Education: Second-Chance Schools

High school for everybody, in a form that Americans would recognize and even envy, is reaching England at last. In the nation that Disraeli once divided between the Privileged and the People, a new kind of high-standards school that mixes all social classes has won a broad beachhead.

As late as World War II, most English children were still leaving school at the age of 14. Publicly supported secondary education was so selective that only one child in eight got any. The historic Education Act of 1944 established free secondary schooling for all. Now 80% of university students come from state schools and only 20% from private schools—reversing the prewar proportions. Yet all this is far short of the country’s growing needs. Nearly two-thirds of all students still quitschool at 15 because compulsory attendance still ends at that age. And even while launching mass education, elite-minded England has clung to the idea that only a few children are academically educable.

The Dreaded “Eleven Plus.” The 1944 act confronts children emerging from six years in state primary schools (at ages 10½ to 11½) with the dreaded “eleven-plus exam”—typically an IQ test, an arithmetic test, an English composition.

Dividing children into three basic groups, the system sends the mechanically minded 5% to good technical schools. The top 20% go to scholarly grammar schools, where in five years they can take an exam for the “ordinary” General Certificate of Education. Some go on for two more years as “sixth-formers.” aiming for the advanced certificate that Britons must earn before entering universities.

What anguishes middle-class Britain is the fate of eleven-plus “failures”—the 75% of eleven-year-olds who are sent to “secondary modern” schools set up by the 1944 act. Stripped of grammar-level minds, such schools are often semi-vocational institutions that cannot offer training for even the ordinary GCE. Parents and children loudly call them “dumping grounds for duds.” Class-conscious Britons feel that “dud” schools spell failure, not to mention the danger of a lower-class accent for their children. To avoid eleven-plus disaster, parents lavish prizes of cash, bicycles and transistor radios on the kids to make them cram harder. Recalling her mother’s expression when she failed, one girl says: “I might have been telling her that I was having a baby.” Many parents buy their way out of eleven-plus failure by spending up to one-third of their incomes on expensive private schools.

To break down this life-blighting system, England is trying a new, U.S.-style solution: comprehensive schools that lump grammar, technical and secondary modern schools under one roof with as many as 2,154 students. England and Wales now have 132 comprehensive schools. London, the leader, has 62 serving 40% of the city’s secondary school students, and will soon make nearly all of its grammar schools comprehensive.

The main merit of the new schools is that they give students of all kinds a real chance to develop their abilities.

Late bloomers get a new crack at academic training. Says Headmaster William Hamblin of London’s Samuel Pepys Comprehensive School: “Last year 150 boys—90% of whom had come here as eleven-plus failures—were able to take the ordinary GCE exam. Four boys, also failures, took the advanced GCE. All four passed and all are now at London University. A tremendous achievement.” This year Pepys has 30 sixth-formers poised for university entrance.

Rich Fare. The school is equally proud that its size (1,000 boys) allows it to offer not only rich academic fare, from poetry to physics, but also art, engineering, metalwork and woodwork. When the school produced Julius Caesar, daggers and swords were forged on the premises. Boys have built everything from lawnmowers to kitchens in the workshops. “In this school, the bright boy who wants to take up pottery, or the boy good with his hands who wants to tackle French, can do so as seriously as he likes,” says Hamblin.

Such treatment is giving former rejects a new sense of worth, spurring them to aim higher. And comprehensive schools are fast becoming socially acceptable to professional people, who now see a real alternative to costly private schools. “I’m delighted we sent her there,” says one professional father of a comprehensive school graduate. “She learned what the world is like by mixing with all sorts, and got a first-rate education in the bargain.” Sums up one proud boy at a big London comprehensive: “We wouldn’t change our school for Eton.”