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CHAPTER 36
Changing Patterns in Organisation
593. In Chapter 2 we looked at the pattern of secondary education as it is today and at some of the new forms of school organisation that are beginning to appear. From the point of view of our terms of reference the most striking fact that emerged was, perhaps, that it is a system in which the centre of gravity is so much more than half-way down. There are so many more pupils under 15 than between 15 and 18 that they are bound to dominate the present structure. The essence of our enquiry has been to discover how rapidly this situation is changing, and to suggest means by which it can be made to change more rapidly. While it is clear that the educational system as a whole must be logically planned from the bottom up, there is need also to look at it from the top downwards. Is it constructed in such a way that it is likely to attract many more young people to stay longer in full-time education? Or do we need as fresh an experimental approach to the institutions which set out to cater for the older teen-agers as we already have to the schools which receive them at 11 ?
A FOUR-FOLD EXPANSION
594. The nation is committed to the task of providing some education for all up to the age of 18, and full-time education for all up to 16. The proportion of boys and girls who will continue full-time education between 16 and 18 is an open question not settled by legislation. How many should they be? At present only 12 per cent of the 17 year-old age-group (taking this as the middle of the range) get full-time education; we think that by 1980 half should. But, if anything like this is to be achieved, it will be necessary to make a great deal of progress in persuading more young people to prolong their education not only in grammar schools but in other types of schools. Sixth Forms have been growing at the rate of roughly 6 per cent per annum for a number of years and now attract nearly half those in the forms below. All the evidence suggests that they have not yet reached their natural limit of growth - there are still many boys and girls capable of following with profit a normal academic Advanced level course who do not get, or do not take, the chance. Some of them are already in schools with Sixth Forms - for them it is a matter of persuasion; some of them are not - for them it is a matter not only of persuasion, but also of provision.
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595. But the hardest, and the most exciting, part of the task ahead lies with those who would benefit by full-time education to the end of the year in which they reach 18 but who are not academically minded. Some of them are in grammar schools; more are not. If our target of half the age-group is to be reached by 1980 we shall need to retain in full-time education up to 18 (including sandwich courses) not merely virtually all those who go to selective schools (including those who now leave at 16) but about one-third of those who at present go to non-selective schools. It is with these that we start very nearly from the beginning. There are full-time courses and sandwich courses for young people up to 18 in technical colleges,* but apart from sandwich courses, of which there are very few, much of the full-time work is on the same lines as in grammar schools and often serves little purpose beyond that of retrieving a previous examination omission or failure. There is virtually no provision beyond 16 in modern schools. In this situation, there is not, and could not be, in any section of the community a tradition of full-time education to 18 of a more practical nature for the non-academically minded. When a boy or girl reaches 15, every family has to make up its mind between employment and education, or a combination of the two. There are usually many forms of employment, but there may often be only one form of full-time education effectively open to a 16 year-old boy or girl. It may be, for instance, that there is in his neighbourhood (as far as he knows) only one place, the local grammar school, where there is any full-time education after 15 or 16 and only an academic Sixth Form course available there. If he attends some other school, or is clearly not an academically minded person, the family therefore concludes that the choice between education and employment is really Hobson's choice. The boy looks for a job. Effectively his choice lies at best between a job with day release and one without. Of course, the actual educational possibilities may be a good deal wider and better than a family realises, but boys and girls cannot choose something they have never heard of, and are hardly likely to choose something of which they are only dimly conscious. Unless the educational provision for boys and girls of 16 and 17 is both varied in its nature and well-known, the choice between education and employment, though theoretically open to all, will in practice be limited to those who went to certain sorts of school at 11 and who liked the subjects taught there.
596. The increase in numbers has to be achieved by persuasion without compulsion. This makes the task more difficult, but also more stimulating. The form of the institutions available and the kind of education they can offer will have a decisive influence on success. There is certainly nothing impossible in the target we have suggested.
*As well, of course, as the provision for older students.
