At this time of year I have taken the opportunity, in the past,

to post a Blog about the secondary performance tables which

for 2011 were published on Thursday January 26th 2012. In

2009 I wrote about the limitations of contextual value-added

(CVA) (TEN POINTS THAT PUTS NHGS IN A LEAGUE APART!)

and in 2011 I wrote about the English Baccalaureate

(THE BEST SCHOOL IN YORKSHIRE AND THE BEST VALUE).

The discredited CVA has been abandoned but the Eng Bac

does not yet include RE or English Literature so we will

need to continue to campaign about that measure. 

The Department for Education (DfE) published the results of

more than 3,300 secondary and 900 independent schools’

GCSE and A Level exams as part of the Coalition

Government’s drive for greater transparency - giving parents

more information than ever before about how their child’s

school is performing. The DfE is publishing 400 per cent more

data about secondary schools than in 2010. The 2011 Schools

Performance Tables now include:

·         how well disadvantaged children perform in each school

·         whether previously high, middle and low achieving pupils

          continue to make progress

·         how many pupils at each school are entered into the core

          academic subjects that make up the EBacc.

The publication of the School Performance Tables for 2011 provide

another occasion for NHGS to celebrate. In a table published by

the BBC they ranked all the secondary schools according to the

percentage of students who had achieved the key national

threshold standard for Level 2 which is 5+ A*-C GCSE grades

including English and Mathematics

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16729387). Some 158 of

the 4,200 secondary schools achieved 100% including NHGS so

they then ranked the schools according to the total points per

student. Each GCSE grade a student achieves carries a points

tariff (A*-58; A-52; B-46;C-40 etc) so the average points score

is the total points achieved by the year group divided by the

number of students in the year.  This year NHGS students scored

648.3 (compared to 561.7 in 2010) which placed NHGS 17th in

the table.  This is a commendable achievement given that the

funding for NHGS in 2010-11 was £4,714 per student. This is even

more impressive when compared to some other well-known schools.

St Paul’s attended by the Chancellor George Osborne was 31st with

617.8 points (Fees £18,825 pa); Westminster attended by the Deputy

Prime Minister was 80th with 562.1 (Fees £21,078 pa) and Eton

attended by the Prime Minister was 120th with 513.4 points

(Fees £21,067 pa). The Fees for Eton College are theoretical as it is

a boarding school only so a relative day rate has been calculated

based upon comparisons with Westminster and St Paul’s. It is

remarkable how close the fees are for these schools – they must

obviously undertake a comparison price check like the supermarkets

(more M & S versus Waitrose than Costcutter versus Lidl). Although

this is just one table drawn from the multitude of statistics published

by the DfE its worth is justified as it reflects the most important Key

Stage 4 performance indicator (5+A*-C including English and

Mathematics) and the average total number of qualifications achieved

by the whole year group.

Pictured alongside the Coalition Government's leaders is James who scored the highest average points score in NHGS's Year 11 in 2011.  In terms of ability, character and potential there are very many students at NHGS who should aspire to top positions and leading roles which a true meiritocracy would facilitate.

This league table is dominated by state grammar schools which occupy all of the top twenty places.  Indeed state grammar schools take up 43 out of the top 50 places. Some 42% of the 164 grammar schools in England achieved 100% 5+A*-C in 2011 compared to about 10% of the secondary independent schools. Speking about the figures published last week the Schools’ Minister Nick Gibb said,

“We should have high expectations for all children regardless of their circumstances. Today’s figures reveal a shocking waste of talent in many schools across the country. All too often, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds aren’t given the same opportunities as their peers. Children only have one chance at education. These tables show which schools are letting children down. We will not hesitate to tackle underperformance in any school, including academies. Heads should be striving to make improvements year on year, and we will not let schools coast with mediocre performance.”

In the light of the performance of the independent schools he could have said,

“We should have high expectations for all children regardless of their circumstances. Today’s figures reveal a shocking waste of talent in many independent schools across the country. All too often, pupils from extremely advantaged backgrounds are given far more opportunities than their peers in the state system yet do not achieve as well as they should do. Children only have one chance at education. These tables show which independent schools are letting children down. We will not hesitate to tackle underperformance in any school, including private schools. Heads should be striving to make improvements year on year, and we will not let independent schools coast with mediocre performance.”

Of course exam results are only one measurable output of a school’s achievement.  As it states on the St Paul’s website,

‘One of the weaknesses of the league table culture is its tendency to focus on statistics. An education at St Paul’s is not about percentages of A grades or whatever. It is about enabling pupils to get to their first choice of university. We have helped the overwhelming majority of Paulines to achieve their personal aims; it is the people we care about, not just the statistics’.

