Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Despite all that has been written and spoken about those children who do not gain Grammar School status, in attempting to alleviate their feelings at having failed, failure is in fact the cold clear truth, and nothing can now change this. (Architect)

  Hard words, and a teacher (unstated at which sort of school) could offer only another cold, clear truth: ‘The Grammar Schools can only take a certain number of pupils, and in most parts of the country there are not enough Grammar Schools.’18

  In fact, by the late 1950s the dynamics of this whole inter-related cluster of issues – 11-plus, grammar schools, secondary moderns, comprehensives – were changing quite rapidly. Above all, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the future of the widely admired grammars was being threatened by deep dissatisfaction with two things beyond their control: the 11-plus and the secondary moderns.

  A significant part of the 11-plus problem was that a child’s chances of passing the exam hinged to an alarming extent on where he or she lived, depending on the availability of grammar-school places. Those chances were as high as 35 per cent in the south-west, 33.5 per cent in Wales, and 31.6 per cent in London and the south-east, but as low as 24.1 per cent in the Midlands, 22.4 per cent in the north-east, 18.9 per cent in the south and, in one particularly ill-favoured city, Nottingham, a mere 10.1 per cent. More generally, beyond that, there was the key question of misallocation. In practice, 11-plus failures had relatively few opportunities to transfer across at a later stage to a grammar, yet even in 1954 the Early Leaving report was revealing, on the basis of 1951 O-level results, that whereas 45 per cent of those who had been at state grammars since the age of 11 got five or more passes, the comparable figure for those who had subsequently been transferred from secondary moderns was 45.7 per cent.

  But the first real heavy lifting in the debate on intelligence testing and selection came from a committee of leading psychologists led by the Institute of Education’s Professor Philip Vernon. In their 1957 report, Secondary School Selection, they declared, in contradiction to the theories of genetic determination popularised by Cyril Burt, that

  psychologists should frankly acknowledge that completely accurate classification of children, either by level or type of ability, is not possible at 11 years, still less on entry to the junior school at 7 [a reference to the prevalent streaming at primaries], and should therefore encourage any more flexible form of organisation and grouping which gives scope for the gradual unfolding and the variability of children’s abilities and interests.

  Moreover, they added, ‘only among the top 5% or so and the bottom 50% do we consider that allocation to grammar, technical and modern schools can be made automatically from test scores and scaled estimates’, with ‘all intermediate pupils’ to be ‘regarded as border-zone’. Later that year, a detailed report on how selection worked in practice (Admission to Grammar Schools, commissioned by the National Foundation of Educational Research and written by Alfred Yates and D. A. Pidgeon) found that, even if all possible improvements were made in the selection process, there would still be an ineradicable misallocation of at least 10 per cent. ‘Whether a 10% error for all the country at large, involving 60,000 children per annum,’ reflected Professor Ben Morris in his preface to the report, ‘is to be regarded as reasonable or intolerable of course depends upon what particular educational values are regarded as most important.’

  Nevertheless, what in most people’s eyes ultimately did for the 11-plus was its inherent cruelty and divisiveness – prompting even a Tory minister, the liberal-minded Sir Edward Boyle (the Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Education who had apparently struggled with some of the questions), to refer publicly in 1957 to its ‘evil effect’ and to how it ‘casts a shadow over the classroom’. Understandably, many parents voted with their feet, it being estimated at the time that nearly half that year’s eligible children were not in the event sitting the test. And when, soon afterwards, a Daily Express poll asked whether the 11-plus should be left as it was or replaced by an assessment based on the child’s general school record, only 25 per cent opted for the status quo, with little difference between Tory and Labour voters.19

