The Evolution of the Comprehensive School

1926-1972

David Rubinstein, Brian Simon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135030810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Originally published 1969. This reprints the second edition of 1973, with updated reading list and bibliography.This volume sets the movement towards comprehensive education against its historical background and discuss the main reasons for the decision to establish a national comprehensive system.

1

The background of the comprehensive school

Elementary and secondary schools: two parallel systems

It is well known that the Education Act of 1902 laid the basis for a national system of secondary education, but it is not so often understood how limited a system this at first was, however great the improvement on what had gone before. Nor is it always realised that secondary schools were not ‘end-on’ to the elementary schools which provided for the vast majority of children, but formed a parallel system.

The typical elementary school in the early years of this century was an all-age school, recruiting pupils at the age of five or earlier, and keeping them until they reached the statutory school leaving age—which was only generally raised to fourteen in 1921. In these schools education was free, but a considerable number of children ceased attending full-time at the age of twelve when they were permitted to go to work half-time. While financial pressures caused many parents to put children to work as early as possible—free schooling did not make up for loss of earnings—there were also demands from industry for ‘little fingers’ at the machines. As late as 1936, one of the chief arguments against raising the school leaving age was that the children were needed in the factories, and it was not until 1947 that the leaving age was in fact raised to fifteen, a measure for which reformers had been pressing for thirty years or more. Elementary education, though its scope was gradually extended, was therefore still seen as a type of education designed for the children of the working class.

By contrast the system of secondary schools, consolidated after 1902, was frankly intended for a minority. Whether endowed grammar schools, which now received grants of public money, or the new schools established and fully maintained by local authorities, these schools were linked with the universities, both ancient and modern, rather than with the elementary schools. Recruiting children at seven or eight and keeping them until fifteen or over, charging fees, they provided a parallel system of education which was only tenuously connected with the basic elementary system until 1907. At that date a link was established between the two systems when the Liberal government, returned the previous year, laid down as a condition of making grants of public money that twenty-five per cent of places must be set aside as ‘free places’ for entrants from the ‘public elementary schools’. From this provision, supplementing the scholarship system already existing and gradually extending in scope, stemmed what was then known as ‘the scholarship’, later as ‘the eleven plus’.

The new secondary system was established at the expense of the ‘higher grade schools’ run by the larger School Boards, which tended to emphasise science and technology and had provided a natural ‘end-on’ extension of elementary education into the secondary range. (The School Boards, set up in 1870, were themselves superseded as education authorities in 1902 by counties, county boroughs and some urban districts with more limited powers.) Only some of these schools survived as ‘higher elementary’ schools within the elementary system, others were assimilated into the secondary system and shaped on academic lines. From 1902 an increasingly sharp division was made between ‘technical’ and ‘secondary’ education, which came under different departments of the Board of Education, and it was the clear aim of official policy, imposed by inspection and other means, to shape secondary schools on the pattern of the larger endowed grammar schools and the ‘public’ schools. This aim was generally realised, so that to pass from elementary to secondary school was to pass from one world into another. It was seen as a main task of the secondary school to ‘assimilate’ ex-elementary pupils to a new sphere of life, not only in terms of an academic curriculum but also in the kind of ‘total’ environment designed to form character and outlook, for which public schools were known.

A clear differentiation between types of school was, then, built into the national system of education as it developed to cover the secondary stage. This was to influence all subsequent thinking on the question of secondary education for all, a demand that began to be clearly advanced after the first world war. For instance, those who wished to see the schooling of the majority extended did not necessarily consider it desirable for all to go to a secondary school of the existing type, with an academic curriculum largely dictated by university requirements. Different forms of secondary education, on the lines that had begun fruitfully to develop in higher grade schools before 1902, seemed more desirable, both from the point of view of social needs and the welfare of the children. On the other hand some saw the dangers of further differentiation and called for a unified secondary school incorporating a variety of forms of education—this later became known as the ‘multilateral’ or ‘many-sided’ school.

After 1918 these views gradually took shape, and it is to the 1920s that the origin of ideas which have since developed in the movement to establish comprehensive schools can be traced. But there was a much stronger body of opinion in favour of differentiation. A brief outline maybe given of these two trends, for the history of our subject during the inter-war years can be seen, in part, in terms of a tension between them. We may begin, however, by looking further back.

