Agit sop
Max Beloff
The Creighton Report Hunter Davies
■ naMish Hamilton £4.95)
'Ail eleven-year-old boy was taken into eLeatIcil care last night because his parents "aye refused to send him to a comprehensive sch.,°01'. (The Guardian. 4 May 1976). I this blood-chilling quotation should be II: es _very reader's mind when he or she takes P Ivir Hunter Davies' glossy piece of propaganda on behalf of the comprehensive prinelPie. Creighton School, a comprehensive in ?Liter London where Mr Davies did a year as (w Leac.her-rePorter for the Sunday Times kI. here much of the material appeared) is the L t nd of school to which all parents will, if abour gets its way, be forced to send their children; and this includes those parents who at the moment feel they can stay outside the !Farrtent because they can afford to pay for „Private education. They too, are on Labour's little list. C/tie hastens to add that Creighton School leslearlY not a bad one. Why should it be? ti,`45 disadvantages in being the amalgamaa-,;41°f two schools with buildings some way tcl'art; it suffers in consequence from more !flter the usual problems of organisation and communications—the proportion ").1 staff who administer rather than teach, gwo.thlo jobs a extent to which non-teaching obs nio a school carry the prestige and the aeY, will shock those who like myself -11s.,Inernber the inspiration of schoolmasters 6:: .whont teaching was a way of life. But er.,eightoll School also has some good teach
as well as some obviously unsuitable ones
urnter Davies' honesty as a reporter outor"..gits his devotion to the comprehensive t1,1,1.elPie when he allows it to become clear the :`,It is Mostly in the older age groups that child pest teachers are to be found. It has s0,11.reo of a great variety of ethnic as well as u/th 7-141 backgrounds who present teachers l_ both a challenge and an opportunity. c I be re is no reason to believe that hton School does not represent one a. -1;ssible Pattern for secondary education in a.vilY Populated urban area. The quesan-ri" Is whether it is the only possible model w,hat it is intended to make of such arp-Ts in the future. The younger teachers (3.' course often committed, as is Hunter sne-v,.„les himself, to the view not only that em.,-.1`1,Y will in some mysterious and unte'tk.aIned way benefit by all children going tucits-,e sLarrle kind of school, but also to atti -!nat go far beyond this initial principle. SehIs Mixed-ability teaching; Creighton
at Present represents a compromise,
villg it for some subjects but not for all. eon ‘t'er bavies has the usual inaccurate and -"Ptilous reference to the Black Papers whose purpose and argument he is clearly incapable of understanding; he just takes the mixed-ability principle as though it were now an accepted truth. Another attitude is a hostility towards examinations, which is communicated to the children in such a way that those who take '0' levels and 'A' levels are led to believe that there is something indecent in wishing to excel, and that if their careers demand external assessment they must accept it as a sort of compromise with the devil. The final attitude is that the school must reflect the current attitudes of the age groups for which it caters—not merely in morals and manners but in matters intellectual. A cheerful, hedonistic, non-competitive atmosphere is to be the aim of the school; if society is not like that, if Britain needs the maximum output of energy and talent from all children, so much the worse for society in general and Britain in particular. Since the studies most closely related to society are in the hands of those who wholly disapprove of its values, and since neither patriotism nor self-discipline figure among the things that the most influential members of the junior staff care about, the country cannot expect much help from this source. But the most striking thing of all is that in what is a school, and one claiming to have its proper proportion of the brighter children, there seems no evidence of any inculcated respect for books or for learning as such. For the middle-class homes this may not matter too much—it depends on their parents—but for many working-class children the deprivation must be enormous. None of this matters to the comprehensive lobby. Professor Peston, who was adviser to the Secretary of State for Education and Science during the regrettable tenure of that office by the self-styled moderate Mr Reg Prentice, makes this quote clear in his introduction to the book. He is incapable of seeing that one can care about children—all children—without subscribing to the dogma that 'all children in the community should be educated together at the secondary level', and it is indecent to suggest as he does that those who take the contrary view express 'under the guise of preserving educational standards a degree of malice which is unusual in the discussion of public issues in this country'. I return to the boy put into care. Who wishes to penalise parents for desiring the best for their children—the National Council for Educational Standards or Professor Peston and his friends? The last word should be with a teacher at Creighton—the obviously highly expert and respected teacher of typing. At theend of the year in question she resigned, prematurely writing across her annual staff survey the following message: 'I am sick and tired of pupil abuse, swearing, discourtesy, inattention, indifference to work—i.e. I am completely disenchanted with State education. It has in my opinion been completely ruined. Great pity'. Great pity indeed! Professor Peston and Bedfordshire County Council, please note.