This is an important consideration but has to be placed in context. If NHGS received the Eton level of funding we would have £24 million a year which is four times the level of our current funding.  Even allowing for area cost adjustments that is a very lavish level of funding.  I could completely re-build NHGS with one year’s ‘Eton level’ funding.

Research by the Centre for Market and Public Organisation based at Bristol University found that:

‘We show that provision of performance data is useful to parents, and Hastings and   Weinstein (2008) show that it will be used by parents and can be transformative to the 

educational outcomes for disadvantaged students’.

(http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2010/wp241.pdf)

This information is used in a case study about school choice for a school in Bristol (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49ut7gAjLwo&feature=related).

Nick Gibb wrote,

‘the purpose of performance tables must be to incentivise schools to raise standards and to enable parents to make informed decisions when choosing a school’.  

This particular table will hopefully encourage parents choosing private education to question whether they are getting value for money. That the present Government is dominated by politicians who were educated in the private sector, notwithstanding their obvious ability and talent, may be more attributable to those hefty fees buying privilege than performance.

The secondary performance tables can be accessed on the DfE website (http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/performance/?pid=pt2011_&cre=superhomepageflash) where there is also a useful guide (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0FESMRIwGk).

The recent release of the film War Horse directed by Steven Spielberg provides an opportunity to evaluate the different ways in which this story has been produced, distributed and consumed.  Michael Morpurgo was born in 1943 and grew up amongst the bomb-sites in post-war London. His uncle died in the war and as a teenager he read the WW1 poets (Owen, Sassoon and Blunden), saw the film, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and saw a performance of ‘Oh What a Lovely War’. After school he went to Sandhurst to embark upon a military career but soon left and went to university where he struggled with philosophy and literary criticism. He then became a primary teacher and whilst he enjoyed teaching he did not appreciate schools or the education system. His wife inherited some money when her father, Sir Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Books, died.  They decided to use the money to establish a charitable project, ‘Farms for City Children’ in the small village of Iddesleigh in Devon, in 1975. This charity funds children, who live in the large urban areas in the UK, to come and stay on a working farm and find out first-hand more about agriculture and the rural way of life.  Morpurgo had started writing when he was a primary teacher and had some children’s books published. In Devon he came under the influence of two well-known poets, Sean Rafferty and Ted Hughes, who lived locally.

“I did more listening than talking, quaffed wine and sat at their feet, drinking in their words and their wit and their wisdom”.

He continued to write and three different experiences combined to start him on writing a story about World War 1. In the pub at Iddesleigh he struck up a conversation with a veteran of the War who had served in the Yeomanry and had worked with horses.

“He told me how he used to confide his worst fears, his deepest feelings, to his horse as he fed him at night. And the more he talked, the more upset he became, and the more engaged I became in what had happened to him - this young man who'd come away from a completely pastoral background and had been thrust into this hideous, hideous trench warfare. That was all that kept me surviving. 'Cause I would go to horse lines each night to feed the horses, and I would talk to my horse, and I'd talk about my mother, and I'd talk about my sweetheart and about home. And about being frightened. Terrified. Particularly the last one. Being terrified you could not talk about amongst your chums, amongst your pals, 'cause everyone was terrified. You couldn't talk about it. People were dying all around you and you saw things that you simply couldn't talk about."

Michael Morpurgo became intrigued by the role of the horse and checked with the Imperial War Museum who estimated that one million horses were used in World War 1 and many of the ones that survived were sold in France at the end of the War for meat so that only about 65,000 returned to the UK. As a result he spoke to other local veterans who remembered the Army purchasing horses at the local market for war duty and he spoke to an officer who had served in the cavalry.

The second influence for the story was an encounter he had with a young man from Birmingham who was staying for a week on the ‘Farms for City Children’ project who had not spoken for two years because he had an 'incurable' stammer. He recounted this experience on a radio programme in December 2010.

“They said ‘He’s been two years in school and he hasn’t said a word, so please don’t confront him or he’ll run back to Birmingham’, which is a long way from Devon and they didn’t want that. So I did as I was told and I stood back and I watched him, and I could see that he related wonderfully to the animals, totally silently, never spoke to the other kids at all, and then I came in the last evening, which I always used to do, to read them a story. It was a dark November evening and I came into the yard behind this big Victorian house where they all live, and there he was, Billy, standing in his slippers by the stable door and the lantern above his head, talking. Talking, talking, talking, to the horse. And the horse, Hebe, had her head out of, just over the top of the stable, and she was listening, that’s what I noticed, that the ears were going, and she knew - I knew she knew - that she had to stay there whilst this went on, because this kid wanted to talk, and the horse wanted to listen, and I knew this was a two way thing, and I wasn’t being sentimental, and I stood there and I listened, then I went and got the teachers, and brought them up through the vegetable garden, and we stood there in the shadows, and we listened to Billy talking, and they were completely amazed how this child who couldn’t get a word out, the words were simply flowing”.