Trends up to 1914

‘Notwithstanding the great gulf that separates the middle from the working classes, and the middle from the higher classes in this country,’ said Richard Cobden, the anti-Corn Law leader, in 1854, ‘nothing would tend so much to break down that barrier as to erect common schools of so superior a quality that people should find nowhere in their vicinity an opportunity—whatever the class might be—of giving the children a better opportunity than by availing themselves of the facilities afforded by the common schools.’ This was a radical viewpoint, advanced at a time when the reconstruction of the country's educational system was first coming under serious consideration. Influenced in part by acquaintance with the newly reorganised school system of Massachusetts, it also derived from what had been a traditional way of providing schools in England; many grammar schools founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were intended to provide a free education for the children in the locality. But the policy eventually adopted leant in an opposite direction, that of establishing grades of school for the various social classes, differentiated both by curriculum and by leaving age. This policy, clearly outlined in these terms by the Schools Inquiry Commission in 1868, was carried out in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

There had been earlier calls for a unified system of education by those who spoke for the working class. In 1841 the Chartist leader, William Lovett, published a plan for educational advance based on the principle of the common school. Later, in the 1880s, when new Board Schools were throwing up ‘higher tops’ and some flourishing ‘higher grade’ schools had developed, Thomas Smyth, described as ‘a representative of the working class’, put a similar view to a Royal Commission appointed to consider the development of elementary education. Elementary schools, he said, should give a general, not a vocational education; in particular, separate schools for different social classes should be superseded by a single school ‘common to all’, as the best means of raising the general level of education.

This standpoint was reiterated in a memorial presented in 1894 to the Bryce Commission (inquiring into secondary education) ‘on behalf of Trades and Labour Councils [and] Co-operative Societies’. Criticising the parallel system of elementary and so-called secondary schools it pointed out (as was the case) that the latter provided a primary education for the ‘wealthier section of the community’. It affirmed that ‘the distinction of primary and secondary schools should be . . . strictly and solely educational, marking the successive stages of an educational curriculum; and not social, marking merely different grades of social rank’. All children should be educated together in a common school ‘and thus realise and enjoy in their youth common interests and pursuits as the children of one country’ (Simon, 1965, 126, 200-1).

The implementing of the 1902 Act, which ended the upward growth of the elementary school and erected new barriers between technical and secondary education, created a new situation. At this time there were conscious efforts to prevent the new secondary system developing as an exclusively ‘class’ system by opening it up to some degree to the working class. But to make a quarter of the places freely available to entrants from elementary schools did not achieve this. The ‘secondary’ system remained a parallel system with a quite different approach and outlook from that of the elementary schools. Only a small proportion of elementary school children could enter through the filter of the ‘scholarship’ examination which became increasingly competitive. The other pupils were fee-payers some of whom entered preparatory departments at the age of seven or eight and then simply passed up the school. The relics of this pattern may still be found in some ‘direct grant’ schools which still run their own preparatory departments.

If this was the major divide in the educational system, there were other differentiated schools within the elementary system deriving from past history and present needs. The School Boards, responsible for all the children in their areas not otherwise provided for, had grappled with the task of establishing special facilities for the handicapped and delinquent, for trade training at various levels, and for higher grade teaching in special departments or schools. After the 1902 Act these schools continued under the new authorities, to be supplemented in the larger towns by additional ‘central’ and junior technical schools, the former having a selective entry and giving a longer course than the normal schools could provide. It was in this situation that some began to argue that differentiation of schools was necessary and desirable and should be the pattern of future development.

‘What we have learned, gradually and slowly,’ wrote Sidney Webb, who was closely involved in the development of London's educational system between 1890 and 1910, ‘is that nothing worthy of the name of a national system of education can be built up out of schools of a single undifferentiated type, however numerous and however excellent they may be.’ While the educational reformers of the mid-nineteenth century were right ‘to insist on the provision of schools by wholesale’, now that practically all children were in school the time was ripe for a further advance. What was needed in all populous centres was ‘the progressive differentiation of the publicly provided school—the “common school” of our Radical grandfathers [i.e. Cobden]—into a number of specialised schools each more accurately fitting the needs of a particular section of children’. Already London had provided, in addition to the normal boys’, girls’ and infants’ schools, ‘three or four different types of higher elementary schools’, schools for the blind and deaf, ‘open air’ and ‘ringworm’ schools, truant and industrial schools, domestic economy schools, ‘a dozen varieties of “trade school”; and, among all the other specialisations, not only one but three or four different types of secondary school’ (Webb, 1908, 288-9).

This quotation is given at some length as an example of thinking which derived largely from the existing situation, in this case in what was by far the greatest urban centre in the country. Few other areas, however, were large enough to develop different types of school on this scale—and even in London the great majority of children remained in ‘all-age’ elementary schools. The principle of differentiation, as outlined by Webb, however, was already well established before the first world war, its main purpose being to fit individual children—other than those who went straight to work on leaving the elementary school— for specific industrial or commercial employment. The period between the wars was to see this process carried a great deal further.

‘Selection by differentiation’—the Hadow reports

The keynote of the inter-war period was the deliberate development of different types of post-primary schools (for children over the age of eleven) and, together with this, of methods of differentiating between children within each type of school, the process known as ‘streaming’. Both processes were closely related to each other from a practical and theoretical point of view.

The Education Act of 1918 provided for the raising of the school leaving age to fourteen, and this was brought into effect in 1921, the aim being to raise it further to fifteen as soon as possible. This meant the end of half-time exemptions and brought the whole thirteen-fourteen age group into full-time education. At the same time there was a growing pressure on the secondary schools which had insufficient accommodation even for all those children who qualified for a place, while the Labour movement was campaigning for ‘secondary education for all’.

