The Dreaded D Stream
By HILARY SPURLING
Iwas open day for the press at selected 'London comprehensive schools. The sixth form at Holland Park School were pleased to see us, provided coffee, pointed reproachfully to an article about Holland Park entitled 'Trapped in the D Stream,' and began patiently to straighten out our lurid notions of life in a comprehensive school. At Tulse Hill. on the edge of Brixton, the same thing happened. It was pointed out 'that the school, which opened in 1956 and is heavily skimmed by grammar schools in the same area, had virtually no sixth form until two or three years ago; it now has forty boys in the upper sixth (the first batch to have passed right up the school), 144 in all sixth forms and rather less than I per cent on probation. It fits into what has become the customary pattern—the number of children who choose to stay on growing year by year, the number of examination successes growing in proportion, rowdyism after the first year, and except in the toughest areas, ceasing to be a problem.
From all sides came tales of hair-raising begin- nings--up to 2,000 eleven-plus rejects of all ages arriving at a new school, staff and pupils constantly lost, tannoy systems running amok, all chains gone from the boys' lavatories within two weeks to make coshes, washbasins wrenched out, chairs flung from windows, cupboard doors plucked off, graffiti everywhere. Gradually the beast is tamed, the geography mastered, repu- tations established. The headmistress of Crown Woods School, the London mixed comprehen- sive, records two fifth-form boys who celebrated the end of GCE with a ride on a stolen, un- licensed motor-cycle. Chased by police, they stopped to hide their school caps and blazers in a ditch, and when this ruse failed pleaded that the affair shouldn't be linked to the school (which had been in existence for only three years) for the sake of its reputation.
I asked people in the streets behind Notting Hill Gate, within ten minutes' walk from Holland Park School, what they thought of its reputa- tion. Most of them had never heard of it. Some had children at the school, in which case they assumed I had a child who'd 'failed eleven-plus' too, and were expansive and unanimously re- assuring. Holland Park, which draws its pupils from families living in one room in South Pad- dington as well as from rich Campden Hill, claims to be more mixed than most; but a lady
with enormous shopping-bags told me not to worry about rough toughs. 'Kiddies from decent families make decent friends. You needn't bother about your kiddy--he'll make friends whO speak nicely.'
Everyone was vague about a definition of com-
prehensive. It seemed to mean that your child could fail eleven-plus and still be in a grammar stream. Boys at Tulse Hill were equally baffled when asked to define a comprehensive school in a school survey. Nearly one-third didrr,'t know at all, others answered in terms of size or streams or, scope: 'a large school,' it's people with brain are separated from Dunces' [sic], 'a school which does woodwork and English and things like that.'
All schools adopt some form of streaming according to ability for teaching purposes, but there is often a further vertical division into six or eight houses on the boarding-school pattern, each house representing a microcosm of the Whole school, and within houses into 'tutor- groups,' each containing about thirty children of mixed age and ability, in an attempt, not always successful, to counteract the effect of horizontal grading. Even horizontal grading is not neces- sarily straightforward to the casual observer; Garratt Green, for example, has a form simply called 'IQ.' The schools 'tend to use some in- genuity in devising form names to disguise the grading of a particular form,' say the compilers of the LCC Survey of London Comprehensive Schools, adding drily: 'how far this deceives the individual is, however, a matter for speculation.'
All agree that the problem Of bright children being pulled down by the dimmer ones scarcely exists. Once you are in the A stream you might as well be at a grammar. At Tulse Hill I met two boys who will be going up to Oxford next year to read classics; one, aged sixteen, passed his eleven-plus, failed to get a grammar-school place, and came to Tulse Hill, where he was instantly recognised to be what is Mown in the trade as 'a flier.'. His parents, he said, were exuberantly enthusiastic over opportunities which they had never had : 'I send my father out for one text,' he reported, 'and he brings back five others.'
There are still the children who sink to the bottom and stay there, whose parents show little or no interest ('if a parent joins the Parents' Association, it is practically a guarantee that the child won't be any trouble,' said one teacher), and who remain to mark time until they are old enough to get out. They are encouraged to mix in social activities, but often the history, geo- graphy and chess clubs see beyond them; even the jazz club is too highbrow. Several schools attempt to solve the problem by creating a remedial department with its own specialist teachers. At Holland Park, the children in the lowest form of all, many of whom can't read and will take some time to learn, obviously liked their teacher, liked school, and felt they had, if not a privileged, at least a special position which they enjoyed. I watched them chanting poems about violent death and slow decay with ex- pressive gestures and prolonged, spine-chilling groans. One small boy was too shy to open his mouth before an audience. Peaky, shock-haired, looking like Oliver Twist at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, he proved to be the form's genius at nature study, the kind of child who finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks and sermons in stones. Dispatched to the playing- field, he comes back with a set of hedgehog teeth in a leaf. Further up the school, a fourth-year general class of boys and girls who would leave at Easter or in the summer were learning how to open a bank account from their form-master, who promised them dummy cheques to sign on Monday. Three incredibly small boys informed me that they would shortly be, respectively, a carpet-layer, a cabinet-maker and a hairdresser. I said how nice they were to their muscular form-master. 'If you had to teach them, they'd shred you to pieces in a moment,' he said cheer- fully.
Sheer size is obviously one of the major problems for the administrators, as to a lesser extent the geography of such complex buildings is to the children. But, when I asked at Holland Park whether the first years, fresh from primary school, were not bewildered and frightened by the maze of corridors and covered ways, they said: 'Oh no, you see, they stick to their forms. When they get lost in the first week, there arc thirty of them all sticking together.' It is a gallant image.
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