The third source of inspiration was a painting by F.W. Reed painted in 1917 which showed a British cavalry charge on German lines with horses entangled in barbed wire.  The painting had been left to his wife Clare.

 "It was a very frightening and alarming painting, not the sort you'd want to hang on a wall. It showed horses during the First World War charging into barbed wire fences. It haunted me."

Michael Morpurgo as a result of these influences wrote a novel for young people and called it War Horse which was published in 1982. It has an author’s note at the beginning which describes the painting of a horse in a school hall with the inscription, ‘Joey. Painted by Captain James Nicholls, Autumn 1914.’ The story is told by Joey and it begins with his earliest memories and his being sold at auction to a drunken farmer and his first meeting with the farmer’s son Albert who befriends him, ‘I knew then that I had found a friend for life, that there was an instinctive and immediate bond of trust and affection between us’. Chapters one to four introduces the reader to Joey and he shares his earliest memories and  his time on the farm in which he is taught to plough and develops an increasingly strong relationship with Albert.  It ends with Albert’s father selling Joey to the army and coming under the control of Captain Nicholls who prevents Albert from joining up because he is too young. Chapters five to eight describes, from Joey’s perspective, his training in the cavalry, his meeting up with another horse Topthorn, their passage to France, their involvement in battles and their capture by the Germans. Chapters nine to fifteen covers Joey’s experience of the war with the Germans, pulling hospital carts, being stabled with an old man and his granddaughter, losing companions and finding himself injured in no-man’s land. Chapters sixteen to twenty-one chart his recovery back with the British, the final battles, the end of the war and his fate.

“My horse would witness it all, the pity and the futility and the huge senselessness, and the hope, too. I would see it and feel it through his eyes. So it is Joey, a farm horse from Iddesleigh in Devon, who tells the story, whose fortunes we follow as he struggles to survive in the mud and nightmarish wasteland of war”.

The novel was well-received and was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize but it did not win; the Morpurgos arrived for the ceremony in a limousine and left via the Tube. The book remained in print selling a modest 1,500 to 2,000 copies a year. Michael Morpurgo worked on a screenplay for a film version for six years but nothing came of it – he had to abandon the project though lack of interest. Then on Sunday April 11th 2004, a retired doctor from Essex called Rosemary Morris listened to an episode of Desert Island Discs with Michael Morpurgo as the castaway. Dr Morris had never heard of him but was so enthralled by his life story that she bought some of his books one of which was War Horse. Dr Morris’s son, Tom, was then associate director of the National Theatre. And when he mentioned that he was looking for an animal story to turn into a stage production, Dr Morris recommended War Horse.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00936nt/Desert_Island_Discs_Michael_Morpurgo/)

Michael Murpurgo takes up the story,

“Tom's mother urged him to read War Horse. He did, and so began a sequence of events that would transform the fortunes of War Horse.  At first, I have to confess, I was sceptical. How on earth could a convincing drama of the First World War be made using life-size puppets of horses? Pantomime horses came to mind all too easily. But this was the National Theatre. Maybe they knew what they were doing. For a year or more Tom and codirector-Marianne Elliot workshopped the story with Handspring puppeteers Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler and the rest of the team - designers, musicians, writers - to explore how it could be done. They came down to Devon to see the landscape of the story, to watch horses working the land. We went to visit The King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery to discover how soldiers worked with horses and guns. There were some tense moments during the preview nights when it was obvious that the play was too long, even clumsy in places, but working along with Nick Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, the team got it all together somehow”.

The play of Warhorse opened in the National Theatre in London on October 17^th 2007 and ran for two sell out years before transferring to the New Theatre in Drury lane in the West End (http://warhorselondon.nationaltheatre.org.uk/). The play was an instant hit and was critically acclaimed.  This was a review from the Daily Telegraph, after opening night,

‘When I heard the answer was going to be puppetry, my heart sank. Puppets are often an embarrassment, involving a lot of effort and fuss for negligible returns. Not here however. Joey and the other horses in the show are truly magnificent creations by the Handspring Puppet Company which don't aim for picturesque realism but with their wooden framework, translucent fabric skins, and extraordinary mobility somehow capture the very essence of everything equine. This is much more than a puppet show, however. Nick Stafford's powerful adaptation of Morpurgo's novel, which wisely ditches Joey's narrative and tells the story through dialogue among the human characters, brilliantly captures not only the mysterious and intense relationship that can exist between humans and animals, but also the dreadful waste and terror of the Great War. Like the poems of Wilfred Owen, this often virtuosic production, superbly designed by Rae Smith, brilliantly lit by Paule Constable and using all the technical resources of the Olivier stage, captures "the pity of war, the pity war distilled". The sight of horses and sword-brandishing soldiers charging across no-man's land into great blasts of machine gun fire encapsulates the futility of the conflict’.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3668613/War-Horse-Horse-play-is-no-puppet-show.html).

