Many of the assumptions underlying the setting up of the tripartite system were based on the IQ research of the 1920s and 30s. A prominent place was occupied by the work of Sir Cyril Burt, who drew heavily on the ideas of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Burt’s research and experimentation were later to be discredited once it was discovered that he had fabricated evidence to support his theories. His arguments, however, were taken very seriously indeed in the 1930s and 40s. Burt believed that social class correlated with intelligence: the higher up the social scale you were, the greater your natural fund of intelligence. Accordingly, environment—including education—had a negligible impact on a child’s intellectual development; it was what you were born with, or rather, what you were born into, that counted. Education thus became an exercise in ‘sorting’ pupils into the correct compartments, at any given age. As late as 1950 Burt would write, ‘Obviously in an ideal community, our aim should be to discover what ration of intelligence nature has given to each individual child at birth, then to provide him with the appropriate education, and finally to guide him into the career for which he seems to have been marked out.’7
Not everyone agreed. One civil servant of the period was later quoted as saying that Burt held ‘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.’8 Golden children were, broadly speaking, interested in learning for its own sake and could grasp an argument; silver children were talented at applied science or art, but lacked subtlety in language construction; iron children could only handle concrete things, for abstractions were beyond them.
From 1944 onwards, local authorities were supposed to assign children to one of three kinds of schools. The more intellectual among them were to be sent to grammar schools; the more practical and vocationally inclined to the new technical schools, and the rest were to be educated in secondary moderns. In fact, the technical schools—the ideal destination of the so-called ‘silver’ caste—never seriously took off, and secondary education in the post-war period quickly became a matter of grammar or secondary modern, all decided by the eleven-plus exam. Thus did the crude eugenicism of Burt and his disciples unduly influence—and warp—the lives of countless children, as the state took on the arrogant task of dividing them into winners and losers before even the onset of puberty.
The 1944 Act was an undeniable improvement on the glaring pre-war gaps in provision. For some, it opened a window on a new future; but for the majority, once again, an education system ruled in which class divisions were, in Sally Tomlinson’s words, ‘created, legitimised and justified’. As Brian Simon writes, ‘Even under a Labour Government elected with a massive majority, the mediation of class relations was still seen as a major function of the education system.’9 A very similar charge would be laid at the door of a future Labour Government, also headed by a privately educated leader and elected with an equally impressive majority, some fifty years later.
Long after the 1944 Act, its chief political architect Rab Butler wrote of how important it was ‘to ensure that a stigma of inferiority did not attach itself to those secondary institutions … which lacked the facilities and academic prestige of the grammar schools’. But how could it possibly be otherwise? Grammar schools had, in general, three times more money spent on them; they had the best teachers, the best facilities, offered public examinations and a secure route into higher education. Secondary moderns—even the many which offered more academic courses—could offer none of these things.
Almost every family in the era of national selection was caught up in the drama of the eleven-plus exams. The crisis was intensified for one pair of twins, who sat the exam in the mid to late 1960s:
After my sister and I took the eleven-plus (along with the rest of my class at St Mark’s Primary School) nothing happened for several weeks. We forgot all about it and then, I remember, a teacher came into the classroom and read out a list of about eight names of boys and girls in the class. We had to go the Headmistress’s room. Miss Simpson was long and lean like Joyce Grenfell, with a bluey-green woollen suit, and flat shoes, and we knew it was important—either good or bad. We trooped out—including me but excluding my sister—to be congratulated and told that we had ‘passed the eleven-plus’. Thereafter all the attention was on me. Which school would I go to—the local grammar, or another selective grant-maintained school out of the borough? Would I wear box- or knife-pleat skirts? Blue or yellow shirts?
My poor sister meanwhile was to go to the local girls’ secondary modern school. No forms coming through the post and discussions about uniforms, books, travel. She took it very badly—she was the ‘failure’, I was the ‘success’, and she never recovered from that feeling. Even today, 48 years later, she refers to me as ‘the clever one’ and to herself as the ‘thick’ one. It was not true, of course, but the education system reinforced a sense of worthlessness from then on.
I completely squandered my grammar-school education, and took ages to settle into any job until my mid-twenties. She left school at fifteen and has worked ever since. Her education in fact wasn’t bad—and I am not sure which of us came off worse. The experience made my father ensure that my little sister went to a comprehensive, which were just being introduced. She really enjoyed school and it being co-ed meant she ‘got on with boys—as friends’ much better than her three older sisters. [Source: private communication.]
All of which meant that, as before the war, the twin threads of class anxiety and class ambition were woven right through the school organisation. According to the journalist Peter Laurie, ‘To have been consigned to the limbo of secondary modern is to have failed disastrously … and very early in life.’10 For middle-class parents, a grammar-school place was often a make or break matter: failure was not an option for children sitting the eleven-plus exam. But while to figures like Edward Heath and Alan Bennett the grammar schools were comparatively easy to get into, and offered a chance to compete with the privately educated elite at Oxbridge and other top universities, the genuinely poor had barely a chance of passing the eleven-plus. In the district of St Anne’s in Nottingham, for example, only 1.5 per cent of the district’s entire school population attended grammars; in neighbouring middle-class suburbs, 60 per cent of children did. There were wide regional variations too. Only 10 per cent of children in Gateshead and Sunderland were educated in grammars, compared to 40 per cent in the affluent county of Westmoreland.
More generally, the education system retained its hierarchical and differentiated character. In fact, there were five or six levels to the post-war set-up: the public schools; the direct grant grammars, which offered some free places; the grammars; the technical/trade schools; the secondary moderns; and the all-age elementary schools, pre-war relics that took twenty years to disappear. The complete lack of a national curriculum meant that teaching in many of the less resourced schools could still be of a poor or patchy standard. In many church schools, the curriculum was left entirely up to the discretion of the head teacher.
During this period, a lot of school buildings were in bad repair and the raising of the leaving age meant that many teachers faced ‘huge classes, in crumbling, sometimes dangerous buildings’.11 Whether in the grammars or in the secondary moderns, there were often low expectations of poor children. Discipline could be barbaric and there was little pastoral care or careers guidance, such as is common today. While the teaching in most schools was satisfactory, the percentage of poor teaching, in all sectors, was much higher than today. The curriculum was far narrower, opportunities for girls were very limited, maths teaching was often mediocre and there were vast tracts of uninspired, rote learning. Inspectors of the period had serious concerns about the quality of teaching of English, while a case study of science teaching in the post-war period in Swansea found it ‘unsatisfactory in all the town’s secondary moderns’. It was not just the secondary moderns; many grammar schools conducted ‘dull and arid’ lessons too.12 Low standards were a widespread problem. According