Because we value our children’s future…

Posted on 04/11/2024

In advance of next month’s Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture, co-sponsored by Forum and the Socialist Educational Association, Jane Martin commends Caroline Benn’s staunch advocacy of comprehensive education and her sustained adherence to its ideals.

This blog celebrates the life and work of Caroline Benn (1926-2000). Co-founder of the Comprehensive Schools Committee which was the main comprehensive education campaign group in 1960s Britain, she was co-opted as an expert member of the Inner London Education Authority (1970-77), the UK education commission of Unesco (1975-82), and the longest serving governor of her local comprehensive school, Holland Park. Her publications include the two most thorough investigations of the British system of comprehensive secondary schools – Halfway There (1970, with Brian Simon) and Thirty Years On (1996, with Clyde Chitty). In the 1980s she joined a writing collective, the Hillcole Group, constituted as a left-wing response to the Hillgate Group of right-wing educators. She was also national president of the Socialist Education Association.

A graduate of Vassar College, one of a group of all-female institutions of higher learning that came to be known as the Seven Sisters, Caroline Benn (née DeCamp) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1926. The eldest of three children, her father and grandfathers practiced law and she grew up in a family of socially-concerned, episcopalian church-goers. Mass unemployment dominated Caroline’s childhood. The economic crash of 1929 left a quarter of America’s workforce unemployed and in Ohio closer to 35 per cent. Interviewed by Jad Adams in 1989, Caroline said she was ‘very affected by the Depression, the people coming to the door looking for work’[1].

Contention in her Republican-voting family arose when Caroline supported Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for economic recovery and Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign. Wallace launched his third-party candidacy for the presidency in December 1947. Wallace’s radical platform advocated accommodation with the Soviet Union to ensure peace; increased spending on welfare, education and public work, new civil rights legislation, and gender equality. Accused of being a Communist, which he was not, Wallace refused to obey racial segregation in the south where actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson campaigned for him at risk to his own life.

In July 1948, Caroline DeCamp sailed across the Atlantic to attend a summer school run by Oxford University. A friend suggested she meet 23-year-old Tony Benn and on 2 August she invited him to tea along with several people. They saw each other daily thereafter and Tony proposed marriage on 11 August. Married in Cincinnati in 1949, the Benns went on to have four children. They shared a sense that social change was possible and acted upon that belief. In 1950,  Tony entered Parliament as Labour MP for Bristol South East. His grandfathers were Liberal MPs and his father was a Liberal and then Labour MP created Viscount Stansgate in 1942. Caroline supported Tony through the battle to divest himself of the peerage he inherited in 1960 so that he could sit in the House of Commons, and later when vilified as the ‘Most Dangerous Man in Britain’ for his left-wing politics.

Fifty years ago, Caroline and Tony took the decision to remove their four children from private schools and caused much comment, often combined with consternation. ‘If they’d have gone to public school, they would have been educated for a society which is going, rather than one which is coming’ Caroline assured journalist Nancy Tuft. A satirical columnist called them the ‘Whizz-bang Benns,’ meaning up-to-the minute, innovative, pioneering, advanced. Tuft thought this an apt label for the then Labour Minister of Technology and his American wife whose work, deeds, insights and thought challenged much received opinion in British education.[2]

Caroline Benn chose Holland Park Comprehensive School over fee-paying Westminster, which Tony attended in the 1930s, because she thought it was the best school offering the best kind of education. Adverse comment, public and private, was incessant but Caroline never wavered, advising one well-heeled critic:

It is because we value our children’s future so much that we want them to have the advantages that come from being educated in a school representing all sections of their country, and not just one exclusive group. Holland Park is such a school, and although it may contain some students that one individual may, for personal reasons, find objectionable, there are probably few schools that do not do this. We know of those who find the sight of Eton boys dressed in wing collars and top hats – with their exaggerated “accents” – equally as objectionable as you find the girls with Cockney accents. And I cannot help but feel that both points of view are a little intolerant.[3]

Answering questions put by the Cambridge-based Advisory Centre for Education (ACE, founded in 1960) she did not consider it ‘daring’ but thought being American made her ‘more inclined to a comprehensive school, for American secondary education is comprehensive’[4].

