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!