated illness, by what methods and why, in prehistoric, Egyptian and Greek times. The children were encouraged to relate those developments to what was going on in the wider contemporary societies. There were again painful discrepancies between the speeds (and neatness) of the pupils.

  Later, Mr Cloake filled out the blackboard charts, drawing the answers from the children themselves. For homework – and I was told that these fourteen-year-olds would be expected to do about an hour and a half each night – they were to compare two contemporary Greek accounts of severe illness, and assess their reliability, accuracy and usefulness. ‘I am not looking for a lot of writing; I am looking for a lot of thoughts,’ Mr Cloake told the departing scholars. Again I had a son who was at the same stage on the same course. From what I saw and from what he told me, these lessons are a success.

  Knutsford insisted that all pupils take one subject at GCSE that is not purely academic, which is a problem with many parents. Mr Walmsley, the deputy head, had a queue outside his office every ‘options’ night of parents needing to be convinced that their children can ‘spare’ the time from purely academic subjects. The school was strong in design and art – encouraged obviously by a head who was trained as a potter. They have had artists in residence; the spirit of one, said Jeff Teasdale, the head of the department and himself an artist, ‘still walks in the department.’

  It is the boast of comprehensives that they are better prepared than are many private schools for the ‘new’ teaching ushered in by the General Certificate of Secondary Education, the sixteen-plus exam, which is based on the skills of learning rather than knowledge – what you can do, not what you know. ‘The pinnacle,’ said Mike Oliver, a deputy head, ‘is more demanding than O level.’ Teachers I met gloated over the difficulties they expect some private schools to have. One said: ‘Their teachers are actually going to have to talk to children, not sweep in, deliver a lecture, and sweep out.’ The gloating, however, ceased when the conversation turned to resources. GCSE is posited on an extraordinarily generous ratio of teachers, and in some subjects is inescapably demanding of equipment. Mr Valleley, Knutsford’s head, told of an instructional video showing a geography field trip, in which four pupils are being assessed by two or three teachers. ‘If we matched that ratio, we’d have to turn out the whole staff to assess our geographers,’ he said. Every teacher had a version of that truth. GCSE is judged by continuous assessment. Who teaches the children while that goes on? Class sizes have been growing. Steve Ings, a young science teacher, spoke of the difficulty of getting round twenty-eight children in one lesson instead of the twenty-one he used to instruct. Mr Valleley said the school would get £8,500 over two and a half years for new books and equipment – sufficient for the school’s bread and butter – instead of the £15,000 he would like. That shortfall is common to most schools. The PTA meeting that I attended was so concerned with this topic, which boiled down to the provision of books, that the chairman had to guillotine the discussion. A teacher crystallized the dilemma: ‘What is the good of, say, a video camera, if you haven’t got a spare body to take off a group of five or six to work with it?’

  Knutsford had a first-rate teaching staff, young and enthusiastic – ‘I thought,’ said one, ‘that I could do a better job than my teachers did for me’ – quite happy, for example, to stay after school for a curriculum development discussion. Mr Teasdale attended one two days after his wife had had a baby. But the teachers were frustrated by limited resources and poor staffing levels. Several have compensated for the fact that nationally falling school rolls have meant fewer promotion opportunities by writing text books. Although many insisted that concern about money came after professional considerations, most obviously felt underpaid, and wondered where the next generation of teachers was to come from. Some complained that the children were spoilt. ‘Left to themselves, some of these children wouldn’t have the wits to live in a shed,’ said one. He added: ‘Teachers are not appreciated. Th
e public thinks that we come out of university with our heads full of stuff that will last us for forty years. Parents want a lot for nothing.’

  Mr Ings, whose two younger brothers – one an army sergeant – earned more than he did, said: ‘I am worried that I am going to burn myself out. I get emotionally tired, absolutely exhausted. But we’ve all invested so much time in teaching, we can’t afford pessimism.’ Several said they were hurt by society’s stereotyped view of teachers. Maggie Jones, the head of business studies, said: ‘People make bland statements that teachers get thirteen weeks’ holiday and finish work each day at half-past three. Nobody sees what it’s like – the piles of marking that you’re still poring over at half-past nine. It gets on your brain, and you don’t switch off. I get into all sorts of arguments. We get blamed for so many things. Surely there must be blame for everyone.’