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Other countries have achieved as much in about the same time. In the United States, for instance, the legal compulsion to attend school (which usually begins a year later than in this country) ends in most states on the 16th birthday, but two-thirds of the boys and girls are in fact at school eighteen months later. Roughly speaking, the stage of the journey that lies immediately ahead of us was accomplished in America in the twenty years between 1920 and 1940, during which the proportion of 17 year-olds who stayed at school and successfully completed the high school course rose from 17 per cent to 51 per cent.
597. Why is it worth while making the effort? There seem to us to be three main reasons. One is the country's need to make the fullest use of the native supply of talent of all kinds. Nobody seriously doubts that we must complete the Sixth Forms of the future by bringing into them all those who can profit from a full academic course. We can call them the old Sixth Formers for short. But the need does not stop there. We saw in Part Six how great is the deficiency of intelligent, educated technicians and their equivalent grades in commerce and business and how many defects there are in the present part-time methods of producing them. There is plenty of scope for sound and solid education of a different kind from the customary Sixth Form courses, if boys and girls can be persuaded to go on with their full-time studies. It is just this practical kind of work which is likely to persuade them to stay. We can call them for short the new Sixth Formers. There is, we believe, a sufficiently close approximation between what they want to do and what the country needs.
598. Another reason for seeking a four-fold increase in the number of young people continuing full-time education up to the age of 18 is to give a larger number of boys and girls a sound and healthy environment in which to grow up, where they will be in daily contact with sympathetic and enlightened adults who have a care and responsibility for their upbringing. We have no doubt that those who are willing to remain longer in full-time education benefit from it immensely as people: they develop internal resources which will make them, when the time comes, much better citizens and parents.
599. The third purpose is allied to the second: it is the need to secure that society itself is healthy. The social purpose of education is to see that boys and girls from every sort of social background, going to many different kinds and levels of jobs, learn to like and respect and be at ease with one another irrespective of class or race or creed. This is something that can be helped or hindered by the way we plan the upper stages of education. Personality changes so much in these later teen-age years that it is important to see that as many
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people as possible have experience of living in a mixed society at this age as well as when they are younger. Good conditions for it are more easily found in education than at work.
600. It is, then, in the national interest that many more young people of 16 to 18 should receive full-time education. How can we persuade them to do so? At least two conditions have to be satisfied, One concerns what is taught; the other, the society in which they learn. A teen-ager will leave school unless he is satisfied that he is learning something worth knowing, which interests him and which will be useful to him. He is also not likely to stay at school, if he can help it, unless the conditions of life there are congenial to him. The two conditions are fairly closely related to one another, but they are certainly not identical. Both require a considerable amount of variety in the education that is provided. What interests one is dull to another; what one can do defeats another; the kind of life that one enjoys is distasteful to another. We certainly do not suggest that the 16 or 17 year-old should have everything his own momentary way - a degree of discipline in work and of conformity with regulations made for the general good is normally acceptable, and is certainly an essential part of education. But we believe that unless school (or its equivalent) can meet him over the way in which it provides what he needs, it will not have the opportunity of providing him with anything at all.
601. There is no sudden or magical change in educational needs that occurs when the compulsory school attendance age is passed. All that is different is the pupil's legal status - he and his parents are now able to give effect to what they already feel. If their reasons for deciding on longer full-time education go beyond a simple yielding to the pressure of social custom, it will be more because they are satisfied with what they have already had than because of anything they are promised for the future. In fact, once the school-leaving age is raised to 16, the last year or two of compulsory school life will in some ways have more in common educationally with what comes after than with the first two years at the secondary school. We have drawn attention to the earlier physical maturity of boys and girls, and to those other powerful forces which produce earlier social development. The near approach of the time when they can leave school and earn their living gives both the possibility of a new interest in school work and also a touchstone by which in any event it will be judged. Workaday relevance becomes for the first time a criterion consciously applied by pupils. It is most unlikely that many of those who at 14 find school lessons pointless and school life restrictive will extend their period of full-time education. It follows that the competition between education and employment starts, and
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the issue is often decided, well before there is any actual possibility of taking a job. In planning the pattern of educational provision above the minimum school-leaving age, it is important not to forget the needs of boys and girls aged 14 to 16.