Although initially sceptical Michael Morpurgo was also won over by the stage adaptation,

“I was convinced I'd found the best way of telling this story. Then I saw what the National Theatre achieved with its stage version of War Horse, now transferred to the West End. Joey is a puppet, a life-sized puppet, so sensitively manipulated that you forget he is a puppet in which the audience invests so much empathy and pity and hope that it is almost too much to bear. "If I'm reading a book with a view to turning it into a show," Morris, the production's prime mover, told me, "I look for five things: story, world, themes, characters and theatrical opportunity. With War Horse, the story was simple and powerful, and the world of the first world war remains present and (in understanding our own folly) of enduring importance. But the thing that made it irresistible was the way in which theme, character and theatrical opportunity combined in the challenge of representing the horse. It created the perfect reason for Adrian Kohler to design a puppet that extended all previous rules of theatre-making”.

And that could have been that with regard to War Horse.  But then a further dose of serendipity as Michel Morpurgo explains,

“Spielberg's producer Kathleen Kennedy happened to be in London, happened to see the play and, like so many, was blown away by it. She called Spielberg and within weeks he'd seen the play, met the cast, visited the Imperial War Museum and decided this would be his next film. In the weeks that followed he worked with Lee Hall and Richard Curtis on the script, and within months the film was being made, all of it in England - in Devon, which Spielberg loved, at Stratfield Saye in Berkshire, Wisley in Surrey, and Castle Combe in Wiltshire”.

The film opened in the UK earlier this month to mixed reviews.

‘This is a soaring, sprawling epic that harks back to the dream-big visionaries of old Hollywood: John Ford, David Lean, David O. Selznick. It was shot on real film stock in the rolling English countryside and on huge, hand-built sets, with barely a pixel in sight. Spielberg’s regular director of photography, Janusz Kaminski, conjures up the romantic staginess of Ford’s horse operas with scenes of horses and riders on the crests of hills, backlit by impossibly saturated sunsets. It’s expansive, expensive, and long on both sincerity and running time. It’s also the best thing Spielberg has made in at least ten years’.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/9010505/War-Horse-review.html)

‘Suffused in a buttery-digital glow, as if shot on special film made of liquid fudge, Steven Spielberg’s  disappointing, coercively sentimental version of War Horse has a baffling, soulless, artificial look.  The director's lack of real feeling for the locale or the era could not be more obvious. When the camera initially swoops over those rolling fields of Devon, in their supersaturated shades of green, it might as well be Kentucky, or County Tipperary, or an unexplored moon of Tatooine. And all the time, John Williams's orchestral score insistently jabs and prods us, so we know when to laugh, when to be scared, when to feel sad’.(http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/12/war-horse-spielberg-film-review)

I have engaged with War Horse in a non-sequential way which has perhaps influenced my evaluation of the three forms in which it has been depicted. I saw the stage version last year and then I read the book and I have recently seen the film.  Like virtually everyone who has seen it (well over a million in London over the last four years) I was completely entranced by the stage play. The life-size puppets were marvelous and their animation by the impressively skilled puppeteers was magical and utterly credible. I would recommend it unreservedly.  The story as revealed in the book is compelling but I found the prose flat and the narration by the horse unconvincing. I did suspend my disbelief for Black Beauty but I could not for Joey. I have talked to students who read the book when they were young(er) and they absolutely loved it so if I had read the book before seeing the play and if I could have read it as a teenager I might have enjoyed it more.  As for the Spielberg film I was unimpressed.  I agree with the Guardian critic above because I found the lighting throughout very unnatural and whereas I was viscerally moved by both the puppets and the actors in the stage version I remained unconnected to the characters in the film; equine and human.  Both the play and the film benefitted from losing the horse narration. As might be expected from Spielberg the war scenes were technically well done and some, such as the firing squad scene, were transcendent. I enjoy reading, going to the theatre and the cinema (watching films on TV is an inferior experience).  War Horse, for me, best works in the stage version (which is taking bookings up to February 2013) which is a remarkable and memorable experience. Credit has to go to Michael Morpurgo, the Children's Laureate from 2003-05 and author of over 120 books which include The Wreck of the Zanzibar (Whitbread Children's Novel Award), The Butterfly Lion (Smarties Prize and Writers' Guild Award), Kensuke's Kingdom, Private Peaceful (both of which received the Children's Book Award), The War of Jenkin's Ear and Why the Whales Came, for conceiving and writing the story in the first place. There is an exhibition running until August 1^st 2012 at the National Army Museum entitled , War Horse: Fact or Fiction (http://www.nam.ac.uk/exhibitions/special-displays/war-horse-fact-fiction) which explores the role of horses in warfare. The last word is with the author of this inspirational work, talking about the stage play,
“And I think of what the horse represents, I think, to me. There's a moment in this show of "War Horse," in the play, where the horse rears up, caught on the wire, and screams. And it's like the scream in the picture by Edward Munch. It's a scream of agony about being alive in this ghastly world and being put through this pain. And it's a scream which seems to touch the hearts. And when you're in a theater and there's a thousand people there, you feel a thousand people screaming inside themselves. Because they know what that scream's all about. Don't want someone saying, "War is a terrible thing." The scream does It”.

