feel that their minds and spirits were involved with the music.’15
More widely, challenges were beginning to emerge to the insidious eleven-plus divide. Education researchers Brian Jackson and Olive Banks revealed the sham of claims by grammar-school supporters that there was ‘parity of esteem’ between the grammars and secondary moderns. Jackson’s work forensically analysed how children were sorted into different streams, along class lines, early in primary school. Teachers were already deciding who was potential grammar-school material. As one teacher told Jackson, ‘In the training of racehorses and athletes, we are most careful to cream and train; why not with children?’ This same teacher held that ‘streaming gives middle-class children the chance their parents had in private or prep schools, now that state schools are more widely used’, an argument that has echoed down the years.16 Jackson’s research also examined in detail how different social groups fared within the grammar system. Very often, upper-working-class and lower-middle-class children languished in these schools and left as soon as they could, while upper-middle-class children prospered.17
According to Ross McKibbin, the working class lost out to the middle class in the competition for grammar-school places, which tended to go ‘to the sons and daughters of professional business men/women’.18 Those working-class children that did win places often left school much earlier, and didn’t progress to further education. Grammar-school life often disrupted family routines: a new ‘posh’ accent and uniform was ridiculed at home; it was hard to do homework. For some, says McKibbin, ‘The deliberate adherence to a local accent often meant wholesale rejection of the grammar school and its values; cultivation of BBC English represented an acceptance of those values and preceded a sometimes heartfelt adieu to class and neighbourhood.’19
A series of official reports, published in the late 1950s and early 60s, built up a powerful argument against selection. In a 1957 report, the British Psychological Society criticised intelligence testing and streaming; in the same year the NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research) came out against selection. It argued that the eleven-plus contained serious errors, a claim backed up by the increasing numbers of children who were achieving academically in some of the secondary moderns. The 1959 Crowther Report on education of fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds argued that ‘it is not only at the top but almost to the bottom of the pyramid that the scientific revolution of our times needs to be reflected in a longer educational process.’20 Four years later the Robbins Report on higher education concurred, rejecting the idea that only a select number of children had talent worth cultivating; the Newsom Report of the same year, looking at the education of children of ‘average’ intelligence, was bold enough to declare that ‘intellectual talent is not a fixed quantity with which we have to work, but a variable that can be modified by social policy and educational approaches … The kind of intelligence which is measured by the test so far applied is largely an acquired characteristic.’21 Even Rhodes Boyson, Tory, headmaster, and champion of the grammars, later acknowledged that the eleven-plus ‘makes considerable mistakes’.22
In the end, though, it was parental opposition that politically defeated selection. Particularly vocal were protests from middle-class families who found their children rejected by the grammars. The NFER report of 1957 claimed that ‘politicians [were] beginning to find that to defend selection was a sure means of losing support.’ Simon Jenkins recalls:
At political meetings at the end of the 1960s, the then education spokesman, Edward Boyle, was torn limb from limb by Conservative voters infuriated at their children who had ‘failed’ the eleven-plus being sent to secondary moderns, along with 70–80 per cent of each age group. They had regarded the grammars as ‘their schools’. The eleven-plus, they said, lost them the 1964 election and would lose them every one until it was abolished. Margaret Thatcher recognised this as education secretary after 1970, as has the Tory party in practice ever since.23
The grammar/secondary modern divide may have defined the post-war education settlement, but there were signs of change from early on. Britain’s first purpose-built comprehensive, in Anglesey, opened in 1949 although it owed its existence to practicality rather than politics; it was simply impossible to sustain a two- or three-tier structure in an outlying rural area. While, according to Benn and Simon, the Tory government in power from 1951 to 1964 never said anything positive about comprehensives, it was prepared to sanction such schools in poor or outlying areas—but not in more affluent areas, where a comprehensive might detract from the status of a grammar school. Some local authorities, such as Coventry and London, pioneered the introduction of comprehensive schools, and, as popular disillusion with the selective system grew, evidence of their success was beginning to filter through.
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