Half our Future? Secondary Modern Schools and the Newsom Report - fifty years on

Professor Gary McCulloch is Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Institute of Education, University of London. His principle interests are in the history of education, including curriculum history, the history of secondary education, the history of teachers and teaching, the history of educational policy, historical perspectives on current educational issues, historical theory and methodology relating to education, and documentary research methods.

Blackwell Secondary Modern School. c1950. Crown copyright

In an article that Gary McCulloch and Liz Sobell published in 1994, ‘Toward a social history of the secondary modern schools’ (History of Education,1994,Vol 23, no. 3, 275-286), the authors pointed out how little attention had been given to Secondary Modern education. They indicated possible future lines of enquiry, such as how gender figured in these schools, how pupils’ families related to the schools, and called for any analysis to be put within the contexts of social stratification and the ‘tripartite system’ . They pointed out that the 1944 settlement established this system in the institutions which the Act set up - Secondary Modern, Grammar and Technical schools - but that the notion that students aged 11 can (or should) be divided up in this way precedes 1944 and persists today. In relation to social stratification, are explicit and implicit ideas about ‘working-class’ education.

Again, these ideas precede the Secondary Modern era, run throughout it and continue today. Studies in this area range across the psychometrics of eg Cyril Burt et al; the monumental reports of eg Crowther and Newsom; Brian Jackson’s sociological study of one grammar school; the historical accounts of eg Harold Silver; Floud and Halsey’s celebrated studies in inequality; fly on the wall explorations by eg Phil Cohen; the political analyses of eg Brian Simon, Ken Jones. The sociolinguistic work of Basil Bernstein and William Labov arrived at very different conclusions on the part played by the ‘home’ language of young people. Meanwhile, what might be called the ‘Bourdieu tradition’ reversed the whole view by asking what is it about the nature of education that appears to suit some social layers more than others. This analysis has been attacked by the Right, sometimes drawing particularly on the ideas of E.D.Hirsch whilst bringing to an end the era of local control of schooling on the grounds that it ‘failed’.

Did it? And if it sometimes did, as Gary McCulloch’s own work as in ‘Failing the Ordinary Child’ (1998) suggests, was the problem with the local control or with national implementation of ideas about adolescence, intelligence, language, social class and the ‘needs of society’ - a notion often reduced to the ‘needs of employers’?

In all this, the voices of pupils, parents and teachers in Secondary Modern Schools have been mostly absent. So, we return to the opening lines of McCulloch’s and Sobell’s article of 1994:

“Surprisingly little attention has been given to secondary modern schools. It is clear that there has been much greater interest in grammar and public schools than for the secondary modern schools, which catered in their time, only a generation ago, for the large majority of the 11-15 age group.”

Gary McCulloch has very kindly written the following introductory notes for our Sec Mod blog. 

*****

Half our Future?  Secondary modern schools and the Newsom Report – fifty years on

October 2013 marks the 50^th anniversary of the Newsom Report, Half our Future, which examined what it called ‘the education of pupils aged 13 to 16 of average and less than average ability’.  The Report tried hard to keep well clear of the debates about comprehensive reorganisation that we then being rehearsed widely.  Yet it was highly relevant to pupils in the secondary modern schools where the so-called ‘ordinary child’ was usually taught.  According to this Report, the characteristic problems of educating such pupils could not be solved through administrative changes, but needed to more basic change in attitudes about educability.  In this spirit, it supported the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen – still a controversial proposal nearly twenty years after it had been endorsed by the Education Act of 1944.

There is some useful literature about the secondary modern schools and its pupils.  My own contributions have tried to show the links between the secondary modern schools and the changing educational, social and political context.  My book Failing The Ordinary Child? (1998) examined these schools as an example of working class secondary education.  A new book, written by myself with my colleagues Tom Woodin and Steve Cowan, looks at the raising of the school leaving age (Secondary Education and the Raising of the School Leaving Age, 2013).  I have also written articles that are relevant to these issues in History of Education (with Liz Sobell, 1994) and the Journal of Educational Administration and History (2000).  What we still lack, though, is a social history of these schools that brings out the everyday experiences of pupils and teachers. [Our italics]

Again a good starting point for such a history is the Newsom Report of 1963.  For the purposes of the Report a national sample was taken that provided over 6,000 pen-portraits of 14-year-old boys and girls, a cross-section of all pupils in these schools.  There were 3,668 secondary modern schools in England at this time, more than two-thirds of all secondary schools.  This survey gives us some help in beginning to reconstruct the experiences of pupils in these schools.  A collection of oral and written testimonies from teachers and pupils, highlighting memories of these schools from those most closely involved, would be a wonderful resource as a basis for a social history schools which is sorely needed, and a great contribution to a fuller understanding.  I look forward to seeing the results of this new enterprise looking back on the secondary modern schools, fifty years on.

Gary McCulloch

Institute of Education London