Education is always, by its nature, a contentious subject. Nowhere is this more the case than in the history of how selection by ability, in the form of grammar schools and a tripartite system of secondary education, was replaced by comprehensive schooling in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. However, Peter Mandler’s The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education Since The Second World War (2020) carries particularly egregious examples of a tendency to slant educational history in order to justify an a priori thesis. In this case, it is to assert that mass comprehensive schooling was widely popular with the general public; that calls for it came from the grass-roots of public opinion; and that it was inevitable as part of a drive towards mass education that those at the apex of political life were forced to accept.
A key aspect of Mandler’s argument is the assertion that the Conservative governments in office from 1951-64 were ‘wedded’ to grammar schools and tripartism and to elite selection in general.[1] However, it is claimed that democratic pressure from below in the form of ‘the ordinary voter’s common sense’ forced them to accept that comprehensives had to be the future.[2] Yet the evidence suggests that far from being unabashed supporters of grammar schools and the tripartite system, the Conservative wavered when it came to defending selection out of political expediency rather than in response to public opinion.
The essential difficulty regarding the tripartite system established by the 1944 Education Act was an insufficient number of grammar schools within certain local authority areas. There was also a lack of flexibility regarding the potential for ‘late developers’ to transfer at age 13 to a grammar school rather than simply be assigned a place on the basis of results in the ‘11 plus’ examination. Furthermore, the secondary modern schools that were envisaged for the majority of pupils deemed not to be academic did not possess a clearly defined purpose. They lacked their own vocational examinations with national accreditation, though they were undoubtedly making headway with ‘extended courses’ designed for lower ability pupils. In addition to these problems, technical schools, intended as the third prong of the tripartite system, were in short supply.
From 1954, under the Education Minister David Eccles, the Conservative government accentuated the lack of respect for, and downgrading of technical and vocational education. Instead of building more technical and also grammar schools in areas where there was a shortage of places, and encouraging further transfers at a later stage, it was decided to encourage ‘borderline’ pupils to stay on in secondary moderns and take GCE ‘O’ levels there.[3] This was intended to boost the secondary modern’s academic status and cynically ‘take the sting out of the 11 plus examination.’[4] This stance was reinforced by the 1958 White Paper Secondary Education For All that further encouraged this blending of the secondary modern’s identity with that of the grammar school. Thus the Conservatives’ approach undermined the very notion of differentiated types of schooling and selection in the first place.
During this period, increasing numbers of proposals to create comprehensive schools were drawn up by local education authorities, particularly in areas of new housing, and were endorsed by the Conservative government. This formed part of a programme of greater educational provision that was calculated to be a pragmatic and electorally beneficial response to the bulge in the secondary school population following the rise in the post-war birth-rate. The Cabinet was convinced that ‘the general public will give us credit.’[5]
However, it is claimed unconvincingly by Mandler that the government and the Ministry of Education knew little about this and only ‘stumbled upon’ the initiatives of pro-comprehensive local authorities in the early 1960s.[6] This is then contradicted by his adding that the Ministry had been aware of a ‘growing accumulation’ of proposals earlier in the1950s and had already grown ‘more liberal’ in their approvals. Indeed, Mandler explains that David Eccles was aware that an emphasis on academic courses in secondary moderns was likely to ‘doom’ the selective system ‘sooner rather than later.’[7] In 1959 the American academic Max Eckstein noted the Conservative government’s ‘side-steps’ regarding the core issue of what type of secondary education they considered ideal: they would not publicly admit to the likely impact of comprehensive schools on the country’s education system as a whole.[8]
The Conservative government’s sleight of hand over grammar schools was epitomised by their laissez-faire approach towards the Leicestershire experiment of the late 1950s. In this case, the local education authority split secondary moderns and grammar schools into ‘high’ schools which all pupils would attend until the age of 14, and then either transfer to a grammar school simply on the basis of their parents wishing them to stay on at school until the age of 16 or beyond, or remain in the high school until they had reached the school leaving age, then 15. In practice, this meant that the grammar schools concerned were no longer academically selective and had had their status irrevocably altered. Yet Mandler does not admit this, instead presenting the scheme as if grammar schools were unaffected and sardonically putting inverted commas around the word ‘destruction’.[9]
