The Flight from School
By an ASSISTANT MISTRESS , STATISTICS can be notoriously misleading. and particularly so when used as a basis for an abstraction such as that created by the Minister of Education. He stated recently haat, as the "over-all average" of children leaving the secondary grammar schools early was not more than 25 per cent., he did not consider it was necessary to introduce special legislation to stop the drain of scholars from these schools. In fact, this figure entirely misrepresents the situation, since the most serious " drainage " occurs in girls' secondary grammar schools in industrial areas of the North of England.
From " Direct Grant" grammar schools very few girls leave before the end of their fifth year of studies ; nor does the problem exist in an acute form in the South. But the percentage of early leavers from many "hundred-per-cent. free-place" girls' grammar schools in the northern towns is alarmingly high. One small mining town in the West Riding affords an outstanding example of the seriousness of what is happening. In 1950, when they had attained the statutory leaving age of fifteen, between fifty per cent. and sixty per cent, of the girls whose parents had in 1946 accepted places for their daughters and signed contracts agreeing that they should stay at school for five years left from the grammar school in this town. This is one of the worst cases, but in many other similar schools the percentage of early leavers is far higher than twenty-five per cent. How to prevent the girls being denied a fair chance of adequate education and training is a problem greatly troubling the headmistresses and juvenile employment officers, for many parents seem impervious to reason. There are several causes of this deplorable state of affairs, the chief being the extremely conservative attitude of the parents, especially the fathers, in these districts, to girls' education. Daughters are generally regarded not as persons who have a right to be trained for a skilled job that will employ their abilities and give them satisfaction, but as potential wage-earners until they marry, often at the early age of nineteen. Many parents accept free places at a grammar school without having any intention of honouring the covenant to keep their daughters there for five years and without having the slightest appreciation of the type of education given there, merely because a few years at a grammar school make the girls acceptable to employers. But suppose other parents accept places in good faith, intend- ing to keep the girls at school beyond the age of fifteen, what happens? The girls grow restless as they reach adolescence. The fifteen-year-olds still at school see friends of their own age in jobs which supply them with, pocket-money and leave their evenings free, whilst they themselves have little or no spending money and have to stay at home at night to do their homework. Often they are urged by their " emancipated " friends—some- times even by the friends' parents—to leave.school. Their own parents, half-convinced of the desirability- of their daughters' .staying at school, are yet anxious that they should be happy, and are so disturbed by their unrest and their (generally purely tem- porary) difficulties with school-work that they yield to the int- portunities of these inexperienced children and allow them to leave school.
There are, of course, some courageous and enlightened parents who are prepared to defy public opinion and to sacrifice some immediate pleasures for the children's ultimate good. But amongst these are some, mothers of large families of girls, either widowed or with husbands incapable of work, whose weekly income is so inadequate to feed and clothe the growing family, that they cannot do without the money that the fifteen-year-old girls can earn. Unfortunately the openings for fifteen-year-old ex-grammar-school girls are plentiful, as employers, particularly in the small towns, are only too eager to employ them, without requiring of them any further training than their four years at the school.
Such backwardness in realising that girls should be as well trained as boys may seem comparatively localised, but it is a matter which affects the whole nation. A semi-literate of fifteen soon degenerates into a demi-semi-literate, and is a far more dangerous member of modern society with all its apparatus of propaganda than a totally illiterate person. These potential mothers of the next generation who leave school at fifteen cannot have received sufficient training in character to enable them to withstand the social pressure around them. They will therefore value education for their daughters as little as do their parents. So there will always be a core of the nation impervious to social progress.
The solution of the problem cannot be easy. The immediate raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen ought to be the answer, as many girls recover from their restlessness by the end of the fifth year in school and wish to continue their studies into the sixth form and then take some professional training. But in view of the shortage of school-buildings, and the likelihood that the supply of really competent grammar-school staff will diminish rather than increase 'until adequate salaries arc paid to graduates. the raising of the leaving age is at present totally impracticable.
A practical solution would be for employers to co-operate with the education authorities and refuse to engage any grammar- school girl to whom her headmistress had not given permission to leave school before she had completed her fifth year of studies. Some measure of co-operation along these lines has, in fact, been achieved in some districts, but in many small towns the eagerness of the employers to acquire the services of the grammar-school girls is itself a contributory cause of the drainage from the schools. There remain the possibilities of- more generous financial assistance to the genuinely distressed, and of coercion of the parent who deliberately and without justification breaks his contract. When the erring parent could be fined for breach of contract the problem was less acute than it is now, which suggests that the abolition of the penalty was a mistake.
The 1944 Education Act made equality of opportunity in education an actual possibility, and it remains for the Labour Government to enforce where necessary the application of one of its fundamental principles. When children and parents are determined upon the girls' leaving at the age of fifteen, the head- mistresses and the Juvenile Employment Officers are helpless to prevent it, though they can, and do, advise strongly against it. But what answer can be made to a mother, whose weekly income amounts perhaps to £3, when she pleads that the small wage the fifteen-year-old can bring into the house will make all the difference between penury and a little comfort? On the other hand, where the girls' adolescent restlessness is exploited by selfish parents or pandered to by weak parents, and there is a clear breach of the conditions on which the free place was granted, legal proceedings are the obvious remedy. One is driven to the conclusion that, far from special legislation to deal with the problem of early leavers being unnecessary, it is on the contrary a prime necessity. The hands-of educationists ought to be strengthened so that their efforts to save these adolescents from exploitation may be of some avail.
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