England has a long history as a nation and there is national pride in many of its long-lasting institutions such as the Bank of England (1694), the Royal Society (1660), the House of Commons (1295), The Court of Chancery (1280) and the University of Oxford (1096).  One of the institutions which we should also take pride in is the grammar school which precedes all the above-mentioned institutions.  Probably the oldest extant grammar school is the King’s School in Canterbury which was founded as a cathedral school in 597 AD.  Our long-standing institutions are generally cherished and respected whereas grammar schools have struggled to survive and are seemingly cherished and respected only by former and hopefully current students and their parents.  It was therefore surprising and refreshing that BBC 4 commissioned a two-part documentary The Grammar School: a Secret History which was broadcast on consecutive Thursdays (January 5^th and 12^th 2012). Its title alone belies the fact that the country is embarrassed by grammar schools rather than proud of them. It is perceived as something that we should be secret about and not champion. The programmes took a sympathetic and appreciative stance towards the very positive contribution that grammar schools have made to the lives of many people who were fortunate enough to attend them in the last century.  The first programme covered the period up to the 1950s and included contributions from high profile beneficiaries of a grammar school education such as Sir David Attenborough and Joan Bakewell whilst the second covered the 1960s and later with contributions from Michael Wood and Edwina Currie and it covered the relative decline in the number of grammar schools in England  from its zenith in 1965 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0197znp).        

The earliest grammar schools (scolae grammaticales) were attached to cathedrals and monasteries and were responsible for teaching Latin – the language of the church – to

prepare future priests and monks. This is why they are called grammar schools as the bulk of the curriculum covered the teaching of Latin grammar. Other subjects required for religious work were occasionally added, including music and verse (for liturgy), astronomy and mathematics (for the church calendar) and law (for administration).

With the foundation of the ancient universities from the late 12th century, grammar schools became the entry point to a liberal arts education, with Latin seen as the foundation of the trivium. The trivium comprised the three subjects that were taught first: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The word is a Latin term meaning “the three ways” or “the three roads” forming the foundation of a medieval liberal arts education. Grammar is the mechanics of a language (always Latin, at the time); logic (or dialectic) is the "mechanics" of thought and analysis; rhetoric is the use of language to instruct and persuade. This study was preparatory for the quadrivium. The quadrivium includes geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music. Combining the trivium and quadrivium results in the seven liberal arts of classical study. Pupils were usually educated in grammar schools up to the age of 14, after which they would look to universities and the church for further study.

‘For some hundreds of years before the middle of the eighteenth century the typical school in England and Wales was the endowed Grammar School, which was generally regarded as the lower stage or feeder for 'grammar scholars', who in due course were to proceed to be be 'artist scholars' at Oxford or Cambridge. One of the basic ideas of the Grammar School was that it was designed to send at any rate its more gifted pupils to the Universities. It was implicitly regarded as a schola particularis of the University which was the studium commune vel generale, and in theory at any rate its function was to instruct its pupils in the trivium. In practice, however, the principal aim of the Grammar School was to give some form of instruction in Latin, which down to the first half of the eighteenth century was still to a great extent the language of theology, law, science, and even diplomacy in Western Europe. The teaching of grammar, described in the foundation deed for Winchester College (1382) as 'the foundation, gate and source of all the other liberal arts, without which such arts cannot be known, nor can anyone arrive at practising them', was regarded as the distinguishing mark of higher education’. (http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/spens/)

During the English Reformation in the 16th century, cathedral schools were replaced by new foundations funded from the dissolution of the monasteries. King Edward VI founded a series of grammar schools during his reign. These schools were open to all and offered free tuition to those who could not pay fees; however, few poor children attended school, because they had to work to contribute to their families. During the 16th and 17th centuries the setting up of grammar schools became a common act of charity by nobles, wealthy merchants and guilds. The usual pattern was to create an endowment to pay the wages of a master to instruct local boys in Latin and sometimes Greek without charge. The teaching was mostly the rote learning of Latin.

