Newsom (1963)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Contents, Introduction, Principal recommendations

Part 1 Findings
Chapter 1 Education for all
Chapter 2 The pupils, the schools, the problems
Chapter 3 Education in the slums
Chapter 4 Objectives
Chapter 5 Finding approaches
Chapter 6 The school day, homework, extra-curricular activities
Chapter 7 Spiritual and moral development
Chapter 8 The school community
Chapter 9 Going out into the world
Chapter 10 Examinations and assessments
Chapter 11 Building for the future
Chapter 12 The teachers needed

Part 2 The teaching situation
Chapter 13 What should secondary imply?
Chapter 14 An education that makes sense
Chapter 15 Attainments and achievement
Chapter 16 The subjects and the curriculum
Chapter 17 The practical subjects
Chapter 18 Science and mathematics
Chapter 19 The humanities
Chapter 20 School organisation and staff deployment

Part 3 What the survey shows
Chapter 21 The 1961 survey
Chapter 22 The boys and girls
Chapter 23 The work they do
Chapter 24 The men and women who teach them
Chapter 25 The schools they go to

Acknowledgements

Appendix I List of witnesses
Appendix II Sex education
Appendix III Deployment of teachers
Appendix IV Letter to Minister on teacher training
Appendix V Statistical detail

Index

A report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1963
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Part 1 Findings
[page 1]

'A boy who had just left school was asked by his former headmaster what he thought of the new buildings. 'It could all be marble, sir,' he replied, 'but it would still be a bloody school.''

'I enjoyed my school life very much. I wanted to stay on, but there wasn't any room.' Fifteen year old leaver.

'Incentives for good behaviour. At school: House points; stars for work and service; public commendation after Assembly. At home: a drink of shandy; staying up late; staying out late; wearing make-up; having a hair-set; use of other people's clothes; money; cigarettes.' Headmistress.

'We believe that the parents are solidly behind us in our work, and the cooperation they display is most encouraging.' Headmaster.

'Outside the very narrow range of their immediate experience, their vocabulary was tragically poverty-stricken.'

'The school's outstanding strength is its social achievement. The girls are fluent and confident and entertained the visitors with an easy grace which would have done credit to a grammar school sixth form.'

'Our headmaster thought the school was marvellous and wouldn't face up to facts.' Fifteen year old school leaver.

Chapter 1 Education for all
[pages 3 - 9]

1. Boredom with everything school stands for, or enthusiasm? Conflict between school and home, or mutual support? Tongue-tied inadequacy, or social competence? What is the true picture of the educational situation of hundreds of thousands of young people today?

2. We believe the answer matters to many people besides the Minister to whom this report is formally addressed. Our terms of reference direct us to enquire into the education of pupils of 'average' and 'less-than-average' ability. If those words have any precise meaning at all, they must refer to at least half the children in the country - every other pupil in school, every other child at home. We have tried, therefore, in setting out our main ideas in Part One of this report, to keep in mind a wider public, especially parents. Part Two, which considers some aspects of school organisation and classroom matters in more detail, is addressed more particularly to the teachers. Part Three describes in detail a survey of a representative sample of schools undertaken by the Council.

3. As the quotations from our evidence on the page opposite indicate, no simple generalisations will apply to all the pupils, and no one formula dispose of all the problems with which this report is concerned. But what we have seen and heard and read has seemed to lead inevitably to a number of beliefs. We shall argue them later at length, but they might be summarised as follows. Despite some splendid achievements in the schools, there is much unrealised talent especially among boys and girls whose potential is masked by inadequate powers of speech and the limitations of home background. Unsuitable programmes and teaching methods may aggravate their difficulties, and frustration express itself in apathy or rebelliousness. The country cannot afford this wastage, humanly or economically speaking. If it is to be avoided, several things will be necessary. The pupils will need to have a longer period of full-time education than most of them now receive. The schools will need to present that education in terms more acceptable to the pupils and to their parents, by relating school more directly to adult life, and especially by taking a proper account of vocational interests. Possible lines of development can be found in many good schools now, but experiment is required, both in the content of the school programme and in teaching methods. Finally, the schools will need strong support in their task, not least from parents, and they will need the tools for the job, in the provision of adequate staff and buildings and equipment.