  As for the other Achilles heel of the existing system, a bald statement in the Manchester Evening News in April 1956 said it all: ‘With shock and disbelief many parents have learned this week that their own son or daughter will be going to a Secondary Modern school next September.’ A year later, Manchester’s recently retired, strongly pro-selection chief education officer, Norman Fisher, accepted that ‘even where there are secondary modern schools in first-rate buildings, it has seldom been possible to persuade parents or children that they offer a reasonable alternative to the grammar school’. And in June 1957 the Spectator published a stark piece by Colm Brogan based on the experience of a female teacher he knew who had recently worked in a co-ed secondary modern on a housing estate near London. ‘Nearly all the teachers devote time, labour and anxious care,’ he concluded, but in the end it was ‘the apathy and the negative attitude of the pupils’, from a working-class East End background, that prevailed, including a total lack of discipline and corporate spirit:

  The school had nothing to offer them that they believed to be of any value whatever. Educationists may talk of deepening the aesthetic experience, rounding the personality and enriching the lives of secondary modern pupils, but these words are as thorns crackling under the pot for the pupils themselves. With the exception of the minority who have agreed to stay on, the sole aim and object of the children is to get out the instant the law releases them. The world outside is Eldorado, to which their eyes and thoughts are ever straining.

  The negative depictions continued. ‘Run away to sea rather than go to a secondary modern,’ was the sage advice of A.J.P. Taylor later in 1957; in 1960, in his manual Secondary Modern Discipline, Richard Farley called secondary moderns ‘the focal point of the duller, less responsible, maladjusted and potentially criminal young people’, so that as a result ‘ninety per cent of the work in a Secondary Modern School is control and discipline’.

  Inevitably, among those teaching in the secondary moderns, a deep defensiveness prevailed. ‘Why is it that when I go into your secondary modern schools the teachers are so apologetic?’ a visiting educationalist from abroad was quoted as asking in 1956. ‘“You must remember,” they tell me, “that these are not the brightest children. You must realise that we do not have the best.” And so they warn me not to be disappointed. They make excuses for the work I shall see.’ But it could hardly have been otherwise, as the Times Educational Supplement (still strongly pro-selection) went on in its report: ‘The visitor was surprised that the teachers expected him to judge the secondary modern school by the grammar school. The teachers, of course, could have told him that the public as yet had seldom done anything else. This was not an apology the teachers were offering the visitor. It was seasoned self-defence.’20

  Yet for all this – including (not least) press treatment of secondary moderns in which, as one observer wearily put it, ‘the stress is upon physical violence and the threat of the adolescent’ – the larger reality was perhaps not quite so bleak. In implicit riposte to Brogan, the New Statesman in September 1957 ran a five-page survey by Judith Hubback in which she did not deny that the 59,000 secondary modern teachers, almost half of them taking classes of over 30, were often mediocre, so that ‘most of the dull classrooms will go on witnessing dull, overcrowded, incompetent and undisciplined lessons for the next few years’. But, she stressed, ‘the majority of classes do not get out of control, the majority of children are moderately well taught and most of the regular teachers do not have discipline problems’. A more whole-hearted defence came the following year from Harold Dent (educationalist and former editor of the TES) in his Secondary Modern School: An Interim Report. By his calculations, over half the secondary moderns were doing good work, almost half sound work and only 5 per cent bad work; vocational courses, tailored to a wide range of aptitudes and int
erests, were giving ‘a lively sense of purpose and reality’; and altogether, the ‘incontestable fact’ was that ‘hundreds of thousands of girls and boys in secondary modern schools’ were now ‘being given a much better, much more genuinely secondary education than were even their elder sisters or brothers who attended the self-same schools only a few years previously’. The picture was positive too in 1959 in E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love, his justly celebrated account of a black teacher at a secondary modern in the East End – drawn from his real-life experience at St George’s-in-the-East Secondary Modern, located amidst the grimness and periodic violence of Cable Street, Stepney, but where a remarkable, inspiring head, Alex Bloom, made every child feel counted and created a real sense of school community.

