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School and College
Studies of Post-sixteen Education
Ronald King
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School and College
Studies of Post-sixteen Education
Ronald King
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About This Book
First published in 1976, School and College is a comparison of the variety of educational institutions â sixth forms, sixth form units, sixth form centres, sixth form colleges, school-college consortia, colleges of further education and tertiary colleges â attended by young people between sixteen and nineteen years of age. Each of these was supported by different educational interest groups, who made suppositions about their respective advantages and disadvantages. The findings reveal that what was supposed to happen sometimes did not happen. Dr. King explores the origin of the ideas behind each form of organisation, and examines the groups that propagated them. These ideas concerned not only the form of organisation but also the nature of education itself. He compares the policies with their practice, and concludes that changes might be required before the expectations of both students and educators can be fulfilled. This book will be of interest to teachers and students of education and pedagogy.
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Chapter 1 The expansion of post-sixteen education
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296799-1
There are more young people over sixteen receiving full-time education in Britain than ever before. This is part of the general expansion of British education which has taken place since the end of the Second World War, and is related to two factors which in educational jargon have come to be known as the âbulgeâ and the âtrendâ. The first refers to an increase in the birth rate, the second to the increasing tendency for young people to choose to stay in full-time education.
This expansion of education for the 16â19 age group has been accompanied by an increase in the number of forms of educational organisation catering for them. In the early 1960s most of these students were members of sixth forms in maintained grammar, direct grant and independent schools. Ten years later less than half of the seventeen year olds in full-time education attended such schools. The rest went to technical colleges or colleges of further education, and comprehensive schools of several different kinds. These include the all-through 11â18 school with an integral sixth form, sixth forms in upper schools with recruitment at twelve, thirteen or even fourteen, sixth form colleges catering for post-sixteen students only, and sixth form centres where the sixth form not only recruits from its own fifth year but also from those of other schools.
The bulge
When birth rates are plotted as a graph an increase over several years appears as a bulge. There have been two bulges in the birth rate in the post-war period. The first occurred immediately after the war and was at its peak in 1947 when 19 per cent more live births occurred than in 1945. The children of this first bulge entered the primary schools in the early 1950s, the secondary schools in the later 1950s and higher education in the mid-1960s.
The birth rate fell in the 1950s until an upward trend in 1956 led to the second bulge which reached its peak in 1964 when the number of live births (875,000) almost reached that of 1947 (881,000). The children of this second bulge were passing through the primary schools in the 1960s and are now in the secondary schools, where the peak will pass in the early 1980s.
It is outside the scope of this discussion to deal in detail with the cause of these bulges. Because of the delicacy of the subject even the specialist research gives only tentative answers. Demobilisation and the resumption of married life were likely factors relating to the first bulge. More speculatively, the affluence of the early 1960s has been suggested to account for the second. However, the relevant educational point about these fluctuations in the birth rate is that the number of 16â19 year olds in full-time education is related to the greater number of people in that age range.
The trend
The bulge does not, however, completely account for this increase; it is also due to a rise in the proportion of young people choosing to remain in full-time education. There was a 5 per cent increase in the number of seventeen year olds between 1961 and 1973 (see Table 1.1), but the number of them in full-time education increased by 115 per cent over the same period. The trend is therefore a more important factor than the bulge. In 1961 14.1 per cent of seventeen year olds were in full-time education; by 1973 this had risen to 28.8 per cent (see Table 1.1). Explanations of the trend are more relevant than those for the bulge but are just as speculative.
| Percentage of age group attending | ||
|---|---|---|
| | ||
| 1961 | 1973 | |
| Modern | 0.2 | 0.7 |
| Grammar | 7.1 | 7.1 |
| Technical schools | 0.4 | 0.3 |
| Comprehensive | 0.3 | 7.8 |
| All maintained schools | 8.1 | 16.6 |
| Direct grant | 1.2 | 1.7 |
| Independent efficient | 2.1 | 2.4 |
| Other independent | 0.2 | 0.1 |
| All independent schools | 3.5 | 4.2 |
| All schools | 11.7 | 20.8 |
| Technical colleges | 2.4 | 8.0 |
| All full-time students and pupils | 14.1 | 28.8 |
| All seventeen year olds | 635,000 | 669,000 |
| Derived from âStatistics of Educationâ, DES, 1961-73. | ||
In the early 1950s there was some concern about the low rate at which pupils remained at school after sixteen, which lead to the Central Advisory Committeeâs report âEarly Leavingâ in 1954. The Committeeâs survey of a sample of the 1946 intake into grammar schools (then virtually the only maintained schools providing post-sixteen education) established the extent of early leaving and suggested some of the conditions associated with it.
A first set of conditions concerned the homes of early leavers. They tended to be overcrowded, with inadequate provision for doing homework. Perhaps more important, early leavers were often the children of low wage earners.
The second set of conditions suggested by the report concerned the occupational market. Many leavers left because a job was made available to them. This factor was confirmed by the Social Survey of the Crowther report in 1970 which linked it with the level of family incomes. Where this was low the chance of a pupil taking a job that became available was very high.
A third set of conditions concerned the early leaversâ experience of school, which was one of dissatisfaction with having to conform, with having to wear a uniform and do as they were told by the teachers. The later survey of the Crowther report confirmed this picture as did that reported by Case and Ross (1965), which found that early leavers were less punctual and rated less obedient and amenable to discipline by their teachers, compared with those who stayed on. A case study (King, 1969J of a single grammar school showed that early leavers were only to a small degree involved in many aspects of school life. However, this experience of school was not necessarily due to their level of ability. The âEarly Leavingâ report showed that a large proportion of early leavers were in the top third of eleven-plus successes. Both the Crowther report and Case and Ross found that many early leavers expressed some regret at not having stayed on.
A fourth and less important element suggested by all three surveys was that of the influence of friends. Early leavers often had friends who themselves left school early and were in employment with money to spend on themselves. This was the pull of the peer groupâ.
The trend towards more staying on in education after sixteen may be explained by examining the changes in the three more important conditions since the early 1950s. Despite the continued existence of many poor families the general standard of living has improved. There has been a decline in the traditional apprenticeship system and less opportunities for young people to take up low-skill jobs. The proportion of unskilled occupations fell from 12 per cent in 1951 to 6.6 per cent in 1971.
There are no surveys which enable a comparison to be made of changes in the internal organisation of schools since the 1950s but it is commonly assumed that some of the reformsâ advocated and implemented by headteachers such as Harry Davies (1965) have been carried out in many schools. These include the relaxation of school uniform and school rules. An additional factor has been the blurring of the distinction between fifth and sixth form studies. Before the introduction of the General Certificate of Education in 1951 entry into the sixth form was generally confined to those who had at least the General Schools Certificate and who wished to proceed to the Higher Schools Certificate. It is now common for pupils over sixteen and defined as sixth formers to be retaking O levels they have failed or wish to improve on, to be taking new O levels, and in some cases not be following an A level course (about 11 per cent of seventeen year olds in 1974) (DES, 1961â74).
These explanations of the trend can be slightly refined by an examination of the social origins of early leavers. The âEarly Leavingâ report showed that they were often from working class homes, particularly where the father had a semi- or unskilled manual occupation. A comparison of the social class origins of the early leavers of the report with those leaving in the early 1960s was made by Kelsall (1963). This showed that although the early leavers were still characteristically working class the rate at which they left had been greatly reduced, particularly among the more able, so that the gap between the social classes had been narrowed.
The late 1950s saw the emergence of what were called, originally by Ferdinand Zweig (1961), the newly affluentâ workers. These were the skilled and semi-skilled manual workers who began to earn high wages in the manufacturing industries, especially those of consumer goods. The studies carried out by Goldthorpe et al. (1967) of a sample of such workers in the car industry in Luton showed that although they had not become middle class in their life styles, they had become more home-centred. Toomey (1970), in a study of workers in a Medway town, found that the children of the more affluent, home-centred workersâ families had a longer educational life than those from less affluent, traditional working class families.
A number of surveys have shown that both older pupils and their parents have a very strong calculative orientation towards education. They see school as the avenue to the occupational structure. The young school leavers in the survey commissioned by the Schools Council (Morton-Williams and Finch, 1968) placed, âTeach you things which will be of direct use to you in a jobâ as the most important school objective. Another survey (King, 1973a), of over 7,000 pupils in different kinds of secondary school, found that 94 per cent agreed that âThe main reason for working hard is to get a good jobâ, and 88 per cent agreed that âPassing exams is the way to get on/The reward for doing well in school and for staying on is a better, more desirable job.
Several surveys, including those directed by Glass (1954) in the early 1950s, have suggested that educational success is an important element in the upward social mobility of children from working class homes to middle class occupations. An effect of greater affluence on some working class parents may have been to make the holding of such ambitions for their children more acceptable. Young and Willmott (1957) in their study in the 1950s of Bethnal Green, a working class area of London, found that some adults had not taken up the grammar school places they had been offered for fear of their âgoing above their stationâ. But Douglas (1964), in his longitudinal study of children born in 1946, found the refusal of a grammar school place to be very rare.
The trend towards a longer educational life has continued steadily since the end of the Second World War, although the rate of increase has slowed a little in the last few years. It is usually assumed that this trend will continue, and a great deal of educational planning is based upon this assumption. However, there have been times when the rate of staying on after sixteen has declined. The national study of Olive Banks (1955) and a case study of a single school (King, 1969) showed high rates of early leaving in both world wars to be associated with the high demand for youth labour and a relaxation of the tied-grant system which kept the grant holder in school with a commitment to train for teaching. The economic crisis of the early 1930s was also associated with high rates of early leaving. With lowered family incomes some pupils left school to try to get jobs and because their parents could not afford to keep them there.
These unpleasant possibilities are left aside in the forecasts of the level of the trend. Those made in âSocial Trendsâ (Nissel, 1974) were of 30.3 per cent of seventeen year olds attending school by 1980, and 35.7 per cent by 1985. If the expansion of numbers in colleges of further education were at the same rate the figures for all forms of education would be 41.5 per cent and 48.8 per cent respectively. This presents the prospect of a doubling of the number of 16â19 year olds in full-time education in the next ten years.
Comprehensive schools
The early arguments for comprehensive secondary education concentrated as much upon what were thought to be the defects of the selective system of grammar and modern schools as upon the supposed merits of comprehensive schools. Drawing on the surveys of the âEarly Leavingâ, Crowther and, later, Robbins reports, a large wastage of educational talent had been shown to occur, particularly among working class children. This wastage has been attributed to the operation of the secondary selection procedure, shown by Douglas (1964), Floud and Halsey (1957) and others to contain a social selection element favouring middle class children, particularly at the borderline level, and to the middle class value system of the grammar school, which Jackson and Marsden (1962) and a previous case study (King, 1969) have shown to be unacceptable to some working class pupils. A major ideological justification of the comprehensive system is that it will widen educational opportunities and reduce the class gap in educational attainment.
The move towards a national system of comprehensive schools is slow. There were 10 such schools in 1950, 130 in 1960 and 2,273 in 1974, with an attendance of 60 per cent of all children in maintained schools. Pupils over sixteen may be educated in a number of different forms of comprehensive school. The Department of Education and Scienceâs Circular 10/65 requested local authorities to prepare and submit plans for reorganisation on comprehensive lines, and listed six acceptable forms of organisation. These were:
- the orthodoxâ comprehensive with an 11â18 age range-the âall throughâ school;
- a two tier system of a junior comprehensive which transfers all pupils at fourteen or fifteen to a senior comprehensive;
- a two tier system of junior comprehensives from which some pupils transfer to a senior comprehensive at thirteen or fourteen and the rest remain in the junior - a version of this method was the original âLeicestershire planâ (see Griffiths, 1971);
- a two tier system of junior comprehensives from which some pupils transfer at thirteen or fourteen to one of two kinds o...