Comprehensive education: completed or defeated? The Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture 2025
Posted on 04/12/2025
FORUM and the Socialist Education Association co-sponsor the annual Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture. Patrick Yarker gives an account of this year’s event.
The 25th Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture departed from the usual practice of giving a platform to a single speaker. Instead, three speakers considered whether the comprehensive education revolution has been completed or defeated. Among the audience of more than 70 who gathered to hear Diane Reay, India Ress and Fiona Millar were members of the Benn family, the Socialist Education Association (SEA) – which co-sponsors the event with FORUM – and the Campaign for State Education (CASE), as well as the FORUM Board. Steve Witherden, MP, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Education and is an ex-teacher, attended and spoke briefly. John McDonnell MP also looked in.
Melissa Benn chaired proceedings with characteristic warmth and aplomb. She spoke of the importance of her mother’s American mid-Western background as grounding her commitment to a good neighbourhood school open to all. Caroline Benn’s association with FORUM began in the mid-1960s when she served as Information Officer for the Comprehensive Schools Committee (CSC), which included members of the FORUM Board. By common consent Caroline Benn was the committee’s driving force. She wrote for FORUM regularly as the CSC became the Campaign for Comprehensive Education. Through the pages of the journal she charted and defended the gains of the movement, illuminated the costs to the public purse of maintaining private education, offered trenchant and far-seeing criticism of government education policy and judicious arguments in favour of egalitarian and anti-determinist teaching and learning.
Diane Reay, in fiery form, was the first main speaker. She said that elimination of the tripartite education system, with its grammar/secondary modern school divide, was only the beginning of the long trek to a truly comprehensive education system. To continue it, there must be redistribution of funding and greater democracy at all levels. A socially mixed school intake was necessary for comprehensive education, and still far from being generally achieved, but not of itself enough. Fixed ‘ability’ thinking would have to be superseded. So would the academisation programme, which had placed significant barriers on the road to change. Schools must become places of nurture for our young people, rather than remaining credentialising factories which too often breed disaffection.
India Rees brought news from the frontline of the urgent need for more funding and a more humane working environment for teachers such as herself. The high-stakes public testing regime must be rolled back. It imposes a narrow curriculum and a correspondingly narrowed approach to teaching. This demoralises teachers, thwarting their desire to teach in more imaginative and supportive ways. Trust in the profession had been eroded. It had to be restored.
Fiona Millar took a more sanguine view. The comprehensive movement had been largely successful. As an educational reform, comprehensivisation was far more significant, and would prove far more lasting, than anything the likes of Michael Gove had managed. A ‘comprehensive generation’ was coming of age in the Establishment. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Archbishop of Canterbury were all products of comprehensive schools, as were many members of the Cabinet. Despite all the challenges remaining, we should not shy away from celebrating what the movement had achieved. The Labour Party should now require that at least 15 per cent of every school’s admissions-cohort comprises children in receipt of free school meals. This should be a central element in a long-term phasing out of all grammar schools.
Over a dozen people spoke from the floor to make a range of points. India Rees’s call for the restoration of trust in the teaching profession was powerfully endorsed. Child poverty must be tackled so that children arrive at school in better shape to learn. The rise of the far right was a great danger, especially given growing alienation among some young people because of the way they feel treated in school. In England, ‘formal’ learning begins at too young an age, with no apparent benefit to children. It should begin later. The continuance of grammar schools and selective authorities has a damaging effect on surrounding non-selective local authorities, undermining claims that the system is a comprehensive one. The Labour Party lacks confidence in taking up progressive reform of the education system: given its majority, it should be bolder. The Curriculum and Assessment Review was a missed opportunity. Academisation continues to fragment the system. CASE has produced a website revealing the number of education providers in any constituency or local authority.[1] Such fragmentation raises the question of who runs our schools, and highlights just how chaotic, and therefore expensive, the system has become. It is urgently necessary to restore democracy to education at local level, by returning schools to local authority oversight.
For FORUM, Peter Moss reminded everyone that early childhood education is now perhaps the least ‘comprehensive’ element in the system, thanks to the privatisation, marketisation and fragmentation of provision. It needs to become part of the general conversation about comprehensivisation. Katie Spicksley highlighted the subtle but decisive change made in the Ofsted framework in 2019, from the previous affirmation of a ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum to advocacy of ‘an ambitious curriculum’. This has been interpreted as requiring didactic and teacher-centric pedagogy and even more emphasis on canonical texts at the expense of other worthy material. Amanda Spielman was responsible for this all-too-easily overlooked resiling from a comprehensive principle. Richard Harris identified how politicians continue to blame parents rather than the structure of the system for failings in pupil-attendance or behavioural challenges in school.
In closing, James Whiting of the SEA thanked all three speakers for their insight and eloquence, and noted to general approval how Caroline Benn’s legacy of campaigning, research and advocacy has been carried on by her daughter.
The spring 2026 number of FORUM will carry texts of the three main speeches. These will also be made available on the SEA website.