4. Such is our thesis. Who are the boys and girls with whom this report is concerned? 'Our children', as we came to call them, cannot be defined as any exact percentage of the population; and a full description of what we have learnt about them from our survey must come later. But if we ask where they are to be found at the present time, they are the boys and girls who form the majority of pupils in the secondary modern schools, or who are in the middle and lower forms of comprehensive schools. Or to put it another way, we can think of an area, typical of much of the country, in which up to about a quarter of all the pupils who leave the primary schools go on to secondary grammar or secondary technical schools. The remaining three quarters, apart from a small number who may be provided for in 'special' schools for the severely physically or mentally handicapped, will go to secondary modern schools. In the latter, there will be an 'above average' group, including some pupils who show themselves capable of doing work similar to that done by many pupils in a grammar school. There will be a second group, generally much larger, who represent the 'average' boys and girls of their age; and a third, usually smaller, group, of those who have considerably more difficulty in remembering and applying what they learn, and who certainly work more slowly. Finally, we can pick out a fourth group of really backward pupils who have a struggle to attain an elementary mastery of reading, writing and calculation. No description of the size of these various groups will be accurate for all schools, but however uncertain the frontiers, all these territories have to be included in the educational map.

5. It was not part of our brief to consider the structure of secondary education, and we have not made any assumptions about what that may be, or ought to be, in the future. The description above will not fit some areas where different schemes of secondary organisation are in operation, but it reflects what most commonly happens now. Whatever the local pattern, the educational needs of the boys and girls are the same. For brevity's sake, we discuss those needs throughout this report largely in the context of the secondary modern school, but the observations apply to 'our' pupils wherever they are found.

6. We had difficulty with our terms of reference. 'Average' and 'below average' are full of pitfalls. The words themselves are useful enough, as ways of trying to identify in broad terms two large groups of pupils; but unluckily they often carry emotional overtones: the idea of 'below-average ability' easily suggests 'below-average people', as though the boys and girls so described were being regarded as generally inferior and in some way less worth educating than their 'above-average' brothers and sisters. There can be no question of regarding one human being as less valuable than another, but though distinctions are difficult, some have to be attempted. Anyone involved in the job of teaching knows that the range of capacities to be encountered among the pupils of even a single school is very wide, and that to fail to take account of this is neither realistic nor likely to be in the pupils' own interests. In order to help individual boys and girls, the teacher needs first to appreciate their difficulties. Whether the individual ceiling of attainment for some, perhaps many, pupils could be higher, is an important matter which needs separate consideration; but that differences exist within any group of boys and girls is a fact of experience.

7. Another fact, perhaps not often enough emphasised, is that the standard indicated by 'average' is rising all the time, and perhaps never more rapidly than in the last twenty-five years. As the life of our society becomes more complex, new demands are continually made on all of us; and this is as true in relation to our personal lives as it is in relation to the changing economic life of the country as a whole. The amount which men and women need to understand, and the range of experiences with which they are required to deal in all the daily business of living, are continually extending. The mysteries of one generation become the commonplaces of life to their grandchildren. In this sense standards do rise.

8. This is not often apparent, because we are seldom in a position to compare, directly, the achievements of pupils of one generation with those of another. In a later part of this report, in which the results are described of a series of tests designed to show the pupils' capacity to read with understanding, there is a clear record of improvement. A test score which even fourteen years ago would have been good enough to put boys or girls well into the above-average category would today put them firmly into the below-average group. Over the intervening years the general level of performance has risen. One of the reasons why there is a quite proper anxiety over the general standards of literacy today is not that fewer and fewer people can read and write, but that more and more people need to do so with greater competence.

9. The point is, could many people, with the right educational help, achieve still more? If they could, then in human justice and in economic self-interest we ought, as a country, to provide that help. Any substantial recommendations affecting provision for half the population are bound to cost money. Are we prepared to foot the bill? We are conscious that, although there is a strong body of public opinion urging expenditure on education as a vital investment, the emphasis at present is almost invariably on the higher education of the most gifted. And with the prospect of a steady, long-term increase in the child population, the cost even of maintaining the existing services is mounting so rapidly that the competition for educational priorities is acute. We therefore think it essential to state at the outset the economic argument for investment in our pupils.

10. Briefly, it is that the future pattern of employment in this country will require a much larger pool of talent than is at present available; and that at least a substantial proportion of the 'average' and 'below average' pupils are sufficiently educable to supply that additional talent. The need is not only for more skilled workers to fill existing jobs, but also for a generally better educated and intelligently adaptable labour force to meet new demands.

11. In spite of popular belief to the contrary, technological advance - especially the introduction of automatic processes - is not leading to widespread unemployment among skilled workers or to the destruction of the level of skill. Skills may be changing and some individual skills become less important while new ones emerge, but the forecast made in 1956 in a government report on 'Automation' (1), that on the whole the level of skill will tend to rise rather than fall, is being fulfilled. If anything, the progress of automation and the application of other technological developments are likely to be delayed by lack of trained personnel.

12. This was recognised in the 1962 White Paper on Industrial Training, which stated that, although both 1961 and 1962 saw welcome increases in the number of apprentices recruited, 'Even so, it remains doubtful whether the number of new entrants into skilled occupations will be sufficient to match future needs. Experience in the United States, for example, suggests that technological progress requires an increasing proportion of trained and technical manpower in the working population, with a correspondingly smaller demand for unskilled and semi-skilled labour. The same is true here. The great majority of unfilled vacancies call for some degree of skill, while a high proportion of the adult unemployed are labourers.'

