style="font-size:15px;"> World War II was an important turning point, as it confirmed concerns that Britain was producing an under-educated workforce unable to hold its own in wider markets. Many schools had been closed in preparation for evacuation, but one million children were not in fact sent away, causing scenes of delinquency and chaos as they roamed the streets. Ministers were criticised for their ignorance: ‘they did not know what had happened to state education because they educated their own children elsewhere.’ Even senior officials at the Board of Education admitted that full-time schooling for most of the country’s children was in many ways ‘seriously defective’, and that for 90 per cent of them, it ended too soon. ‘It is conducted in many cases in premises which are scandalously bad.’4
The 1944 Act, then, embraced two vitally important principles: free secondary education for all (some state schools had charged fees prior to the war), and a clear distinction, and path, between primary and secondary schools. A young Tory reformer, Quintin Hogg—later Lord Hailsham—thought the Act ‘an elementary piece of social justice’. Soon, however, it was clear that in many ways it reproduced the fragmented legacy of the earlier period.
Firstly, it wholly failed to address the problem of the private sector, which at that point was severely weakened both morally and financially, making it ripe for reform and possible incorporation into a new universal state system. But no action was taken to deal with the public schools, as we shall see in Chapter 6. Secondly, Rab Butler—appointed by Churchill to consider and draw up plans for education reform, despite his initial reluctance—and his junior minister, Chuter Ede, came under huge pressure from the Anglican and Catholic churches to retain their religious influence and involvement in the school system. At that time the churches ran half the schools in the UK. Although by the mid twentieth century England had become a less religious society, the idea still prevailed that this was a ‘Christian country’ and many thought that Christianity would temper a ‘peculiarly democratic bill’.5 A compromise was found in the conversion of church schools into two main types: ‘controlled’ or ‘aided’. In the case of controlled schools, the state would take over their costs, appoint staff and governors, etc., but the schools would follow an agreed religious syllabus. Voluntary-aided schools retained more independence and power. The state paid for their running costs, but the Church kept buildings under its control, with help from a government grant, and continued to appoint staff and governors. The third problem with the 1944 Act was its fatal flaw: the enabling of a pernicious three-tiered school system, based on the idea that children had very different talents and aptitudes and should therefore be educated separately. Both the 1938 Spens Report and the 1943 White Paper had considered the idea of multilateral education. In fact, the latter had explicitly declared: ‘There is nothing to be said in favour of a system which subjects children at the age of eleven to the strain of a competitive examination in which not only their future schooling but their future career may depend.’6 Butler himself was not hostile to the idea that all children should be educated in the same schools. But the 1944 Act was heavily influenced by what Caroline Benn and Brian Simon called the ‘wordy circumlocutions’ of Sir Cyril Norwood, the chair of the 1943 committee and a strong supporter of grammar schools—and, therefore, of the idea of selection. While the Act itself, permissive but not prescriptive, did not set down how schools should be organised, Norwood called upon a ‘general educational experience’ to support his recommendations that different types of children should be educated in different types of school.
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.
