When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (38 page)

Wilson borrowed Hugh Gaitskell's phrase ‘grammar schools for all', which offended educationalists trying to create a new type of school, but reassured the middle classes. It was Mrs Thatcher, when Education Secretary, not the much reviled Shirley Williams, who signed the most comprehensive reorganization orders. In those early years, schools were trying to teach children of all abilities according to a syllabus created for the top 25 per cent. Schools within schools developed. The urgent need was to devise curricula to cope with schools that contained future Oxbridge scholars at the next desk to children destined for Youth Training Schemes. The best state schools began to move from the world of pure scholarship to one of democratic citizenship. Parents – and editorial writers – who had themselves been to selective schools became alarmed. Their children did not know who the Younger Pitt was, so they shot off to school meetings to find out what was going on. There they were assailed by jargon from teachers who seemed reluctant to let them get too close to the school. All professions, as Bernard Shaw said, are indeed a conspiracy against the laity. A second suspicion was added: not only had standards collapsed, but some form of unacceptable ideological manipulation was taking place. The system, it appeared, had been hijacked.

This was the agonized scene to which we returned from the United States – a lot of very concerned people fed nothing more solid than scraps of local gossip and blatantly prejudiced newspaper headlines. George Walker complained of the ‘lack of serious intellectual discussion' about comprehensives, and that there had never been a Dimbleby or Reith Lecture on the subject, for example. The
schools
never won the hearts and minds of the people, and the
concept
never caught the imagination of the intellectuals.

My visit to Knutsford was an attempt to give classroom reality to some of these concerns. I was at the school for a week, far longer than any parent would be before making up his mind about whether to send a child, but not long enough fully to penetrate the hidden agenda that tells you what an institution is really like. The school fosters an obvious
esprit
de
corps
. Staff and pupils are proud and offer a visitor a positive image. I was very aware of the dangers of misreading the school: a former teacher had told me how his very poor school had always successfully closed ranks when an inspection was due. If any teachers, mainly themselves the products of grammar schools, had doubts about the practicality of the comprehensive ideal, they hid them. Many had experience in other forms of school – grammar and fee-paying – yet said persuasively they were totally convinced by the strengths of comprehensive teaching. Frank Walmsley, the senior deputy head, said: ‘Comprehensives are vastly superior for most, if not all, pupils. I am very clear about it. The more able are not at a disadvantage: they do as well, if not better, as in grammar schools. The world has changed. A good comprehensive will broaden their horizons and widen their later opportunities.'

Knutsford teachers were cautious about trumpeting the school's academic record, though most acknowledged that ‘unfortunately' the school's reputation was largely based on university and A level successes. Seventy per cent of the children leave with at least one O level, 46 per cent achieve four or more, and 17 per cent – of the original ‘mixed ability' intake – leave with three or more A levels. The school has 165 in its sixth form, 135 of whom are studying A levels. Each year it sends a handful to Oxbridge.

I met a group of six sixth-formers – four girls, two boys – three of whom were to try for Oxbridge. They were articulate, self-confident, ambitious. The school, they said, mixed well socially, though there was some bullying in the early days. They claimed they had more confidence than if they had gone to private schools. One said she might be a teacher because of the inspiration of her English teacher, which made the others laugh. Most had concrete career plans – one to be an economic geographer at the United Nations. A teacher told me later that the sixth was very left-wing – much as his contemporaries had been in the late sixties – but the pupils claimed to be a mixed bunch. One did say: ‘They just sit there groaning about Mrs Thatcher: it's really boring.'

They were egalitarian in their own behaviour, rejecting the notion of prefects, for example. At a parents' evening there was voluble concern at this lack of pupil structures. Many thought prefects could supervise lunch hours and cut down on litter and smoking. Feelings grew heated. The cry ‘why can't they be like we were' was taken up enthusiastically. The sixth-formers were aware of the shortage of resources – ‘outdated history books with pages missing,' said one – and argued that the government ought to reorder its priorities: money for schools, not defence. They were also censorious of their less diligent contemporaries – ‘some go through the school wasting their own and their teachers' time and the taxpayers' money: it makes you mad.'