‘In the sixteenth century in England and Wales the traditional general curriculum for the grammar school and the University, as distinct from the professional studies of divinity, medicine and law which were pursued at the University alone, was in substance the mediaeval seven liberal arts, but in them the balance of studies had been considerably modified. The quadrivium belonged to the University; the trivium was rather unsystematically distributed between pupils in Grammar Schools and students in their first year at the University. It must be remembered that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to a great extent in the eighteenth century, youths were admitted to the Universities at the age of 15 or even earlier. Of the studies included in the trivium, the only one that was systematically taught in the Grammar Schools in effect was grammar, which meant Latin literature, and in particular the necessary preliminary study of Latin grammar, which was regarded as the special 'business' of schools’. (http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/spens/)

The industrial revolution and the development of business and trade created a demand for modern languages and commercial subjects. Most grammar schools founded in the 18th century also taught arithmetic and English. There were disputes between school masters who wanted to stay with the traditional curriculum as enshrined in the endowment and a burgeoning urban middle-class who wanted a more commercial curriculum. This continued pressure resulted in the Grammar Schools Act 1840 which made it lawful to apply the income of grammar schools from endowments to purposes other than the teaching of classical languages, although the change still required the consent of the schoolmaster. Thomas Arnold's modernisation of the curriculum and pupils’ experience at Rugby School; providing a non-classical course of study as an alternative to the traditional one that emphasized Greek and Latin, establishing a house system, stressing school spirit, emphasising Christianity and games like football and cricket as means of improving character, became a model for other Victorian public and grammar schools. Classics formed the core of the curriculum, but were supplemented by instruction in French and Mathematics (including Arithmetic, Algebra and Geometry), which were taught by the classical form masters. The Rugby curriculum also included English, German, Ancient History and Modern European history.

The Royal Commission on the Public Schools was set up in 1861 'to inquire into the Revenue and Management of Certain Colleges and Schools and the studies pursued and instruction given there'. Its report (published in 1864) made recommendations relating to the government, management and curriculum of the nine ancient foundations - Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, St Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Harrow, Rugby and Shrewsbury. It effectively established these as a separate class of 'public schools' and recommended that the curriculum should consist of classics, mathematics, a modern language, two natural sciences, history, geography, drawing, and music. Interestingly, in relation to the Headmaster’s responsibilities, the Commission stated:

‘the Head Master should be as far as possible unfettered. Details ... such as the division of classes, the school hours and school books, the holidays and half-holidays during the school terms, belong properly to him ... and the appointment and dismissal of Assistant Masters, the measures necessary for maintaining discipline, and the general direction of the course and methods, which it is his duty to conduct and his business to understand thoroughly, had better be left in his hands’.

The Clarendon Report's proposals formed the basis for the 1868 Public Schools Act, which did away with many of the old foundation statutes and instituted new governing bodies for the schools, 'with a view to promote their greater Efficiency, and to carry into effect the main Objects of the Founders thereof'.

Following the Clarendon Report the Schools Inquiry Commission, under the chairmanship of Lord Taunton, was appointed to inquire into the education in secondary schools as a whole. The Commissioners investigated 782 grammar schools, plus some proprietary and private schools.  Its brief was 'to consider and report what measures (if any) are required for the improvement of such education, having especial regard to all endowments applicable or which can rightly be made applicable thereto'. They found that provision of secondary education was poor and unevenly distributed. Two thirds of English towns had no secondary schools of any kind and in the remaining third there were marked differences of quality. The Commission reported that the distribution of schools did not match the current population and that the provision for girls was very limited. The Commission proposed the creation of a national system of secondary education by restructuring the endowments of these schools for modern purposes. The result was the Endowed Schools Act 1869, which created the Endowed Schools Commission with extensive powers over endowments of individual schools. Endowed grammar schools which provided free classical instruction to boys were remodelled as fee-paying schools (with a few competitive scholarships) teaching broad curricula to boys or girls.

In the Victorian period new schools with modern curricula were established, though often

retaining a classical core. These newer schools tended to emulate the great public schools, copying their curriculum, ethos and ambitions, and took the title "grammar school" for historical reasons. A girls' grammar school established in a town with an older boys' grammar school would often be named a "high school".

