Let’s get the most damaging myths out of the way. The move towards comprehensive education was not some rash act of anti-democratic statist zeal, nor was it, in the astonishing recent words of Tony Blair, ‘pretty close to academic vandalism’.1 Far from it. Early comprehensive reform was bipartisan, slow and uneven in pace, with change occurring over many decades. The first comprehensive opened in Anglesey, Wales, in the late 1940s, while most of the transformation towards a comprehensive system occurred in the 1960s and 70s—and still the reform remains incomplete. A number of local authorities retain use of the eleven-plus to this day.
It may have been halting and fragmented, but it had a profound impact on post-war Britain. For to make real sense of the intense opposition that the comprehensive ideal provoked, we have to acknowledge the radicalism inherent in the idea of universal education; the idea that every child, of whatever background, is deserving of a serious education; that all the nation’s children might learn from a broadly common syllabus, enjoying matching resources and similarly high expectations; and, possibly the most threatening idea of all, the suggestion that at some points, in some places, the nation’s children—Muslim, Christian or Jewish, upper-class or impoverished, girl or boy, black or white—might actually be educated in the same classrooms together.
Here, then, were the key ingredients of what I call the piecemeal revolution, a moderate, rational plan for educational reform that still shakes us to our roots. As a nation, we are more connected to our pre-World War II and indeed nineteenth-century assumptions, prejudices and modes of social organisation, than perhaps we realise. Class stratification remains the default position, even in the twenty-first century.
That the British public has never developed the kind of affection for, and loyalty to, the idea of universal state education as it has to the National Health Service might in part be due to the crass divisions and base prejudices that shaped the 1944 Education Act. The Act was a Tory one, and so predated the reforming Labour administration elected in 1945 and led by Clement Atlee that set up the welfare state and created the NHS. Yet, in many ways, it anticipated and shared in that postwar spirit. For the first time in the history of England and Wales, the state underwrote a universal, compulsory free education system for all, which represented a tremendous leap forward. Yet written into this progress was an a-priori separation of the country’s children into winners and losers by the age of eleven—a division that predictably shaped itself along class lines.
Things could have been very different. The pre-war 1938 Spens Report had ‘considered carefully the possibility of multilateral schools … the provision of a good general education for two or three years for all pupils over eleven-plus in a given area, and the organisation of four or five “streams”, so that the pupils at the age of thirteen or fourteen years may follow courses that are suited to their individual needs and capacity. It is a policy which is very attractive: it would secure in the first place the close association, to their mutual advantage, of pupils of more varied ability, and with more varied interests and objectives, than are normally found in a school of any one type.’2 Ultimately, however, the report rejected the option of multilateral—comprehensive—schooling.
After the Spens Report, the war years saw intense consultation and negotiation between politicians, civil servants, the churches and the private schools, as well as another report—the 1943 Norwood Committee on educational reorganisation—which recommended the establishment of three distinct types of secondary school. During this time, it became widely acknowledged that if Britain won the war it would be impossible to go back to the pre-1939 situation, when nearly 90 per cent of young people left school at fourteen, only 10 per cent achieved passes in public examination and fewer than 5 per cent went on to higher education. It was vital that the country educated more of its citizens and to a much higher level.
In many ways, education had not radically altered from the fragmented patchwork of nineteenth-century provision, particularly in its tendency to assume, in the words of Matthew Arnold, that ‘the education of each class in society has, or ought to have, its ideal, determined by the wants of that class and by its destination.’3 Although a number of pieces of legislation from the mid nineteenth century onward began to implement a national system of elementary and secondary schools, locally controlled, its administration was frequently deemed ‘chaotic’. While the upper classes tended to be shipped off to the great public schools or elite day schools, and the middle classes were educated in the competitive grammars—which based their curriculum upon the public school model—the working class received a wildly uneven elementary education, its quality dependent on which regional school board or church was in charge. These arrangements, more or less, continued up to 1939.
World War II was an important turning point, as it confirmed concerns that Britain was producing an under-educated workforce unable to hold its own in wider markets. Many schools had been closed in preparation for evacuation, but one million children were not in fact sent away, causing scenes of delinquency and chaos as they roamed the streets. Ministers were criticised for their ignorance: ‘they did not know what had happened to state education because they educated their own children elsewhere.’ Even senior officials at the Board of Education admitted that full-time schooling for most of the country’s children was in many ways ‘seriously defective’, and that for 90 per cent of them, it ended too soon. ‘It is conducted in many cases in premises which are scandalously bad.’4
The 1944 Act, then, embraced two vitally important principles: free secondary education for all (some state schools had charged fees prior to the war), and a clear distinction, and path, between primary and secondary schools. A young Tory reformer, Quintin Hogg—later Lord Hailsham—thought the Act ‘an elementary piece of social justice’. Soon, however, it was clear that in many ways it reproduced the fragmented legacy of the earlier period.
Firstly, it wholly failed to address the problem of the private sector, which at that point was severely weakened both morally and financially, making it ripe for reform and possible incorporation into a new universal state system. But no action was taken to deal with the public schools, as we shall see in Chapter 6. Secondly, Rab Butler—appointed by Churchill to consider and draw up plans for education reform, despite his initial reluctance—and his junior minister, Chuter Ede, came under huge pressure from the Anglican and Catholic churches to retain their religious influence and involvement in the school system. At that time the churches ran half the schools in the UK. Although by the mid twentieth century England had become a less religious society, the idea still prevailed that this was a ‘Christian country’ and many thought that Christianity would temper a ‘peculiarly democratic bill’.5 A compromise was found in the conversion of church schools into two main types: ‘controlled’ or ‘aided’. In the case of controlled schools, the state would take over their costs, appoint staff and governors, etc., but the schools would follow an agreed religious syllabus. Voluntary-aided schools retained more independence and power. The state paid for their running costs, but the Church kept buildings under its control, with help from a government grant, and continued to appoint staff and governors. The third problem with the 1944 Act was its fatal flaw: the enabling of a pernicious three-tiered school system, based on the idea that children had very different talents and aptitudes and should therefore be educated separately. Both the 1938 Spens Report and the 1943 White Paper had considered the idea of multilateral education. In fact, the latter had explicitly declared: ‘There is nothing to be said in favour of a system which subjects children at the age of eleven to the strain of a competitive examination in which not only their future schooling but their future career may depend.’6 Butler himself was not hostile to the idea that all children should be educated in the same schools. But the 1944 Act was heavily