A Teacher’s Journey Through Britain’s Education Revolution

Education looms large in the Overton Window: it is a Good Thing, and since the 1944 Education Act, schools have been doing it. Today we read of vast truancy rates and regular assaults on teachers. Something is amiss.

Kevin in 9D has Maths and English today. In maths he must learn long division of fractions, and in English he must learn about fronted adverbials. I will call these ‘Kevin’s lessons’. The 1944 Act deals at length with different kinds of schools, who managed and should manage them and who paid, and should pay for them. Not much was said about the lessons, beyond that they must be ‘suitable’. The people on the wartime committee all knew that ‘suitable’ was teachers in classrooms with blackboards, teaching children words about various things, just as it was in the public schools which they had nearly all attended, and in the local authority secondary schools which had unexpectedly grown out of the ‘Board Schools’ of 1870–1902.

The Tories on the 1944 committee did not know anything about Kevin but they were anxious to please the people with a view of a New Post-war Jerusalem. The socialists on the committee did not know Kevin either, but they insisted that kids would be in secondary schools if only they could afford the fees. The Tories believed them. Because there would be no fees in the new secondary schools, the ragged trousered urchins would flock in and ‘thrive’. It appears not to have occurred to the committee men that the kids who were now to be compelled to attend secondary schools might not want the ‘opportunities to thrive’ afforded by knowing long division of fractions and fronted adverbials.

The results were unpleasant. The phrase ‘Blackboard Jungle’ was heard. Was the 1944 Act a mistake? The socialists changed their tune. It was not a mistake. We had introduced the Wrong Kind of School. They explained that the chaos and mutiny in the ‘3rd tier’ ‘Secondary Moderns’ was because Kevin was enraged at being denied the ability to study long division of fractions and fronted adverbials. He had been denied it because of the 11+ exam. The new thing was Comprehensives, where Kevin’s lessons would be properly taught by graduates.

Here I come in. In 1965 I began to teach in a nearly new purpose-built concrete and glass comprehensive on a large Midland city’s council estate. As a graduate I would normally have been expected to go into private or grammar schools, where we would not have encountered the ragged urchins like Kevin in the Bad Old Secondary Moderns. In the ‘comp’ I did encounter them. The other graduates and I were surprised.

My maths colleague told me about his syllabus, including the famous long division of fractions. In his training he had learned about the stages by which mathematical thinking developed. He knew that a test at the most basic level was to tear up a piece of paper and ask the children whether there was now more paper or less. It tests whether the person understands ‘conservation of area’. The answer, dear reader, is that there is the same amount, but most of his Year 8 class got it wrong. These were the children to whom he was expected to teach long division of fractions, requiring far more thinking power. It was utter madness.

I was supposed to be teaching the Norman Conquest to the same class. If there had been a test of historical thinking they would have failed that, too. I was clueless but I was visited by a bureaucrat from the LEA who ‘deemed me efficient’.

My Head of Department was woke. He would not give me textbooks in packs of 30, which would enable me to say ‘Read Chapter 4 and answer the questions’. He gave me 40-odd miscellaneous books without telling me how to use them. I thought of worksheets. One evening I was tackling ‘Julius Caesar’. I found that his tutor was a Gaul called Gnipho. This was bizarre enough to stick in my memory. In the next book I found that his tutor was a Greek called Molo.

This was a shock. At Oxford I had become aware of some strange people called ‘Marxists’ who insisted on contradicting the 1066 And All That orthodoxy. They were, however, quite mad and could be ignored. I could not ignore two simple textbooks contradicting each other on a matter of fact! How could this be? By midnight I had no worksheet, but half a dozen more contradictions. It was a Road to Damascus moment. History was not an agreed body of fact, but a cacophony of allegations!

My worksheets led the kids to the contradictions, but they were not impressed. The wife of the incompetent English teacher got a promotion and they were moving away. With her help I paused Kevin and went to the grammar school, where I found young people as committed to the space-time continuum as I was, and my contradictions went down a storm. I thought “I have cracked this teaching thing!” Still feeling guilty that I was not teaching Kevin, I applied for a job in a comprehensive in the South Midlands.

My first comprehensive had been all boys, but this one was mixed. Unselected girls were a shock. They belched, but if I put pressure on them their boyfriends stoned my house. The kids were supposed to do homework, but the admin involved was vast, and even after going through all the proper procedures they wouldn’t do it. The Head of Department who I had been appointed to replace was still there. He gave me a class to teach ‘Integrated Studies’. Teaching ‘9 Int’ about Red Indians was as bad as teaching fronted adverbials and long division of fractions. My faith in secondary education as the broad highway to the New Jerusalem was badly damaged. Cognitive dissonance made me as pale as a ghost.

The job centre said I was ‘overqualified’ to drive lorries, but by great good fortune I got my old job in the grammar school back. My contradictions did the trick again. Take-up for History at O Level soared. My wife taught me what she had learned at the Open University about ‘Readability’: short words and short sentences were easier to understand. I recovered some of my faith. This was Kevin’s way to the New Jerusalem! I applied to a grammar school in the far west of Wales. It would surely soon go comprehensive, but I would be ready for it! I got the job because I had attended the same Oxford College as the Head. 

All the top jobs went, by ‘Buggins’ Turn’, to the staff of the former boys’ and girls’ grammar schools. They did not know what to expect. One designed the new telephone system. He had only given one phone to the Heads of Year between them, having no idea that they would be on the phone most of their days talking to policemen, probation officers, social workers, journalists and parents.

My readability-controlled World History course went forward successfully, but I knew that classrooms full of words would never inspire the ordinary kids, so I ran the cricket as a voluntary extra. Just by cricketing in the yard with eight little Year 7s I prevented it becoming a war zone, but my superiors had no idea. Another Welsh comprehensive collapsed into anarchy in three weeks. In my school the ex-girls’ grammar staff demanded chaperones as they passed along the corridors.

In about 1983 the GCSE was announced with brilliantly woke ‘criteria’. Thanks to shingles I had time to devise a readability-controlled scheme to submit to the Welsh Board. It had an original way of teaching bias. The officials did not understand my scheme, but were being harassed from London for being excessively conventional, and my scheme seemed wacky enough to get the officials off their back. My scheme was approved and I was on Welsh TV for its inaugural exam.

My scheme met the ‘brilliantly woke criteria’, but a London committee told me that they ‘could not possibly allow’ it, and banned it. (The officially approved schemes did not, and still do not, meet them, although each has a preamble which says that they do.) When the 1990 National Curriculum turned out to be the one from Grantham Girls’ Grammar School taught out of order, I abandoned Kevin and fled to a prep school, doing all the things they ‘couldn’t possibly allow’.

After retirement I did some supply teaching as a classroom assistant in a primary school. Happily, as it now appears, there I saw the lesson on fronted adverbials which I mocked at the beginning. (The phrase beginning ‘happily’ in the previous sentence is an example of a fronted adverbial, by the way.) My supply agency sent me to ‘safeguarding’ training. I asked how we could safeguard girls from FGM. I have not had a single day’s supply teaching since.