When the 1944 Education Act abolished secondary school fees in England and Wales, belief that it was possible to identify three types of children with three types of mind—academic, technical and practical—supported the expansion of an academically selective school system. Rather than ability to pay, the procedure used to separate pupils in each locality into the numbers required to match the number of grammar school places available was 11-Plus attainment testing, which included an element of intelligence testing. However, England’s diversity of local government subcultures, local conditions and personnel saw some local authorities – including Coventry, London, and the West Riding of Yorkshire – come down in favour of comprehensive secondary schools in their areas.

During the 1950s the incipient comprehensive education movement gathered steam as government reports and sociological surveys showed how the 1944 Act played out in practice. Grammar schools remained middle-class institutions and influential research findings confirmed the relative chances or odds of success against their working-class counterparts in opportunity, performance, and aspiration.[5] Most children left school at 15 and went straight into full-time employment with no educational qualifications, while the social value of the selective grammar school offered their students a sense of having been ‘chosen’ for ‘better’ things. As time passed, the concept of ‘human capital’, the need for more public expenditure in science and technology, which sustained economic growth and development, and rejection of deterministic theories of intelligence translated into support for comprehensive education.

In his leader’s speech to the 1963 Labour Party conference Harold Wilson pointed to the scientific revolution and persistent under-performance of British industry in the face of international competition. Labour won the 1964 general election, pledged to the abolition of the segregation of children arising from the 11-plus in 1964. As prime minister, Wilson appointed former teacher Michael Stewart as his Education Secretary and Stewart put a policy paper to the Cabinet setting out his view of how to proceed. First, a circular requesting local authorities to submit plans for reorganisation and second, legislation to make this a legal requirement. The Cabinet, led by Wilson, refused to agree.

Stewart’s successor, Anthony Crosland, set out the government’s approach in Circular 10/65, which requested local authorities to send in plans to show how they intended to develop education along comprehensive lines and suggested six main forms of reorganisation. Two types of plans were asked for within a year. 1) Interim schemes (to begin within two years). 2) Long term schemes with no dates asked for, or laid down, for them to begin and end. Outside Whitehall, those wanting to accelerate change launched the Comprehensive Schools Committee.

Supporters and critics alike acknowledged the Committee’s moving spirit was Information Officer Caroline Benn. With files on every local authority in the country, so great was Benn’s knowledge that policy-makers and planners would consult her if they were thinking of a particular pattern of comprehensive education. Across three decades, she contributed numerous articles for education journals, besides editing Comprehensive Education, the journal of the Comprehensive Schools Committee.

A tenacious campaigner who never lost sight of her principles, Caroline Benn belongs to a long line of reforming women who helped make the world. We can think of American examples like Jane Addams who set up a women’s settlement in Chicago, Hull House, in 1889, and cleared a space for a new public role for women. In Britain, members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild were driven by a vision of a more just society in campaigns that spanned welfare, work and community. This is not an argument for alternative heroines. It is a case for deeper knowledge and understanding of women’s utopian energies and their role in participatory politics. This is important since one of the stakes of social conflict over the idea of common schooling is also conflict about the scope of the political. We owe it to Caroline to continue her struggle to promote the comprehensive philosophy of the equal value of every child (and every person) and every learner and every type of talent.

 

Click here to see ‘Caroline Benn and the Comprehensive Movement: A Timeline’

 

Notes

[1] Jad Adams, Tony Benn: A Biography, Hull, Biteback, 2011, p51.

[2] Nancy Tuft, ‘Whizz-bang wife. Nancy Tuft talks to Caroline Wedgwood Benn, wife of the Minister of Technology’, Liverpool Daily Post, April 30, 1968.

[3] CB Box 33, Holland Park School 1962-67, Caroline Benn papers, UCL Institute of Education.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Olive Banks, Parity and Prestige in English Secondary Education: A Study in Educational Sociology, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955.