The Comprehensive School. Guidelines for the Reorganization of Secondary Education

252 Pages·1973·18.976 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Halsall and Edmund King (Auth.)

The Comprehensive School
Guidelines for the Reorganization
of Secondary Education
by
ELIZABETH HALSALL
Department of Educational Studies, University of Hull
PERGAMON PRESS
OXFORD · NEW YORK
SYDNEY · TORONTO
Pergamon Press Ltd., Headington Hill Hall, Oxford
Pergamon Press Inc., Maxwell House, Fairview Park, Elmsford,
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Pergamon of Canada Ltd., 207 Queen's Quay West, Toronto 1
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Rushcutters Bay, N.S.W. 2011, Australia
Copyright © 1973 Elizabeth Halsall
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
Pergamon Press Ltd
First edition 1973
Reprinted 1974
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Halsall, Elizabeth.
The comprehensive school.
(The Commonwealth and international library.
Education and educational research division)
Bibliography, p.
1. High schools—Great Britain—Administration.
I. Title.
LB2901.H34 373.2'5'0942 72-10107
ISBN 0-08-017068-4
Printed in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford, Surrey
To
My Father
Foreword
THIS book has been written from the conviction that, although there have now been
published a number of books and a considerable number of articles on various aspects of
secondary reorganization, no one has yet really attempted to relate the practical problems
and issues, as they are encountered inside the schools in the course of administration and
policy-making, to the research available on at least some of these problems and issues.1 To
do this has required a great amount of reading, occasionally in areas where the writer had
only general rather than specific expertise, and even more reflection, in order to piece
together material from different areas of research and see the significance of the whole, into
which the interlocking parts of the material had been combined, for a specific problem of
organization or policy. This diflScult task was made easier by the writer's experience of
teaching in and organizing a comprehensive school on the one hand and in research on the
other. It was therefore possible to arrive at a synoptic view, but no claim is made that
the conclusions reached are without error, only that an honest attempt has been made,
from a position of vantage, to weigh up the relevance of the material to the problems facing
the schools.
1 This is not to decry such work as that of Benn and Simon in Half Way There, indeed much of it was most
relevant to some of the problems discussed, but the point of view is different. In their book, necessarily, the
issues are viewed from outside rather than inside the schools.
IX
CHAPTER 1
The Comprehensive Movement
THE movement towards comprehensivization in British schools during the early and middle
sixties has recently shown signs of losing momentum, especially since the withdrawal of
Circular 10/65; and the variety of types of reorganized schools set up has led some to
question the need for, and the value of, the whole reform. This book is in some places
critical of the policies followed in England and Wales; but at no point is the desirability of
the reform questioned. This is because a study of comparative education, viewed both
historically and contemporaneously, leads to the conclusion that in education, as in other
aspects of political and social life, there are general movements which affect large areas of
the world and which it is pointless to oppose, since they are powered by deep motivations of
great force. These deep desires produce decisions of policy often taken outside education,
sometimes inside it; either way they affect it right down to classroom level, and result in
persistent common trends in educational systems which, individually, are unique. Opposition
to such deep and powerful forces is futile. We get better results by tapping them.
If we look for a moment at other periods than our own, periods in which we ourselves
are not emotionally involved, we have a chance of generating more light than heat and we
are all the better prepared to look at our own times with the measure of detachment that is
needed if we are to make sense of what is happening now.
There are several clearly distinct periods in secondary education in Western Europe, each
of them linked to distinct social situations and reflecting their needs, both in school organiza-
tion and in curriculum: the medieval period, the Renaissance and post-Renaissance period,
the period of the first Industrial Revolution and of the political revolution, and the first half
of the twentieth century. In every country of Western Europe in turn we see the same
phenomena recurring within a particular period. In the small space available it is possible
only to stress the main lines of development, without the qualifications that a more detailed
analysis would demand, but, as our purpose is insight and understanding of our own period,
this should be enough.
Although others attended it, especially in the later period, the medieval academic school
was essentially a pre-vocational school for clerics, and its curriculum, as exemplified in the
trivium and quadrivium, by covering the main areas of the domain of knowledge, prepared
its pupils for the higher studies of philosophy and theology. The knight and the artisan
mainly got their training for adult life outside this school.
With the advent of gunpowder, the rise of nation states and the creation of mercenary
armies—indeed the nationalization of the army—the medieval knight found himself if not
unemployed, at least underemployed. His solution to the problem of increased leisure in
more settled local conditions was to go to school and study classical literature. This was
1
2 THE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL
sufficiently like the medieval literature of vernacular lays and epics to which he was accus-
tomed, to please him better than the more science-based trivium and quadrivium of the
medieval school. Hence a change in the nature and aims of education in the Renaissance
and post-Renaissance period and, to a considerable extent, in its curriculum. Since the
Knight had turned gentleman, and so too had the scholar, and the wealthy merchants and
professional men who aped both, education was geared to the production of gentlemen of
leisure. Hence the typical continental academic school of the Renaissance and post-Renais-
sance period, whether northern European Latin school or southern European Jesuit college,
was a product of vast economic and social changes involving the redundancy of the knight
and the rise of the middle class.
