Empty Pots and Magic Boxes
In other areas, Labour was on the move. Tony Crosland, a dashing ex-paratrooper and admirer of Hugh Gaitskell, has featured earlier in this history for his rebellion against socialist puritanism and his seminal book The Future of Socialism, which called on the left to accept the consumer society and the mixed economy. By 1965, as MP for Grimsby, he was a rising Labour star, a glamorous, cheroot-smoking, rough-tongued man known for his ferocious attacks on the public school system. He had recently married the exceptionally beautiful divorced American journalist Susan Catling, acquired two stepdaughters and moved into a house in London’s Notting Hill, no longer the scene of riots and not yet the backdrop for glossy films. Wilson had made him Education Secretary after offering the job to Crosland’s friend and rival Roy Jenkins, whose children were at private schools. Crosland’s next two years would make him one of the most controversial, reviled and admired ministers in the history of British schooling. His wife Susan wrote a book about him which is as tender and eloquent a portrait of a twentieth-century British politician as exists, but in it she also revealed a couple of sentences he uttered to her which have been hung around Crosland’s reputation ever since. Luckily for posterity, the journalist in her trumped the pious memorialist. It was late one night in their home when he had been at a wearisome dinner with teachers’ associations. Crosland’s tread was ominous as he mounted the stairs.
He stopped at our bedroom door.
‘Good evening. You’d better come in the study.’
I put my novel aside and got smartly out of our bed, wondering what had caused this latest vexation.
‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England,’ he said. ‘And Wales. And Northern Ireland.’
‘Why not Scotland?’ I asked out of pure curiosity.
‘Because their schools come under the Secretary of State for Scotland.’ He began to laugh at his inability to destroy their grammar schools.
By 1965 the post-war division of children into potential intellectuals, technical workers and drones – gold, silver and lead – was thoroughly discredited. The private or ‘public’ schools still thrived, with around 5 per cent of the country’s children creamed off through their exclusive portals. For the other 95 per cent, ever since 1944, state schooling was meant to be divided into three types of school. In practice, however, there were just two. For roughly a quarter of children there were the grammar schools, offering traditional academic teaching, including much memorizing and strict discipline. The grandest of these were the 179 direct-grant schools, effectively independent of central government and often with strong traditions of their own – schools such as Manchester Grammar, Haberdashers’ Aske’s, Elstree, and King Edward’s in Birmingham. They tended to be long-established schools, town academies or old foundations, with uniforms, badges and school songs to match. Their brighter children would be expected to go to the expanding university sector and to become professionals. Alongside them, also traditionalist in atmosphere but with less independence and status, were some 1,500 ordinary grammar schools, maintained by the local authorities.
For the other three-quarters of state-educated children there were the secondary moderns, frankly second-rate and often in buildings which reflected their lower status. As one writer observed in 1965, ‘modern’ had become a curious euphemism for ‘less clever’. Some of these schools were truly dreadful, sparsely staffed, crowded into ancient and unsuitable buildings and sitting almost no pupils for outside examinations before most were released to start work at fifteen. At A-level, in 1964, the secondary moderns, with around 72 per cent of Britain’s children, had 318 candidates. The public schools, with 5 per cent, had 9,838. The third kind of school originally planned in 1944 was to have been the technical school, teaching specific practical skills on German lines, but these had been forgotten. In practice there was therefore a sharp, public, sheep-and-goats division of the country’s children which took place at eleven years old through the ‘eleven-plus’ examination. It in turn was based on an IQ test supposed to scientifically measure intelligence. Among those who made it to the grammar schools, many hated being separated from their old friends – George Best and Neil Kinnock being among the innumerable examples of eleven-plus successes who then bunked off or frittered their school days in a mood of rebellion. Many of the majority who were rejected and sent to the secondary moderns never got over the sense of rejection and failure. John Prescott never forgot that his brother passed, and was given a bicycle while he failed and wasn’t. Rifts opened in families. Siblings turned on each other.