PATTERNS OF ORGANISATION
602. The institutions that boys and girls attend for full-time education between the ages of 16 and 18 are organised in a good many different ways, although they may be teaching essentially the same things. We pick out for discussion four ways in which the different environment they provide may have a significant bearing on their power to attract and retain different groups of young people. One general point may, perhaps, be made first, which would indeed be trivial if it were not often felt to be important by teen-agers. It is the question of names. A 17 year-old boy may attend a school or a college - the former may sound childish to him, the latter a trifle high falutin' to us. A 17 year-old girl may be known officially by her Christian name or as Miss Smith or Miss Jones. Schools have pupils; colleges have students. Does it matter? To some, clearly, these distinctions are important. For the sake of simplicity we refer in this chapter to schools and pupils (without prejudging the issue) except where in a particular context we are clearly referring only to a technical college and its students, and we use the phrase "a 17 year-old" as a short way of describing a boy or girl who is over compulsory school-age but under 18.
603. The first of the points of organisation is the age-range. This can be 11 to 15 or 16; 11 to 18; 13 or 14 to 18; 16 to 18 and beyond. The characteristic pattern of grammar, technical and comprehensive schools is from 11 to 18. Most of the independent boys' public schools have an age-range from 13 or 14 to 18, and this is the pattern adopted for the Leicestershire experimental grammar schools which are open to all who at 14 promise to undertake at least a two-year course in them. Technical colleges and a number of private colleges of various types start at 15 or 16. Modern schools (and they are two-thirds of all secondary schools) cater for pupils from 11 to 15 or 16. For the overwhelming majority of modern school pupils the only way beyond 16 in full-time education is by moving elsewhere. Schools with an 11 to 18 age-range involve nearly twice as long in the same institution as in any other stage of the educational system (unless the infants and the juniors are run together, as is now uncommon). The presence of quite young boys and girls involves a paternalism in discipline which often spreads upwards to those who do not need it. Schools with a wide age-range, covering very different stages of growth, need to make a conscious effort to see that each
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stage gets its appropriate environment. It can be done, and where it is, pupils who persevere find satisfaction and valuable experience in the responsibilities which come to them. As they come up the school, they live very much in the present with their contemporaries; but, when they reach the top, they are brought into contact with the whole age-range of pupils and they meet the staff on a new footing. They have to learn how to get on with boys and girls of all ages and how to get the best out of them; and in the process they get a valuable insight into the development of character and personality. Schools with the restricted age-range of 13 or 14 to 18 recruit at an age when boys and girls are still young enough to need a paternalistic discipline but it brings them into a society whose centre of gravity is at a much higher age than in the ordinary secondary school type. The shorter span of school life or, to put it another way, a second wind at a time when personality changes rapidly and boredom often sets in, may make such a school an acceptable place up to 18 for some who would never complete that long seven-year journey from 11. A fresh start at 16 in a technical college or some similar quasi-adult institution has a strong appeal to those who are anxious to get on to the next stage or to demonstrate, as much to themselves as to others, that they have outgrown childish things. For them, the custom of being treated as all adult in the conventions of speech and administration may be the best way of eliciting genuinely mature behaviour in place of the rebelliousness which so easily springs up in resentment at any fancied affront to their still insecure sense of adult dignity.
604. Almost as important as the age-range of the society to which a boy or girl belongs is its size, the second of our four points of organisation. There are certainly some who can flourish easily in either a big or a small school; there are others who find a stimulus in the larger society, with its wider choice of opportunities, which they would never have got from a small community. There are others who need the intimate close-knit unity of a small school where everybody must play as many parts as he can manage. There is no reason to suppose that the size of school which is right for a boy at the age of 12 is right for the very different person that he will be at 17 (though of course it may be). Indeed only a large school may be able to provide the variety of courses that older boys and girls need. With many individual exceptions, it is probably true to say that the older the pupil, the larger the school can be.