The restricted character of the curriculum of the academic school ensured that the poorer
members of the middle class would look elsewhere for their education, to the French school
of the Continent or the eighteenth-century dissenting academy of England; these schools
served practical needs for such subjects as geography, mathematics and French, the language
of international trade, as pre-vocational studies for commerce. Even the nobility, who were
replacing churchmen as administrators, had to found courtly academies with broader-based
studies. As the range of knowledge and skills needed increased, so did the range of the
curriculum. Again a general European sociological situation had produced a general
European educational development, coloured by local variations in timing and organization.
The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution are in some senses watersheds in
both the social and educational history of the West. The growing complexity of social and
commercial tasks in a technologically developing society made it increasingly imprudent
to use status by birth as an index of capacity for a function, or patronage as a means by
which a post could be obtained. Such a change in practice could only be brought about in an
atmosphere which stressed the worth of men as individuals, as individuals with rights as well
as duties. Democratization was probably the inevitable corollary of industrialization. It is
no coincidence that public secondary examination systems began to be set up in Western
Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards. They provided that evidence of capacity
that birth was unable to furnish. England was a late starter in this new development, but this
fact does not invalidate the argument. In any common development countries proceed at
their own pace and for their own reasons.
In the same way secondary academic schools organized and supported by the state or the
public authorities also began to be set up, and a drive began, to establish the new modern
subjects as equivalent in prestige to the older classical subjects. These two movements
dominate secondary education in the nineteenth century, and approximately by the end of
it have found expression in every industrializing Western European country. We can set
alongside them the movement for mass literacy, and with it the foundation of the elementary
school, and subsequently of the advanced elementary school for the further education of
artisans. All of them are responses to the expansion of knowledge and technology, the
increasing complexity of industrial and social life and the beginnings of democratization.
The advanced elementary schools are of particular interest. Even their names significantly
echo the fact that they are responses to a situation common to all countries, though with
features peculiar to each. In Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium, we have the
mittelschiile, the mellemskole and the ecole moyenne or middelbare school, in Holland the
ULO school (extended lower education school), in France the ecole primaire superieure, in
England the higher-grade school. All survived, except the last, until the mid-twentieth
THE COMPREHENSIVE MOVEMENT 3
century. They often combined general and prevocational training in a sub-academic type
course and led to intermediate posts in commerce, industry or agriculture or to a higher
specialized vocational training. Their fees were cheap enough for parents who could not
afford secondary education for their children and their curriculum was often peculiarly
responsive to local or national economic and social needs.
Their existence underlined the fact that there were two separate and parallel systems of
education for different social classes. Even for the older age-groups there was no sharing of
facilities, teachers or students. An industrialized civilization could not manage without
literate workers, including some of quite considerable knowledge, but the prejudice against
the kind of knowledge required by the working class and the vast gulf that separated the
social classes at the time ensured that the middle and the working classes would be educated
in different school systems all over Europe. The school system reflected the social system
and the state of technology, and it did so everywhere.
The retention of separate educational systems for different classes is perhaps only possible
while the community remains moderately static. An industrialized society is of necessity
more mobile than a. peasant economy and it manifests an increasing need for the well
educated, not to be found in sufficient numbers in the middle class alone. Western Europe
reached this stage in the early years of the twentieth century, when the idea of equality of
educational opportunity, or at least of la carriere ouverte aux talents began to be preached,
and arrangements began to be made for training the intellectually gifted children of the lower
middle and working classes, by means of scholarships and free places at secondary schools.
These became available as technological growth provided the money, and idealism and
enlightened self-interest provided the will, to pay for them. Hence in the early part of the
twentieth century there is a moderate intellectualization of the academic secondary school,
as ability to profit, as well as ability to pay, became a criterion o fentry. As bright children
moved from the elementary into the secondary school, almost inevitably there wa sa gradual
change from the idea that the elementary system and the secondary system are parallel
systems of education based on social class to the view that they are stages of education end
on to each other.
