THEMES DISCUSSED
THE GLARING INADEQUACIES AND NONSENSES OF THE 11-PLUS AND THE SCHOOL CERTIFICATE
| PAGE NO. IN KINDLE EDITION | QUOTABLE QUOTE | COMMENT |
| 27 | “Even today, half a century after it was generally abandoned, there are still many people who view the days of widespread selective education in this country as a golden age.” | SAD BUT TRUE! There wasn’t, isn’t, and never will be, a “golden age” in education because such an age is dependent on human beings, who are fallible. The nearest you get to a golden age in education in East London, for instance, is the 2020s. |
| 38 | “There was a good deal more to success or failure in the 11-plus than meets the eye.” | YOU BET! It was often interpreted as a sign that you’d let your parents down. This caused divisions and even complete emotional break-ups within families and lifelong trauma for those affected. |
| TBA | “The 11-plus loomed like a shadow over primary school kids.” | JUST A BIT! Didn’t I just know it! |
| TBA | “The 11-plus still casts an exceedingly long shadow.” | Old dogmas die extremely hard deaths, particularly in the field of education. |
| TBA | “Scholarship day” was seen by many parents as the most important day of their children’s lives” | DEAR GOD! Did these parents really know what mattered? Their attitude seems to have been based on the idea that life was predictable. It wasn’t even back in the day. It sure as hell isn’t in the 2020s! |
| 127 | “The problem with boys is that they can be really awful; cruel and violent, especially when they are going through puberty. Having girls around somewhat moderates their behaviour; they don’t want to attract the disapproval of girls.” | AND I AM UNANIMOUS IN THAT!! And they don’t get any better when they become men. Even Dr Mark Fenton, immediately past head teacher of Dr Challoner’s, admits that in his book DR CHALLONER’S GRAMMAR SCHOOL ; THE FIRST 400 YEARS. He talks about some 1970s Chaloner’s teachers as being “the sort that you’d be better not to cross.” The 11-plus never tested a boy’s inclination to be cruel (or not). But parents assumed that it did. On the basis that assumptions make an ASS out of U and ME, that assumption has a high asininity factor. |
The 11-plus was never designed to be a mark of success or failure, but parents saw it as such. Politicians did little to correct this woefully misguided view.
The 11-plus was claimed to be both coach-proof and cheat-proof. In reality, it was neither. Parents who had friends who were teachers got their friends to coach their sons for the 11-plus. One such friend, in the teaching profession, got hold of past papers. This tipped the playing field in favour of the middle-classes, who were more likely to mix with professionals such as teachers.
(BY DAVID LAWES : This is still the case, all exacerbated by the growth of providers of 11-plus tuition, whose services are generally not affordable to the working classes. In 2013 Bucks County Council, one of few remaining practitioners of 11-plus selection realised this and toughened the 11-plus).
The 11-plus failures were generally those whose parents didn’t have either money or influence.
The original 11-plus had challenging maths questions.
(BY DAVID LAWES ; The 11-plus that I sat in Bucks in 1971 most certainly didn’t. All it had was verbal reasoning questions. Obviously between the 1940s and the 1970s the 11-plus was watered down, thus turning grammar schools into semi-comprehensives).
There was little movement between grammar and secondary modern schools post-11-plus but such movement as occurred was more common from secondary moderns to grammars than the other way around.
(BY DAVID LAWES : This is not at all surprising and reflects my own experience with Dr Challoner’s in the 1970s. I can recall only one boy transferring to a secondary modern, but lots of ex-secondary modern boys transferred to Dr Challoner’s. Some were very much grammar school material ; the fact that they failed the 11-plus speaks more about the inadequacy of the test than of their ability. One won a prize for overall achievement within 6 months of starting at Dr Challoner’s, having transferred from the now defunct Cestreham (secondary modern) school. But others were clearly not grammar school material and were sent to Dr Challoner’s just to prove that it was popular and over-subscribed, at a time when its existence was threatened (“under siege” as Dr Fenton puts it).
Despite failing the 11-plus, many secondary modern pupils who later transferred to grammar schools did better at GCE exams than did many of those who’d started at grammar schools.
(BY DAVID LAWES : I saw this happen at Dr Challoner’s with one or two boys. But the 11-plus in Bucks in the 1970s tested only verbal reasoning, not maths or physics, and it was in these subjects at which the secondary modern-grammar school transferees tended to do best.)