  Miss Jones was one of several who did not resume taking sports sessions after the original teachers’ dispute. Plenty of sports were taking place, but a widespread staff attitude seemed to be that if something was worth doing it was worth being paid for. Another teacher said that if parents wanted their children to play cricket, they should enrol them in a club, and not expect the school to provide teachers and facilities. The experience of the Thatcher years had turned them vehemently against the Conservative government. ‘The school isn’t full of left-wing, radical Trotskyists, but you won’t find anyone prepared to be an apologist for Mrs Thatcher,’ said one senior teacher. A colleague said: ‘The mandarin class is totally indifferent to the state system.’ He suggested that instead of spouting ‘unthinking nonsense’, critics should come into school for a week. ‘That would dispel their worries.’ If we are to get good teachers, we will have to cosset them. A head said to me: ‘If you had an eighteen-year-old, bright in maths, physics, computing or technology, would you encourage him to go into teaching? My God, no. You could probably count the number of physics teachers in training on the fingers of two or three pairs of hands.’ Teachers no longer enjoy the status of revered community figures, equal in esteem to the vicar and the doctor. My grandfather, a Midlands grammar school head in the early part of the twentieth century, had enjoyed that kind of respect in his town. School then was still the source of all learning: now children enjoy positive influences like foreign holidays, but teachers also have to contend with the sad fact that many of their charges spend more time in front of television than in the classroom. A teacher wrote to me that the ‘lack of social status’ was as bitter as the ‘constant denigration’ in the press and the poor pay.

  An educationalist told me that her 26-year-old mathematician son was already earning four times as much as he would have been getting as a teacher. The daughter of one of the senior women staff at Knutsford was paid as much as her teacher father within a couple of years of starting as a financial analyst. Joan Gregory of the Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools said: ‘Those in the schools are the only teachers we’ve got, and if we don’t pick them up and dust them down, then we’ve got troubles.’

  No school can turn every sow’s ear into a silk purse: there must have been ‘Carols’ at Knutsford who have fallen by the wayside, and ‘Johns’ who failed to fulfil their potential. I was constructively taken to task by an Observer reader after the paper ran a feature based on my Knutsford visit. She described herself as ‘an old enthusiastic teacher’, and accused me of writing a ‘panegyric’. She pointed out that there was no side-stepping the hard work that was associated with academic success in selective schools. ‘Everything will be boring for adults who, when young, were conditioned to be entertained without effort or concentration,’ she wrote. ‘The satisfaction derived from learning by rote your multiplication tables, or three theorems or King Harry’s speech before Harfleur – and fearing the consequences of not having learned them – would, if still present in our comprehensive classrooms, just tip the balance in the matter of their survival.’ But I can see very few people as thoroughly exposed as I was – whatever their prejudices – coming away from Knutsford or a similarly well-run school without believing that such schools can work. With more resources, greater public and political support, and a full range of children, they might do magnificently. As a nation, we cannot afford for them to do otherwise.

  ‌Chapter 10

  ‌‘A Plastic Lollipop’

  ‘KD’ Patel sat in a red leather armchair with his feet tucked beneath him. The undone buttons at the neck of his white shirt revealed an enamel medallion on a gold chain. His toes peeped from the slip-on white sandals he wore beneath tropical slacks. His wife, Lata, petite and pretty in pullover, jeans and boots, served tea. She was, I was amazed to learn, a Labour member of Brent Council, which seemed about as probable as Sue Ellen being a waterfront organizer for the Teamsters. Her real-life presence was difficult to reconcile with the image of a demure, sari-clad woman, smiling from her election leaflets. We sat in one corner of a large, ornate room, in which the furniture had been pushed against the red walls, as it might be in the waiting room for a doctor who offered exotic cures for the illnesses of affluence. There were marble-topped tables, peacock feathers in vases, pistols and swords on the walls, and a bright, floral carpet under foot. Occasionally KD burped loudly.