As a result types of school hitherto considered part of the elementary school system began
to move into the secondary system, and the same types of course to occur in two different
kinds of secondary school. Thus the French ecole primaire superieure was brought into the
secondary system as the college moderne, and the Belgian moderne course was to be found
in the traditional academic school, the athenee, and in the advanced elementary school, the
ecole moyenne. The first movement produces a secondary system with several types of school,
the second a reason for amalgamating them. Indeed the Swedish movement towards
comprehensivization was prompted by the need to reduce the number of types of school
and to avoid duplication of courses as much as by the wish not to make too early distinctions
between children. In England the killing off o fthe higher-grade school and the general anti-
vocationalism of English education prevented the development of a large number of types
of secondary school. Otherwise England was left with the same problem as all the other
Western European countries, namely, that the schools newly introduced into the secondary
system did not have the prestige of the traditional academic school. The latter, i na period of
increasing affluence and increasing aspiration after the Second World War, therefore
became the focus of increasing competition as pupils strove to get into it.
At the time further expansion of the curriculum made it more and more difficult for one-
4 THE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL
stream academic schools to survive and so the setting up of common schools in many rural
areas became inevitable.
The Common School
Meanwhile the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. had already moved on to the common school.
The Latin school had never had the same hold in the United States as elsewhere, because of
the need to deal appropriately with the ever-expanding and novel needs of an ever-expanding
and shifting community, in a country where there was a continual influx of immigrants from
different ethnic groups and cultures. Hence by 1850 the principal type of secondary school
was the academy, fee-paying and private, but very flexible in its curriculum. The high school
in turn replaced the academy, after the Kalamazoo case of 1874, where the underlying issue
was much the same as that in the Cockerton judgement in England. The judgement given,
however, was actually the reverse and led to a massive expansion of free publicly supported
high schools, with very varied curricula and for children of all social classes. Hence by 1930
half the 15-18-year-olds were receiving full-time education.
Russia developed the common school after 1917 as a matter of political principle and as a
result of political revolution. The school was created in conditions of low technological de-
velopment. As a result the Russian approach to common schooling was different from that
of the U.S.A. As economic conditions improved the U.S.S.R. delayed longer and longer
the age at which children were divided up and sent off into specialized schools. By 1940 the
7-year common school was found nearly everywhere, but qualifying examinations deter-
mined progress up the educational ladder. Now there is a 10-year common school.
The Western European movement towards the common school began significantly in
Sweden, a country not. impeded economically by world wars and one in which social
stratification is less intense than in some other countries. After a period of well-planned
experimentation during the 1950s, accompanied by scientific evaluation, the common school
for pupils aged 7 to 16 was made compulsory by the Education Act of 1962. In the last 3
years of the course, optional subjects were to be gradually introduced and in the last year
the course was divided up into nine different sections. The 1968 Education Act has subse-
quently reduced the amount of differentiation and has also decreed the setting up of a
unified school for the 16-19-year-olds for 1971. Similar, though less extensive, developments
have also taken place in the other Scandinavian countries.
Most other Western European countries, having greater social, academic or administrative
divisions, have been moving with greater difficulty towards the common school. France
produced notable reports and plans for reform, but, owing to political instability, structural
stratification in the Ministry of Education and conflicts between church and state and
between the bourgeoisie and the workers, no serious changes took place until the return of de
Gaulle to power. The Berthoin reform of 1959 was, however, soon replaced by the Plan
Fouchet of the middle 1960s, as the absence of real unification became apparent. In 1963,
twenty-three junior secondary multilateral schools {colleges d'enseignement secondaire)
were set up experimentally. Their 4-year courses involved observation and guidance of
pupils. By 1967, 1200 of these schools had been established, with 1975 as the date for the
completion of the reform. The C.E.S. is followed by differential upper secondary education,
in which the traditional lycee is evolving from an 11-18 school to a 3-year school on sixth-
form college lines.
THE COMPREHENSIVE MOVEMENT 5
In Italy, Holland and Federal Germany moves towards educational change have been made.
Italy established a common middle school by the Law 1854 of 1962. Holland passed the
Mammoth Law in 1963 and began to implement it in 1968. It allows for a common curricu-
lum1 for 12-year-olds, but in three types of schools; some comprehensive schools are,
however, already being developed. Germany published the Rahmenplan in 1959 and the
report of the Federal Educational Council in 1970, the latter recommending the unification
of secondary education; but the decentralization of power to the various Länder since the
war has prevented any overall reform; so far change has occurred only locally. Both Germany
and Holland have been hindered by the diversified character of their second-level education.
The tendency to think that in a common school the interests of the able child cannot be
protected without the creation of very large schools, an erroneous line o fthinking common
over a long period in England, has faced Holland with an as yet unsolved dilemma; owing
to the arrangements for municipal, Protestant and Catholic school systems, she has a large
number of small schools.
