A Teacher & Parent Viewpoint

In 1964 I think, my daughter, Jill, went to Aylesbury Secondary Modern Girls' School in Bromley. It was also when I began my own teacher training, so I was more critical of methods there than Jill was herself. However, here's a story I'm sure you'll love.

 

Being very keen on theatre, I took our four children whenever I could. At some time during Jill's 5 years at Aylesbury, we went to see a Shakespeare - Jill thinks it was at the Old Vic while it was still the 'Naitonal Theatre'. Whatever it was, we all loved it (even the youngest of our four children). Jill was so excited by it that she enthused about it to one of the teachers. Shortly afterwards, there was a parents' evening, at which I was castigated for taking Jill to see a Shakespeare play - "giving her ideas above her intellectual capacity".

 

From 1968 to 1973, I taught English at Cator Park Secondary Modern School for Girls, in Penge. There, I had several altercations with the headmistress. In those days, before drama was on the curriculum, I used it nevertheless in my English lessons whenever I could. Then I proposed starting a lunch-time drama club for one of the years. The Head was horrified, and forbade it passionately. But my passion was just as strong as hers, and I kept nagging, giving all the theory of education values of it that I could come up with. In the end, she looked bored, gave in, and said I could put up a notice about it in the hall, "but no-one will come," she said. I put up the notice, and next day, 70 girls turned up! And kept coming.

 

Another story from the same school - which only ever entered the girls for CSEs. Having nurtured 'my girls', the ones who'd begun at the school in the same year as I'd begun teaching there, and whom I'd kept for the whole 5 years, I suggested that we enter them for GCE English.  I was told not to be ridiculous - our girls are not up to it. I persisted, nagged some more, and finally she gave in. They all achieved their GCE English, though I'm afraid I have no record or memory of their precise grades. 

 

Finally, with ref to this Head - during my last year there (I had to move to another part of the country for my husband's job), it was suggested by the Council that a drama studio be built in the grounds of the school. I'd like to think it was because some of the governors had come to watch one of my lunch-time drama sessions, which the Head had suggested - in the hope, I suppose, of them insisting on putting an end to it, but they were terrifically impressed, one of them telling the Head how good they thought it was for the girls, and that they all agreed 'they'd never seen anything like it!' But I have no evidence of that hope. Anyway, plans went ahead, and I helped the architects with suggestions for the interior, which would give drama teachers the most flexible opportunities for its use. By the time it was built, I had left, so I've never seen it, but was flabbergasted to hear that the Head had never allowed it to be used for anything other than assemblies - never drama. She left shortly afterwards, and I've heard that the school now has quite a reputation for performance arts.

 

In the 1980s, we came back to the London area, and I had an English teaching post at a girls' secondary modern in Mitcham. In my third or fourth year there, I felt that the only way to help some of my girls who seemed to be struggling with things like spelling, punctuation, etc., was on a one-to-one basis. So I instigated a system by which I spent some of my lunch-hour/s in a cupboard-like room that was available, and arranged for girls to come and get individual help, when they needed it. I was pleased with the results, and prepared to keep going. However, my head of department took me to the local pub one day, told me off for doing it "We get paid to teach whole classes, not individual children", and suggested I find another job.

In my final year at primary I got to sit a lot of practise papers. My parents were called into the school because although I was top of the class I was under performing in the tests. I was answering the questions too slowly. I felt I had to answer each question before I moved on, despite being told I had 30 seconds per Q.

When I "failed" the 11th plus I felt sad. When the head showed me my result on a print out and told me that had I been a boy I would have gone I felt sadder. He said he could intervene but felt I would do better being at the top of a set rather than the bottom. In a way he was right but to this day I still feel inferior.

