Education

Part of Orders of the Day — Supply – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 3 July 1974.

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Photo of Sir George Sinclair Sir George Sinclair , Dorking 12:00, 3 July 1974

I agree with the Secretary of State in forecasting that education will be one of the important elements in the forthcoming election. I agree that it should be, because it is patent from every discussion that we have in our constituencies and with friends that people are desperately worried about what is going on in some of our schools. I believe that those worries are fully justified.

There are too many schools in which both work and behaviour are bad. In the worst, teachers have lost control and work is constantly disrupted by rowdy children who have been allowed to get out of hand and to defy authority without being checked or punished. In such schools truancy is rife and teachers are mocked, threatened and even subjected to physical violence. Such hostile prospects are already driving some teachers in training—for example, in the Birmingham area, as the National Union of Teachers told us two weeks ago—to seek work outside education. This is a serious situation.

It is claimed that such schools are most often found in decaying inner-city centres. But, in such areas, some good schools do exist and triumph over the difficulties of the environment. As a member of a Select Committee, I have over the past six years visited many of those areas and I have been taken over good schools. I have, on my own account, also visited other schools in such areas—I refer particularly to Clissold Park in Stoke Newington where two of my nieces have been teachers. Some of those good schools were in bad buildings, but they were marvellously led by gifted heads and dedicated staff. There the children were secure and full of life and could get on with their work and play. There, also, parents were encouraged to take a lively interest in the school community and the school was being begged by parents from outside the immediate neighbourhood to take in their children.

The stark fact is that we do not yet know enough about what makes a good school work. We, certainly, do not know enough to allow us to be dogmatic. But we do know that it depends far more on leadership and on teachers and on the support of parents than on buildings and equipment. We know that good schools can be found in deprived neighbourhoods and bad ones in easier neighbourhoods. We find both not only in decaying city centres but also in the country.

Schools must not be too large, otherwise it becomes difficult to build proper relationships between the staff and the young. They must be orderly and disciplined. A good school must be a learning community in which young people are cared for as individuals and feel confident, and in which they can grow and flourish. It takes time and imagination to create such a community, but this is what we should be aiming at.

Such a school is easily recognised. In any neighbourhood most parents who are concerned about the education of their children have a shrewd idea about which schools are good and which are bad and where they would prefer to send their children.

So far I have been talking about schools in the maintained sector. But there are good schools and bad in other sectors, too—the voluntary-aided, the direct grant and the wholly independent.

Schools are living communities. They do not remain static. Today they are having constantly to adjust their attitudes and teaching to the rapidly changing conditions of the technological age, to the changing attitudes of parents and their young, and the changing attitudes of the teaching profession.

In this uncertain field it is right to experiment, but we must expect some of the new ideas, however fashionable at the outset, to produce problems when put into action. Some local education authorities are experimenting with middle schools and some with six form colleges. Both these initiatives, as I hope the Secretary of State will allow, may affect the structure of the secondary comprehensives. There are new ventures also in the fields of further and higher education. And, at the other end of the scale, there are exciting educational discoveries in nursery schools and play groups. But these are experiments and we must allow time in which to judge both their contributions to our educational system and their claims on our limited educational resources. We do not know enough yet to justify imposing any of these new patterns uniformly throughout the country.

Here I come to the nub of my argument. Experience over the past few years has shown that the comprehensive school, too, is still experimental and should not be imposed upon us as the best or only answer. Some of them are good and some of them are bad—I hope that the Secretary of State will allow this, too—and there are many between the two extremes. But they have produced their own serious problems—for example, the idea of the right size for the all-through comprehensive is having to be revised. It has proved extremely difficult in schools of 2,000 or more to build a community in which the individual can receive proper care and a sense of security and belonging as a basis for making the best of his or her talents. If the size of such comprehensives should be halved—as ILEA now seems to think—their structure also may have to be changed.

Surely, what we now need is a calm and thorough assessment of what is good and what is bad in the existing patterns of comprehensive schools, and of how best to deal with those that are now recognised as being far too big. In the meantime, when there is so much doubt about the best patterns—and we shall always need variety and experiments—and when there are far too many bad schools and far too many desperately worried parents, I believe that it is wrong—it is educationally wrong—to destroy or change the nature of any good school anywhere. Equally, I believe that parental choice—a basic right that is being unduly restricted—should be made as wide as practicable and that it should be encouraged to play a more influential part in deciding which patterns are best suited to our needs. My hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr. St. John-Stevas) has described some of the choices which he believes should be open and should be expanded.

It is, I know, fashionable to assert that selective schools cannot usefully coexist with comprehensive schools, but this is not borne out by the facts. There are good examples of happy coexistence in London and in other cities, for example. Bristol and Norwich—