Any schooling system has some problems. Most involve unfairness at one stage or another. Academic selection and examinations require children to fail, as well as to succeed. But by the late fifties, there were larger complaints. The IQ tests were shown not to be nearly as reliable as first thought. Substantial minorities, up to 60,000 children a year, were at the ‘wrong’ school and many were being transferred later, up or down. Different education authorities had wildly different proportions of grammar school and secondary modern places – division by geography, not examination. A big expansion of teachers and buildings was needed to deal with those post-war baby-boom children who were now reaching secondary school. Across Britain, there were rotting buildings and a shortage of around 60,000 teachers. Desperately looking for money, education authorities snatched at the savings a simpler comprehensive system might produce. Socialists who wanted more equality, among whom Crosland had long been prominent, were against the eleven-plus on ideological grounds. But many articulate middle-class parents who would never have called themselves socialist were equally against it because their children had failed to get grammar school places. With all these pressures, education authorities – that is, local councillors, not national politicians – had begun to move towards a one-school-for-all or comprehensive system during the Conservative years. Tory councils were doing this, as well as Labour ones. The Conservative Education Secretary, a man on the left of his party, Sir Edward Boyle, found that ninety of the 146 education authorities in England and Wales were making some moves towards comprehensive schooling by 1962.
So when Crosland took over, the great schooling revolution, which has caused so much controversy ever since, was well under way. There were already comprehensives, on the Swedish model, and they were much admired for their huge scale, airy architecture and apparent modernity. The first had been Kidbrooke in Blackheath, south-east London, which opened for 2,200 girls in 1954. Grammar schools across the country were fighting back, particularly in cities with a strong sense of their history, such as Bristol and Nottingham, but across the country generally they were losing ground. What Crosland did was to hasten their destruction. He did this not by ordering the education authorities to go comprehensive but by requesting them to, in what has been described as the most famous circular in the history of the education department, directive 10/65. He did not say how many comprehensives must be opened nor how many grammar schools should be shut down. But by making government money for new school building conditional on going comprehensive, the change was greatly accelerated.
By 1970 when Wilson was defeated, a third of children were at comprehensives and a mere eight education authorities were holding on to the old division. The revolution simply rolled on. Edward Heath, devoted to his old grammar school, had promised to stop bullying education authorities into destroying grammar schools. Crosland’s 10/65 was duly withdrawn, and Heath appointed that ultimate enthusiast for the grammar schools system, Margaret Thatcher, as Education Secretary. She duly announced a presumption against further shake-up and change. But what happened? Out of 3,612 proposals for compre-hensives sent to Mrs Thatcher, she turned down just 326 and the proportion of children at comprehensives nearly doubled again, up from 32 per cent under Labour to 62 per cent under this thoroughly Conservative politician. As one of her biographers flatly pointed out, ‘for all her strong prejudices against them…Margaret Thatcher approved more schemes for comprehensive schools, and the abolition of more grammar schools, than any other Secretary of State before or since.’ Heath, who fought a tough campaign as Prime Minister to save his local grammar school in Bexley, blamed the desire of Tory-led authorities to save money by replacing boys-only and girls-only grammars with co-ed comprehensives. He also confessed: ‘The tide was strong, but I do wish in retrospect, that the many supporters of selection had all campaigned more vigorously before it was too late.’
There had always been a contradiction in the way comprehensives were sold, which was neatly summed up by Wilson when he promised that they would offer ‘a grammar school education for all’. Since the essence of grammar schools was that they selected only the brightest children, this was plainly a ridiculous suggestion. Yet Wilson was reflecting back something that was deeply rooted among parents and many Labour voters, which was a simple enthusiasm for ‘good’ education, meaning traditional teaching in a disciplined environment, popularly associated with grammar schools. Most other countries, after all, had traditionalist, even rote-learning education in a single state system without the division of schools by academic ability. If the Germans and Americans, the French, Russians and Swedes could do it, why not the British?