This group of countries is not moving easily towards the common school and, it would
appear, is moving towards a junior secondary school which is multilateral rather than
comprehensive. It is not yet clear whether for them this is a final or interim stage. If previous
educational evolutions are anything to go by, this stage is an interim one, though the present
continental tendency to set up options for whole courses, rather than for separate subjects,
strengthens the multilateral approach.
To sum up the trends in school organization at the secondary level in the years 1900-70,
it is clear that as a result of increased industrialization, social mobility and democratization,
the barriers between the elementary and secondary systems of education were gradually
broken down. The concept of secondary education as a stage following the elementary or
primary stage replaced that of secondary education as a different kind of education suited
for a different social class of pupil from those educated in the elementary system. In a
particular country the process usually takes several stages2:
1. the acceptance of the idea that all children should have a common primary school so
as to give all an equal chance of the first phase of secondary education;
2. progressive raising of the school-leaving age to give all children a chance of the first
phase of secondary education;
3. abolition of fees in secondary schools and provision of maintenance grants;
4. intellectualization of the academic secondary school, as elaborate systems of selection
for different types of school are developed in countries with different types of post-
primary education; the intellectually selective grammar school is thus a stage in the
evolution from parallel elementary and secondary systems for different social classes
to primary and secondary systems end on to each other and for a wider social spectrum;
5. the tendency to put off until later and later both the choice of vocation and the intro-
duction of highly specialized vocational teaching;
6. at the junior stage of secondary education the adoption o fa common curriculum, and
of an orientation and guidance period, by different types of school;
7. the amalgamation of different types of schooling and the development of comprehen-
sive or multilateral junior, and sometimes senior, high schools, where rigorous
1 Provision of a common curriculum is sometimes the first sign that a more radical organizational reform
is in the offing.
2 Not every country goes through every stage.
6 THE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL
selection is replaced by student guidance in the choice of an appropriate course or
group of subjects at the senior stage.
As a result education is increasingly catering, not for a number of different social classes in
different schools, but for a wide range of occupational and personal requirements in a single
school, with a common curriculum at the bottom and a measure of increasing specialization
at the top, reflecting the wide variations in types of jobs currently available in an industrial-
ized society. This evolution has taken place in a general context of lessened social division,
increased social aspiration and increased economic wealth, such as was experienced in the
U.S.A. soon after the century opened.
The development of the British comprehensive school from small beginnings in London,
Coventry and some rural areas in the early post-war years, with increasing momentum in
the 1960s, can now be seen against the background of a similar evolution in Western Europe.
It has taken place in the same atmosphere of political and academic controversy common
elsewhere and has had its own peculiar handicaps. The lack of a sense of direction in the
central authority and a period of economic stringency, produced Circular 10/65—rather
than a government bill—with its suggestions of several varieties of comprehensive school,
as already set up by innovating local authorities. Other handicaps would appear to be the
earlier lack of an upper elementary school, easily transformable into a junior comprehensive
school—a common development elsewhere—and the fact that the first public examinations
take place a year later in the secondary course than is true of some continental countries.
Hence a 5 year + 2 year arrangement of stages of secondary schooling rather than the 4
+ 3 or 3 + 4 found elsewhere. These latter structures produce separately viable schools of
easily manageable size. The English 5 + 2 structure leads to the "all through" comprehen-
sive school, which tends to be large, or arrangements involving a change in the middle of a
course, or the hiving off of the short upper 2-year course into the sixth-form college, which
will only be a really satisfactory educational institution when the course is lengthened to
3 or 4 years.
One may conclude perhaps with the following reflection. Comparative historical studies
demonstrate at particular periods the existence of common educational trends. These may
proceed at varying speeds in different countries according to the quirks of local and national
circumstances, but everywhere the particular evolution eventually reaches completion. There
is no reason to suppose that the present evolution towards a common school is any exception
to this persistent pattern.
A comparative study of the present educational scene thus shows that, although the
research on the effects of selection, carried out in this country by Vernon and others in the
1950s, was valuable in alerting educationists to the inefficiency of the most efficient
selection process in existence, the result of these investigations merely added fuel to flames
that were already burning. As has been demonstrated by comparative educationists,3 other
countries in Western Europe, where research in educational psychology was less plentiful
or non-existent, were also moving towards a common school under the influence of strong
and persistent social and economic pressures. Even if the psychologists' results had been to
confirm the efficiency of the selection process,4 these forces would not have been denied.
3 For example, in World Survey of Education, Vol. III. Secondary Education, Unesco, 1961, pp. 85-110.
4 In fact, the evidence on the effects of selection, though sparse, all points in the same direction. Attempts
to segregate produce erroneous decisions and unselective systems obtain at least as high levels of attainment
as selective systems, perhaps higher. (Yates, A., The Organization of Schooling, Students Library of Education,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, p. 53.)