Fifteen to Eighteen
By STUART MACLURE
SIR GEOFFREY CROWTHER'S Advisory Council on Education in England reports today in what is probably the most important document on educational policy published since the war (15 to 18: H.M.S.O., 12s. 6d.). For many years it has been the function of the Council and its predecessors to formulate long-term educational strategy. Half a dozen reports over the past thirty years have mapped out the route followed by suc- cessive Presidents of the Board and Ministers of Education. What Sir Geoffrey and his colleagues have tried to do is nothing less than draw up a twenty-year plan to raise English educational Standards to the level which the modern world demands.
Their basic aim is that the proportion of boys and girls who stay on to 17 in full-time education should be increased to 50 per cent. from the present 12 per cent. They want to raise the school- leaving age to 16 in the late 1960s. They want to match these. improvements in the schools with more efficient education in technical colleges, more of it full-time. They believe there is a lot of talent in the upper reaches of the secondary modern school which is being wasted—the 'second quartile' of ability. And they have suggested how the senior forms of grammar schools might be improved. The development of these themes, and the careful examination of what is being done at present, runs to some 500 pages of text, which are now thrown into the arena of discussion.
Inevitably, the first point on which argument will fasten is the blunt recommendation that the school-leaving age should go up to 16 in 1966,1967 or 1968. It is going to need more convincing argu- ments than the report deploys to persuade public opinion and the Government that this is either practical or desirable. The shortage of teachers is one key, the tendency towards voluntary staying on the other. In effect, the Council are saying : 'Use some of the extra teachers who will be in the schools by 1966-68 to raise the leaving age instead of reducing the size of classes to a maximum of thirty in secondary schools.'
This will seem to many people a bad bargain, especially because wherever new schools, properly stalled, are getting into their stride there are encouraging signs that more and more children will stay on at school voluntarily. Instead of having more teachers for the pupils who want to stay on, the schools will have to cope with a large minority of 15- to 16-year-olds whose one desire is to be elsewhere. Earlier maturity and earlier marriage will raise special problems in girls' schools and mixed schools, which might well daunt the boldest head.
The case for raising the age to 16 would be stronger if there were clearer ideas about how the extra year should be spent. The report is no great help here. More experience of voluntary staying on is needed before the picture becomes much clearer.
County colleges—which school-leavers would be obliged to attend one day a week to 17, later to 18—would, under the Crowther plan, be introduced over the ten years betWeen 1969 and 1979, piecemeal, area by area. The report recom-
mends that compulsion is needed before experi- ments can show how best to organise a college. This seems a highly dubious approach, especially as, here again, nobody knows what to teach in county colleges and everybody admits that only teachers of rare genius and exceptional personality will be able to make a success of the job.
A large section of the report is devoted to the Sixth Form. Lord James of Rusholme and Mr. B. M. W. Young, the headmaster of Charterhouse, were both members of the Council, and not sur- prisingly, the cardinal principle of specialisation at 15 or 16, the hall-mark of English secondary education, is warmly endorsed. Excessive and premature specialisation are attacked. Ancient and modern languages take a knock. The report is highly critical of the failure of the sixth forms to use to good advantage what is described as 'minority time'—that is, time devoted to subjects other than the main specialisations. It puts for- ward some moderate suggestions as to how to make scientists literate and arts students 'num- erate.'
But the authors of the report reserve most of their shafts for university entrance requirements. They manage to convey the sense of impotence in schools in the face of pressure from the univer- sities. Entrance requirements and selection pro- cedures leave the sixth forms hog-tied and it is nobody's business to look simultaneously at the interests of the schools and the universities. Al' that can be done—as in this report—is to drop sizeable hints and make pointed suggestions. The trouble is easy to identify : competition to get into a university is growing faster than new places are being provided; therefore selection procedures bring more pressure on the sixth forms. Oxford, Cambridge and London enjoy such overwhelming prestige that an artificial shortage of places is likely to continue indefinitely to distort the sixth- form curriculum. These chapters deserve to be studied with care in the universities where there are already plenty of uneasy consciences, but no one seems to have much hope of radical action.
Every report of this kind has a flavour. This is no exception. It is a conservative expression of the liberal views of fifteen years ago. It neither takes away from nor adds much to the doctrines of the 1944 Act. It seems to be afraid of looking critically at the experience of the post-war period —in spite of lengthy chapters on the changing social background—for fear of backsliding. It emerges as neither progressive nor reactionary, merely confirming and repeating liberal views which have since become orthodox.
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