Looking at a Dyslexia report the other day I think I probably have some form of it. When it came to transition from state primary to state secondary with my own children - at the last minute I sent them to a private school. Their self-confidence increased as did their aspirations and their results. I didn't want them to slip through the net the way I did
By Anonymous on This blog on 27/03/12

Copyright of the Author.  Not to be used without permission

I also don't remember taking the 11+ although I may have done. My parents went through a period of legal seperation and so we moved between their home towns a number of times. One town had already gone over to being fully comprehensive and the other still had the secondary/grammar school divide.

I started my secondary school life in a secondary modern, moved to a comprehensive school for a couple of years and then completed my last year at the secondary school. I remember being excited about moving up from junior school to the big school. My friends and I were mostly concerned about showing off our gymnastic skills and wondering whether our new PE teachers would be impressed.

The school was within walking distance. I do remember a girl near to us going to grammar school and having a nice uniform.At the time I didn't question why she was going to the grammar and I was not.Also, there was the safety of going where all your friends were.I vaguely remember feeling that the grammar school was for better off people and anyway my parents wouldn't have been able to afford the uniform or bus fares.
However, I don't know why I remember feeling this as the secondary had a uniform too, of sorts.Grey skirt, blue jumper or cardigan but not a blazer.The secondary wasn't co-ed as there was a boys school close by.

I don't remember that I enjoyed my time there but I wasn't especially miserable either. I have very little recollection of lessons except reading Lorna Doone in English class and the domestic science department having a mocked up dining/living room where pupils learned to make and serve meals and be proper little domestic goddesses.  Getting the chance to do that was supposed to be a privilege. In my last year at school we had to choose whether we wanted to go in the class that lead us onto a nursing career or a class for those interested in office/secretarial work. The two other streams were for the least able pupils.I neither wanted to be a nurse (we had been shown around the local hospital to see tape worms in jars etc) or work in an office.I suppose I must have plumped for the office option as I remember sitting at a desk with a typewriter.

I left school in 1967 at the tender age of 15years and 3months without any qualifications and got a job as an office junior.  As a young mother in my early twenties I studied with the Open University. Thank God for Jenny Lee!

By Oddie Park on This blog on 27/03/12

Copyright of the Author.  Not to be used without permission

I moved to a junior school in the south of England in 1964 from Scotland and joined the last two terms. I had already been to 4 different schools before so was used to being the new girl. Nothing prepared me for what was to come.

I was given a number 48 which was the number of girls in the class. I couldn't understand their accent and they couldn't understand mine. I hated it. I tried a bit of school refusing but after a few days of being taken to the school in tears by my father I realised it was futile.

Everyone else had done their 11 plus and knew which school they were going to be going to. One day I was taken into the heads office and sat down in front of her to do the test that I was told would decide if I were to go to the grammar school or not.   She watched everything I wrote for what seemed like hours. Some weeks later I was told I had failed. I didn't tell anyone at school as the shame was too much.

Day 1 at the secondary modern was another shock. Not only had I failed but I had failed so badly I was put into the 3rd out of 4 classes. The work seemed trivial and undemanding. A month or so later I was unexpectedly moved to the top class. I was told if I did well enough and came top in the end of year exams I might be moved to the grammar school.

I worked hard and got really good marks in all my tests, except for needlework where I was second from bottom and art where I came bottom of the class. I came top in maths science French etc. There was nothing to be done I couldn't be moved. I was told if I was capable I would be able to do GCSEs rather than CSEs. I did well over the years in my exams. The French teacher allowed me to join the higher class sometimes and I took French gcse in  my 4th year.

One day in the French class we had to write down our plans for the future and it was my turn to read them out to the class. I said I wanted to go to university. That was a big mistake, the French teacher told me and the class that not one of us was bright enough to do that. So I kept quiet about what I might want to do. I was pleased to be able to do maths, chemistry English biology at gcse level. The biology was crazy...I had followed the cse lessons only to find a week before the o level exam that the curriculum was for human biology and the level I had been entered for was biology....I had done no plant biology at all! And failed, similar for physics....but I came away with cse grade 1's and 5 O levels.