In a historical retrospective the Crowther Report, published in 1959, stated:

‘It would be wrong to picture the endowed grammar schools of England at that time as upper class or middle class preserves to which a mere handful of elementary school boys were admitted. The Bryce Commission had careful surveys made in 1894 of the whole extent of secondary provision in seven counties which between them contained 30 per cent of the population. A quarter of the pupils in all the secondary schools (excluding only those schools in which the headmaster was the proprietor) had formerly attended elementary schools. The range of variation, of course, was very wide - some schools admitted none, while in others "about all," or 75 or 80 per cent, came from elementary schools. When the endowed grammar schools were taken as a class, the justifiable complaint was not that they were socially exclusive, but that there were not nearly enough of them, so that only about 4 or 5 pupils per 1,000 in the elementary schools were able to pass to the grammar schools, a figure which may be contrasted with the 200 per 1,000 for whom there are grammar school places to-day’.

(http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/crowther/crowther1-01.html)

The Grammar Schools have had very varied histories. Some with slender endowments gradually fell into decay; some became in practice elementary schools, and most of them were distracted by the varying claims of different classes of boys who required different kinds of training. Nevertheless, many small Grammar Schools continued till the middle of the nineteenth century or even later to take the sons both of the lower middle class and of the gentlefolk of the neighbourhood, sending boys not infrequently to the Universities and producing from time to time some distinguished scholars. (http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/crowther/crowther1-01.html)

The development of secondary education in England and Wales was influenced by the State taking on responsibility for organising a national system of elementary schools for children between the ages of 5 and 13 from 1870. The government appointed a Royal Commission on Secondary Education in 1894 under the Chairmanship of Mr (afterwards Viscount) Bryce, with wider terms of reference than any of the earlier Commissions, 'to consider what are the best methods of establishing a well-organised system of secondary education in England, taking into account existing deficiencies, and having regard to such local sources of revenue from endowments or otherwise as are available or may be made available for this purpose and to make recommendations accordingly.'

The Commissioners in their report stated that specialisation too early on in education was problematic:

'It is instructive that witnesses representative of technical and classical education were agreed in regarding instruction in their special subjects as inadequate by itself, and in holding that secondary education suffered from a too narrow early curriculum, and we may add a too utilitarian spirit.'

The Report continued:

‘All education is development and discipline of faculty by the communication of knowledge, and whether the faculty be the eye and hand, or the reason and imagination, and whether the knowledge be of nature or art, of science or literature, if the knowledge be so communicated as to evoke and exercise and discipline faculty, the process is rightly termed education. Now, Secondary Education may be described as a modification of this general idea. It is the education of the boy or girl not simply as a human being who needs  to be instructed in the mere rudiments of knowledge, but it is a process of intellectual training and personal discipline conducted with special regard to the profession or trade to be followed’.

The Bryce Commission Report (1895) resulted in the establishment of the Board of Education, a Consultative Committee for Education and the setting up of Local Education Authorities to 'supply or aid the supply of education other than elementary'. Local authorities were responsible for all secondary (including technical) education within their respective areas. The Education Act 1902 (Balfour Act) resulted in two types of state-aided secondary school: the endowed grammar schools, which now received grant-aid from LEAs; and the municipal or county secondary schools, maintained by LEAs. Many of the latter were established at this time and others evolved from higher grade science schools or pupil teacher centres. The Board of Education Regulations for Secondary Schools were first issued in 1904 and reinforced the tendency of the new secondary schools to adopt the academic bias of the established ones.

The Consultative Committee, created under the Education Act 1899, on the recommendation of the Bryce Commission, issued several influential reports in the inter-war period, three under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Hadow and one chaired by Sir Will Spens. The first Hadow report, Education and the Adolescent, published in 1926, was concerned with both elementary and secondary education. The Spens report of 1938 on Secondary Education recommended parity of all types of school in the secondary system, with a tripartite arrangement of grammar, modern and technical. It stated:

‘In every phase of secondary teaching, the first aim should be to educate the mind, and not merely to convey information. It is a fundamental fault, which pervades many parts of the secondary teaching now given in England, that the subject (literary, scientific or technical) is too often taught in such a manner that it has little or no educational value. The largest of the problems which concern the future of secondary education is how to secure, as far as possible, that in all schools and in every branch of study the pupils shall be not only instructed but educated’. (http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/spens/)

Rab Butler (Conservative) was appointed President of the Board of Education in the summer of 1941 and the coalition government began to make plans for an ambitious programme of 'social reconstruction' in the post-war period. Policies, though executed by ministers of one of the two parties, were jointly agreed. The 1944 Education Act (3 August 1944), based on the 1943 white paper Educational Reconstruction, formed an important part of this programme. The 1944 Education Act, influenced by the Hadow & Spens reports, created the first nationwide system of state-funded secondary education in England and Wales. Grammar schools were one of the three types of school forming the Tripartite System which developed following the 1944 Act.  Grammar schools were intended to teach an academic curriculum to the most intellectually able 25% of the school population, selected by the eleven plus examination. In reality the tripartite system did not develop as by 1958 only 4% of secondary students were educated in technical schools. The Crowther Report, which considered the provision of education for 15 to 18 year olds, published in 1958, stated,

