Back to school

Roy Kerridge

Between 1954 and 1958 I attended Holloway School in North London. It had been a boys' grammar school when I started and was a comprehensive school by the time I left. Throughout my first year there, in the grim gloom of the Old Building, lessons were interrupted by the roar of drills as the New Building slowly took shape. Light and airy when complete, the New Building seemed to go hand in hand with New Teachers, fresh faced young men, all agog to take part in a new educational experiment. The change-over seemed very exciting to us boys, although it did not affect us much, as 'non-selected' first formers did not arrive until we were in the third year. Essentially Holloway remained what it had been for some time, a mediocre, good humoured, fairly hard-working grammar school. Most of the boys came from working class homes but picked up middle class accents, and hoped to please their parents and teachers by becoming bank clerks. New Elizabethans, we took for granted that Progress was Good and that our school was getting better.

How does Holloway fare today, after nearly a quarter century of being comprehensive? A few weeks ago, I went back to find out, my first visit since leaving. No one remained from my schooldays, and office and teaching staff gazed at me incredulously. I found that they regarded the late Fifties as the Bad Old Days, when caning was allowed, boys had to put their hands up to speak to a master, hymns were sung in Assembly, boys wore caps and groaned under the oppression of being taught by men in black gowns.

'Nowadays we don't believe that you have to dress smartly to win the boys' respect', I was told.

I smiled, as I remembered the black gowns smudged in chalk dust that protected old tweed jackets with leather elbows. Now some of the masters wore blue denim, and mistresses had been added, the fresh faces replaced by strained, jaded and even embittered ones. Nevertheless, some idealists remained, and one of them hauled me off to talk to the boys about changes in the school.

'Hymns in Assembly! The boys would never stand for that', I was told.

'I think boys accept whatever they find in a new school', I replied. 'Isn't a religious service compulsory, by law?'

'Yes, but the law is ignored. So many boys are immigrants that we wouldn't know what religion to have. Some West Indians are Rastas and worship drugs, for example'.

I didn't see any, as the many boys of West Indian or African descent looked as bright, cheerful and open-faced as the others. As a whole, the boys seemed an unusually pleasant lot, more earnest and less given to boredom and bullying then in my day. During two lengthy visits to the school I saw no signs of ugly hooliganism, punks or Rastas, and while the coloured boys tended to make friends among themselves, there appeared to be no prejudice or impassable barriers.

Middle class accents were evidently out, among the staff as well as the pupils. Back in the Fifties, the first batch of non-selected boys had had an elocution teacher brought in to help them. This tale of levelling upwards, a forgotten idea, shocked today's teachers.

'I felt very weighed down by all the homework when I was here', I said.

`Ah, we don't have homework now. We have what we call "work at home". All the boys are called by their Christian names, and uniform is no longer compulsory. You'll find it very different.'

Addressing some 13-year-old boys, I found myself talking to the brash Cockney lads in 'T' shirts about gruesome canings, while they told me about the school ghost. Well mannered boys in uniform who called me 'Sir' (an odd experience for me) I inadvertently ignored, although they may have had something more sensible to talk about. In this could be seen an allegory of the comprehensive system, which favours the cheeky and non-academic, who can please Sir or Miss with a joke, above both the dim plodder and the shy but brilliant, who tend to be ignored. It was now Holloway's proud boast that there was no streaming, and every class was Mixed Ability, and I saw clearly that this just did not work. A different style of teaching is needed for a different style of child.

Anew informality prevailed, which varied from attractive mateyness, with boys and masters telling each other riddles, to plain silliness, such as when, between lessons, a master played outrageous punk records to the boys and talked about concerts he had been to, and his favourite groups. Instead of rows of desks with inkwells, I found shiny low tables arranged around the room, a fashion that was introduced just before I left the school. Text books seemed few, and of a far worse quality than anything I remembered. First of all, a class of 11 and 12 year olds danced cheerfully into the room, looking very young for their ages. A jovial man, the master, picked boys up in the air and waved them around, to their great enjoyment. Then began the teaching, and I saw that, because of their Mixed Ability, the boys could not be addressed as a class. A master had to go from boy to boy, looking at different work. No wonder many of the staff had circles under their eyes and looked as if they had been to Hell and back. Every lesson was in effect 20 lessons, and every boy learned about one twentieth of what he would have done in a streamed class among his peers. Shouting for attention instead of raising a hand added to the bedlam, and over half the class did not seem to be taught at all. Never mind, they might get their turn to be taught later on, at the other half's expense. Exulting over the lack of streaming, and probably knowing no other means of teaching, the masters at Holloway were making unnecessary difficulties for themselves and the boys. I looked at the exercise books and was amazed to see that the boys wrote in printing, not adult handwriting as I had been taught by the age of eight.

My surprise dwindled when I saw that the master wrote on the board in the same way, with an occasional pot-hooked letter here and there for no apparent reason. This uncertain slapdash way of writing seemed general in the school. Most of the first year boys seemed on the mental level of nineyear-olds in the Fifties, yet with alert faces and engaging manners. When I was in the first year, the English master read us stories by P.G. Wodehouse and W.W. Jacobs for a treat — now the teacher gave out comics and football quizzes. Looking at the eager faces aroUnd me, I wondered if their brightness was deceptive, or if normal teaching would reveal many a hidden grammar school boy ready to come out. 'Sir' told me to help some of the boys with work for their CSE Folders. A teacher from another school tells me that the CSE English exam, whose top grade is equal to an '0' Level, works like this. Fifty per cent of the exam consists of an appraisal of a boy's school work from the first year upward, presented in a folder. Forty per cent is an orthodox examination and ten per cent is an oral test, though in fact I was told that this often went by a master's recommendation. CSE folders usually contain neatly typed work, translated from the semiliterate tortured wanderings of bemused boys by the English teacher, who corrects as he types. This makes CSE English quite an easy exam to pass in most schools.

After break, I sat through a second year class who could not be kept in order, and the unfortunate master kept waving 'Referral' papers at them in a vain show of force. The only punishment left, in a school that had once been over-fond of slippering and detention, was the Referral Room, where you were now sent with a yellow form with your crime ticked on it, and had to sit writing your own account of what had happened.

My happiest memories of Holloway Revisited are of the sixth form literature class in the afternoon. There were only five of them, and they were taught in a group, for since some boys had left and others given up English, the lesson was not a Mixed Ability one. A glance at their exercise books revealed that adult writing had been mastered, and the standard was that of a class of 13-year-olds in my day. Aubrey Hodes, a bearded master in his early fifties, discussed, with some originality, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. When the boys read aloud, they could not modify their day-to-day accents and translated Wells into Cockney.

A dark-skinned boy asked if slavery had been introduced by the time the book was written, and was surprised to be told it had already been abolished. This confirmed my impression that most Englishmen, black and white, confuse slavery with the Empire, the Independence movements of the Fifties and Sixties stirring folk memories of Wilberforce. Probably I had learned more in one voluntary day at Holloway than during my whole enforced stay years before.

Instead of an uneasy marriage of secondary modem and grammar school, with one partner dominating the other, Holloway and possibly other comprehensive schools represented something completely new. There was no trace of grammar school about it, yet it was not a secondary modern. Boys were not being prepared for a workman's life, which would have been seen as a failure. Nor were they groomed to be scholars, though some could talk jargon. What will become of them? If they all become social workers, England is doomed.