 I made no friends at the secondary modern and kept myself to myself. Others taunted me for being a swat, I didn't try very hard but remained an outsider. I went on to the 6th form college, which was at the grammar school. Without the basic O levels it was always going to be hard, but I ended up after 3 years there with some decent A levels...re-sitting in the 3rd year in zoology ( I never did plant biology) maths and physical science. I applied to study medicine and after my 3rd attempt failed to get a place at clearing, I was offered various places to study nursing at a polytechnic, genetics at university etc and then medicine in London!

Now I am coming towards retirement as a GP in north east England.  I qualified in 1979 without any difficulty and have enjoyed a continuous career ever since. The schooling is something I regret, I never had an academic school background which I would have loved. Despite my failure in needlework and art those are both hobbies I now have and have done some creative work in both. Perhaps the constant failure made me more determined to succeed. My experience of school in a non-caring, non-academic surrounding has helped in my understanding of patients in working class areas, but I feel I missed out on a lot. There is lots more to say, but writing this has in some ways helped.
By christina on This blog on 23/03/12

Copyright of the Author.  Not to be used without permission

1. I was  from a single parent family and my mother and I moved around a great deal. I went to 11 different infant and primary schools.  I don't actually remember taking my 11+. What I do remember was being called to the girls grammar school for an interview because I was '' borderline" the interview was terrifying. Four very stern women kept asking me what I wanted  to do when I left school. I was really very uncertain but thought I might want to be a teacher!

2. That was obviously the wrong answer. I remember a letter coming addressed to my mother. She opened it in my presence, and I learnt I had failed to achieve a place at the girls grammar because 'I was uncertain about my long term future, and what I wanted to be' I felt angry having got to an interview and then being rejected, but even then I knew deep down a girls grammar was not for me. No one in my family had ever got beyond secondary modern school so why should I be any different? was the thought going through my head.My family were not bothered one way or the other.

3. My first experience of secondary school was perhaps different from many because at the time my junior school extended into a secondary school. Therefore all of my friends who had been with me at junior school moved through with me.I enjoyed those two years, and felt my learning experience was a good one. However 2 years into my secondary school, the  school became junior only and I ended up at an all girls secondary modern. I hated it.  That settled. I became a prefect, and two years after that I moved again at the age of 15 to  the local technical college to take my GCSE's followed by A levels. The four years there were some of the most formative of my life.

4. One thing I do remember in my first secondary school was that the local weekly paper ran an essay writing competition, and we were encouraged to send in essays, for which the winning one got 2shillings and six pence! I got rich on that. I also remember that you sat in the class according to your ability, so as the teacher faced the class,in  the first desk on her left hand side sat the brightest pupils whilst in the bottom right hand corner sat the 'least bright' I remember being in the middle because I was hopeless at maths. It was very intimidating.Your places were read out at the beginning of the week. The other thing that was intimidating was that if you received free school meals your name was read out on a separate register. There was always separatism in relation to free school meals. Even at college we were given meal tickets and had to stand in separate queues.

5.The expectations of me were not made clear till I went to college. At my first two secondary schools I was left to drift. Goodness knows how I actually got to sit the entrance exam to go to college, because my secondary school finished at 15 and that was it. At college I remember being encouraged to take A levels and in my first year I applied to university to do sociology and social administration after A levels. My law lecturer nearly persuaded me to change to law saying  that I would never get into sociology after a secondary education, but I stuck to my guns and even though I had 5 rejections in a week from my chosen universities, I eventually got an offer of a two Bs and and a C from Newcastle

6. I left my secondary education with 6 O levels and three A levels, two As and a B. My friend called round to tell me he had got three B's and I was ecstatic for him, but he embarrassingly relalised I hadn't got mine, so he told me. I had the best results of the college. I was ecstatic!!!! But I had to work for it. It didnt come easy. My mother spent the summer telling friends I hadnt got the grades to go to teacher training college, my initial career choice, I had to go to university instead.