In grammar schools, it was quite common for A-streamers to be groomed for high achievement, whilst the B-streamers were left to coast. This proved disastrous for the grammar school B-streamers. Many ended up getting a few GCE O levels. Some did less well than their secondary modern counterparts. Because they’d been to a grammar school and had been only moderately successful when brilliant success was expected, the grammar school B streamers were assumed to have something wrong with them. They were wrongly typecast by employers as lazy or thick. Their employment prospects were worse than for those who had been to a secondary modern school and got at least 5 O levels.
(BY DAVID LAWES : I went to a grammar school and failed O level maths. Even after I passed it at age 22 after taking a correspondence course, my initial failure appeared to count more than my later success. I asked a careers adviser why this mattered and was told that I was very naïve in thinking that it wouldn’t matter! I’m surprised I ever worked a day in my life).
You normally took 6 subjects for the school certificate (the past equivalent of GCSEs). If you failed one of them, you had to take the whole lot again. But it was considered by many better to pass all 6 School Certificate subjects at one sitting than to get 6 separate GCE O levels.
(BY DAVID LAWES : And this was considered a fit-for-purpose system?)
GRAMMAR SCHOOLS AND SOCIAL SNOBBERY
When grammar schools became entirely free (many had previously been fee-paying, prior to the Education Act, 1944), many wealthy parents took their children out of them and sent them to private schools They didn’t want them mixing with the sons of roadsweepers. Grammar schools, prior to the 1944 Act, were a kind of cheaper private school.
Secondary modern school pupils were often typecast as delinquent and ill-mannered. In fact, most of the opposition to comprehensive schools came from parents worried about their children mixing with ex-secondary modern pupils, not about academic standards. When a new comprehensive, Woodberry Down, opened in Hackney in the 1960s, one pupil reported that his parents had told him, “There’s no telling what awful habits you’ll pick up at that place.”)
(BY DAVID LAWES : This was self-evidently the case at Dr Challoner’s during the 1970s, but the stereotypes of secondary modern and comprehensive school pupils bore a remarkable resemblance to the grammar school pupils with whom I had no choice but to be in the 1970s! And some teachers were viscerally opposed to comprehensive schools, one of them terming them, “Those other establishments.”
Comprehensive schools had subject-specific streaming.
(BY DAVID LAWES : This fact is often overlooked. By any objective standard it’s a more effective form of selection than was the 11-plus. But as explained earlier, the main opposition to comprehensives was everything to do with social factors, and very little to do with academic ones, but this was under-played at the time. It was blindingly obvious to me as a 14-year-old Challoner in 1974!)
THE EFFECT OF THE 11-PLUS ON FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
If one member of the family passed the 11-plus and his brother (it was usually boys) didn’t, ill-feeling could be generated and could last years.
There was a social cachet at getting your children to a grammar school. It was therefore more often the parents who were distraught at their children failing the 11-plus than it was the children themselves. Parents made their own children feel like let-downs if they failed the 11-plus. It tore families apart and led to spiritual divorces between parents and children.
MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT THE GRAMMAR/SECONDARY MODERN SCHOOLS SYSTEM
Post-1945 there was a very deeply ingrained perception that a child’s entire future was set in stone by the type of school that he/she attended.
(BY DAVID LAWES : An utterly naïve philosophy even in the relatively stable post-War years. Life was never that predictable.
Contrary to popular belief, the chief beneficiaries of grammar schools were not working-class boys. Far more middle class boys benefitted, thanks to the often disproportionate influence of their parents. In fact, half of 1950s children in grammar schools were from the middle classes, an over-representation at the time. Here’s why;
Grammar schools demanded uniforms. Many secondary moderns didn’t. Working-class families often couldn’t afford to buy school uniforms.
Grammar schools were geared to those who “stayed on” after the school leaving age. Working-class families needed their children out at work as soon as possible to bring a wage into the house. Staying on was therefore not an option for many.
Grammar schools were seen by many parents and politicians (more by those in the Labour party than in the Conservative party) as “engines of social mobility.” You heard ex-pupils say, “If I hadn’t passed the 11-plus I’d have become a butcher’s boy.” Success and failure were viewed in very predictable black-and-white terms in those days.
BY DAVID LAWES ; There never were such things as “engines of social mobility.” Nor will there ever be. Social mobility is so dependent on external factors that no single factor could ever be the deciding one. Obviously both political parties must have recognised this. The Labour party may have forced the issue between 1974 and 1979 but the Conservative party did far less to stop it than it could have done. Even Margearet Thatcher admitted that when she was education minister, she found comprehensive education “difficult, if not impossible, to stop.” I passed the 11-pluls and went to a grammar school. I didn’t pass O level maths whilst there and couldn’t have hoped to have done thanks to Discovery teaching methods and incompetent teachers (although I took it later by correspondence course and passed with Grade B). I ended up on anti-depressants some years later. Both these developments crucified my life chances and made me worse off than the average secondary modern school pupil who’d left at 16 with a few GCEs. The only social mobility that I experienced was a downward trajectory although I’ll concede that this was not due entirely to my tragic grammar school experience. We hear far too little from those grammar school pupils for whom the experience wasn’t a rip-roaring success. Even today they are sworn to an oath of silence.