  Everything about the house and the man was unashamedly ostentatious: lions rampant on the suburban Wembley walls outside, palms each side of the front door, two Mercedes in the driveway, a vast enclosed swimming pool and disco area at the end of the garden. The property was a statement: ‘I have arrived. I have succeeded. You take me on my terms.’ Facing the swimming pool there was a ‘guest’ house, a three-storey town house. The whole property, said KD, was worth £850,000: I would have put it higher. The garden was ornate, with, I read in a self-publicity brochure that KD handed me, ‘symmetry reminiscent of Mogul Gardens’. Three Alsatian puppies romped between the white statues and the ponds. Mrs Patel’s colleagues on Brent Council met beside the pool to plan a socialist nirvana for their electors. ‘Wasn’t this just a little lavish for the home of a Labour councillor?’ I asked Lata. She laughed: ‘I started on the petrol pumps: I am as socialist as any of them.’

  KD’s professionally printed biography, written by ‘a freelance journalist based in London’, was entitled, ‘KD PATEL: A Flair for Fortune.’ It opened: ‘Businessman, philanthropist and patriot, Kantilal Dahyabhai Patel … a neat, unassuming man, clearly at peace with himself without appearing complacent.’ Walter Mitty could not have commissioned a more pleasing work of self-aggrandizement. But the achievements it reported in such gaudy prose were real enough. From a cotton mill in Gujerat at the age of sixteen, via ruination at Idi Amin’s hands, to a millionaire in London, with little but his native wits to propel him. His father had died in Uganda when he was a baby, and his illiterate mother had returned to her village in India. KD’s first capitalist venture had been a sweet stall, then a wholesale business that had gone bust: he re-emigrated to Uganda in his early twenties, still with considerable debts to settle in India.

  While I had been in America, Britain’s high streets were galvanized by a group of Asian immigrants – many, but not all, from East Africa – who were behaving much as immigrants to the United States have always behaved. With vigour, enterprise and courage, people like KD, many of whom had arrived penniless little more than the day before yesterday, were revitalizing corners of the British economy. They did it at best in an atmosphere of complacent patronage – CBEs and unwinnable parliamentary seats for acceptable Conservatives; at worst against violence and prejudice that make life for a person with brown skin in certain parts of Britain an inconceivable agony.

  In 1972 I had covered the arrival of one identifiable group of these immigrants, the 27,000 Ugandan Asians sent packing overnight as the result of a dream by a bloodthirsty madman, whom the British never took seriously because he was large, roly-poly, awarded himself ridiculous medals, and who had served as a sergeant in the King’s African Rifles. They were received here in a spirit of
official pessimism. These people represented a ‘problem’: they would need housing, welfare, schools, they would form ghettos. The anti-immigrant poison spread by Enoch Powell coursed in the public veins. Edward Heath’s government was unequivocal in accepting its responsibilities, but politically no one dared embrace these new Britons too fondly for fear of a backlash at the polls.

  There was no welcome for them to match that on offer to newcomers to the United States, where football stadia full of new citizens of every colour and belief are sworn to the allegiance of their adopted country amidst patriotic razzmatazz. American immigrants are wrapped in an emotional welcome that declares a new beginning, not just for them but for the society they have joined. ‘I am the son of an immigrant,’ boasts Mario Cuomo, governor of New York, from the public platform. We demand ‘Where do you come from?’ of people who were born here.

  Those who already knew the character and achievements of the Ugandan Asians forecast that the newcomers would rapidly buy their own houses; would start businesses; and would ensure that their children were well enough educated to become major contributors – doctors, engineers, accountants, business people – to the society they were joining. Those who didn’t know them, like myself, but who met them at the RAF camps where they were housed, were struck by the improbable optimism of refugees who, in many cases, owned no more than the clothes they wore.

  Most people, plucked from their homes, jobs and businesses and dumped summarily thousands of miles away in a strange, cold, indifferent land, without fluency in the local language, would have been utterly demoralized. Yet some of the younger Ugandan Asians appeared then to be crazily excited. This was the land on which they had set their hearts; and, although they arrived in appallingly adverse circumstances, they were determined to succeed. A young man, wearing an open-necked shirt and two rows of cowrie shells, in Britain only ten days, said: ‘We were told there were not enough jobs to go round in England. In fact there are. The English just won’t do them.’ One brother already had a job in Dorset, and another a college place. That day one thousand supporters of the ‘British Campaign to Stop Immigration’ marched in Bradford, and a further one thousand took to the streets of Birmingham. According to a spokesman: ‘We are not being racialist – if fifty thousand Eskimos came to this country, we could not take them.’