Education

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 22 January 1959.

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Photo of Mr James Ede Mr James Ede , South Shields 12:00, 22 January 1959

I have dealt with him; one does not waste too much time on the small fry.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to the White Paper. I should like to read to him and to the House a paragraph that we put into a White Paper of 1943. The last part of paragraph 28, dealing with the question of the suitability of a particular school for a particular child, if we had a tripartite system, read: An academic training is ill-suited for many of the pupils who find themselves moving along a narrow educational path bounded by the School Certificate"— that was the School Certificate of those days; I admit that in these days any type of school can have a School Certificate Examination suitable to its particular curriculum— and leading into a limited field of opportunity. Further, too many of the nation's abler children are attracted into a type of education which prepares primarily for the University and for the administrative and clerical professions; too few find their way into schools from which the design and craftsmanship sides of industry are recruited. If education is to serve the interests both of the child and of the nation, some means must be found of correcting this bias and of directing ability into the field where it will find its best realisation. I think that is still a legitimate criticism of the grammar school to which admission is obtained by the normal method at the present time. It is one of the things to be deplored that up to the moment the nation has not seen the education service with the vision so eloquently put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Fulham, (Mr. M. Stewart) at the close of his speech. For it is the vision that the school has, the ideals it holds up as the best for the pupils, that will largely determine the success of democratic education in this country.

It is a difficult process to describe, but I think it is probably a mutual process between social standards, social values and the educational service of the country. The man or woman who gives of his or her best to the community in the calling he or she has adopted is entitled to equal honour no matter the social circumstances of that calling. I, for one, hope that the vision expressed by my hon. Friend will be steadily upheld throughout the struggle there will be in the near future about the content of education in this country.

Let us be clear on this point. Education is something that is carried on in the class room, on the playing fields or on the school journey in the contact between a more mature mind and an immature mind, and the task of administrators and legislators is to endeavour to let that contact take place in conditions that enable both teacher and taught to exercise their joint influence over as wide a range of interests as possible, so that the pupil shall get a chance of revealing in the course of this process what his real gifts are.

I recollect the second meeting of the Surrey Education Committee I attended, when we had a pupil-teacher ratio of forty-eight pupils per teacher, which was very good in those days. I am talking about 1914. I never had a class of less than 55 to teach. Some genius had discovered in his peregrinations round the county a school which had 287 pupils and seven teachers. His mathematical training had been just sufficient to enable him to put forward this proposition: bring one child up from the infants' school, sack one of the teachers, 'and you will achieve the pupil-teacher ratio that has been declared right by this authority. He did not understand it when I said to him as a practical teacher turned administrator, "Do you realise that if you do this you will put every child in the school out of his stride for the next six weeks?" For the complete reorganisation of a school, which is so easy in the committee room, can have the most disastrous effects on the progress of the children in that school.

I believe we have to find a far higher place in the social values of the school for those children whose gifts are practical, who tend to particularise rather than to write glorious woolly essays—which I rather think the right hon. Gentleman thought the author of this Amendment had given us. I am thinking of the child who moves slowly, who wants to be convinced before he puts another foot forward that he is already stepping on solid ground. I had a boy who held it as a cardinal principle that seven sevens make fifty-three. I made him say "Seven sevens are forty-nine" twenty times, and when he had done it he turned to me and said. "Please, sir, why are they?" The correct answer to that question on the other side of the House would be "I would like to see that question on the Paper." No boy—I am talking about boys particularly, although I have taught mixed classes—gets a sense of achievement by having all his sums marked wrong every morning, with the haunting dread that if he gets one right by accident he will immediately be punished for having copied or cheated.

I agree with what the right hon. Gentleman said on that score. We have got to make education alive and something in which the child is interested, because without interest there is no real education. The wider we make the school the greater facility there is for a child, who is leaving a form to which he is generally attached in order to go to another form of pupils of about his own age, to deal with a subject in which he may be either very strong or very weak. That is one way of helping to get the child interested in the school.