  Even so, this was undoubtedly the exception rather than the rule. More representative – but still positive in its own terms – was the experience of Julia Gunnigan, teaching in 1959 in the secondary modern at Pimlico and encountering an atmosphere that was rough but friendly. ‘The boys queuing to hand over their lunch money would sometimes pause at the head of the line and demand: “Fulham or Chelsea, Mam?”,’ relates her son John Lanchester. ‘The wrong answer would get a scowl and sneer; the right answer would be met with “Buy ya dinner.”’ And, relevant not just to the typical working-class secondary modern, he also describes what his mother found during her London sojourn:

  No one would ever admit it, but people were happy where they were. They were especially happy with the level of complaint and grumbling, which often seemed one of life’s most important pleasures. A few of her brightest pupils had passed the eleven-plus and been offered a place at grammar school, but their parents had not allowed them to take it up. She raised the question with one of the parents and they shuffled and looked shifty and embarrassed and eventually admitted to her – as they perhaps wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been Irish – ‘We didn’t want him to think he was better than us.’21

  Middle-class parents, alarmed by the possibility (however statistically slight) of their children failing the 11-plus, felt very differently. ‘In some of the Home Counties and other areas where there is a large middle-class dormitory population, the abolition of entry to the County Grammar schools by payment of fees has caused a great deal of bewilderment and intense public pressure upon the authorities to provide some outlet of comparable value,’ noted F. S. Marston in the Journal of Education as early as 1954. ‘Indeed, it may be that parents with this social background will, despite their preference for the Grammar school, join with others having very different ideas to replace it by the comprehensive [i.e. non-selective] school unless some other acceptable solution is forthcoming. It is only too probable that the unilateral Modern school is engaged in a race against time.’ In practice, this race against time meant not an ‘education for life’, the vocational model upon which the secondary moderns had originally been conceived in the 1940s, but instead something more akin to grammar school lite, through the provision of exam-tested extended courses. ‘The knowledge that others in such a [secondary] modern school are succeeding and going to college or a student apprenticeship is the greatest educational tranquilliser for parents and is worth 1,000 pamphlets describing the methods of selection!’ declared Rhodes Boyson, head of a secondary modern in Lancashire’s Rossendale Valley and a Labour councillor, in a letter to the Sunday Times in February 1958. ‘What parents fear in the 11+ is not technical error, but an alternative choice which will cut their children off from later educational opportunities.’ Progress along these lines, however, was relatively slow, and by 1960 there were still only 21,680 secondary modern pupils staying on after 15 to take GCE exams.

  From Tory politicians, for the most part viscerally committed to the grammars, mere boosterism of the ill-favoured but indispensable secondary moderns was no longer enough. In late 1958, Geoffrey Lloyd unveiled the government’s White Paper Secondary Education for All: A New Drive, promising among other things a five-year £300 million programme of new school building, mainly for the secondary moderns, as well as a greater emphasis at the secondary moderns on supplying examination courses for academically abler pupils. Altogether, reckoned The Economist, ‘it embodies the Conservative tactic for grasping the political thistle of the eleven-plus: to level up educationally without seeking to stamp flat socially; to overbid the comprehensive school with the new-style secondary modern (renamed high school); to put the really big money behind a practical “parity of esteem” which will alone take the sting out of selection’.22

  From this perspective, there was no doubt about the identity of the elephant – or potential elephant – in the room. ‘Have you heard about what are called comprehensive schools?’ asked Gallup earlier in 1958, a reasonable question given that there were still fewer than a hundred – one of which, Holland Park, started in September that year under reassuringly traditional lines (uniforms with school crest, house system, streaming). By a narrow majority, most people had heard of comprehensives; by a much larger majority, 58 to 19 per cent, those who had heard of them thought they were ‘a good idea’. Accordingly, it was an urgent political context in which Lloyd’s White Paper served, in The Economist’s sympathetic words, ‘blunt warning’ that the Conservative government ‘will not approve attempts by local authorities to “comprehensivise” schools if they would damage existing grammar schools’– a warning designed to ensure that ‘the grammar schools can be left to get on with their essential job of training the country’s upper quartile of intelligence for the major academic and scientific skills’.23 Grammars and selection on the one hand, comprehensives on the other: by the late 1950s a national debate was gathering steam.