‘Carol', a problem child, never made the sixth: in her early days at Knutsford she was frequently truant. Her father (Manchester overspill) draws a disability pension, and hasn't worked for many years. When I visited the family, he was stripped to the waist, exhibiting a fine torso and some elaborate tattoos. Occasionally, he was shaken by paroxysms of coughing. His wife said she missed the cosiness of inner Manchester, but he was all for the wide open spaces. If he could, he said somewhat unconvincingly, he'd be a sheep-farmer in the Falklands. ‘Teachers are not old enough, and there's not enough corporal punishment,' was his view of Britain's educational ills. Carol twice tried to kill herself. In her fourth year she was enrolled in a school programme known as the Knutsford Community Certificate, which involves attending college half a day a week and working in the community. She blossomed, taking a responsible role on a residential week away from school – younger children thanked her for her help, the first time she had been thanked for an achievement in her life, working hard for six months at a local hotel, and qualifying for a three-year catering course. She knew what she wanted to do – work for an airline – and, against considerable odds, looked set fair.

The next night I met ‘John's' mother in her modern ‘executive-style' house. She and her husband are both graduates who went to private/public schools, and sent their children to Knutsford with some trepidation. John left with four good A levels to spend a year in industry sponsored by a multinational corporation before university. A primary-school friend of John's – said to have been of equal ability – who went to a local fee-paying secondary school with a strong academic record, dropped out of the sixth form after one year and took a non-degree course at a college. ‘I haven't heard of anyone at a private school who did better than John,' said his mother, whose daughter got three A levels at Knutsford and also went to university. ‘I would tell anyone to use that school. If I had another child and could afford fees, I'd still send him there.'

How can one school get the best out of both Carol and John? Are they exceptions? Do pupils in the middle without any obvious special needs get equally stretched? Is there a trick to teaching ‘mixed ability' classes, which, if only those educated in narrow peer groups could understand it, would set the national mind at rest over comprehensive schooling? I spent much of my time at Knutsford trying to find answers to these questions, sitting in on ‘mixed ability' classes and talking with teachers. The aim is clear and laudable, and the problem simply stated. At one end of the ability range is the stock English figure of the professor who cannot change a light bulb: at the other, thousands of children leave school branded as ‘failures' because the traditional academic courses offer them nothing. Michael Duffy, head of King Edward VI School, Morpeth, and a former president of the Secondary Heads' Association, told me: ‘By being taught in the same environment, children have equality of esteem, opportunity and provision. It is not a question of levelling down: clever children are entitled to good teachers, but so are the others. By teaching high flyers and low attainers in the same context, we are equipping them for adult life in all its dimensions. Within the school walls we are hard-headed and realistic about different children's abilities to learn. The key is the right lesson correctly delivered.'

Looking back on a ‘traditional' education, it is clear that, as well as much first-rate teaching, there was a great deal of boredom involved in learning things that were either rapidly forgotten – whither has fled all that maths and Latin? – or redundant. Most of us also had hidden experience of ‘mixed ability' teaching in such subjects as woodwork. I was extremely bad at it, and chiselled away ham-fistedly while some others turned perfect lamp standards on lathes. It never occurred to any of us that we were suffering because of the wide range of abilities in that group. So long as the instructor had time to get round us all, and attend to our needs, we were learning. Recently, I coached a ‘mixed ability' soccer team, whose players ranged from kids who could kick the ball into the net with either foot from the edge of the penalty area to those born with the proverbial two left feet. It was fun, watching the children develop week by week, with no obvious disadvantages to either extreme.

