Ready the ground
Posted on 25/09/2024
Ahead of the Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture, which takes place in November and which Forum is co-sponsoring with the Socialist Educational Association, Patrick Yarker argues the need to move beyond a discourse of fixed ‘ability’ in the long struggle for a comprehensive education service so powerfully advocated by Caroline Benn.
The demand in England for common schools, incipiently for a system of comprehensive education, goes back at least as far as the 1830s and the debates on education which informed the Chartist movement. In her biography of Keir Hardy, Caroline Benn quotes the future Labour leader arguing at the end of the C19th for a state education system free at all stages and available to everyone without the need to pass entrance exams or tests. But after its formation the Labour Party did not adopt that perspective. Instead, Party policy tended towards the Fabian Society’s proposal: differentiated secondary schooling, with a scholarship element to enable the ‘bright’ working class child to access a secondary education otherwise unaffordable. (See chapter 3 of Clyde Chitty’s book, ‘New Labour and Secondary Education, 1944-2010’.)
In the struggle for comprehensive education it isn’t only the type of school that is at stake, or the structure of the system. What matters as much, perhaps more, is the way in which those to be educated are regarded by those who will teach them. No good setting up a formally non-selective school (and system) if, upon entry, pupils and students are at once selected—separated—into different sets, groups or streams on the basis of how supposedly ‘able’ they are regarded as being. Separate provision will tend to congeal into injustice. To be true to itself, comprehensive education requires a final break from the determinist understanding of human educability which undergirds all varieties of selective educational provision whether by school-type or ‘ability’ group, and which historically has found expression through the ideology of fixed innate ‘ability’.
The 1944 Education Act offered ‘such variety of instruction and training as may be desirable in view of [children’s] different ages, abilities, and aptitudes…’ The view that children came in kinds, with different kinds of minds, and so were best served by different kinds of schooling—‘academic’, technical’, ‘modern’—informed the thinking of the Education Ministry in the decades before World War 2 and watermarked the policy of post-war education ministers. Yet even in the heyday of IQ-ism and the 11+ an understanding of human beings and human educability which rejected determinist assumptions about ‘ability’ and the existence of an ‘ability range’ continued to animate arguments for a comprehensive education system, not least thanks to the research, advocacy and campaigning of Brian Simon, Caroline Benn and Clyde Chitty.
To reject the idea that ‘intelligence’ can be meaningfully quantified, and that genetic and/or social factors absolutely determine the extent to which someone can learn, and instead to favour a non-determinist and hence more truthful view of human educability, is implicitly also to counterpose a more egalitarian and democratic social order to that hierarchical order which a stratified education system cannot but help to reproduce. It is also to persist in believing that what is valuable in education is not circumscribed by numerical outputs, and that to design an education system more and more orientated to the calculable and quantifiable is to misconceive what it means to educate.
In 1970 Brian Simon and Caroline Benn wrote that Britain was a halfway house. The country was only half-way towards establishing a comprehensive education system: ‘half-realising the need for, but still fearing the consequences of, a radical break with tradition’, as Clyde Chitty puts it in the book already mentioned. Half a century on, England’s road towards fully comprehensive education remains untraveled. New Labour turned its back. Grammar schools still hold out, and private schools great and small still guard their turf. Armed with an increasing panoply of tests, the ‘ability’ discourse has entrenched itself in the structures and practices of state schooling.
Caroline Benn understood the need radically to break with the tradition of fixed ‘ability’ thinking and practice in order to enable comprehensive education, as Jane Martin makes clear in an article published in Forum 57/3: ‘Building Comprehensive Education: Caroline Benn and Holland Park School’. Responding to the claim that some people are particularly ‘able’ or ‘gifted’ and should be educated apart, it was Benn’s view that:
Giftedness is what education itself helps to create and release, and the purpose of the education system is to help foster as many gifts as possible in as many children as possible. Selection for giftedness … stunts our chances of helping the gifted… ‘The way we help giftedness is by encouraging a flexible, alert, high-standard, stimulating, and supportive comprehensive education service for everyone at every stage. A comprehensive system is the only way we can openly ensure attention to all equally and at the same time protect and reveal the full range of human gifts’.
Returned to power with a big majority, Labour now could ready the ground for a radical break with the tradition of segregated education. Time was, the Party actually began to dismantle, tentatively and indecisively, the tri-partite structure of post-war state schooling and shift England towards a fully comprehensive system. Does it still see the need for an education service which openly ensures ‘attention to all equally’? Can it find the will to walk the comprehensive road again?