It was the singular misfortune of the comprehensive experiment that it coincided with a move away from traditional education to what was called child-centred teaching. In the long run, this may well have been more important than any structural reorganization of schools. Instead of viewing the child as an empty pot, happily large or sadly small, into which a given quantity of facts and values could be poured, the new teaching regarded the child as a magic box, crammed with integrity and surprise, which should be carefully unwrapped. Perhaps a more organic metaphor is called for. The young sapling should be watered and admired, not tied to a stick, nor pruned. Here was a fundamental disagreement about the nature of humanity and social order. Philosophically it goes back to the French thinkers of the eighteenth century but it was fought out in concrete form in British classrooms throughout this period. The old rows of desks facing a blackboard began to go, and cosily intimate semicircles of chairs appeared. Children of different abilities were taught in the same room, so that they could learn from each other, causing some chaos and boredom. Topics replaced lists. Grammar retreated and creativity advanced. Teachers began to dress informally and encourage the use of an Adrian or Sara, rather than Sir or Miss. Corporal punishment went from state schools entirely and on the vast, windy sites of the seventies comprehensives, with their modernist airiness, discipline loosened. The elite remained mainly in private schools, taught much as their parents and grandparents had been. But across the country millions of parents shook their heads and wondered. Hostility to comprehensives, which would swell through the eighties and nineties, was much of the time really hostility to trendy teaching, the spirit of the sixties which was being marshalled and organized in scores of teacher training colleges.
Crosland’s legacy went far beyond comprehensives. He was a high spender on education, as was Margaret Thatcher, both believing long before Tony Blair that there was no better way of investing taxes than in ‘education, education, education’. In particular, he oversaw a big expansion of higher education, the creation of thirty polytechnics to supplement Britain’s universities. These were to develop the technical and practical higher education enjoyed by Germans and French students but which was sadly lacking in the fustier and more academic British universities. This offended the universities, not surprisingly, who had been hoping for a major expansion in their own right. The Robbins Report had reminded the country that just 5 per cent of British youngsters went into higher education, as compared to 25 per cent of Americans or 12 per cent of French. There was a major expansion underway, from the trendiest of all, Sussex University at Brighton, to the ‘redbricks’ which were in fact often concrete, granite or plate glass erections, from Liverpool to Bristol, Aberdeen to Southampton. But Crosland argued the then-fashionable case that Britain needed technical and industrial colleges on the German model far more than universities. Britain had to get away from ‘its snobbish, caste-ridden hierarchical obsession with university status’. Later, the wheel would come full circle when the polytechnics and other colleges would simply be allowed to call themselves universities, but at the time the Crosland ideology seemed on a par with his crusade for comprehensives, a vigorous attack on the old and traditional in favour of a more efficient and egalitarian new Britain.
Perhaps the proudest educational achievement of the Wilson years was the Open University. It too was nothing if not new. First proposed in 1962 by the same Michael Young who had co-written Labour’s 1945 manifesto, the Open University was hatched in government by Jennie Lee, a Scottish miner’s daughter, and Nye Bevan’s widow. Originally described as a ‘university of the air’, the OU was meant to offer higher education to millions who had not had the chance to go to a campus university. Lee was determined that it should offer serious, heavyweight degree courses, taught by academics with a strong reputation. Attacked by the Conservatives at the time as ‘blithering nonsense’, it aimed to use television and the postal service to teach degree-level courses in everything from the sciences to history and law. It has been one of the most successful and liberating acts by a post-war government in education. Its critics attacked it first for being not elite enough, and later for attracting too many middle-class women but by the mid-2000s, the OU was being ranked in the top five British universities for teaching quality and had given qualifications to some 600,000 of the 2 million people who studied with it. This is often credited as Wilson’s great contribution, and he was a great supporter; but Jennie Lee was the heroine of a hundred committee fights to create it.
As for Crosland he would go on to serve as the Environment Secretary who warned the high-spending local authorities in 1975 that ‘the party’s over’ but the destruction of Labour’s own high-spending instincts in the economic storm of the seventies blew away the easy optimism of his political philosophy. In 1977, still hoping to be Chancellor and after enduring a dinner sitting beside a woman whose conversation about the EEC he said was killing him, Crosland died of a stroke at the age of fifty-eight.