The Ones Who Walk Away from MGS

[steepholm]

One of my pet peeves is the phrase "grammar school system", applied to the arrangements for state schools brought in by the 1944 Education Act. This evening, for example, there's been a programme on grammar schools, which the BBC web site describes as being about "the British grammar school system, whose aim was to give the best education to talented children". It talked a lot about the 11 plus, from the point of view of those who passed and failed it. David Attenborough, Joan Bakewell, and others, were on hand to laud the schools that opened the way to their being sirred and damed.

The trouble is that there never was a "grammar school system". Talking about it in that way is like referring to universities as "the first class degree system", and ignoring the existence of people who don't get firsts, who are (even in these days of grade inflation) the vast majority. What the '44 act actually brought in, of course, or attempted to, was a tripartite system, of which grammar schools were only one part, the other two being secondary technical schools (of which relatively few were ever built) and secondary moderns. While grammar schools got most of the money, about 70% of children were branded failures at the age of eleven and sent to secondary moderns. It's quite certain that these included many mute inglorious Attenboroughs, and Bakewells born to blush unseen. I celebrate David and Joan, but I also mourn their thwarted cousins.

Earlier this week, in a quintessentially Radio 4 series that takes famous people back to the sites of their childhood paper rounds, we had Alan Parker looking at the bleak north London flatscape of his youth, and commenting: "I didn't have much ambition. The huge difference for me was that I got to the grammar school, Dame Alice Owens, at the Angel. And I was the only kid in the flats who got to that grammar school, and that was the absolute salvation for me: that was the reason that I ended up doing what I do now." This is obviously good news for Alan Parker, and since the programme focused on him it comes across as a fine endorsement of the "grammar school system". But do we really believe that of all the children in those flats, only Parker was intelligent and potentially-academic enough to have benefited from the kind of education he got at Dame Alice Owens? Thought not. And if grammar school was his "salvation", what does that make the Sec. Mod.?

Personally I still root for the comprehensive system (with setting not streaming, thank you), but whatever one's opinion, as a point of terminology it seems only fair to call the tripartite system by its proper name; or else, given that over two thirds of children were sent along that route, to call it "the secondary modern system". Otherwise, it just gets a bit too much like Omelas - but with most of the city's children in the cellar.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

As a foreigner with only a spotty knowledge of the UK educational system, I am struggling to understand some of this, and I'm quite prepared for pitying comments telling me I ought to go look at some album cover of four guys walking across a road.

What is "the comprehensive system" that you say you root for? Is it the same thing as the system with the title "the grammar school system" which you say is inaccurate and would better be called "the secondary modern system"? Or is it something different?

If it's the same thing, why are you rooting for it, if it condemns 70% of the children to the cellar in Omelas? Perhaps that is explained by your desire for "setting not streaming," but while I think I know what "streaming" is, what is "setting"? And isn't the Omelas comparison a bit extreme? Are the secondary moderns really that bad? Have none of their ex-students ever achieved Attenborough/Bakewell/Parker levels of success despite their disadvantages, ever? (Mind, I'm not arguing that, if they did, it proves that the secondary moderns are as good as the grammar schools. I'm from a country which has people pointing to our president as proof that blacks are no longer discriminated against, so I know how fatuous that sort of argument is. I'm just looking for some calibration of the degree of disadvantage here.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Fair questions all, and I'll try to answer them.

The comprehensive system is distinct from the tripartite system that comprised grammar, technical and secondary modern schools, and was brought in (piecemeal, and not in every part of the country) to replace it, especially through the sixties and seventies. As the name implies, the idea of a comprehensive school is that everyone goes there (apart from people in private education, but that's another matter).