In fact, the sources show that Eccles and the Ministry of Education officials knew very well what the Leicestershire experiment meant, and in internal correspondence cynically questioned ‘whether he (Eccles) can afford to permit its gradual spread without reference to him or whether to look for a means of controlling it.’[10] It was noted by the Chief Inspector of Schools that local authorities proposing to imitate Leicestershire ‘seem prepared to sacrifice the interests of their ablest pupils for the sake of removing selection.’[11] They admitted in 1960, four years before Labour took office, that 25-30 grammar schools in Leicestershire and Derbyshire were threatened: ‘The only alternative is to let matters take their course.’[12]
It was concluded that any alteration of the existing legislation to strengthen ministerial powers against these local authority experiments should be discouraged, and it was indeed thought that local authorities reducing their proportions of grammar schools places might be ‘as well’ for the Minister, as it enabled ‘sensible but unpopular things to be done without his taking the blame.’[13] They were also aware that such schemes were ultimately a mere preparation for fully comprehensive schools when the school leaving age was eventually raised to 16. In the meantime local plans were to be carefully presented following consultation with the Parliamentary Secretary Edward Boyle, with some portrayed ‘with a mere shift of emphasis’ as ‘large and properly ambitious modern schools.’[14] Any public or semi-public discussion of the implications of such schemes was to be discouraged in case the matter was brought into ‘party politics.’[15]
In order to support the contention that those in government were forced to adopt comprehensive schooling owing to public indignation from below, the British working class are portrayed by Mandler as fervent believers in the nebulous concept of ‘grammar schools for all.’ Yet a key survey published by New Society in 1967 showed that parents (as far as anything concrete can be deduced from such surveys) held an essentially mixed attitude. The sample of 1,331 adults supported the idea of comprehensive education by a slight majority of 52 per cent compared with 48 per cent of those against and ‘don’t knows.’ However, if all types of schooling were available to their children, the greater number favoured a grammar school at 46 per cent, compared with only 16 per cent for a comprehensive. Strikingly, a resounding 76 per cent desired the retention of grammar schools. Even on the specific question of selection at age 11 into different types of schools, a slight majority in fact favoured this – at 46 per cent compared with 43 per cent against and 11 per cent ‘don’t knows.’[16] In addition, support for comprehensives in 1967 was notable in areas where grammar schools had not yet been supplanted and were running alongside them. Rather than the fatuous idea that the general public wanted all grammar schools to be swept aside and replaced with universal comprehensives, the responses appear to suggest that the comprehensives was envisaged as offering more varied parental choice than the secondary moderns alone could provide. As the left-wing sociologist Dennis Marsden himself admitted, claims of a mandate for comprehensives were therefore ‘so much eyewash.’[17]
Neither is Mandler consistent in his attitude towards the reliability of pro-comprehensive local government officers in representing public opinion. It is claimed that they, along with Labour-supporting teachers at annual Labour Party conferences, were a ‘sensitive barometer’ of parental feeling in the 1950s and early 1960s regarding the supposedly widespread parental hatred of selection, as well as ‘reasonably efficient instruments’ in channelling public opinion against the 11 plus examination (notwithstanding whether it was right and proper for them to have been doing such a thing in the first place.)[18] Yet Mandler subsequently implies that those LEAs that accepted later Thatcherite and New Labour policies for greater parental involvement in running schools (with a consequent diminution of their own roles) were not really so representative of parents. According to Mandler, it was difficult for advocates of LEA control to explain how ‘sporadic voting for local councillors’ was more democratic than parental participation on school governing bodies.[19] But surely the same could have been said regarding the democratic validity of local councillors’ pro-comprehensive stances undertaken ‘in the name of the people’ in the 1960s? Mandler seems to think that LEAs represented local parents’ feelings adequately only in instances where it suits his underlying thesis.
