From Graded to Comprehensive Schools

Extract

Perhaps no other state can exhibit the variety in organization represented by English educational institutions at the secondary school stage. Within the boundaries of a single local authority may often be discovered public and private schools, direct grant grammar schools financed by the Ministry of Education, and their municipal counterparts governed by local councils, in whose care would also be found secondary modem and technical schools. The religious bodies, particularly the Church of England in the countryside and the Catholic Church in the industrial areas, have their own parallel foundations.

Nevertheless, irrespective of the constitution of the Governing Board or the section of the population served, the majority of them will probably echo in their studies and administration the prevailing educational philosophy. According to this theory there exists in the nation an intellectual elite with inborn mental superiority - although its protagonists differ as to its extent. Professor Cyril Burt estimates five per cent as specially gifted and requiring a separate academic course, while the present Minister of Education considers as many as thirty per cent of the senior pupils ought to be in attendance at grammar schools. All adherents are agreed, however, that one of the chief tasks of the administrator is to discern the elite by an examination at the age of eleven or thirteen years and, thenceforward, to provide them with the best available facilities for an advanced academic course. To such philosophers the examination also reveals those, the hapless majority, with mental ability of a lower order: these they assign to a school where a practical course forms the main staple of the curriculum. At such secondary modem schools there would be a minimum of abstract academic study and no attempt would be made to prepare the scholars for external examinations.