Butler in his memoirs says he had been told that ‘Fleming was a distinguished Scottish judge who could be relied upon to provide impartiality; I had not been prepared for the limitations of his views or for the humourlessness with which he gave them rein.’ After two years’ work Fleming produced what Butler judged to be a ‘sensationally ingenuous’ report.84 Its recommendation was that LEAs could, if they wished, offer a 25 per cent share of places, to be paid for out of the rates, at public schools willing to allocate such places. It thus, in Anthony Howard’s phrase, depended on ‘two-way traffic: a local authority ready to make a heavy investment in individual pupils rather than in a collective facility like a school swimming bath, and a headmaster or a governing body prepared to accept such “guinea pigs” as part of the school’s regular entry’.85 Moreover, Fleming’s report was not handed over until two months after the education Bill’s third reading and a mere week before Royal Assent. As Butler put it, ‘the first-class carriage had been shunted on to an immense siding’.86
A version of Fleming was later enacted, but the public schools’ financial crisis had eased, and as Howard records the scheme soon foundered, ‘with public school headmasters making only a token obeisance in its direction and local education authorities, in the period immediately after the war, becoming increasingly reluctant to favour a particularly bright child as against the general mass of run-of-the-mill pupils in their care’.87 By 1948 a mere 155 places had been taken up by local authorities under the Fleming scheme.88
Fleming has been judged by many as a great lost opportunity. The combination of financial crisis in the public schools themselves and widespread criticism of their role and performance in the early 1940s provided the only time in the twentieth century when the political will and political votes to integrate them into the national education system just might have been assembled. Instead the public schools and private schooling were to remain a running sore in the education debate, poisoning arguments about the class-bound nature of Britain and equality of opportunity for ever and a day. Anthony Howard believes it was Butler’s ‘one real failure in his general strategy for educational reconstruction’. Butler, he says, was enough of a meritocrat not to approve of birth alone providing the winning educational ticket, and ‘he was quite enough of a central planner to realise just what the eventual impact of the withdrawal of the top 5 per cent of parents from a national structure of secondary education would be. He needed them to be involved, as he confessed in old age, if only to make sure, through their influence and articulacy, that standards in the State sector were kept high … The time was ripe, the public mood was propitious, the opportunity was there. And yet he contrived to throw it all away.’89
While Butler was manoeuvring his way through the church and public school problem, Sir Cyril Norwood had been at work on the secondary school curriculum. His report in 1943 followed Hadow, Spens and the Green Book in confirming the expected divide of secondary education for all into three different types of school: selective grammars, selective technical schools, and secondary moderns. It did so in language that in later years was to have an uncomfortably patronising ring.
Like Gaul, the committee believed that children were divided into three parts. Those ‘interested in learning for its own sake’ who could ‘grasp an argument’ and care ‘to know how things came to be as well as how they are’. A pupil who ‘will have some capacity to enjoy, from an aesthetic point of view, the aptness of a phrase or the neatness of a proof’ who can take ‘a long view and hold his mind in suspense’. Those were the grammar school children who would ‘enter the learned professions’, or take up ‘higher administrative or business posts’.90 The technical schools would be for children whose abilities ‘lie markedly in the field of applied science or applied art … to prepare boys and girls for taking up certain crafts – engineering, agriculture and the like’. The secondary modern was for the pupil who ‘deals more easily with concrete things than with ideas. He may have much ability but it will be in the realm of facts … He may see clearly along one line of study or interest and outstrip his generally abler fellows in that line; but he often fails to relate his knowledge or skill to other branches of activity. Because he is interested only in the moment he may be incapable of a long series of interconnected steps; relevance to present concerns is the only way of awakening his interest, abstractions mean little to him … he may or may not be good with his hands or sensitive to music or art.’
Much of this argument was based on the IQ work of the 1920s and 1930s, which was not uncontroversial even at the time. Its leading exponent was Sir Cyril Burt, the educational psychologist, some of whose work was later to be discredited as fabricated. He had been an adviser and witness to the Hadow and Spens inquiries and was Professor of Psychology at University College London. Sir Toby Weaver, a future deputy secretary at the Ministry of Education when the official mind on these issues had changed in favour of comprehensive schools, characterised this as ‘a general belief, I believe totally false, that children were divided into three kinds. It was sort of Platonic. There were golden children, silver children and iron children.’91
The Norwood report was anxious not to make this division at eleven-plus rigid. The schools should have ‘such parity as amenities and conditions can bestow’, and from ‘one type of education to another there should be ease of transfer, particularly, though not exclusively, in the early stages, for the transition from primary to secondary education is not a break but a process’. Particularly at thirteen-plus the performance of children should be ‘sympathetically and skilfully reviewed’.
But while the Board’s official mind was on a tripartite system, the stream which would in time become the comprehensive river was already running. At this point the term usually used was ‘multilateral’ and its definition was not always clear. To some it meant three types of school on one site, not one comprehensive school. The Spens committee in 1938 (Sir Will Spens was a former tutor of Butler’s at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) had considered multilaterals but had ‘reluctantly’ come down against them. They would need to be big – ‘say 800 [pupils] or possibly larger’ – which would mean much new and expensive school building. ‘We cannot therefore recommend the general creation of multilateral schools, even as the goal of a long range policy.’ Spens was firm, however, that ‘parity between all types of secondary school is a fundamental requirement’: the same teachers’ pay, class sizes, and building requirements until the sixth form, that is, post-sixteen education, was reached. ‘The multi-lateral idea, though it may not be expressed by means of the multilateral school, should in effect permeate the system of secondary education as we conceive it.’92
Some of the left had latched firmly on to the multilateral idea. The Labour-controlled London County Council declared against segregated secondary schooling as early as 1935 and by 1944 was including comprehensives in its post-war development plan. Harold Dent of the Times Educational Supplement declared in his 1942 book A New Order in English Education: ‘I am utterly opposed to the idea of segregating adolescents in different types of school.’ He recorded ‘at least a strong minority opinion (latterly growing increasingly in strength) among educationists in favour of the “multi-lateral school”, ie the single school with a wide enough range of activities to meet the needs of all pupils’.93 And in the same year the National Association of Labour Teachers persuaded the Labour Party Conference to call on the Board of Education ‘to encourage as a general policy, the development of a new type of multilateral school’.94 But the idea, as yet, was still being formed. It did not command mass support. For many Labour MPs and councillors, equality of opportunity lay in ending fee-paying in grammar schools, thus opening them up to bright working-class children.
As these arguments proceeded, Beveridge finally gave Butler the chance to get his Bill. Called down to Chequers in March 1943 by Churchill to help prepare his ‘After the War’ broadcast – the one which committed Churchill in principle to ‘cradle to grave’ social security and much else beside – Butler seized Winston’s new willingness to talk about post-war reconstruction and told him that he was drafting