I was born in South Africa and lived there until I was nearly 12, when the whole family came to England permanently in 1961.  There was no equivalent of the 11+ in South Africa, and I was totally unprepared for it.  I don't remember feeling anything other than the expected sense of inadequacy on learning that I'd failed, because I had no real idea of what it was all about and the likely consequences.

A few years ago I met an Australian who had come over to England at more or less the same time, who subsequently attended the same school I did.  He was streamed into the bottom stream, and it took him all his secondary school life to work his way up to the A stream, where he took and passed 5 GCE O-levels.  I remain deeply impressed by that.

The school was, well, school.  It worked in much the same way as the junior school I'd attended in South Africa, though school milk and school dinners were novelties.  I don't remember there being any bullying.  Some of the staff were very good, some less so, but that's normal.  I remember most of them being friendly and helpful.  I was in the A stream from the start.

I had the advantage that I'd played some rugby in SA.  I had been hopeless at it, but compared with my contemporaries in the UK, I was well ahead, so was immediately recruited into the school and house rugby teams, which raised my status from the start.

My parents were both university graduates, and I think they were much more disappointed that I didn't go to the grammar school than I was.  All through my schooling, it was just assumed that I'd go to university, and my parents did their best to keep my nose to the grindstone.  They failed, as I was pretty idle.  I had quickly learned that I could come near the top of the class by doing a little work in the run up to the annual class exams.  I thought that was pretty cool, but actually I was letting myself down and it caused me problems later in life.

I think the head was pretty ambitious for the school.  I don't remember there being any drama, but there were annual Gilbert and Sullivan performances, and regular Spoken English and Spoken French competitions, and a school magazine produced annually with contributions from the pupils.

The school encouraged us, too.  The A stream pupils were expected to take up to 8 GCE O-levels, and the average pass rate for the class was about 5.  The pupils in the upper B stream also took O-levels, though fewer.  I didn't know many of the pupils in the other streams, and have no idea how many O-levels they took or passed.

I passed 8 O-levels in my fifth year, and, with one other boy, transferred to the local grammar school.  I thought I'd stand a better chance of getting decent A-levels there, though I suspect that was a not true.  No idea now, of course.

I did minimal work at the grammar school and of the 4 A-levels I took, only actually passed Biology and General Studies, gaining O-level passes in Chemistry and Physics, so two years and no progress there!  I went on to a Technical College to retake Chemistry and Physics, passing them well enough to get into university, where I idled away a further 3 years and scraped a third in Biological Sciences.  I have never used my degree in any professional capacity, though my wife is a biologist, so it was useful in that respect!

I did enjoy my time at the secondary modern, though looking back, I realise I was very snobbish about the school and my fellow pupils.  I figured I was going to university, and few of them had any such ambitions.  I didn't mix with them socially much, either.

I still think streaming is the right way to go in education, though I disagree with the gulf that divided secondary modern from grammar schools.  Ideally there should have been one big school that would allow continuous promotion up and down the streams, rather than the 11+ and then the final 13+ exams.  There was a similar-sized all-girls grammar school right next door to my school.  It would not  have been impossible to combine them into one, fully-streamed school of 1200 pupils. Whether that would have helped me, I doubt.  I think my real limiting factor was my own attitude. 

The exam culture, taking class exams at the end of every year, was not good for me, because it was too easy for me to come top or nearly so.  Continuous assessment of some sort might have helped me get better at actually applying myself.  I'm still rubbish at that!

Secondary Modern Experience

By Archie

Last Year of Junior School.

In infants school I had shown some early aptitude for reading and had been bumped up a year into an older group. I don’t think I ever recovered from this experience. I went through Infants and Junior never quite catching up. I travelled through those early years with the same cohort of children. We took our 11 plus exam in 1958. There was a local grammar school and a Technical school which was seen to have a science base, which appealed to me. I passed the first stages of the 11 plus and was selected for interview and written test at the Technical school. This I failed.