However, teaching mixed ability classes in such a way as to stretch the brightest while engaging the dullest is hard, and for this reason almost all comprehensives divide pupils into classes of different abilities. Streaming and setting are two ways of doing this. Streaming refers to the practice of dividing a year group into (say) three groups - top, middle and low - which would be treated separately for all their lessons. Setting is more flexible, and groups people on a subject-by-subject basis, so that you could be, for instance, in the top group for French but in the bottom group for maths. In both cases, however, there are mechanisms (which vary from school to school) that allow pupils to be moved from one stream or set to another, should they turn out to have more (or less) promise than they initially showed. This is what distinguishes the comprehensive system from the tripartite system, where pupils take an exam at 11, which effectively seals their educational fate.

Yes, the Omelas comparison is extreme - secondary modern pupils aren't actually tortured, although many of them carry the shame and bitterness of failure with them for the rest of their days. What I had in mind also though, was the way in which in Omelas there's a conspiracy of silence about the price paid for the city's well being. The phrase "grammar school system", in erasing the experience of the vast majority of children, is doing something analogous, I think.

Yes, ex-secondary modern pupils have achieved fame, riches and success, but few of them have achieved academic success, and where they have done so it has typically been by the much harder road of night school, autodidacticism, etc. The system didn't offer them any second chance: they had to carve it out for themselves.

(In my area, they abolished the 11-plus the year before I was due to take it. My older brother took the exam and went to grammar school: I didn't, and went to the comprehensive that had until the previous year been the secondary modern. My mother taught at the one, and my father at the other. So I think I saw most sides of the system.)

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Thank you; that is entirely clear, and I realize I knew much of this (including the term "comprehensive school" though not "comprehensive system") now that I've been given clearer context. It was the word "still" in the final paragraph of the post which made me think that the systems were different names for the same thing.

The 11+ exam is one of those things that sound good theoretically. Giving students the kind of education best suited for their own character and abilities: what could be wrong with that? What's wrong with it is the gaping hole between the resulting educational tracks, the practical irreversiblity of the decision, basing it on a single set of exams, and making the life-setting course at such a young age.

I do suspect, though, that it was an improvement on the previous system, in which educational tracking was based on the wealth or social status of the student's parents. (Except perhaps in Scotland, which might account for the brilliant academic careers of a lot of poor Scots.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

A couple of things I should add, perhaps. It's not that secondary moderns were/are "that bad". They were just never designed to be academic, but to teach practical skills (along with basic numeracy and literacy), that would fit people for manual and low-grade clerical jobs. They simply weren't geared up to get people ready to go to university. (It's because I went to an ex-secondary modern, for example, that I was never taught Latin, much to my regret.)

Secondly - although perhaps this was clear enough - in common parlance no one talks about the tripartite system, even though that's its proper name. It's always known as the "grammar school system".

[sovay]

(It's because I went to an ex-secondary modern, for example, that I was never taught Latin, much to my regret.)

You never had the Latin for the judging?!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Luckily, I was able to recoup some of my self-respect later by writing a novel about naked ladies down a mine shaft.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I know no Latin either (they thought I was too dim to be taught it) and took revenge by studying Old English and Old Norse instead.

Maybe I should write such a story in Old Norse alliterative verse? :o)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Go for it!

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Wait - is that what Elvis Costello is singing about? That basement?

I know someone (actually the guy whose Dad used to glimpse Thomas Hardy on his walks) streamed into a tech school at eleven, and eventually to a Polytechnic school. He worked like a dog to get into a doctoral program and eventually taught third world economics at the Open U. He now teaches in the US. But even with his degree and several books his background both oppressed and stigmatized him. (Alan Krueger once expressed contempt for him - what a way to be known to the leading figures in your field: like the first Blackadder series). He felt like a poor person among the self-possesse rich, but much worse since the sense of inferiority and stigma were internalized much more deeply. He felt, over and over, that he didn't have the background he needed to think about the things he wanted to think about. It made him defensive and bitter - he did important work but he was incalculably damaged by decisions made when he was eleven years old.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's a very common story, alas. (The internal stigma, not the getting onto a doctoral programme and making it as an academic.) Unfortunately, the BBC is very unlikely to a make a two-part documentary about it.

