Mr Callaghan joins the debate
T. E. B. Howarth The biggest net gain for education so far as a result of Mr Callaghan's conversion to educational realism is that it has got Mr Fred Jarvis, the Jack Jones of our scholastic bankruptcy, on to our screens. Up against Alastair Burnet, he predictably did his .norm41 :1/4:'JT thing. If industry is complaining about children not going into engineering (let alone not being able to read or write much), then that must be the fault of industry, aided and abetted by the grammar schools and Oxbridge. By nine o'clock news time, some of the comrades may have tipped him a wink, since there was rather less righteous indignation. However, as long as we can keep him on the box, we all have a hope for our children and grandchildren, even if nobody tells us that the National Union of Teachers are overwhelmingly Primary school teachers, Many of whom quite honestly must have a low IQ or they Would get rid of their executive, which has been about as politically activist a left-wing lobby as we have in this country. If the BBC or ITV get tired of Fred, which they well might, one could suggest that they try and flush out the comparatively shy figure of the communist Max Morris, a great NUT man.
• •The quaint thing about Mr Callaghan's initiative is that he describes himself as starting a great nat ional debate about education. Exctpt at Transport House and among °ne or two senior members of the staff of the Times Ethicational Supplement and the Guardian, there has been a vigorous debate. going on about education since the early sixties and Edward Boyle's collapse over comprehensives. At the cost of slightly wearying the informed reader, onecan rapidly recapitulate, without unduly over-simplifYing, the gist of the problem. Middle-class Labour intellectuals, faced with the possibility of yet another electoral defeat of disastrous consequences in 1964 (which would have occurred but for Christine Keeler), were badly short of a rallying cry and found one in the allegedly ghastly immorality of the eleven plus exam. This fitted in well with Prominent strand in their mythology, going back to Bertrand and Dora Russell and A. S. Neill, whereby proper educational ?rounding was to be subordinated to general infantile licence at the primary stage. You followed this with the giant comprehensive all-1n school, which theoretically could cater for all abilities at their proper level. If you ever entertained any doubts about their suitability for academic children, Richard Crossman, drawing on the great wealth of experience of working-class schooling he had derived from College at Winchester, was always ready to reassure you--and the rest of us—that really able children can
always rise to the top.
Well, now we all know that except in a tiny, and probably decreasing, handful of megalo-comprehensives in exceptionally favoured neighbourhoods, run by exceptional headmasters, this process has produced neither liberty, nor equality nor fraternity nor efficiency. So eager beavers of the educational Left, like Tyrrell Burgess and the activists of the NUT, hasten to assure us that the Ark of the comprehensive Covenant can be contained in much smaller tabernacles, something like 700 rather than 1700. But though they think we are all fools, we aren't. We know that a school of 700, starting with children of eleven years old, simply cannot cater properly for children of all a bi'ities and still boast a sixth form which can provide a full range of 'A' level opportunities for decent university candidates. So you spend ever more money thinking up middle schools and sixth form colleges. But even that is not much good, in that such academic teachers as there are in the subjects which Mr Callaghan and his friends in the CBI like, as for instance physics and mathematics, don't like working in middle schools, where the children tend to blow their noses a lot and are not specially interested in the calculus. At the time the children arrive at the sixth form college, nobody much really knows them for at least a month or two, which is not ideal in your seventeenth year.
All in all, it is not in the least surprising that things are not going too well, particularly when you throw in for bad measure the terrible educational problems created by our immigration policy. However, you will be told by Mr Jarvis that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, in that more and more children are leaving school with qualifications. Here again, we are not the fools Mr Jarvis and the executive of the NUT think we are. To begin with, these qualifications include a great many CSEs, which are not always terribly difficult to acquire. Secondly, the possession of one or two '0' levels or even one 'A' level in certain subjects at E grade is not going to do much to help Mr Callaghan or the CBI. Thirdly, and most important, the more children you enter the more are likely to pass and to pass at a certain level determined by the percentage in each grade in relation to the size of the whole field. Even if this were not so, the fact that illiteracy, to say nothing of innumeracy, is at its present national level represents an appalling disgrace and condemnation of a system into which we have poured millions of pounds over the last twenty years.
It is intriguing to speculate just what impelled the DES to produce their now cele
brated and skilfully leaked Yellow Book. Under Sir William Pile, nothingever seemed to stir. Not a voice was raised, at any rate effectively, against a decade and a half of monumental folly, only temporarily impeded by Margaret Thatcher, and which has culminated in the lunacy of driving the Direct Grant schools into the private sector.
It is much to be hoped that Conservatives keep a close eye on the Schools Council, a disastrous institution, notoriously dominated by the NUT, which is described in the Yellow Book as 'mediocre'. Its Chairman, Sir Alec Smith, appears also to belong to the group of educational pundits who are convinced that the rest of us have a mental age of ten. He is reported to have said that he was tired of hearing that teacher unions dominated the council. `Every time I chair a meeting the teacher members have done their homework thoroughly. I very rarely have to put matters to the vote. That tells me that there is not any kind of caucus domnating' (TES, 15 October). But the whole educational world has known for years that the only teacher union that matters in the Schools Council is the NUT; and nobody doubts for a moment that their well-drilled minions have done their homework impeccably; and of course there is no need whatever for Sir Alex Smith to put matters to a vote. Indeed there is probably very little need for Sir Alex Smith to be there at all. Anymore than there was really very much need for Sir Alan Bullock to be in the chair of the Bullock Committee, since the composition of his committee rendered the outcome of its deliberations totally predictable and largely nugatory.
It is curious that Mr Callaghan, if he really thought he was starting a debate, should have apparently referred slightingly to the Black Papers, which have been for some time making the same points as the Yellow Book, but in plain language. The first number came out in February 1969 and Labour lost an election in 1970. A new Black Paper is on the way and a pre-emptive strike has been highly necessary. Conservatives will wish Mr Callaghan well, if he translates his brave words into action over the monitoring of standards. How it is best done is something we should be thinking about carefully. In the process we shall not wish to pay undue attention to Mr Jarvis. He is a paper tiger, whose main achievement is to have pressed for ancksecured pay scales for teachers so inflationary that LEAs have had to cut back teacher employment drastically. Furthermore, it should be recalled that not long ago the Times Educational Supplement conducted an opinion poll among teachers on some of the main issues raised in this article. The result was so 'reactionary' that they have never dared to repeat the experiment. If they did, Mr Jarvis would carry even less conviction on the box than he does at the moment. More importantly, we shall certainly now have an opportunity before the election to see how Mrs Williams reconciles educational reality with trade union dogma. She is not going to find it easy.
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