Exam Results


The rejection Letter arrived one morning and within minutes my friend’s mother was at the door checking on my result, and crowing delightedly as her son had passed for the Grammar school. I was destined for the local secondary modern school. The promised bicycle for passing was no more, instead I was offered a consolation prize; a corgi toy guided missile with soft rubber tip on a launching truck in canary yellow as I remember it.



Sec Mod


Many of my junior cohorts, well the boys that is, were also destined for the sec mod school. Thus we all ended up one September morning nervously filing into what seemed a very large hall. The building was pre war and low level. There was a main entrance in the centre and two large squares of class rooms led off from this, one side for boys the other for girls. Our entrance being at the extreme edge of the square and as far from the girls as could be arranged and never the twain did meet. There were roughly 450 boys in our school. Classes were streamed by ability, the G stream being the top or most academic and a lower strata or T stream, not sure what the T stood for, Technical perhaps? Bullying was a massive problem. There was a north playground which was for first years only and was strongly segregated for our own protection. There was a humiliating ritual called The Block, and older boys would pass in the corridor and ask if we had been ‘blocked’ yet. Blocking consisted of a public beating while hung face down over the low walls which separated the class room corridors and surrounded the square of the senior playground.

The recently arrived headmaster had notions of turning the school into an imitation public school in model and manner. The school was divided into four houses; Mallory, Scott, Wingate, and Nelson for the purposes of inter school competition sports etc. He wore a black gown and was a strict disciplinarian, caning boys regularly on slight pretexts and handing out detentions. The staff was either elderly and near retirement, or else were ex soldiers. Corporal punishment was administered by them also as well as by the head, in most cases a few smacks with an over large gym shoe or plimsoll or a simple tweak and pull of the hair and a rap with a knuckle on the side of the head or a thrown missile such as a blackboard rubber.

There was an assembly every morning. Times tables we learned by rote at the beginning of every maths class. We read various classic books and attempts were made to teach us to play the recorder. French classes were taken in the same class room as Spanish classes and with the same teacher. The G stream doing French, the T stream doing Spanish (supposedly easier). The French teacher was at least enlightened enough to use Tintin books as French text books, and so I was exposed to their graphic beauty which was most influential.

One of our form teachers was an elderly Christadelphian who on Friday afternoons would read aloud to us for an hour while we followed the text as he read. His religion prevented him from taking the Lord’s name in vain, and so he censored any such moments as he read, thus when reading H G Wells’ The Invisible Man he would exclaim, ‘Oh gosh’, instead of the ‘Oh God’, which we could clearly see printed in the book in front of us.

There were few facilities such as showers etc. After Gym class we were expected to shower by splashing ourselves from the wash basins in the cloak room, watched often by the head. During our second year the head was absent, through illness and the deputy head, a metal work teacher ran the school. After six months of this a court case against the head appeared in the local paper.  Boys had been abused by the head and he was sent down. The paper was hidden from me by my parents. No one asked any of us if we too had suffered any abuse. It was never referred to again, if any of us were bold enough to mention it we were promptly told to shut up.

A new head was appointed. He was an entirely different character from the previous head. He had an abiding love of Shakespeare and drama. His first job was to encourage older boys to get involved in putting on a school play something which had never been attempted.

The art teacher at the school was a maverick figure an exotic refugee from the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Along with the head he encouraged me to go to Saturday painting classes at the local Art School.

I took only two G C E’s, we were only put in for exams which it was felt we would definitely pass. I took English and Art both of which I have survived on ever since. Few boys went on to further education. I was one of the luckier ones and ended up in 1963 attending the local Art College full time.

Like most school experiences Sec Mod was a mixed bag. The bullying from staff and older boys was genuinely terrifying at times. The lack of any feminine presence was keenly felt, girls remained unattainable, a mystery. The place stank of cheesy masculinity of the worst kind. The saving grace was being encouraged to follow your own path if you showed the slightest aptitude, the pressure of exams was slight if not nonexistent, and the new and enlightened head was an enabler of the best kind who literally saved my life.

copyright 2012 Not to be published without permission