that feeling. Even today, 48 years later, she refers to me as ‘the clever one’ and to herself as the ‘thick’ one. It was not true, of course, but the education system reinforced a sense of worthlessness from then on.
I completely squandered my grammar-school education, and took ages to settle into any job until my mid-twenties. She left school at fifteen and has worked ever since. Her education in fact wasn’t bad—and I am not sure which of us came off worse. The experience made my father ensure that my little sister went to a comprehensive, which were just being introduced. She really enjoyed school and it being co-ed meant she ‘got on with boys—as friends’ much better than her three older sisters. [Source: private communication.]
All of which meant that, as before the war, the twin threads of class anxiety and class ambition were woven right through the school organisation. According to the journalist Peter Laurie, ‘To have been consigned to the limbo of secondary modern is to have failed disastrously … and very early in life.’10 For middle-class parents, a grammar-school place was often a make or break matter: failure was not an option for children sitting the eleven-plus exam. But while to figures like Edward Heath and Alan Bennett the grammar schools were comparatively easy to get into, and offered a chance to compete with the privately educated elite at Oxbridge and other top universities, the genuinely poor had barely a chance of passing the eleven-plus. In the district of St Anne’s in Nottingham, for example, only 1.5 per cent of the district’s entire school population attended grammars; in neighbouring middle-class suburbs, 60 per cent of children did. There were wide regional variations too. Only 10 per cent of children in Gateshead and Sunderland were educated in grammars, compared to 40 per cent in the affluent county of Westmoreland.
More generally, the education system retained its hierarchical and differentiated character. In fact, there were five or six levels to the post-war set-up: the public schools; the direct grant grammars, which offered some free places; the grammars; the technical/trade schools; the secondary moderns; and the all-age elementary schools, pre-war relics that took twenty years to disappear. The complete lack of a national curriculum meant that teaching in many of the less resourced schools could still be of a poor or patchy standard. In many church schools, the curriculum was left entirely up to the discretion of the head teacher.
During this period, a lot of school buildings were in bad repair and the raising of the leaving age meant that many teachers faced ‘huge classes, in crumbling, sometimes dangerous buildings’.11 Whether in the grammars or in the secondary moderns, there were often low expectations of poor children. Discipline could be barbaric and there was little pastoral care or careers guidance, such as is common today. While the teaching in most schools was satisfactory, the percentage of poor teaching, in all sectors, was much higher than today. The curriculum was far narrower, opportunities for girls were very limited, maths teaching was often mediocre and there were vast tracts of uninspired, rote learning. Inspectors of the period had serious concerns about the quality of teaching of English, while a case study of science teaching in the post-war period in Swansea found it ‘unsatisfactory in all the town’s secondary moderns’. It was not just the secondary moderns; many grammar schools conducted ‘dull and arid’ lessons too.12 Low standards were a widespread problem. According to the 1959 Crowther Report, on the education of fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds, 38 per cent of grammar-school pupils failed to achieve more than three passes at O level: so that of the entire cohort of sixteen-year-olds nationwide, only about 9 per cent achieved five or more O levels. In his careful study of exam papers of the period, Adrian Elliott has unearthed numerous examples of unchallenging English papers and examples of basic miscomprehension of questions in maths, evidence which successfully challenges the claims made so frequently today that the increase in the number of exam passes is solely the result of ‘dumbing down’. In 1961 the Ministry of Education even raised concerns about the deficiencies in general education of Oxbridge candidates.
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,