[joyeuce]

At some point in the last year I have seen a BBC documentary on people's experiences of secondary moderns - but not a two-parter and probably not as in-depth as this grammar school one (which I have not yet watched). But at least someone somewhere was recognising that the experience was there and was worth sharing.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I must admit that passed me by entirely.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Australia mostly has a comprehensive system. Much harder for the very bright sparks, but way better in general.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That was also my experience, and that of my children.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Despite the name, MGS was a direct grant school up to 1976, when it became independent.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

True enough - and I didn't want to make things even more complicated by getting into the question of direct grant schools (even thinking about which makes me angry). But I needed a trisyllable ending in 's' for my Omelas pun!

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I know. My education at the female equivalent left me appallingly pedantic.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Don't get me started on grammar schools! Kent still has them and I made the grave mistake back in the day of passing the 11+ and fetching up experiencing living hell in one, which I cut and ran from, unqualified, at 15.

It wasn't wise to be working class in a grammar and even less wise to be trans...........:o(

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Kent still has them, and exclusions are above average - although it's not clear which schools are doing the excluding:

http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Exclusions-national-average/story-12007357-detail/story.html

I'm glad I went to a bog-standard comp.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I could rant all day about the injustices of the 11+ system (which is what I always call it, not the "grammar school system"). And that's despite the fact that I passed the 11+ and in theory should have benefited from a "grammar school education". Unfortunately, it didn't suit me at all because it was assumed that a) if you were bright, you were academic and b) that the academic is superior to the practical. Also the British system suited the clever specialist, not the clever generalist, and still does to a large extent.

It was just possible to make it to university if you failed your 11+. I met a couple of lads at the technical college where I ended up retaking my A-levels who had both gone to secondary moders schools due to failing the English part of the 11+. Both were excellent at maths and probably these days would have been diagnosed with dyslexia and given extra help at an early age. However, if it hadn't been for their parents backing them to the hilt and getting them to leave school at 16 and transfer to the local tech where they were sailing through physics, maths and further maths (and desperately struggling to pass the O-level English needed to get them to university), I don't know what they would have done. Ended up very frustrated, most probably. But as you say, a comprehensive school with setting would have provided for their educational needs much better, as well as allowing me to keep doing the practical subjects I enjoyed instead of just fast-tracking me through the academic ones.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

For some reason &*&%^! LJ isn't letting me respond directly to to your post, so I hope this posts as a new thread!

My brother went to the local tec and is now a senior social worker.

Fwiw I would say that I am both bright and academic as the six lots of letters from four unis after my name these days would testify, but grammar, especially with the personal issues I was dealing with at the time (including being abused by one of the teachers in said august institution) just wasn't the way to go- Working for four years then being accepted as an undergrad on merit was...................

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I don't think abuse, class prejudice or transphobia are going to be easy to deal with whatever the system - but this system in particular has additional iniquities. To adapt President Bush, its slogan might have been "Two thirds of children left behind".

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Granted that I was a 'suitable case for treatment', but the issues still exist and are not being dealt with.

More like four fifths, but yes!

As to the council estate, as they used to say, you can fight your way out or sing your way out, but anti intellectualism always seems to preclude admitting that you can study your way out.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I am with you on comprehensives. My first political action, at 10, was to refuse to take the 11+ -- we lived in Notts at the time, which was comprehensive, but the Grammar School survived as an Independent and my junior school was all for it. They were rather appalled at me, but I stuck to my guns.
My head of dept in my last university had been taught by my father, when the latter was working in a 2ndary Modern. 40 years on, there was P with a PhD, a chair, and a stellar reputation. So much for the judgement passed on him by the examiners when he was 11. But, as you say, there were so very many more who lost hope at 11 or never had another chance.
It was iniquitous. No wonder the Tories loved it.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling I may have sat something for Nottm High - or more likely had the opportunity to do so. I'm glad I didn't go, as a friend who went three years later hated it. (My dad worked opposite it four days a week; entirely unconnectedly it's apparently in a red light district)