Lucky Thirteen
AQUII E. excellent and far-reaching report has just gone forward to the Education Depart- ment of the West Riding County Council. Its ostensible purpose was to find a way of intro- ducing comprehensive schooling' into an area where there are already in existence sufficient viable small schools to make the change-over to a few large-scale comprehensive schools taking children from eleven to eighteen unrealistic. Its ad hoc proposals go far beyond the direct issue between streamed and comprehensive schooling, and should have a bearing on educational plan- ning throughout the country. They are all the stronger in that the conclusion was clearly not thought out beforehand, but is the result of con- sultations with experienced educationists in all parts of the county. What has•emerged is not a discussion of the merits of comprehensive schooling as such, but an acute study of the right age for transfer from primary to secondary education. It is strange that it is at present illegal to build a school that will cater for children of just under ten together with children of just over twelve, while it is prevailing practice to educate children of eleven along with girls about to be married and men eligible to join the army. This anomaly is a clear result of having determined the age of entry to secondary education at a time when the school-leaving age was fourteen and three years in a senior school seemed the best that could, or need, be provided for the child who could not get into grammar school. The introduction of the Certificate of Secondary .Education and the loss of faith in the eleven-plus has in, fact recently changed secondary education a lot for some, children. So has the admitted need to have more than 20 per cent of our children reasonably educated, with the resulting concen- tration only on the top two streams. On the whole, however, the process has gone little fur- ther than creating another rung on the famous meritocratic ladder. Many children in Modern schools begin again with the same basic syllabus at the beginning of each of the four years they attend, and children fresh from primary school still in need of a class teacher and no rigid division between subjects are pushed into wood- work and metalwork shops they are quite likely to have no interest in. Perhaps most serious of all is the harmful effect senior boys, counting the days until they are allowed to leave, con- vinced they have nothing more to learn in schools that long ago gave up the struggle, can have on younger children who still assume that education has something to offer them.
The West Riding report would solve the prob- lem by having us think of education in three stages: the priniary school up to eight or nine, the middle school up to around thirteen, and, finally, the senior or high school. Even if this led to nothing more than the postponement of streaming for a couple of years, the proposal would be more than welcome. It could ease the enormous pressure at present on primary schools, it could hold back specialisation and the too early pressure of examination syllabuses, above all it could encourage children of thirteen to believe that their education still has some way to go. They would go on to more senior insti- tutions where perhaps a more mature code of behaviour would prevail than in most Modern schools and where everyone might be helped towards some form of specialisation when they were ready for it.
The report concludes with the recommenda- tion that the Minister be asked to permit a limited experiment on these lines in certain parts of the West Riding. It is possible that some time ahead the Plowden Committee will make similar recommendations on a wider scale. But the Minister should be ready to take note of them now.
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