605. The third of our aspects of organisation is the choice between a single sex or a co-educational school. This is a matter on which parents and public opinion differ about what is desirable, as much as pupils do in what they prefer. Nor is there any stability in their attitudes. What is right for a boy at 12, and what he wants then,
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may be quite wrong at 16 or 17. But, as with the size of school, so with the type of organisation - where he goes at 11 normally determines where he will be at 17 if he is still at school. Roughly half the modern schools, and well over half the comprehensive schools, are co-educational; but two-thirds of the maintained grammar schools and nine-tenths of independent and direct grant grammar schools are single sex.
606. The fourth way in which different forms of organisation provide differences in environment is the contrast between the self-contained world of the school and the semi-detached world of the technical college. Is there room for part-timers as well as full-timers in the same institution? The overwhelming majority of boys and girls who are receiving full-time education at 17 are in schools where there are no part-timers. Those who go to technical colleges, however, form part of a mixed community. The contact with the world in which they are going to spend their working lives is much closer. Some will happily continue in full-time education in this way who would have been restless and dissatisfied at school. Others may find it disturbing. There is another consideration. We normally think of full-time education as a continuous process which goes unbrokenly on until it is finally given up. And so it is in most cases. But adolescence is at best an unsettled time and mistakes are bound to be made. Few boys and girls who have gone out to work are likely cheerfully to return to school, although they may before long agree that they made a mistake in leaving. They can, however, easily return to full-time education in a technical college, and a good many do so. No difficult change of status is involved. They have taken the decisive step in leaving school and moving into the adult world, and nobody is going to ask them to reverse it.
ORGANISATION AND THE NATURE OF THE CURRICULUM
607. The possibility of leaving school at 15 raises the question of the desirability of staying on. What is the purpose to be served? This is a question that all families must face and, to some extent at least, the answer must be given in terms of the kind of life that the boy or girl is planning to lead. Translated into educational terms, it involves a decision about curriculum. There is the possibility of an academic course either on the science or the arts side on the lines we discussed in Chapter 25 or of a cognate but intellectually less exacting nature described in Chapter 27. There is also the possibility of a course, which again could be either at a high or an intermediate level, following the practical approach we were concerned with in Chapter 35. Where are these various kinds of course best provided? How are pupils to get admission to them?
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608. Academic courses are provided for the most part in the Sixth Forms of schools, though there are similar courses also in some technical colleges. The greater part of the work is a straight-line continuation of subjects studied throughout their secondary school course. There is a strong case for continuity of teaching. The pupils know their teachers and are known individually by them. Arrangements can be, and often are, made for them to go as fast and as far as they can in their strong subjects without waiting for their weaker subjects to be brought up to the level (usually Ordinary level in the G.C.E.) at which they can be put on one side. Practical courses for pupils over 16 are at present provided mainly in technical colleges, though they can be - and to some extent are - also provided in schools. One of the ways in which they differ from academic courses is that they introduce a wide range of subjects which are either completely new or not so firmly rooted in the main school curriculum as the traditional subjects of the Sixth Form. This does not, of course, mean that the traditional subjects as a whole disappear, but that those which remain bulk less largely in the minds and in the timetables of the pupils and that the methods of teaching them may be significantly different. The new subjects in the main have a close connection with the world outside the school, and are rather more loosely linked to the curriculum that has been followed in earlier years. Schools (like technical colleges) might well develop courses which, though full-time education, involved a good deal of practical work experience. Teachers would need to have close connections with the world of work in the same way that Sixth Form masters keep in touch with the universities. There is no educational reason why this sort of work should not be done in school - after all, as we have said, a good part of every course would be school work in the strict sense - but there would not be the same sort of presumption as there is in the academic courses, that school is the