13. This trend in industrial employment is matched by a second, the expansion in employment in service occupations at a level that makes new demands on their employees. The retail trade for example, is increasingly looking for a better educated recruit who will neither be an errand boy nor possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of the product he sells, but be more capable of understanding and reacting effectively to the human situation in which he finds himself.

14. These developments are still at a relatively early stage, but the trend is clear, and should be setting the vocational pattern to which our educational system is geared. Other advanced industrialised countries are also having to look critically at their educational systems, and attempts are being made to measure the national reserves of ability.

15. Can our pupils be regarded as one such reserve of ability? Will a substantial investment in their education produce people capable of fulfilling the industrial roles indicated above? If we look at what has happened when popular education has been extended in the past, the answer is an optimistic 'Yes'. New provision has always elicited new responses. Intellectual talent is not a fixed quantity with which we have to work but a variable that can be modified by social policy and educational approaches. The crude and simple answer was given by Macaulay 139 years ago (2): 'Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses. The supply adjusts itself to the demand. The quantity may be diminished by restrictions and multiplied by bounties.'

16. A more subtle investigation into what constitutes the 'restrictions' and the 'bounties' in our society is of far more recent growth. The results of such investigation increasingly indicate that the kind of intelligence which is measured by the tests so far applied is largely an acquired characteristic. This is not to deny the existence of a basic genetic endowment; but whereas that endowment, so far, has proved impossible to isolate, other factors can be identified. Particularly significant among them are the influences of social and physical environment; and, since these are susceptible to modification, they may well prove educationally more important.

17. The problem is not solely a matter of social conditions. There are still large differences in the progress and attainments of children who appear to start with equal advantages, and even brothers and sisters in the same family differ from each other in talents. Factors of health and growth, character and temperament come into it, as well as native wit, which must be reckoned with, even if it cannot as yet be precisely measured. But when we refer to pupils in this report as 'more able' or 'less able' we are conscious that the terms are descriptive rather than diagnostic; they indicate the facts about the pupils' relative performance in school, but not whether that performance could be modified given different educational approaches.

18. There is very little doubt that among our children there are reserves of ability which can be tapped, if the country wills the means. One of the means is a longer school life. There is, surely, something of an anomaly in the fact that whereas a five year secondary course is regarded as an essential minimum both for our ablest children in the grammar schools and for those of very limited capacities indeed, in schools for the educationally sub-normal, less is demanded for the large majority of children who neither progress as quickly as the first group nor are as severely limited in their potential as the second.

19. Our terms of reference imply, and the whole argument of our report assumes, a school leaving age of sixteen for everyone. We have again considered the position with great care, and we have unhesitatingly come to the same conclusion as the Council reached in 1959: 'This is a duty which society owes all its young citizens' [Crowther Report]. The evidence presented to us makes it clear that in the last few years there has been a marked strengthening of conviction in this matter, both among those professionally concerned with education and among the interested general public. The percentage of pupils who voluntarily remain at school beyond the minimum age of fifteen has doubled in the secondary modern schools since 1958, (3) and this in itself testifies to an increasing confidence in the schools and to a belief on the part of many parents in the value of a longer education for their children. Already in some modern schools, pupils are voluntarily remaining not only for a fifth but for a sixth year, and we have little doubt when the formal school leaving age is raised to sixteen, there will be more pupils voluntarily choosing to stay to seventeen and even eighteen.

20. But the decision to raise the school leaving age should not therefore continue to be deferred and progress left to follow its voluntary course. There are still too many boys and girls who, otherwise, will leave at the earliest permissible moment, whatever their potential abilities, because outside pressures are too much for them. Again and again teachers confirm that the pupils with whom we are especially concerned stand to gain a great deal in terms of personal development as well as in the consolidating of attainments from a longer period of full-time education - but it is just these boys and girls who most readily succumb to the attractions of the pay packet and the bright lights it commands.

21. Besides, in the national economic interest we cannot afford to go on waiting. Others are already ahead of us. It is true that we start school a year earlier than most other countries, but there is no reason to assume that the majority of our children are ahead of other people's at the age of fifteen when they leave school. In the United States nearly two thirds of the population are at high schools until the age of eighteen, and there is currently much concern over 'the drop-outs', many of whom have stayed at school till sixteen. France, with problems of shortages of teachers and of accommodation comparable with our own, has already raised the school leaving age from fourteen to sixteen for all the pupils who started school in or after 1959.