PUPIL HUMILIATION
This was endemic in the state education system in the post-war years.
11-plus results were announced to everyone in assembly via the head teacher. Those who had failed were “named and shamed.”
If you forgot your PE kit, you were required to run round the playing field stripped to vest and pants. It was usually ex-military PT instructors who inflicted these draconian punishments. A lifelong hatred of any physical sport was often the result of being taught by such brutes.
Grammar school boys were routinely “roughed up” by those in secondary moderns.
You had to ask the teacher for toilet paper when you needed to be excused. The paper was unabsorbant.
ARCHAIC TRADITIONS
Slates were being used as late as the 1950s. There wasn’t the money for exercise books.
Dip pens were used right up to the 1960s. They were extremely messy. You really had to write very carefully with them. They weren’t even remotely efficient.
(BY DAVID LAWES : They had them at Park Lane Primary School Reading, when I was there in the late 1960s)
Ball-point pens were frequently banned in grammar schools as late as the 1970s. It was thought that snobbery was at the root of this.
(BY DAVID LAWES : This was the case at Dr Challoner’s in that era although, fortunately, it was poorly enforced. Only a minority of the teachers at that time used fountain pens!)
A lot of time was spent in grammar schools teaching Latin pronunciation because Latin was a major part of the private school curriculum and the grammar schools saw themselves as state-run private schools. But even in private schools, boys had started to doubt the value of Latin as early as the 1940s. Some ex-secondary modern pupils say that their education was more geared to the real world than that which they would have received in a grammar school.
(BY DAVID LAWES : How much relevance did Latin and Greek bear to the real world?)
To a much greater extent than is the case in the 2020s, state schools, more especially grammar schools, were left to their own devices. Schools and individual teachers could teach what they liked. Grammar schools in particular prized this freedom. Many teachers in both types of school didn’t have a clue about what they were teaching.
(BY DAVID LAWES : This was a policy failure on an epic scale and damaged the life chances of millions! The UK had a funny perception of risk in those day. They saw the alleged benefits of a laissez-faire education policy (e.g. less danger of political manipulation) as being far grater than the very real risks (i.e. your life chances being dependent on where you happened to live at the time you became of school age).
SEXUAL SEGREGATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS
Was very much in vogue from the end of WW2 to at least the early 1960s
(BY DAVID LAWES : And in many grammar schools, still is in the 2020s, although that’s changing, e.g. Dr Challoner’s, very aggressively segregated in the 1970s, admitting girls to the 6th form since 2016).
The main fear of parents and teachers about co-educational secondary schools was that mixing of the sexes would inevitably lead to girls getting pregnant.
(BY DAVID LAWES: The fact that, as Simon rightly points out, it would lead to moderation of the potentially awful behaviour of pubescent boys, was not considered sufficient compensation for the perceived risk of girls getting pregnant. This was extremely poor thinking and demonstrates that advocates of single-sex schools were completely out of touch with reality. They really didn’t appreciate how tough the unmoderated pubescent boy could be. I soon found out how tough unmoderated boys could be at 1970s Challoner’s – and were encouraged to be by bullying teachers!)
Co-educational schools were considered to be potential disaster areas for intelligent girls
(BY DAVID LAWES : What an insulting misogynistic view, very much of its time! The implication is that girls are easily distracted. A sweeping judgement if ever there was one.
You could go from age 7 to age 15 without meeting someone of the opposite sex.
(BY DAVID LAWES : This was a phenomenon of its time and considered to be of no consequence, presumably because of the prevailing view that a woman’s place was in the home. If you suffered psychologically from this kind of segregation, it was condescendingly assumed that something was wrong with you!)
It was normal for boys to carry penknives when at school
(BY DAVID LAWES : It’s a truly appalling indictment of the UK education system that this was ever allowed. Any form of knife, even a penknife, can kill! And it happened in the grammar schools too. I was stabbed by such a knife in October 1974 at Dr Challoner’s. Boys would have been less inclined to carry penknives if girls had been around. All knives should be banned in all schools, by law. If a knife is brought into a school, the offender should be expelled immediately and the police should be called.)
DAVID LAWES 