Schooling and Social Change 1964-1990

Roy Lowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134706051
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is the first book to offer an overview of the ways in which the sweeping social and economic changes of the modern period have impacted on the education system. Roy Lowe draws on estensive research to paint a vivid picture of the ways in which schools and universities were moulded by external events and of the part they played in promoting modernisation of society.
The book explores some key themes:
* the nature of the economic transformations taking place;
* the growing awareness of gender issues;
* the changing ethnic composition of modern Britain;
* the bureaucratisation of society and the rise of a new politics.
Exploring the links between these issues and educational provision, Lowe argues that the growing political significance of educational issues is largely explained by the critical part played by the education system in providing social and economic stability during these years of swift social change.
Roy Lowe is Professor of Education at the University of Wales, Swansea.

1
THE POWER OF THE PAST

Looking back from the vantage point of the mid-1990s, one of the most striking things about the English education system is how little it has changed since 1964. I have argued in an earlier book, Education in the Post-War Years, that the form taken by English schooling into the 1960s was already largely determined by the historical residue, by a preference for established practice and procedures which tended to inoculate education and educators against radical change. If ever one was to look for a significant restructuring of English education it would surely be during this most recent thirty years, a period which has seen both economic and social transformations. Yet it is impossible to avoid the judgement that much of the landscape of English education today would be immediately recognisable to a visitor whose most recent acquaintance with it was in 1964, and some of its key features are almost unchanged.

Broadly, what I mean by this is, first, that schooling remains structured and differentiated in modern England. Not only does the clear distinction between private and public sectors remain, with roughly similar proportions of students passing through the two sectors, but, within each, a clearly recognised hierarchy of schools and institutions persists, and seems likely to continue to do so. Further, although there have been some modifications in the ‘pecking order’ of schools and universities, those which were widely esteemed during the 1960s remain by and large the most sought after.

Second, educational practice remains largely unchanged, despite the expenditure of enormous energy and finance in efforts to reform curricula and to disseminate ideas on new approaches to teaching. In their internal organisation and their day-to-day working practices schools are as remarkable for what has survived during the last thirty years as for what has changed. Third, within the educational profession, the same established career hierarchies persist, modified slightly perhaps in response to increases in scale, but broadly similar in their impact, and having the effect of discriminating against women, against ethnic minorities and between social classes, albeit often unconsciously so. And this last point relates to, and is part of, a broader

phenomenon, which is the survival of a particular set of values and attitudes within our educational system. In the next few pages I will look briefly at each of the sectors of our education system to try to substantiate these rather wide claims. Perhaps the best starting point is the schools themselves. A quick glance at the numbers of schools of different types at the beginning and end of the period (Tables 1.1 and 1.2)¹ shows in broad terms what changes took place. The figures for 1964 cover England and Wales: those for 1988 England only. Unfortunately, a direct comparison is made very difficult, if not impossible, by changes in the way in which the Ministry, and later the Department of Education and Science (DES), collected and codified their statistics. However, there is sufficient comparability between these two sets of figures to allow us to conclude immediately that the broad structure of the system persisted. During the late eighties, schools were still organised as primary or secondary, and the co-existence of state and private sectors continued.

In brief, primary schools remained relatively small (the average number of pupils in each school was fairly stable, falling from 189 to 187 during this twenty-year period), but secondary schools grew spectacularly, with the average number of pupils rising from 482 to 739. The reasons for this growing contrast between the two sectors are not far to find. While primary schools continued to perform a ‘community’ function (a role which was seen as increasingly important given the growth in scale of urban life and changes which were taking place in the structure of the family), the secondary schools were closer to the eye of the political storm, more at the mercy of reorganisation schemes, and increasingly perceived as successful in so far as they were large enough to generate sixth forms of a reasonable size and to offer a broad range of curricular choices. It is worth remarking, too, that the large urban comprehensive schools which attracted so much comment during the seventies and eighties were in reality untypical: the vast majority of secondary school children, including those in the comprehensive sector, were in schools of less than 1,000 pupils in size. There were significantly more private schools than in 1964, but they still catered for less than 8 per cent of the population.

Table 1.1. Schools in 1964 (England and Wales)

Table 1.2. Schools in 1988 (England only)

