The Reign--Life in Elizabeth's Britain by Matthew Engel

Author:Matthew Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

15

DOWN WITH SKOOLS

IN 1957, JOHN CLARKE, THE SON OF A RAILWAY CLERK, SAT AN exam at Brackley Junior School in Northamptonshire. This was the 11-plus, the test that set the lifetime trajectory of millions of British children even before they reached puberty. If they passed, they were eligible for a grammar school – often ancient institutions, devoted to academic excellence. If not, they would go to one of the new secondary moderns and while away the time before being released into the real world four years later.

Clarke failed. In his case, though, he had taken the exam before his eleventh birthday and was, unusually, eligible for a second attempt. This time, his father – a keen reader whose own father had discouraged his schooling – was galvanized, and so was the boy, and he passed. In 1967 John Clarke was elected a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, the youngest of the century. He later became professor of history at the University of Buckingham.

We will never know how many John Clarkes lie unknown and forgotten in country churchyards or municipal cemeteries without ever having had the chance to prove their potential. It was this evil that the Wilson government set out to eradicate by trying to abolish selection in the school system; the aim was to make all schools comprehensive. The word of the moment was meritocracy, popularized by Michael Young in his 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy.* And everyone thought meritocracy must be A Good Thing.

Unfortunately, Young was too subtle. Yes, he was against the 11-plus; he was against the whole idea of intelligence as the benchmark of merit. He wanted schools to encourage all skills – including manual ones – and saw a meritocracy as creating yet another self-perpetuating elite as pernicious as heredity and aristocracy. Instead, the notion of IQ, systematized by the American psychologist David Wechsler in 1939, became immensely popular.

Labour’s policy was pushed through by the Education Secretary, Anthony Crosland. A public school boy himself, he knew what he didn’t like about the state system. ‘If it’s the last thing I do,’ he told his wife, ‘I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school.’ He did not have the power to compel their abolition but, if local councils did not submit plans to go comprehensive, there would be no money for new schools; and in 1967 even true-blue Surrey sulkily surrendered.

But public attitudes were not straightforwardly left v. right. The movement towards comprehensives was already happening when the Tories were in power, often under the aegis of Tory councils. According to the long-time education correspondent Peter Wilby: ‘The impetus for comprehensives really came from the middle class because they couldn’t cope with their children failing the 11-plus. It was regarded as a disaster. They didn’t want their children going to school with the oiks from the council estate. There were many minor private schools who catered mainly to 11-plus failures.’

The secondary moderns had only been invented in 1944, when Rab Butler set up what was supposed to be a tripartite system: grammars, sec mods and technical schools.

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