There were of course exceptions, schools that challenged the conventions and constrictions of the time. One such phenomenon was St George’s-in-the-East, a post-war secondary modern run by the remarkable Alex Bloom, and the location for one of the most famous education-related narratives of the post-war period: To Sir With Love. While the film concentrates on the trials and tribulations of its protagonist, a black teacher played by Sidney Poitier, the original book put more emphasis on the innovations of the school itself.
Alex Bloom was, in the words of radical educator Michael Fielding, ‘arguably one of the greatest figures of radical state education in England’. He was certainly considered hugely significant by equally important figures such as A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill, one of the original free schools. Bloom opened St George’s-in-the-East Secondary Modern School in Cable Street, Stepney, on 1 October 1945. From the start he discarded many of the conventions, restrictions and taboos associated with schooling of the period, including corporal punishment, excessive regimentation and competition. He had a stated abhorrence of ‘marks, prizes and competition.’ He was dealing with children living in an area of extreme poverty, in bombed-out streets, with little hope for the future. Many were ‘lonely and bothered souls’, for whom school was their only experience of human warmth and structure. He also believed that most of the children emerged from primary school with the sense that they were failures. Two of his guiding principles were that the children should feel that they counted, and that the school community should mean something.
While most secondary moderns and their pupils suffered from the thin curricula, poor resources and consequent low self-esteem that usually accompanied the education of those who failed the eleven-plus, St George’s pioneered collaborative, student-centred learning, in which pupils were encouraged to make up their own curriculum, and to be involved in active debates about what they were going to learn and had learned. St George’s school council facilitated discussions between staff and students about the life of the school, and Bloom staunchly supported the right of students to say what they felt ‘without reprisals’. A range of pupil committees took responsibility for everything from midday dancing in the Hall, school meals and sports, to the appearance and social life of the school, including concerts, parties and visitors.13
Former pupil Abraham Wilson has written of his life at St George’s:
Our classes were introduced to the way democracy worked by having annual elections, when each class elected a boy and a girl to represent them at regular meetings, that were chaired by the head boy or head girl, where decisions were made concerning some aspects of running the school. It was from such meetings that we chose to have ballroom dancing during the lunch break, which was very popular with the pupils in their last year at school. It was also by a similar suggestion that we were able to have a canteen, with cakes bought from a local bakery.
Each morning the Headmaster, Mr Alexander Bloom addressed the school assembly with the head girl and boy seated each side of the headmaster. The assembly began with a piece of classical music being played. It was my first appreciation and introduction to composers such as Brahms, Beethoven, Strauss and many others. I still have very clear memories of our headmaster and remember his strong outlook and some of his views. He was a small man no more than 5’3”. He had a thing about noise and would often tell us to keep our foot on the ‘Soft Pedal’ when he thought the volume of noise throughout the school was too loud.14
To Sir with Love provides some brief, but deeply felt, sketches of life behind the closed doors of London’s East End at that time. The main character’s respect for the hardship he witnesses among the families of his students is very moving, as is the story of their growing attachment to him. To Sir with Love also gives us a unique insight into the pioneering educational methods of Bloom, and his ability to engage the students. Early on in the novel, Rickie, the main protagonist, describes an assembly in which the ‘Head read a poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The records which followed were Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu, and part of Vivaldi’s Concerto in C for two trumpets’. Watching it from the outside, the novel’s protagonist is struck by the sight of ‘those rough-looking, untidy children; every one of them sat still… and attentive, until the very echo of the last clear note had died away. Their silence was not the result of boredom or apathy, nor were they quiet because it was expected of them or through fear of consequences; but they were listening, actively, attentively listening to those records, with the same raptness they had shown in their jiving; their bodies were still, but I could feel that their minds and spirits were involved with the music.’15
More widely, challenges were beginning to emerge to the insidious eleven-plus divide. Education researchers Brian Jackson and Olive Banks revealed the sham of claims by grammar-school supporters that there was ‘parity of esteem’ between the grammars and secondary moderns. Jackson’s work forensically analysed how children were sorted into different streams, along class lines, early in primary school. Teachers were already deciding who was potential grammar-school material. As one teacher told Jackson, ‘In the training of racehorses and athletes, we are most careful to cream and train; why not with children?’ This same teacher held that ‘streaming gives middle-class children the chance their parents had in private or prep schools, now that state schools are more widely used’, an argument that has echoed down the years.16 Jackson’s research also examined in detail how different social groups fared within the grammar system. Very often, upper-working-class and lower-middle-class children languished in these schools and left as soon as they could, while upper-middle-class children prospered.17
According to Ross McKibbin, the working class lost out to the middle class in the competition for grammar-school places, which tended to go ‘to the sons and daughters of professional business men/women’.18 Those working-class children that did win places often left school much earlier, and didn’t progress to further education. Grammar-school life often disrupted family routines: a new ‘posh’ accent and uniform was ridiculed at home; it was hard to do homework. For some, says McKibbin, ‘The deliberate adherence to a local accent often meant wholesale rejection of the grammar school and its values; cultivation of BBC English represented an acceptance of those values and preceded a sometimes heartfelt adieu to class and neighbourhood.’19
A series of official reports, published in the late 1950s and early 60s, built up a powerful argument against selection. In a 1957 report, the British Psychological Society criticised intelligence testing and streaming; in the same year the NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research) came out against selection. It argued that the eleven-plus contained serious errors, a claim backed up by the increasing numbers of children who were achieving academically in some of the secondary moderns. The 1959 Crowther Report on education of fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds argued that ‘it is not only at the top but almost to the bottom of the pyramid that the scientific revolution of our times needs to be reflected in a longer educational process.’20 Four years later the Robbins Report on higher education concurred, rejecting the idea that only a select number of children had talent worth cultivating; the Newsom Report of the same year, looking at the education of children of ‘average’ intelligence, was bold enough to declare that ‘intellectual talent is not a fixed quantity with which we have to work, but a variable that can be modified by social policy and educational approaches … The kind of intelligence which is measured by the test so far applied is largely an acquired characteristic.’21 Even Rhodes Boyson, Tory, headmaster, and champion of the grammars, later acknowledged that the eleven-plus ‘makes considerable mistakes’.22
In the end, though, it was parental opposition that politically defeated selection. Particularly vocal were protests from middle-class families who found their children