If we look more closely at the categories of school, a number of shifts in emphasis quickly become apparent. Within the primary sector, many separate infant schools had disappeared. By 1988 the bulk of the primary provision was through mixed junior/infant schools, a type of school which was already well established as the main provider of primary schooling by the mid-sixties, but which had become the dominant type twenty years later. All-age schools, a relic of the pre-war system which was done away with in the 1944 Education Act, disappeared completely during the 1960s, their survival until then telling us a great deal about the parsimony with which some local authorities had implemented the 1944 legislation. By 1988 there were over a thousand middle schools at work. These by-products of local authority reorganisation schemes began to appear in the late sixties: most of them have survived. Turning to those secondary schools provided by the state, we see that technical and bilateral schools had virtually disappeared during the period under review; the number of grammar schools shrank dramatically, and the comprehensive school came to dominate this sector. Sixth-form colleges were a new feature in the educational landscape, with over a hundred in existence by 1988. The ending of direct grant status in 1976 forced the majority of the direct grant schools into the private sector, and this goes some way to explain the increase in the number of independent schools recognised by the DES. The other key factor which accounts for the swift growth of the private sector is the founding of a large number of small preparatory and junior schools whose existence was necessarily more tenuous than that of older and larger foundations, and it is the relatively small size of these institutions which explains the apparent contradiction of a significantly greater number of schools catering for a similar proportion of the population.

It must not be assumed, though, that this catalogue of change suggests a transformation of our educational system. For many schools, what occurred during this period was a change of designation and a slight but significant change of role. Most of the grammar, technical and bilateral schools which disappeared during this period reappeared as comprehensive schools in the 1988 statistics. Similarly, the 10,570 junior/infant schools at work in 1988 included many which had been listed under a different heading in 1964. I will have more to say later in this book about what this might have meant in terms of the changing social functions of these schools.

Perhaps most significantly, what does emerge clearly from these statistics is that the period saw a decisive shift in favour of mixed education. Within the state sector single-sex primary schools virtually disappeared, while at secondary level there was a similar trend. But here it was a trend with its own peculiar characteristic. Briefly, the more prestigious the school, the greater the chances of its remaining single-sex. By 1988 there were three times as many single-sex grammar schools as there were mixed. Put another way, this means that the single-sex grammar schools can be shown in retrospect to have been those which were most likely to survive into the 1980s. Meanwhile the development of other kinds of secondary schooling, particularly of comprehensives, meant an increasing reliance on mixed education. Within the private sector, which was historically far more committed to the provision of single-sex education, it is impossible to be precise about the impact of this trend into the 1980s, although it was clearly well established. Many girls’ private schools remained single-sex. Comparatively few boys’ schools did: one investigation has shown that, by 1981, of 211 Headmasters’ Conference schools, 46 were co-educational in the full sense of the term and a further 72 were admitting girls at sixth-form level.² This was a stratagem which enabled these schools to gain the benefit of fees from female pupils while remaining predominantly ‘male’ in ethos and exclusively so in the intake of younger pupils. It is this variegated nature of the approach to co-education in the private sector which makes it so difficult to generalise about, and which probably explains the fact that the annual returns of the DES ceased to classify these schools by sex during this period. Even here, though, the trend was inexorable, and inclined towards mixed schooling.

To a considerable extent, these trends were historically mediated. Carol Dyhouse,³ June Purvis⁴ and others have shown how, during the nineteenth century, an education system developed which educated boys and girls for separate spheres—boys for public life and employment, girls for the home and motherhood. It is clear, too, that for differing social classes this meant different things, with single-sex schooling being far more the preserve of the middle and upper classes, and elementary schools never departing from the model established in small rural communities where there were simply not the resources to educate boys and girls separately. As elementary schools became larger during the nineteenth century and came to cater for the new townships, this model was modified through the introduction of boys’ and girls’ departments in the larger schools, but it never disappeared completely. During the early twentieth century, an influential ‘progressive’ lobby for mixed schooling developed: Alice Woods campaigned tirelessly for mixed education between 1903 and 1931, ⁵ reflecting a middle-class concern for greater individual liberty and calling for experiments in co-education which could test ‘what differences are inherent and unalterable, and what merely the results of a different upbringing’⁶. A small number of progressive private schools was appearing which tried to do just this. Abbotsholme was founded as early as 1889, and Bedales only four years later. Within the boys’ schools there was a growing number of educators, such as the Reverend Cecil Grant, who favoured co-education because it was likely to lessen the risk of homosexuality in the public schools.⁷ Equally pervasive was the argument that girls were likely to have a civilising effect on boys. Against this growing lobby for mixed education were ranged those heads of girls’ secondary schools who saw the dangers of girls becoming in one way or another subordinated to boys in mixed schools. When the 1904 Regulations for secondary schools insisted on a common curriculum for boys and girls, the Headmistress of Winchester High School for Girls was one among several who wrote to the Board of Education to remind them of

the strong desire to avoid over-pressure; and, with this end in view the number of hours instruction has been fixed at 16…Your Regulation makes it necessary…Either to change entirely the character of the school…or else to forgo entirely a grant from the Board.⁸

Doubts about co-education were shared by Maude Royden, who argued in 1919 that girls were likely to leave ‘initiative and leadership to boys’ if they were educated together.⁹ Thus, most of the attitudes and arguments which have been rehearsed around the topic of mixed education since 1964 were already established at the start of the century.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the Newsom Report, Half our future (a title which referred, not to girls, but to pupils of average and below average ability of either sex), warned in 1963 that:

In addition to their needs as individuals, our girls should be educated in terms of their main social function—which is to make for themselves, their children and their husbands a secure and suitable home and to be mothers.¹⁰

During the following few years the reconstruction of mixed and single-sex education took place in the absence of any large-scale public discussion and in ways which were largely predetermined by these historical precedents. As the requirement that the state should provide universal secondary schooling was increasingly implemented through comprehensive reorganisation, the tradition that state schools were predominantly mixed was unthinkingly taken up and never seriously challenged. At the same time the partial moves towards mixed education in the private sector were influenced by so called ‘progressive’ ideas which had been in circulation for much of the twentieth century. It is hardly surprising that all this resulted in the same arguments being reworked in the context of the late twentieth-century feminist movement. It seems likely, too, that the accident of the way in which coeducation was introduced in different sectors of education between 1964 and 1988 may have led, inadvertently, to a confirmation through schooling of social class contrasts between girls. Those girls who failed the eleven-plus during the 1960s and 1970s and entered secondary moderns, or who entered the new mixed comprehensive schools, may have undergone a gendered educational experience which unconsciously echoed the preparation for housewifery and motherhood which girls received in the late nineteenth-century elementary school, except that by the 1960s it was the minor professional jobs leading to marriage into which girls were propelled by peer-group pressure and often unspoken teacher expectations. A Department of Education and Science survey in 1975 showed clearly that in the new mixed secondary schools the contrasts and stereotyping between boys and girls in curriculum choice were becoming greater,¹¹ and this is shown clearly in the examination performances reported later in this chapter. By contrast, those girls who passed the eleven-plus and aspired to single-sex grammar schools entered a world which shared many of the values of the girls’ public schools. But it remained, of course, the larger independent schools which were most successful in winning high academic honours for their pupils, as was shown by Kathleen Ollerenshaw in 1967.¹² One of Roedean school’s professed objectives in the late sixties was the production of ‘good professional women’.¹³ For the successful girls from these schools, the universities and established professions such as teaching, medicine and the law beckoned, but on terms which led to differentiated career routes for males and females. For the rest, a particular kind of clerical work was available. As June Purvis has summarised it:

The girls who have attended an elite independent school might work behind the counter at Harrods, but not at Woolworths.¹⁴

Another characteristic which differentiates developments in the primary sector from those taking place at secondary level during these twenty years is the size of schools. The next set of statistics show that, while primary schools remained roughly the same size during the period under review, secondary schools became significantly larger (see Table 1.3).

Table 1.3. The size of schools (numbers of pupils)

In respect of staffing ratios, too, there were some enduring contrasts, as is shown in Table 1.4. The secondary sector continued to be far better staffed than the primary, and there was little erosion of the striking differences between staffing ratios in the state schools and private schools, the latter by and large being far more lavishly resourced. Undoubtedly, in those localities where secondary education was reorganised on comprehensive lines, the invidious disparities in staffing ratios which had existed at secondary level within the state sector in 1964 largely disappeared. But it should not be forgotten that the transfer of many direct grant grammar schools into the private sector after 1976 meant that many of the more prestigious secondary schools were exempted from this trend.

Table 1.4. School staff-pupil ratios

Much of this was reflected in the performance of pupils, and in this respect, too, it is possible to discern enduring patterns which are measurable in terms of examination results and staying-on levels. The continuities in examination performance at 16 years of age are striking, and are very suggestive of the ways in which the schools themselves perpetuated patterns and attitudes even during a period of extensive reorganisation. Table 1.5 makes a comparison between external examination results in 1964 and 1988. Several characteristics are immediately evident and can be seen to have been relatively constant. Although there was an increase in the numbers succeeding in sixteen-plus examinations, the total achieving ‘O’ level equivalent grades in 1988 remained a small minority of the age cohort and is comparable with the number who succeeded in 1964. The broad balance between subjects was largely the same, too. Latin in 1988 generated less than 20,000 ‘passes’, about half the numbers succeeding twenty years earlier. The number of students presenting in Economics had quadrupled.

Table 1.5. Examination passes at 16-plus (thousands)

Apart from these dramatic changes, both the proportions of students in different subject areas and the total numbers remained surprisingly constant. Perhaps the most striking change is ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. THE POWER OF THE PAST
• 2. EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY
• 3. CONTESTED PEDAGOGIES THE STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL OF THE CURRICULUM
• 4. SUBURBS AND SCHOOLS
• 5. BRIDGING THE GENDER GAP?
• 6. A NEW EUGENICS ETHNIC MINORITIES AND EDUCATION
• 7. BUREAUCRATISATION AND THE GOVERNANCE OF EDUCATION
• 8. A NEW POLITICS OF EDUCATION?
• 9. CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY