Life Lessons

The Case for a National Education Service

Melissa Benn

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788732215
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

It is time for a radical shake up of the purposes and practices of our education system. Melissa Benn is one of the most clear sighted and vocal campaigners for improving our schools. She shows here how we need to rethink education for life. As more and more of us live and work longer than ever before, a National Education Service should, like the NHS, be the framework that ensures a life-long entitlement for all, from early years provision to apprenticeships, universities and adult education. Like the NHS, it should be free at the point of delivery. The purpose of learning is not solely to pass exams but to prepare for living in the world; citizens of the future will need to develop their imaginations as well as their intellects, to be at ease with both knowledge and uncertainty. Life Lessons sets out a radical agenda for how we make education for all, and make it relevant to the demands of 21st century. This requires a deep-rooted, long-term vision of the role of learning in our society, one that is ready to take on the challenges of a new century and be part of a wider shift towards greater equality.

PART ONE

Backstory

1

The Long Road to Reform

Undoubtedly, the education service has markedly improved over the last sixty years. Our young people are better educated, they enjoy greater opportunities than ever before and their aspirations and expectations are higher than we could have dreamed of when we were their age. There is, however, a lot still to be done if we are to fulfil the vision for education outlined in the 1944 Act.

David Bell, Chief Inspector of Schools, 2004

Where to start? While the opening of the first private school, King’s College in Canterbury, can be dated back to the year 597 and the earliest university, Oxford, was established around the middle of the twelfth century, our more-democratic institutions of learning have only taken root in far more recent times. Official accounts date the beginning of adult education to the founding of Toynbee Hall in the late nineteenth century, but there is evidence of much political and working-class activity before then. In 1851 the Chartist reformer Bronterre O’Brien opened the wonderfully named Eclectic Institute in Denmark Street in London’s Soho, offering adult education classes in English, French, science and maths.

While the Elementary Act of 1870 was the first in a sequence of legislation to underwrite compulsory education in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland have always had autonomous school systems) it makes sense for our purposes to begin our brief historical survey in 1944 with the establishment of universal free secondary education (up to age 15). This was an important advance that had long been urged by progressive thinkers such as R. H. Tawney, who had published Secondary Education for All in 1926.

Although the Act itself made no direction as to the organisation of schools, the decision was made to set up the secondary system along tripartite lines. This sorted children into different kinds of learners, to be sent to three types of school: grammars, secondary moderns and technical colleges. Soon after, largely for reasons of resources, this became a binary system – grammars and secondary moderns – placing the young into two distinct camps: the so-called academic, and those deemed not to be.

This was not necessarily inevitable. Comprehensive education had been debated in progressive circles prior to the Second World War, and the 1938 Spens Report had carefully considered, if not finally embraced, the idea of multilateral schools: that is, comprehensive provision up to the age of 14. However, the Conservatives were wedded to a selective system, as was a powerful strand of Labour opinion represented by such influential figures as R. H. Tawney and ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, minister of education in the post-war Attlee Government, who wanted to preserve ‘a ladder of opportunity’ for some working-class children.

The story of the great social divide enshrined in the 1944 Act and its many human and educational consequences has been much told, so I will pick out only a few salient facts. It was clear from the start that the eleven-plus exam – used to divide children at the end of the primary stage and determine entry into grammar school – was (and indeed remains) an unreliable test. It was largely working-class children who lost out, sent to the less-well-resourced schools offering a narrower curriculum with far fewer opportunities to gain qualifications (although there were some inspiring institutions within the dispiriting national model, such as St George-in-the-East, a secondary modern in Stepney, led by the innovative Alex Bloom).

While a few young people from working-class and lower-middle-class homes did spectacularly well in grammars, and found their lives transformed, particularly if they went to Oxbridge (Alan Bennett, Andrew Neil and Margaret Forster are among the more famous names that come to mind), many selective schools were of poor quality. As Adrian Elliot, a former comprehensive head, records in his study of state education since the late 1950s. ‘According to the Crowther Report in the late ’50s a staggering 38 per cent of grammar school pupils failed to achieve more than three passes at O-level … Of the entire cohort of sixteen-year-olds at this time, only about 9 per cent achieved five or more O-levels and … less than half of those who attended grammar schools reached this benchmark.’¹ The historian David Kynaston marks the class divisions within the sector even more starkly:

By the mid-1950s a middle-class child who had been to a grammar was five times as likely to go on to a university as was a child from an unskilled working-class background who had also been to a grammar; while by the 1960s the 22% chance that a boy from a working-class background would attend a grammar – compared with a 66% chance for a boy from a service-class background – was actually 5% less than it had been in the 1950s.²

This may have been one of the many contributing reasons why the grammar/secondary modern divide lasted for such a short period. Protests began building from the late fifties onwards as middle-class parents who resented their children being sent to what were clearly regarded as second-rate schools were joined by researchers who questioned the empirical basis of an ‘intelligence’ test and progressive campaigners who believed that every child had the right to a broad and balanced curriculum and stimulating teaching. From the early 1960s onwards, these rebellions, harnessed to a Labour Party by now committed to comprehensive education, led to the reorganisation of the school system along largely non-selective lines.

Why do we still know so little, and celebrate even less, the successes of comprehensive education? That a new generation of educational activists and administrators, including anti-grammar Tories and many in the academy and free school movement, now adhere to its principles so hard fought for half a century ago but rarely give it credit is not merely a form of disguised tribalistic discourtesy: it is also the result of a long-standing distortion of the historical record. So much of the history and practice of early comprehensive education has been forgotten or woefully misrepresented in the media and political mainstream and too lazily conflated with sloppy standards, poor discipline and working-class failure summed up in the peculiar phrase, ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. In one of the more comic examples of the attack-dog genre, the writer Tony Parsons jibed that ‘as a start in life going to a comprehensive is the equivalent of dying on the Somme’.

In fact, the advent of comprehensive education meant that millions of children no longer faced demoralising, life-altering tests at the tender age of eleven. Many were given a chance, for the first time ever, to study a much broader range of subjects, and go on to university. Comprehensive reform carved out new and promising paths as definitively as the grammars did for the lives of a previous generation. For Brian Simon, the educational historian and leading reformer:

the concept of a common curriculum for all … was a major objective of the whole comprehensive reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This movement was primarily concerned to prevent shutting off access to full life opportunities for considerable proportions of the nation’s youth.³

Peter Housden’s study of schools in Market Drayton, Shropshire, in the mid-sixties traces the tangible impact of the change. In 1958–60, just 17.5 per cent of the pupils of the town’s grammar and secondary modern schools had left school ‘with a meaningful basket of qualifications’. In 2014, the equivalent figure for the Grove, the comprehensive that replaced the grammar and secondary modern, was 55 percent. In 1958–60, 6 per cent of pupils had achieved at least one A Level pass; in 2014, 22 per cent did so.⁴ These figures are reflected on a national basis: the number of students in education at age seventeen grew from 31 per cent in 1977 to 76 per cent in 2011 and those achieving a degree rose from 68,000 in 1981 to 331,000 in 2010, an almost fivefold increase.⁵

Statistical evidence is useful, but the meaning of the change resonates far more powerfully at a human level. Reviewing his career in secondary education, the pioneer teacher and campaigner Clyde Chitty has spoken of how ‘appalled’ he was at his first placement in the sixties at a secondary modern in Penge, south London, where ‘because they’d failed the eleven-plus, [the boys] were treated like dirt and that upset me’.⁶ Chitty saw how selection permeated the attitudes of everyone in the system, from children through to parents, teachers, politicians and the media. Chitty compares this to his later experience at a Leicestershire comprehensive, Earl Shilton, where there was much more openness, creativity and achievement:

We insisted that boys did typing and girls did metalwork and woodwork, and that was good. That was new. A large [percentage of children stayed beyond sixteen] … in my last year four of my A level history class got into Oxford and they were girls and that was tremendous.⁷

In Chitty’s view, the foundational belief of comprehensive education, and his own practice, is that ‘you have to think that every child in front of you has amazing ability’.

So much more could have been made – and still could – of the key principle of ‘universal educability’: the idea that all, not just a chosen few, deserve the broadest, the best education. The history of our system is, in some ways, the story of the consistent underestimation of the abilities and talents of most young people. It explains not just the latent social bias underlying selective practices but the racism of the ’60s and ’70s that led many black parents to start up their own supplementary schools, in order to provide a more stimulating schooling, and the unconscious (or indeed conscious) sexism that, not so long ago, deemed girls unfit to master maths or science subjects and which still channels many working-class girls into caring or service work. Children with ‘special needs’ are still too often considered an expensive problem that needs expunging from mainstream schooling.

As I discuss in the next chapter, the debate about selection has been reignited by the current prime minister, Theresa May, and some key allies, who are keen to take us back to that failed post-war world. It is therefore more important than ever that progressive political leaders reflect intelligently on the huge gains set in train by the reforms of the ’60s and ’70s while at the same time showing a nuanced understanding of mistakes made and wrong turnings taken along the way. Within this, it should not be forgotten that today’s widespread commitment across the political spectrum (or, at the very least, lip service paid) to the idea of all children getting a shot at an ‘academic education’ is the direct result of comprehensive reform. It changed our deepest attitudes for the better and should be built on, not dismantled.

However, at the same time as incremental moves were made towards fostering more radical perceptions of human possibility, there have been, over the past half century, perennial calls for action in the opposite direction: a constant agitation to return education to its most traditionalist forms and methods. An early intervention of this kind can be found in the Black Papers, a series of articles published in the Critical Quarterly from 1969 to 1977, with contributions from writers such as Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch and the London comprehensive head and later Conservative MP Rhodes Boyson. Black Papers authors took issue with the phasing out of selective tests for secondary education and the student sit-ins of the late sixties, but they became synonymous with a rejection of so-called ‘progressive education’ and the call for a return to more conventional methods of teaching and strict discipline.

The traditionalism of the more immediate period has drawn inspiration from two distinct sources: England’s private and grammar schools, and the charter school movement in the United States. Influential figures from Labour’s Andrew Adonis to the Conservative Michael Gove have made clear their belief that comprehensive education should model itself on the attitudes and atmospheres of selective and private education. During the Coalition years (2010–2015) the US charter school movement, which inspired much of the academy and free school revolution – with its focus on a strong knowledge and test-based curriculum often backed up with draconian behaviour policies – took centre stage in fierce debates. The movement attracted a kind of evangelical fervour on both sides of the Atlantic but one little noted feature linked both perspectives: neither advocated broader social and economic change or a more integrated, equal educational system. Instead, reform was predicated on a version of separate but not-at-all-equal. Far from being a political problem, the private sector was – and is – considered a model that the new ‘independent state schools’ have sought to emulate, albeit with diluted resources: an approach sometimes summed up in the catch line ‘culture not cash’.

In the early years of the Coalition, something of the flavour of the Black Papers re-emerged. Robert Peal, a young teacher, attracted attention with his polemic Progressively Worse: The Burden of Bad Ideas in Our Schools, which placed the failure of modern English education firmly at the door of progressive ‘experiments’ in schooling, the supposed prioritising of skills over knowledge in state schools, and alleged liberal enabling of rowdy behaviour in our classrooms. Education Secretary Michael Gove also spoke of the ‘progressive betrayal’ which had actively harmed working-class children’s chances. Shortly afterwards, the Coalition Government implemented a number of what many believe were backward-looking changes, including the compulsory imposition of phonics in primary schools, major revisions of the primary curriculum and the content of GCSEs, including the removal of coursework and ‘speaking and listening’ modules, and of A levels.

Yet the story of progressive methods is often the story of our school system at its best and boldest. We can find its origins in the impressive work of the philosopher John Dewey: in particular his conviction that students need to be engaged in their own learning and that school should be a preparation for active citizenship. The 1931 Haddow Report on primary education argued that ‘a good school is … not a place of compulsory instruction, but a community of old and young, engaged in learning by cooperative experiment’ and that ‘the curriculum is to be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored’. The Plowden Report of 1967 emphasised the multiple ways in which knowledge can be discovered and anchored in a young person’s mind, that learning can be a kind of play rather than a grim grind, and that the teacher should be trusted to decide which approach to adopt at any given time.

Many of these ideas have passed into common currency and practice, if not political rhetoric, just as the wilder practices of some allegedly ‘child-centred’ philosophies have been rightly consigned to oblivion. It is also true that, within many classrooms, progressive approaches have long co-existed with the more fruitful elements of traditionalist methods: emphasis on mastery of key skills, deep knowledge, the judicious use of homework, and informal and continual revision of facts in order to anchor what has been learned. If one compares the methods of the pioneer teacher-educator Winifred Mercier, working in Manchester and Leeds in the early twentieth century, with that of the contemporary teacher and head and influential blogger Tom Sherrington, author of The Learning Rainforest, there are far more points of continuity and similarity than difference: in the work of both, one finds a commitment to a complex mix of the acquisition of knowledge and the development of skills, both sustained, hour by hour, week by week, by the enthusiastic engagement and autonomous judgement of highly skilled professionals.

The potentially most significant, and worrying, development of the past seventy years is relatively recent: the semi-marketisation of our education system, including, since 2010, in higher education. The introduction of tuition fees under New Labour in 1998, which were subsequently raised by successive Labour governments and took a sharp upward turn after 2010 under the Coalition, has turned England into one of the most expensive higher education systems in the world.

Other changes followed in the wake of this move. Like schools from the late 1980s onwards, universities were set in competition with each other, institutions tested and judged through the results of the Research Excellence Framework and latterly the Teaching Excellence Framework, both creating long paper trails and the deployment of dubious metrics. Higher education now has its own league tables, ranking everything from student facilities to rates of graduate employment and earnings. Furthermore, the replacement of the block grant by the fee structure has also enabled the opening up of the market to new providers. A host of private institutions have grown up, some charging double the fees of English universities and attracting wealthy foreign and domestic students with the lure of Oxbridge-style tutorials and liberal arts curricula.

If one side effect of the move to the loan system has been that universities have been protected from the chill winds of austerity, it has also dangerously shifted the balance of interests away from both students and junior and middle-ranking staff. Over the past few years, the salaries of senior management, particularly vice-chancellors, have rocketed and universities have indulged in an array of luxury, even vanity, projects – new buildings, superstar academics – designed to lift a university’s place in the rankings. At the same time, employment conditions for many academic staff have become increas...