Orders of the Day — Education

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 24 July 1951.

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Photo of Dr Horace King Dr Horace King , Southampton, Test 12:00, 24 July 1951

Briefly I want to say one or two things about the problem revealed by the Minister's answer to recent Questions to the effect that 20 per cent. of grammar school boys and 25 per cent. of grammar school girls left the grammar schools last year in their 15th year. Education to 16 years is the meagre minimum for grammar schools and we hope that grammar school education will, in time, continue for most children up to the age of 18 years.

One of the main causes of early school-leaving is economic. The high cost of living, the high wages paid to children between 15 and 16 years by a labour market clamouring for bright juvenile labour, and the joy of being no longer a financial burden, to one's parents and, most of all, the sad effect of bereavement taking the bread-winner from the home—all these are tempting young children away from grammar school tragically too soon.

Employers like to have their young employees as soon as possible to train them in the way of the firm, but I believe employers can help themselves as well as the children if they will realise that they are better off even from a business point of view if they let the children remain at the grammar schools to obtain a good general education before going on to special training. The better the foundations the more successfully can special skills be built upon them.

The most exciting part of education, the really critical and vital part, begins with adolescence. That is why the giving of secondary education to all children up to the age of 15 has been one of the greatest things this country has done since the war. That is why the grammar schools do not want to lose the potential leaders of the next generation when grammar school education is reaching its most vital stage in the adolescent years. Children give to a school as well as take away from it, and I think they give most and in doing so receive most in their later rather than their earlier years.

I therefore plead with all the earnestness I possess with parents whose children are in grammar schools and who find the financial burden a heavy one, to make all the financial sacrifices involved and to resist the attraction of an extra wage coming into the house, for the sake of the child's long-term interests. I urge education authorities to increase their maintenance and clothing grants to help poor parents to keep their children in grammar schools, and particularly to help the widow's children.

The second great cause of early school-leaving from the grammar schools lies in the fact that we have not yet found the best way of choosing children who are to go there. We decide a child's future educational career at the age of 11 plus. It may be true that the nation's 5 per cent. most able children reveal their ability at that age, although I doubt it. Julius Caesar certainly did not. It was not until he was 40 that he got out of the "backward class" into the "A stream."

Some children develop late and go a long way further, even though they mature after the date prescribed by local educational authorities. Many of the children who leave grammar school early are children who have developed rather precociously and then find the going too heavy. One of our problems, and a very mighty one, is to see that the "late developer" on the one hand gets the kind of education for which he or she is fitted and that the precocious child, on the hand, is not left stranded in an atmosphere which is too exacting for it. The heavy demands of grammar school syllabuses call for tremendous moral qualities—qualities of character as well as intelligence. No selection tests can measure these moral qualities which are so vitally important and have a bearing upon what a child will do at the grammar school.

Intelligence tests have recently come under fire. I would agree that such tests are not infallible. I believe that the real enemy of the intelligence test is the man who, having established an I.Q., believes it has got an absolute value. The intelligence test is a useful instrument. It tries to measure what the child is capable of doing rather than what he really knows, because what he knows depends upon the accident of his home surroundings and so many other things. But neither intelligence tests nor the old tests in English and arithmetic can measure the moral qualities.

Moreover, the nervous reaction of a child to examinations, particularly in these days when parents inflict their anxiety on their children, makes it important that the various tests to which a child is submitted should be taken as casually as possible. They should be in the child's own classroom, with his own teacher, without the terrifying apparatus which accompanied the old scholarship examinations. They should be spaced over a long period. It is extremely wrong to decide a child's fate by his behaviour on a single day which might easily be one of his off days.

Above all, it is important that examinations, no matter how scientifically administered, no matter how skilfully concealed, should be supplemented by some other method of selection. Weight should be given to the reports and the knowledge possessed by the teachers of the child in the junior school, and the final lists of children who go to the grammar school should be vetted by committees of head teachers who should discuss all the borderline cases very carefully indeed.

I have spoken very briefly on what I think is a very important subject. I think we ought to give teachers in our junior schools a much greater part in the grave task of selecting which children are to go to the grammar schools. I would urge the Minister to investigate the wastage which is taking place from grammar schools, to see that bereavement or financial hardship does not take the good child away from the grammar school, and, above all, to investigate the methods by which various authorities are selecting children for grammar school places.