Throughout the book, ‘democracy’ is portrayed as synonymous with egalitarianism and comprehensive schooling. Vague terms are employed throughout such as parents wanting the best ‘for all equally’ and a ‘general advance for all’ as opposed to the old system which was ‘a contest for relative advantage.’[20] Selection by academic ability is represented as an arbitrary mechanism imposed from above in which the majority are ‘denied access’ to the best schools, rather than a biological, social and practical inevitability in any human society that seeks to advance beyond the measure of the lowest common denominator.[21]
Owing to its emphasis on the grass roots, the book ignores the fact that ministers held powers regarding the number and size of schools that could have been used to block comprehensive schemes. They could also have influenced local authority policies through the signals they sent out regarding their commitment to the selective system. A long line of privately-educated Conservative education ministers and civil servants, who were markedly inclined to view the maintained secondary education system as a vehicle for short-term gain, thus have their role minimised and are, one might say, comprehensively let off the hook.
By equating his egalitarian and social-democratic values with those of the public, and in particular with those of the working class, grammar schools are portrayed by Mandler as upholding the prevailing social order. In fact, the Franks Report of 1966 showed that by 1964-5, grammar and direct grant school pupils were a clear majority at the University of Oxford at 51%, compared with those from the independent sector, whose proportion had decreased from 62% to 45% since 1938-9.[22] This success was achieved without any kind of special dispensation on the part of Oxford or regulations emanating from the Office for Students designed to ease the passage of those from state schools today. Comprehensive schooling’s real intention was always to develop a ‘classless’ society, rather than to drive higher educational standards. The present government’s imposition of VAT on private school fees and other policies hostile to independent schools and educational selection, are testament to the failure of the comprehensive system to achieve even its own goal. Furthermore, the Conservative Party’s non-position on selection within the state sector has amounted to a default stance of accommodation with social engineering in order to hide the consequences of what it allowed to occur between the 1950s and 1970s. Rather than a victory for the working class, the decimation of grammar schools and the associated ideal of meritocracy was, in fact, a god-send for the established order.
Piers Legh is the author of The Conservative Party and the Destruction of Selective Education in Post-War Britain: The Great Evasion. It was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/conservative-party-and-the-destruction-of-selective-education-in-postwar-britain-9781350254640/ While at the University of Manchester he completed a doctorate whose research partly formed the basis for the book.
[1] P. Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2020), p.62
[2] Ibid.
[3] See Minister’s meeting, Secondary Education, 23rd February 1955, ED 147/206
[4] Memorandum by the Minister of Education, ‘A Drive in Education,’ 14th July 1958, p.3, CAB 129/93
[5] Ibid, p.1
[6] Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy, p.64
[7] Ibid.
[8] M. Eckstein, ‘Britain’s White Paper on Education and Its Implications,’ Comparative Education Review, vol 3 (June 1959), p.17
[9] Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy, p. 51
[10] Ministry of Education brief, L.R. Fletcher to T.R. Weaver, 29th March 1960, ED 147/641
[11] W.R. Elliott, Notes on Various Forms of Secondary School Organisation,’ 10th December 1960, ED 147/641
[12] L.R. Fletcher to T.R. Weaver, 29th March 1960, ED 147/641
[13] Ibid.
[14] G.N. Flemming to E. Boyle, 1st April 1959, ED 147/640
[15] M. Smieton to D. Eccles, 9th March 1961, ED 147/641
[16] D.V. Donnison, ‘Education and Opinion,’ New Society, vol 10, no 265 (26th October 1967), pp.583-7
[17] D. Marsden, ‘Politicians, Equality and Comprehensives,’ in R. Bell, G. Fowler & K. Little, Education in Great Britain and Ireland (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973), p.124
[18] Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy, p.56 & p.145
[19] Ibid, p.146
[20] Ibid, p.181, p. 141
[21] Ibid, p.147
[22] University of Oxford, Report of Commission of Inquiry (Oxford University Press, 1966), vol ii, statistical appendix, p.47, table 31.