I am glad to say that while not many schools are called comprehensive the move to comprehensiveness is growing. During the Recess I went to a school about four miles from where I live, where some of the pupils who passed the common entrance examination go to this school as the grammar school their parents select. It also takes all the pupils in the immediate neighbourhood of the school who have not passed the common entrance examination. The testimony of the head teacher there was that whereas he had experience in a place where they dealt only with secondary-modern, where children come with a preliminary sense of frustration and failure, because of the way he was organising this school he was able to make it plain to every pupil that if he was qualified for the grammar school side he would go to it, and it he was not qualified for that but had blundered into it he would be transferred to something more appropriate.

He said, "I do not want the children to sort themselves out. I want them all to feel they have a chance of succeeding in this school according to their abilities, no matter what happened at the Common Entrance". I replied. "Well, you will have a hard job to do it." He said, "There is only one thing that stands in the way. The grammar school child can get a grant towards clothing but not the child who does not pass the Common Entrance examination."

I have not had time to inquire, and I do not know whether that is a national or a local regulation. All I say is that where there are these various forms of bilateralism, multi-lateralism and all the other horrible descriptions people will insist on giving to things that ought merely to be called secondary schools, that will at any rate never receive the support of the national Government. Every child in any school should be equal before the law and before the regulations. Because I have not been able to complete my inquiries, I am not trying to put blame anywhere tonight. I hold it as a fundamental belief that we must not differentiate inside a rate-aided school between one child and another on any other basis than one that has been recommended by a doctor.

I have heard something about the settlement of 1944. I was at all the meetings, but I never heard the participants call it a settlement. All that I think the present Home Secretary and myself managed to do was to give everybody something but nobody as much as he asked for. We got to a stage when we had a Measure to which no serious opposition —on that particular score with which I am now dealing—was offered in the House. I do not want to reopen any old sores, but hon. Members who were here in 1944 will recollect that one afternoon our late friend Dick Stokes said he was going to divide the House. I saw Sir John Shute and Mr. Joseph Tinker—and old Members of the House will know the status they had—to tell him not to do it, and it was not done.

I hope that the same spirit of accommodation—I will not say more than this—that enabled us to take the tremendous steps forward at that time will prevail today. I was a Nonconformist child in days when it was a serious disability to be a Nonconformist child. No child ought to be penalised or put into an inferior building because of the faith of its parents, and still less because of the faith of the school managers. I say no more than that, but as one who took part in those days in what I regard, under the tremendous and powerful leadership of the present Home Secretary, as a great advance, I hope that we shall be able to get the same spirit going now that we had then. I am quite sure that the right hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. C. Davies), who played no undistinguished part in those proceedings, will agree with me.

We are engaged, and shall be engaged for years, in a very competitive world in which our standard of living and our influence in the world will depend upon the skill of our craftsmen and the creative genius of our designers. I say nothing to belittle mere academic attainment, but in this particular connection the word "mere" is not out of place. We shall need an education service based on a national conception of social values, which will attract the man or woman who gives his or her best according to the abilities with which he or she has been endowed, and anything which suggests that the education which produces good craftsmen, and particularly skilled creative designers, is in some way or other a sort of second-class education will not secure for us the full effort that our people are able to give.

I rejoiced when I went to Stoke Newington to the comprehensive school there and was told that 80 per cent. of the children stayed on beyond the time when they were free from a legal obligation to attend school. The right hon. Gentleman this afternoon said that they go on beyond the compulsory leaving age, and that is a phrase that I sometimes hear used. There is a sort of belief that a child ought to go at 15 and that we ought to have some excuse for keeping it at school beyond that age. I hope that we shall increasingly get the support of the parents, employers, teachers, school managers and citizens generally in an endeavour to keep the child at school as long as we can.

Inside the schools themselves, in the intimate relationship between teacher and pupil, I hope there will be opportunities for children who do avail themselves of this chance to get especial attention, sometimes in things that are outside the run of education for the ordinary child in school, in which we can give a child something that marks him out as an individual, with a capacity of his own. If we can do that, I believe that we can face the future with quite certain equanimity in this country. It is because I believe that the best way to do that is through the comprehensive school that I shall vote for the Amendment tonight.