Some Aspects Of Our Post War Educational System

The school leaving age was raised to 15 in 1947, having been delayed for eight years because of WW2. After the war the Tripartite system was adopted in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and consisted of grammar schools, technical schools and secondary moderns. County schools were being replaced as fast as possible. Faith schools were still part of the educational landscape.

Although the eleven plus was used as the basis for allocating pupils to what was deemed to be their appropriate school within the new system, parents could opt to send their children elsewhere, for example to a private school, if they could afford it. I believe that the new Tripartite system was introduced for the best of reasons; the grammar schools gave more working class pupils a means to educational and social mobility and the less academic were said to receive an education to suit their needs. The motive for the new system remains debatable. Were secondary modern pupils fodder for the prevailing economy?

The system of selection was flawed to some extent – for one thing the availability of grammar schools was a bit of a lottery e.g. if you lived in Wales there was a much better chance of passing the eleven plus, simply because there were more grammar schools available in that area -  in Gateshead the opposite was true.

About 20% of pupils went to a grammar school and many of the remainder to a secondary modern. There were very few technical schools.  A typical secondary modern school pupil was felt to be one that copes more easily with concrete facts rather than abstract thought:



"He is interested in things as they are; he finds little attraction in the past or in the slow disentanglement of causes and movements. His mind must turn its knowledge or curiosity to immediate test, and his test is essentially practical…because he is interested only in the moment he may be incapable of a long series of connected steps; relevance to present concerns is the only way of awakening interest, abstractions mean little to him’.

Well, aside from the fact that the above statement makes no reference to she, I can say that I went to a secondary modern and do not recognize myself in the above description at all! In fact I once approached Mr Forster, the woodwork teacher, and explained that I was hopeless at woodwork; I offered a solution - I should study history, but nothing became of it until the later 60s, other than self education! I seem to recall that Malcolm Gibb was good at woodwork as well as many other subjects. My sole product from woodwork was a knife fork and spoon box but it never held cutlery and was stored in a shed for years before eventually being thrown away. For some reason my school reports were also thrown away, probably in error, by one of my parents – I am not sure which one.

It seems that the very first ‘A’ form at Ushaw Moor Modern was unlucky not to be offered an immediate GCE course, largely because we would have been about seventeen years old by the time the course finished. It did set up ‘S’ forms, that eventually would take the GCE, and those pupils did quite well; in about 1964 they achieved an average of just over four passes each.

If I had been savvy when I was sixteen I would have objected most strongly to the local technical college offer of a Royal Society of Arts stage 1 commercial course. That is what they did offer - despite some very good Northern Counties School Certificate results. Such an offer demonstrated the muddled thinking of the authorities at the time.

From the late 50s headmasters of secondary modern schools had began to realize that the currency of educational certificates was becoming important to some parents and a proliferation of qualifications became available to some of their pupils. The Department of Education decided to tidy things up in the middle 60s and introduced the Certificate of Secondary Education which was a nationally recognized but regionally organized qualification. It was designed for about the top 40% of secondary modern pupils and pitched clearly below GCE. Some other school leaving qualifications, such as the Northern Counties School Certificate, were phased out .My research and personal observations indicate that it is likely that all Northern Counties candidates were capable of success in the CSE but not all CSE candidates were capable of the same in the Northern Counties exam.

In 1966 a Durham MP discovered that in the South East of England 25.3 per cent of pupils achieved five GCE O levels whereas in the North it was 14.1% .I cannot supply figures for Wales - which is a sort of aside regarding my earlier comment concerning Wales! Although the figures and expectations have changed over the years I believe that the educational disparity between North and South still exists.

In 1976 a Labour Government introduced the Comprehensive system of education, although grammar schools still linger in some areas and tend to be strongly defended, with some merit, by those with a vested interest in them.

So there we are: clearly not an article for all readers!  I do hope though that it brought memories back for some of those that lived through this somewhat flawed period – a period that nevertheless gave significant opportunities to some. Of course life long learning is the key to success and  many of our generation made good whatever school education we may have enjoyed or suffered.

Wilf Bell