It was now becoming clear that some reorganisation of education for children over the age of eleven was urgent. The all-age elementary school, often with only one class for each year-group, could not cope effectively with the older children, particularly in the provision of courses to meet their needs. The Consultative Committee to the Board of Education was therefore asked to report on ‘the organisation, objective and curriculum’ of courses of study suitable for children who will remain at school until fifteen.

The secondary (grammar) schools were, however, deliberately excluded from the Committee's terms of reference; it was clearly the policy of the Board of Education that these schools should remain separate. The Committee agreed with this policy. In its report The Education of the Adolescent (1926) it proposed that elementary schools should be divided into primary schools on the one hand, and post-primary schools on the other, the age of transfer being about eleven. While there should be a single primary school, however, post-primary schools should consist of a variety of types. In addition to the secondary schools (following ‘a predominantly literary or scientific curriculum’) there should be central schools (giving a four year course ‘with a realistic or practical trend’), non-selective central or ‘modern’ schools, as the committee proposed they should be called (for the bulk of the pupils), ‘senior classes’ for those for whom it was impossible to provide a separate school, and, finally, junior technical and trade schools. In effect, the Hadow Committee (as it came to be called after its chairman) proposed that there should be five different types of post-primary school parallel to the existing secondary schools.

These five types were, in fact, all in existence in various parts of the country when the Hadow Committee reported, although at that time containing only about 5 per cent of elementary school children aged eleven to fourteen. The report reinforced existing developments which had taken place in response to social trends and political pressures. Its main importance lay in its recommendation for the break at eleven. By this age, the Committee argued, children have given ‘some indication of difference in interest and abilities sufficient to make it possible and desirable to cater for them by means of schools of varying types but which have, nevertheless, a broad common foundation’. Consequently a new phase of education should commence for all at eleven. ‘We regard the general recognition that the aim of educational policy must be, not merely to select a minority of children for the second stage, but to secure that the second stage is sufficiently elastic, and contains schools of sufficient variety of type, to meet the needs of all children, as one of the most notable advances,’ runs the report. ‘Thus all go forward, though along different paths. Selection by differentiation takes the place of selection by elimination’ (Hadow, 1926, 74, 78).

This was to blur over the fact that selection for ‘secondary’ education—that is, for the full secondary (now grammar) schools—would inevitably continue to be selection by elimination of the majority, so long as the demand for secondary education greatly exceeded the supply of places. In spite of the Hadow Committee's recommendation that all post-primary education should be regarded as secondary in character, the new ‘senior’ or ‘modern’ schools remained squarely classified as elementary, controlled by the elementary code of regulations rather than the secondary. Though the new buildings were greatly superior to those of the all-age elementary schools, they were inferior to those provided for the full secondary school, while the salaries of teachers, grants for equipment, and so on were calculated on a scale that was a great deal less generous.

It is important to note that the Hadow phrase ‘selection by differentiation’ covered a more far-reaching conception of differentiating children than there had previously been, and from a much earlier age. As the primary and postprimary schools were separated out, children were to be increasingly graded and classified within them. It was later officially stated that the Hadow principle of reorganisation resulted from ‘recognition of the difficulties of classification in schools organised on traditional lines’. Once junior and senior schools were separated, and each sufficiently large in size, it became possible to arrange promotion by age ‘and classification by ability at the same time’. This was the best means of meeting the needs of ‘different types of child’ for it enabled the provision of complete courses of work ‘of a differentiated kind’ which could be followed uninterruptedly ‘by each type of child’ throughout his school life (Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers, 1937 ed., 33-4).

In fact, attention concentrated after 1926 on providing senior, and junior, schools large enough to accommodate three or four parallel classes in each year group. By the late 1920s, then, official policy favoured not only a differentiation of post-primary schools but also the classification of children within schools (including primary schools) into parallel ‘streams’ following different courses with different objectives.

This was to go much further than before in emphasising the different needs of different ‘types’ of child. In fact what was essentially a system of organising the product of various stages of historical development, had become transmuted into a set of educational principles, to be applied not only in shaping the system of schools but also the internal organisation of each school. How had this come about?

The theory of intelligence and selective tests

In the post-war period there was a growing interest in diagnosing qualities of mind which, so far as the educational system was concerned, derived primarily from the need to select children at eleven for secondary schools. There was, in addition, increasing criticism of the Junior Scholarship Examination itself; it was argued that this was not selecting those most capable of benefiting from a secondary education. There was also concern that children from poor homes were often at a grave disadvantage in a competitive examination. If some form of relatively ‘culture-free’ test could be devised, to measure intellectual ‘capacity’, as apart from attainment, this would be fairer to the children and would relieve the pressure on schools now forced to prepare children for the examination.

That it was thought possible to construct tests of this kind was the result of developments in psychologi...