The 1965 Education Act

By HENRY FAIRLIE

C OMETIIING has got to be done about educa-

tion in this country: on this everyone is agreed, and to this extent education is already a political issue. Not necessarily an open issue, on which the parties will actively compete for votes; but certainly a submerged issue, which holds within it the hopes and fears of most people for the future of their children. No problem today worries middle-class parents more; and none has so suddenly erupted, in a matter of a few years, into the lives of so many people who never used to care about it.

It is an issue which almost perfectly combines an appeal to self-interest and an appeal to idealism. People are aware, as they have never been before, that here lies at least part of the answer to the problems which face both them individually and the whole of the society in which they live: that it is on education that their children's chances in life depend; that it is in the present educational system that most of the diversions which bedevil all other social arrange- ments have their origin; and that, until the system is vastly improved, it is a little hopeful to expect that we shall maintain our position in the modern world of Telstars and computers.

Something must be done: but what? In education, perhaps more than anywhere else, it is important to see clearly the points where there already is growth, and where there is likely to be. The Minister of Education has to run a service in which the free choice of pupil and parent is all-important. He cannot direct; only provide opportunities. His success will depend, first, on the accuracy with which he and his advisers foresee the growth of new demands; and, secondly, an his ability to provide for them sufficiently and in time.

There is today one obvious point where a new demand is growing, and will continue to grow. More and more pupils are continuing at school after fifteen of their own accord: the main- tained secondary school, in other words, is no longer regarded as the end of education. During the many fruitful years while Sir David Eccles was Minister—it may not have been the end he once imagined to his political career, but one wonders whether any other could have been more fruitful—there has been something of a revolution in this respect.

In a mere four years, from 1956 to 1960, the number of pupils aged between fifteen and seventeen in all types of secondary schools went up by 50 per cent., and that was before the effect of the exceptionally high birthrate of 1946-48' was felt. In the ten years since GCE was intro- duced, the number of passes at '0' level has nearly doubled and at 'A' level more than doubled. This is the beginning of a movement which is obviously going to continue.

The President of the Association of Chief Education Officers recently estimated that any- thing up to 500,000 places might be needed for those who wished to stay on at school after they were fifteen: this without raising the school- leaving age. 'Our Vlth form expansion has been tremendous,' said the headmaster of Middles- brough High School earlier this month. 'Five years ago, only one-fifth of our intake stayed on.

Now it is nearer to one-half'; and the head- master of Bilbarough Grammar School (opened in 1957 for 500-550 pupils, but already coping

with 700) had the same story to tell: 'Sixty-five per cent. of my pupils are now staying into the VIth form.'

This is the kind of growth which cannot be stopped. It is the result partly of the 1944 Educa- tion Act, partly of increased prosperity, and partly of the increasing awareness of the impor- tance of higher education. 'You must realise,' Sir David Eccles said to me, on the evening before he ceased to be Minister of Education, 'that the parents whose children are now beginning to reach our schools are those who were the first in their families to have secondary education. They know what education is, and what it can do for their children. They will ask for it for their children—and they will know what to ask for.'

There has, of course, been a similar increase in the demand for further education of all kinds. When people talk about raising the school- leaving age in an abstract way, as though it is a decision which can be taken more or less at will, when it is convenient, they forget that the pupils themselves are already raising it.

The other significant point of growth is the expansion of all scientific and technological studies. `If productivity in Britain is going to rise by 4 per cent. a year,' said the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research last week, It is not a matter of fiddling with banks and credit. It is a matter of getting our technology right.' He wished, he added, that 'those who sit on the NEDC' would under- stand this. But time is on his side. The demand for technological education will itself soon force the authorities to supply it. Again, this must have an effect on education lower down the scale. Not only do the number of technologies for which students must be pre- pared grow, but they increasingly make good teaching of languages a necessity. The Annan Committee reported at the beginning of June that 'as many secondary schools as possible should offer Russian in the early stages of the curriculum'; and a survey of French teaching in

Manchester's secondary (as opposed to grammar) schools has shown that, although the subject was almost unknown in them ten years ago, it is now taught to 6,000 pupils in thirty-eight of the fifty- six secondary schools_ Facts and figures like these—there are plenty more of them—are important, because it is only

their cumulative force which drives home the fact with which I began : that education has become a real influence in the lives of hundreds

of thousands more people than ever before; and, as Sir David Eccles said, it will increasingly become so, as generations follow on generations, each having proved that they and their like can profit by it, and each expecting more and better education for their children. No one who has gone into the subject at all withholds his praise from Sir David. He has left

to his successor an ably worked-out system of priorities in education, based on his personal conviction that we must 'put a fresh emphasis

on the skills of the average man.' But, in spite of his achievements, there is obviously much more to be done. I do not think it is first a

question of money. What is needed is another imaginative leap forward in the whole concept of the purposes and scope of public education, comparable with the 1870, 1902 and 1944 Edu- cation Acts. Only then will the resources be made available.

Sir John Wolfenden pointed out recently that the earlier Acts had established elementary and then secondary education as the rights of the citi- zen : we were now, he went on, approaching the stage when further education should be estab-

lished as a similar right. I have tried to show in this article that the time has come, and I have no longer the slightest doubt that the only govern-

mental act which would have any significant effect on education is the raising of the school- leaving age, not to sixteen but to seventeen.

The question is no longer one of keeping chil- dren on at school but of providing them with a genuine training and with a real foothold if they

wish to continue in further education at univer- sity and advanced levels. I can see no reason why a Government determined to tackle this question once and for all should not promise to raise the school-leaving age to seventeen within the period of its next term of office.

Moreover, it is at this level that the social divisions in education can be broken. The more one examines the educational system, the more one realises that the divisions at the bottom of the scale—in primary and preparatory education, especially—survive today only because of the fear that there will be no adequate opportunity, particularly for the average boy, at the top. This opportunity can be provided only by the generous provision of facilities for further education; but these, again, would be meaningless without the raising of the school-leaving age.

Special skills are now as important as reading, writing and arithmetic were in 1870, and it would be introducing no new principle if the State acknowledged that the child has a right to education and training in them. The raising of the school-leaving age to seventeen, linked to an expansion, which is already going on, of all the institutions which provide further educa- tion, is the only way of conferring this right. The 1902 and 1944 Acts were introduced by Conservative Ministers of Education. The 1965 or 1966 Act should be as well.