At Knutsford all children start in the first year in totally mixed classes, gradually being ‘set' in ability groups according to the nature of the subject. I attended a first-year French lesson. It was the last period of the day, the sun was shining, and rugby was being played outside the window. The teacher, Gary Frost, engaged the children individually, prowling the classroom.
‘Tu habites une ville? Oui ou non?'
This darting technique kept everyone's attention, even those I had marked down as reluctant scholars. Everyone made a stab at one or two answers, or read words in French. The written exercise was to copy some statements – one girl had finished while a boy was painfully writing the first sentence – and then to use the same phrases to write about their own families. No one noticeably flagged. It would obviously become harder to give everyone the sense of being in the same race as the year progressed and the bright began to accumulate knowledge. But French is one subject that is set by the second year according to ability. I would not have been unhappy to have my child start in that class. In fact, one was then in a similar group in his own school.

History is cited as a subject in which new teaching methods allow pupils not only to go at their own pace, but also to learn techniques of far greater value than the ‘Plato to Nato' string of dates. The aim is to teach children to handle evidence – primary and secondary – and to apply that skill in, for example, testing the accuracy of what they read in the newspapers. John Cloake, a history teacher about to take a class of fourteen-year-old GCSE students, said: ‘Our greatest asset is a child's natural curiosity. So much of education works against that. We are not here to provide the answers. If I did, they would simply be chasing my version of the right answer.' In his lesson, the children were studying the development of medicine. He wrote an open chart on the board, with spaces for explaining who treated illness, by what methods and why, in prehistoric, Egyptian and Greek times. The children were encouraged to relate those developments to what was going on in the wider contemporary societies. There were again painful discrepancies between the speeds (and neatness) of the pupils.

Later, Mr Cloake filled out the blackboard charts, drawing the answers from the children themselves. For homework – and I was told that these fourteen-year-olds would be expected to do about an hour and a half each night – they were to compare two contemporary Greek accounts of severe illness, and assess their reliability, accuracy and usefulness. ‘I am not looking for a lot of writing; I am looking for a lot of thoughts,' Mr Cloake told the departing scholars. Again I had a son who was at the same stage on the same course. From what I saw and from what he told me, these lessons are a success.

Knutsford insisted that all pupils take one subject at GCSE that is not purely academic, which is a problem with many parents. Mr Walmsley, the deputy head, had a queue outside his office every ‘options' night of parents needing to be convinced that their children can ‘spare' the time from purely academic subjects. The school was strong in design and art – encouraged obviously by a head who was trained as a potter. They have had artists in residence; the spirit of one, said Jeff Teasdale, the head of the department and himself an artist, ‘still walks in the department.'

It is the boast of comprehensives that they are better prepared than are many private schools for the ‘new' teaching ushered in by the General Certificate of Secondary Education, the sixteen-plus exam, which is based on the skills of learning rather than knowledge – what you can do, not what you know. ‘The pinnacle,' said Mike Oliver, a deputy head, ‘is more demanding than O level.' Teachers I met gloated over the difficulties they expect some private schools to have. One said: ‘Their teachers are actually going to have to talk to children, not sweep in, deliver a lecture, and sweep out.' The gloating, however, ceased when the conversation turned to resources. GCSE is posited on an extraordinarily generous ratio of teachers, and in some subjects is inescapably demanding of equipment. Mr Valleley, Knutsford's head, told of an instructional video showing a geography field trip, in which four pupils are being assessed by two or three teachers. ‘If we matched that ratio, we'd have to turn out the whole staff to assess our geographers,' he said. Every teacher had a version of that truth. GCSE is judged by continuous assessment. Who teaches the children while that goes on? Class sizes have been growing. Steve Ings, a young science teacher, spoke of the difficulty of getting round twenty-eight children in one lesson instead of the twenty-one he used to instruct. Mr Valleley said the school would get £8,500 over two and a half years for new books and equipment – sufficient for the school's bread and butter – instead of the £15,000 he would like. That shortfall is common to most schools. The PTA meeting that I attended was so concerned with this topic, which boiled down to the provision of books, that the chairman had to guillotine the discussion. A teacher crystallized the dilemma: ‘What is the good of, say, a video camera, if you haven't got a spare body to take off a group of five or six to work with it?'