Labour and the Schools
By STUART MACLURE THE Labour Party's policy document on edu- cation, Learning to Live, has appeared at last and effectively corrects the garbled 'reports of its contents which have appeared from time to time during recent months. To judge from some of them, there was at one time a danger of the authors of the report being hypnotised by the chalk line of the public schools. In the event, they have refused the integrators and the nationalisers alike and stand committed to the undoubtedly correct decision to keep the independent schools independent. As a matter of fact, the concluding paragraph on this subject in Learning to Live might have, come from a speech of Lord Hailsham's at Brighton last year. It is good advice to all parties :
There is a risk that argument over this
question may give it an importance which, in proportion to the whole field of education, it does not possess. Compare, today, the free national system of education and the private fee-paying system. It is the national system which provides the greater variety and attempts the most difficult tasks. Despite all its present inadequacies, it is vigorous and capable of great advance. To make the nation's schools fully worthy of the nation will be an immense achievement. Smaller classes, better- qualified teachers, better equipment and a
higher proportion of sixth formers in our own schools will open the door of opportunity and steadily reduce the influence of the privileged fee-paying schools on public life. We believe that the next Labour Government should concen- trate its educational endeavours on this work.
The political sting of the report, of course, is the chapter on 'Comprehensive Secondary Edu- cation.' This is studiously mild and the extent to which it would send the balloon up would depend entirely on the way in which it was administered. This is no blueprint for the establishment of a network of big schools on the London pattern. Instead the report envisages various different methods of achieving the main aim—that of end- ing the segregation of children at the age of eleven into separate types of school. (As a matter of fact the number of schools with a wide range of courses of the kind envisaged by the report is growing steadily each year and certainly not only in those parts of the country where Labour is strong.) The report defends selection as a continuous part of educational guidance, but disputes the necessity of elevating certain decisions made at ten plus to special importance. How to 'end the eleven plus' would be left to local authorities to decide, but the authors note that there are many variations on the comprehensive theme which can be played. -There is no getting away from the fact that Learning to Live proposes to lay down the comprehensive principle for universal appli- cation and would require all authorities to pro- duce plans to this end, with the consequent demise of the grammar school in its present form. But it seems to be recognised that local circum- stances and susceptibilities would have to be re- spected. All in all, this section is much less radical than many people thought it would be.
This is about the only really controversial pro- posal in the report : the rest shows remarkable restraint and a genuine desire to construct a realistic five-year programme. A Royal Commis- sion on the universities is proposed and, while the universities themselves are unlikely to welcome this, there is little doubt that there would be plenty to look into to keep a Commission busy for a few years. The block grant which figures in Mr. Henry Brooke's Local Government Bill would go, and the percentage principle be restored for education 'as part of the general review of local government finance . . . which will be carried out by the Labour Government.' The Edit- cation Act would be amended to prevent children from leaving school before they have completed the fourth year at a secondary school. This would mean a mass exodus each July instead of three times a year and would add to the problems of the youth employment service at a difficult time, but has obvious advantages for the schools. Special schools and other services for the handicapped would receive priority. The pro• jects of raising the leaving age to sixteen and of setting up county colleges are pushed firmly beyond the first five years.
The core, of the five-year plan is the reduction of the sizes of classes and the replacement 01 slum schools and all-age schools. The authors of the report want to reduce the size of all classes to thirty—the present unenforced regulations allow forty in primary schools and thirty in secondary—but there is no quick or cheap waY of stepping up the supply of teachers to the extent which the report advocates. Although this is bracketed with the five-year programme, it is not stated how long it would take to bring about' Latest figures indicate that a capital programrne, for teacher-training colleges of between £30 and £40 million may be required—in addition to evetY improvisation—to achieve the present aim of O' ducing all classes to regulation size in ten years' To realise Labour's larger ambitions in five year5 would involve the building of about 50,000 nal, training-college places at a cost of about £10u million, and thereafter the recruitment of 25,000 would-be teachers each year. If the money were available, there would still not be enough candy dates of quality.
As for replacing the old schools and re" organising the remaining all-age schools—t° carry this through in five years, while at the sarlie time pressing on in technical education, wool° probably push up the size of the annual school'
building programme from around £60 million as at present to over £100 million.
The cost of all this is vast. But there is no way of getting round it, and no doubt that the quality of the educational system will determine the Pattern of economic no less than cultural life a generation hence. Something along the lines of this report is well on the way to becoming an agreed policy—the Liberals put out broadly similar proposals a couple of weeks ago and, when the time comes, the Conservatives will be climbing on to the same band wagon. The Labour report explicitly recognises that it can only be carried through given a larger share of the national income, and makes the claim that the Labour Party is prepared to face the difficulties of getting this across to the public in terms of priorities. (The phrase from Challenge to Britain which is quoted in support of this has a sancti- monious ring—We must see that the money is found even if this involves going without other things'—but is hard to dispute.) This manifesto—one of the best party docu- ments about education published since the war— will have served a useful and perhaps unexpected purpose, if as well as sharpening political con- troversy it actually helps to hammer out an agreed programme across the party lines. The authors and the readers of this and other policies for education appreciate the cost and the need for the cost: there is a major task of cerebral irrigation to be undertaken before this fully per- meates the mind of the public at large, let alone the Chancellors and Shadow-Chancellors.
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