‘The proportion of grammar school places to the total population varies so greatly from one part of England to another, and bears so varying a relation both to the social background and the distribution of ability in particular communities, that about the only thing one can safely say is that the grammar school will contain the ablest, and the modern school the least able, of the boys and girls in its catchment area (excluding the educationally sub-normal). There is a considerable intermediate group of boys and girls whose abilities would in one place give them a grammar school education and in another a modern school one’.

These issues were real and they provided practical support to the social and intellectual arguments about selection at eleven which were also included in the Report,

‘Once it is agreed, as more and more people are coming to believe, that it is wrong to label children for all time at 11, the attempt to give mutually exclusive labels to the schools to which they go at that age will have to be abandoned. All over the country changes are being made that profoundly modify the previous pattern of education, and in certain areas, the system is not being modified so much as replaced by a different form of organisation. There are many variants, and no doubt there will be many more. We distinguish three for particular mention because of the contrast of their approach. They are the comprehensive school, the bilateral school and the two-tier organisation of secondary education. All aim at reducing the waste of talent which arises from the overlap in ability which we have just been discussing, or - to put it in another way - all aim at giving each individual pupil a better chance of an education suited to his needs. All have two points of internal organisation in common. The first is that all levels of ability are represented in the same school; the second is that all levels of ability are not represented in every class. All the variants try to provide a common social life; none tries to provide a uniform curriculum’. (http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/crowther/crowther1-01.html)

These arguments and others persuaded the Labour Party to undertake a reversal to its support of the 1944 Act and adopt a policy of comprehensivisation in its manifesto for the 1964 election. The Labour Party won that election with a narrow majority.  This resulted in the issuing of Circular 10/65 which stated

‘It is the Government's declared objective to end selection at eleven plus and to eliminate separatism in secondary education. . .  The Secretary of State accordingly requests local education authorities, if they have not already done so, to prepare and submit to him plans for reorganising secondary education in their areas on comprehensive lines. There are a number of ways in which comprehensive education may be organised. While the essential needs of the children do not vary greatly from one area to another, the views of individual authorities, the distribution of population and the nature of existing schools will inevitably dictate different solutions in different areas. It is important that new schemes build on the foundation of present achievements and preserve what is best in existing schools’. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/des/circular10-65.html)

There was no compulsion in this circular and even when the Labour Government increased its majority in the 1966 election it did not force LEAs to develop comprehensive schemes. The Conservative Government, with its new Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher, withdrew the 10/65 Circular in 1970. The Labour Party was re-elected in two elections in 1974 and the 1976 Education Act, stated the principle that:

‘local education authorities shall, in the exercise and performance of their powers and duties relating to secondary education, have regard to the general principle that such education is to be provided only in schools where the arrangements for the admission of pupils are not based (wholly or partly) on selection by reference to ability or aptitude’. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/index.html

Fortunately for sympathetic LEAs and the remaining grammar schools the rest of the Act lacked the necessary compulsion and Grammar schools survived until the 1979 Education Act which was passed by the Conservative Government, elected in that year, which repealed the 1976 Act. There was no further legislation specifically concerning selective education and grammar schools until 1998 when the Labour Government, under Tony Blair, passed the School Standards and Framework Act. This enacted the Education (Grammar School Ballots) Regulations 1998 which provided for ballots of parents to end selective education for individual grammar schools, groups of grammar schools or areas with a selective system.  Only one ballot has been organised under this legislation in Ripon which resulted in a decisive vote in favour of retaining selection with a 75% turnout and 67% voting in favour of retaining selection (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/673218.stm)

In 1965 there were 1,477 grammar schools in England & Wales, including 179 direct grant schools.  Now there are only 164.  As is clear in the account above they have experienced a turbulent history.  I was fortunate to attend a grammar school in 1965, the year of Tony Crossland’s infamous circular. I completed my seven years of education in a selective school. Unlike many of the contributors to the recent BBC 4 documentaries I was not transformed by particular teachers at the school but I was generally stimulated by their joy of knowledge and scholarship.  For me, at that time, it did provide a ladder of opportunity to a world of learning, knowledge, understanding, detail, wonder, discovery, investigation, challenge, complexity, insight, revelation, erudition and intellectual fulfillment within a conducive, supportive context that enabled me to flourish personally and socially.