  There were already some predictable anti-compers. ‘Greater equality of opportunity is not to be attained easily by some administrative reorganisation of our schools,’ but rather by ‘the civilising effects of extended education on the homes and on the whole community’, warned Eric James of Manchester Grammar School, reviewing Floud et al; ‘a veneer of confidence is being spread about the comprehensive school which has no substance to support it’, claimed the TES soon afterwards, in February 1957, in a fierce attack on the LCC’s determination to push ahead with more comprehensives; and later that year The Economist visited one (probably Kidbrooke in south-east London) and worried not only about ‘too ready a flight in the new schools from academic subjects into pottery and cookery and dressmaking’ but also whether the staff was ‘so “comprehensive-minded” that duty to the majority is all and a special effort with the bright ones thought rather unfair’. In his sceptical response to Lloyd’s White Paper, which he interpreted as the government trying ‘to catch votes by buttering up the secondary modern schools rather than by thinking out what is their purpose’, Christopher Hollis in the Spectator declared that selection went with the grain of the fundamental human reality that there were many children who were ‘simply of the type that learns by doing rather than by reading’, whereas at a comprehensive, ‘if the non-academic boy is to leave school at fifteen and the academic boy to stay on till eighteen, then the non-academic can never in the nature of things attain to a position of prominence and responsibility and is likely to feel more frustrated than if he stayed in a school [i.e. a secondary modern] of his own kind’.

  Another seemingly entrenched anti-comper was Harry Rée, liberal-minded head of Watford Grammar School, who in his 1956 book The Essential Grammar School rejected the comprehensive alternative as requiring huge, unwieldy schools and strongly defended the grammars as ladders of social mobility and as the democratic alternative to what he saw as the dying public schools. So too a promising playwright, who had taught at a grammar, in his letter to the New Statesman soon after Hubback’s survey of the secondary modern. ‘The fact is that if a child has failed his 11-plus he is probably stupider, or lazier, or both, than the child who has passed,’ wrote Robert Bolt. ‘Socialists don’t quite like to say this because it seems to imply second-class citizenship, but a human being has his cit
izenship, not in virtue of his attainments, but in virtue of his mere humanity.’ And, Bolt continued, it was the ‘special style and panache’ of a grammar sixth form ‘which enables children of ability from moneyless homes to compete on a footing of absolute equality with the sprigs of the upper class’, thereby making ‘a Grammar school sixth the only wholly successful intrusion of democracy into the special reserve of the rulers’. A starker warning still, also from a leftish perspective, came in the same magazine a year later (October 1958) from B. Laslett:

  Unhappily, these schools [comprehensives] are too new to have the confidence of many parents who care about education, and many, given a choice, will feel unable to take a risk, and will struggle to find money for fees in a misguided effort ‘to buy the best’ for their own children. Among grammar school teachers there is at present strong prejudice against comprehensive schools, and many will get out, if they can, into fee-paying schools.

  The comprehensive threat to grammars would, in short, ‘make it more certain than ever that fee-paying schools will flourish’.

  Two heads of new comprehensive schools naturally on the other side of the argument were Miss Margaret Miles of Mayfield in Putney and Mrs Harriet Chetwynd of Woodberry Down in Stoke Newington. The comprehensive principle, claimed Miles in a Third Programme talk in 1957, recognised through its heterogeneity that pupils had ‘widely varying interests and abilities and long- or short-term objectives’, whereas in the avowedly homogeneous grammar ‘the average girl’ was ‘often regarded as a dud’. As for the assumption that, in order to provide courses for all abilities, comprehensives by definition would be too big, she asserted that ‘size can give dignity to an institution and it can give stimulus and a sense of adventure’. Chetwynd, writing in the New Statesman in February 1959 to counter an ‘Against the Comprehensive’ article by Rée, impatiently summarised the familiar anti-comp negatives (‘size, chaos, teachers will not mix, children will not mix, parents will not mix, the most able will be neglected, the least able will suffer, schools will be sausage machines, there will be no room for the individual, leadership will go only to the academic seniors’) before setting out her credo: