Is the comprehensive education ideal dead?
Blog 8 July 2023 The SEA manifesto could deliver a rebirth of comprehensive education if implemented. Sheila Dore reviews Margaret Morris's memoirs including the campaign for comprehensive schools.
How the SEA manifesto promotes comprehensive education
James Whiting, General Secretary of the SEA, argues the comprehensive ideal is much bigger than abolishing the 11 plus and reintegrating existing grammar schools. He shows how comprehensive education has been comprehensively undermined by the right and how the SEA manifesto would reverse this.
The movement for comprehensive education has been stuck in the doldrums since the unfinished attempt to end academic selection at 11 by the Wilson government of the sixties. Slowly but surely the right started chipping away at comprehensive schools. Specialist schools, City Technology Colleges, Grant maintained schools, partial selection, selection by aptitude all played their part in undermining the idea that one school can provide quality education for all the young people in a local community regardless of so-called academic ability. The SEA does not believe that simply abolishing the 11 plus in areas where it still operates will restore the comprehensive ideal. Changes since 2010 have accelerated the move away from quality local schools for all children to competition in a rigged market.
First, let me agree with Comprehensive Future (the non-party political group campaigning to end the eleven plus and open the last existing grammars to all pupils) that selection at 11 is quite different for two main reasons. It is done quite unnecessarily early. Why select at 11 when the KS3 curriculum is the same in both selective and non-selective schools? In many countries (e.g. France and Germany) selection plays a role at 14 when vocational/technical courses become available for many pupils whilst others progress to the academic hothouses. (Lycees or Gymnasiums). To a degree selection for vocational/academic courses at 14 was starting to happen under New Labour’s diploma within schools, but was cut short by Gove’s reforms. The second reason is the selection is based not on achievement in particular areas of the curriculum but an IQ test. The intellectual basis on which the test is predicated has been criticised from a range of perspectives. It is unreliable, arbitrary and unfair. The SEA along are demanding in its manifesto that selection at eleven is ended once and for all.
However, there is an illogicality in opposing selection at 11 and not considering how it operates, often more insidiously, at other points in the system. 183 out of 4188 secondary schools in England are grammars:-4%. Whilst I accept that they often affect the school ecology in a wider area, just arguing for changing their character whilst not addressing selective practices in the system as a whole, will always only be relevant now to a small minority of parents, pupils and teachers. From the right’s perspective there is no urgent need to introduce more grammars despite the dinosaurs who rear their heads from time to time. Gove, arguably the most ideologically driven education secretary ever, left the topic well alone because he knew it was a diversion from his project. To put it simply, this was to introduce a knowledge rich curriculum and linear examinations which measure how far pupils have retained and understood it, and then use these exams to select pupils for the best sixth forms and then the best universities.
Now there is an increasingly selective market in sixth forms with many pupils who failed the 11 plus ironically welcomed back to grammar schools post-16 because of their subsequent GCSE success. (This undermines arguments for the effectiveness of the 11 plus identifying the ‘most able’). However, on the other side of the coin lie so called comprehensive schools (Brampton Manor in Newham, Twyford in Ealing are examples) who set high entrance criteria to their sixth forms in order to maintain an ‘academic ethos’. They do not provide vocational courses. This results in students being creamed off from other local school sixth forms and worse, their own pupils, who do not make the grade, told to find FE places elsewhere. Surely pro-comprehensive campaigners should be arguing for comprehensive post 16 provision too. A start would be joining the growing movement across the sector calling for the abolition of GCSEs. If successful, the practices outlined above would cease. The SEA manifesto argues for the abolition of GCSEs and for a single overarching qualification at 18 within which students should be able to pick vocational, technical and academic elements of equivalent value and switch institutions at 16.
The Tories have deliberately disrupted the idea of a quality local school for all children through its free schools and academies programme. This move has trumped the chipping away at comprehensive schools referred to in the first paragraph and has massively increased marketisation in the cities where there is an illusion of parental choice. Whilst centralised control over the curriculum, teaching and assessment has increased, the variety of schools competing to deliver the prescribed diet has expanded. This inevitably leads to hierarchies of schools particularly in cities. Nearly a third of pupils not getting their first choice in both London and Birmingham this year, shows this hierarchy is very much in play with some schools vastly oversubscribed at the expense of others. At the same time the design of MATS means schools in them are no longer accountable to local communities. Instead they are run by trusts like United Learning who run schools from Carlisle to Poole rolling out the same curriculum in them all. This was not what was meant by the original campaigners for comprehensive schools who sought to educate pupils from all classes in a community in the same schools. The SEA manifesto argues that all schools should return to local democratic oversight. We believe there was too much autonomy given to heads under the 1988 Act and that local authority control in the past was opaque. No mechanisms existed for teachers, parents and community stakeholders to have a say in the running of local schools. For local comprehensive schools to make a comeback democratic planning has to replace the rigged market the Tories have created.
The SEA manifesto also tackles the last hidden barrier to true comprehensive education: the segregating of disabled children and those with special needs. The manifesto calls on Labour to re-state its commitment to inclusion and to work towards the position where mainstream schools become the default providers of education for these children. Newham council has a strong record in this regard.
Selection throughout the system is deliberate. Right wing ideology insists that that there are hierarchies in everything. The rigged market ensures there is a hierarchy of schools in an area. Then there is the hierarchy of knowledge taught in schools where Gove decided on which subjects are worth studying both at GCSE (EBAC) and A level (facilitating subjects). The arts, social sciences, design technology and vocational subjects were either excluded or labelled second class. Within subjects for example in English a traditional white cultural perspective was imposed, and in History the struggles of the peoples who were subject to exploitation by our empire ignored. Pupils are often sorted into hierarchies within schools through setting and streaming. They are then made to sit examinations in the so-called higher forms of knowledge. If they do not do well they are diverted to vocational education which continues to be viewed as second rate. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly vocational courses are not always a positive choice for pupils. Finally, the ‘best’ are selected for our elite universities.
If implemented the SEA manifesto would drain away selection from the system and reinvigorate the comprehensive ideal with quality democratically-run inclusive local schools emerging, for all children.
James Whiting (SEA General Secretary)
Campaigning for Socialism: Memoirs of Max and Margaret Morris:
Published by AUSTIN MACAULEY PUBLISHERS
Sheila Dore, SEA NEC, reviews this fascinating book charting the rise of the NUT as a winning force, the campaign for comprehensive schools, the history of the SEA and the leadership of Max and Margaret Morris
This is a remarkable book, and it is difficult to do it justice in a brief review. It explores the life and work of two committed and dynamic socialists and provides insightful and illuminating commentary on the political events that were the backdrop to their various campaigns.
Underpinning the book is the contrast in style of the two contributors. The sections written by Max Morris are challenging, fact-driven and oratorial. While those written by Margaret Morris are gentle, intuitive, and full of historical detail but no less passionate and persuasive. At times the book is humorous.
A thread that runs throughout is their separate relationships initially with the Communist Party and later with the Labour Party. Max was refused a school headship on the grounds that he was a communist and Margaret Thatcher, then Secretary of State for Education, refused to go to his induction as President of the NUT in 1973, for the same reason. Margaret Morris left the Labour Party, as many did, over Iraq, but subsequently re-joined to campaign vigorously alongside Max for Labour in power at both local and national level.
I began teaching in 1972 when the influence of Max Morris was at its height. He \was a magnetic force. His powers of oratory were unsurpassed. He fought passionately for comprehensive education, for teachers’ salaries, for respect for the profession, for the rights of special needs pupils, for a broad and balanced curriculum and for parity of esteem for technical and academic education. Campaigns still so vital in education today.
I met Margaret in 2003 when I joined the SEA and she and Max were on the national executive. Margaret has a background in Housing and Higher Education. Margaret was active in the Hornsey Housing Association. She campaigned tirelessly against Rachmanism and for the provision of decent homes for all. The Association produced a set of radical proposals, the first of which was the target of 750 new homes a year in the Hornsey area, a decidedly modest target considering the housing crisis from which we are now suffering. In Education Margaret lectured at Queen Mary College, PCL and finally became principal lecturer and Director of Social Sciences and Admissions Tutor Her passionate commitment to widening participation, modular degrees and inclusion are powerfully explored in the book.
At times it reads like a Who’s Who of politics. Margaret met Khrushchev when she headed up a delegation to Russia of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. She also met Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, in the hairdressers. Max worked with Butler, Gaitskell, Wilson and John Smith and declared Margaret Thatcher the most ‘capable adversary we have seen in many years’. Jack Jones, the trade union leader once described as ‘the most powerful man in Britain’ was a personal friend.
Max was one of the founders of the comprehensive school movement. Within the NUT a number of members formed the National Association of Labour Teachers, the precursor to today’s Socialist Educational Association. He wrote a pamphlet, ‘The People’s Schools’ in 1939. After military service ended in 1945 he returned to teaching and to fighting for comprehensive education against the prevailing view that children could be divided up into different types and levels of ability, as set out in the 1944 Butler Education Act. Max continued to pour scorn on the system of ‘selection by clerical error’ as he called it but it wasn’t until 1965 that legislation was passed ‘by which time the case against the 11+ appeared irrefutable’.
The setting up of Willesden High School with Max Morris as Headteacher as the prototype for a truly comprehensive school is also a very inspiring chapter.
Each chapter is riveting in its own way but in the current climate the chapter ‘From strike leader to President of the NUT’ is the most exciting. Max Morris was responsible for dragging the NUT out of its polite lethargy onto the battlefield of industrial action. He railed against the mandarins of Whitehall and championed the classroom teacher. ‘It must be remembered that there had been no experience in the Union of strike action since 1924’. In 1969 dustmen had been offered 16%, airline pilots 15%, firemen 12%, miners 9%, teachers 3.5%. Max went into action. There was ‘a magnificent demonstration the Royal Albert Hall’. There were rallies and strikes all over the country. It was agreed that there would be a strike in the summer term which would affect exams. There was a national day of protest on March 3rd and 10,000 teachers marched on parliament. The government climbed down and the value of the award was £42 million. The cost of the action was £3 million. ‘Not bad business’, Max calculated. Max was jubilant that the teaching profession had stood up and been counted. There was no other way of driving home to the public, which backed the strikes, that the professional expertise of teachers needed to be valued
The book also has an international dimension. When Max was president of the NUT, they visited many different countries. Margaret recalls how when they were in Russia they were shown around ‘a neighbourhood comprehensive school’. The ‘neighbourhood’ was a housing estate for diplomats and high foreign officials. The children were being groomed for the foreign and diplomatic service. Margaret was singularly unimpressed and commented ‘unselective my foot’.
On a personal level Margaret tells of her early years. She was born in 1930 and enjoyed a happy life until 1939 when war was declared. She was then ‘whisked away from home to live in the countryside’. When her period of evacuation ended she asked her father how he was going to vote in the 1945 election. His reply, ‘Labour, of course’ was her first introduction to politics. She also speaks of her struggles with tuberculosis, Max’s Jewish background and childhood poverty, their marriage, adoption of Georgina their daughter, their pride in their grandchildren, and the sad death of Max at their beloved home in Menton, France. These chapters, interwoven with the powerful political content of the book provide the reader with a rounded, humane and sensitive understanding of their life together.
Credit must go to Margaret for the collation and illumination of chapters written by Max. She is an established historian in her own right having written the book ‘The General Strike’ which Professor Peter Hennessey described as ‘one of the best books on the subject ever written.’
Sheila Dore