22. The French procedure of naming the date on which the higher leaving age will become operative well in advance strongly commends itself to us. In this country, we cannot now afford to wait another ten years until boys and girls who have not yet entered the primary schools become fifteen. But, if the decision were taken quickly, a leaving age of sixteen could be made operative for all pupils who enter the secondary schools in or after 1965: that is, the first year of full-time compulsory education up to the age of sixteen would be 1969-70. The Crowther report urged the claims of the years 1966-69, when the secondary schools will experience a relative easing in the pressure of numbers, as the most apt for introducing the higher leaving age. The chance of using that spell is virtually gone, but in 1970 at least the actual numbers of boys and girls who will reach the age of fifteen, and who would be the first to be affected by the new provision, are relatively low - 655,000 compared with 663,000 in 1969 and with 738,000 in 1975. There would be advantage in making the change when the first age group to be affected is relatively small. There are, in any case, undoubted advantages in taking the decision and announcing the date five years in advance: in this way, the pupils and their parents know from the beginning of the secondary course where they stand, and both teachers and administrators can make their plans with a definite goal ahead.

23. There is one other point about our terms of reference which we must make straight away: they appear to leave open the possibility that when the school leaving age is raised, some pupils below the age of sixteen may be following full-time courses in colleges of further education. We are ourselves convinced, and have found almost unanimous agreement among those who have contributed evidence, that the schools should be responsible for boys and girls up to this age. This does, not rule out the transitional use of the colleges for the full-time education of fifteen to sixteen year olds, in the period before all secondary schools have the buildings, staffing and equipment to provide a fifth year for all their pupils. Interim arrangements, however, ought not to involve the creation or enlargement of further education establishments so that the temporary expedient becomes a permanency. We say this not in any criticism of the work now being done with full-time fifteen and sixteen year old students in colleges of further education: these students are in any case mostly among the abler boys and girls of their age group, rather than those with whom this report is especially concerned. But when the school leaving age is raised to sixteen for all, there will be a fundamental change in the whole educational situation, and the schools must be equipped, staffed and re-orientated in their working to meet it. If they do their job well, the colleges of further education will have to meet rapidly increasing demands for courses by older school leavers.

24. Active cooperation between the schools and colleges will, however, be essential, and in some areas it might well prove an admirable arrangement to allow pupils to attend a local college for some part of their final year's programme, in order to take advantage of special equipment and facilities. There is everything to be said for extending the pupils' experience beyond the school walls at this stage, and this is one promising way of doing it. But the ultimate responsibility for the pupils' welfare up to the age of sixteen should rest with the schools, and the educational programme, though increasingly outward looking, should be school based.

25. Clearly, the value of offering all pupils a longer experience of full-time education depends in considerable part on the resources of staffing and on the material conditions, in terms of buildings and equipment, which the schools may be expected to enjoy. From the findings of the National Advisory Council on the Training and Supply of Teachers it is clear that on current policies there will be a continuing shortage of teachers into the 1980s. This will be less acute for the secondary than for the primary schools, but we are well aware that the effect of conditions in the primary schools, particularly on pupils who do not learn easily, could have marked significance for success or failure at the secondary stage. On material needs, our own survey of schools gives some indication of the size of the task of bringing all school buildings up to the standards which have already long been established as desirable, quite apart from the need to improve further on those standards to take account of changing educational ideas and teaching methods, and of the growing number of older pupils staying on.

26. In attempting, therefore, to indicate what we believe to be educationally desirable, we realised that we might appear economically unrealistic; on the other hand, we see no reason to assume that the proportion of the national income spent on education is unalterable. We have tried, in the later sections of this report, to suggest both what educational developments can be undertaken here and now, especially by the more fortunately placed schools, and in what ways improved resources in staff and facilities will ultimately be needed for all schools if they are to develop as they should.

27. We realise that much of what we have to say, particularly about the content of the final year of a longer school course, is speculative. It is necessarily so, because one of the facts about 'our' pupils is that they constitute so far only a small minority of those boys and girls who have voluntarily stayed on at school. There is as yet little store of experience within the national system of education in this country of teaching them right up to the age of sixteen or of testing different teaching approaches. We do not yet know what their achievements might be given a longer school life, a suitable programme, and work in reasonably sized groups with teachers of high quality. The analysis of the problem which both our witnesses and we ourselves have made convinces us that the solution can only be found in action; and that through experiment it can be found.

Recommendations

(a) An immediate announcement should be made that the school leaving age will be raised to sixteen for all pupils entering the secondary schools from 1965 onwards. The year in which the new leaving age first becomes operative would then be 1969-70, when the number of fifteen year olds involved is relatively low. (paras. 19-22)

(b) Full-time education to the age of sixteen should be school-based. This is not to preclude some part of the school course in the final year being followed off the school premises, e.g. in a college of further education. (paras. 23 and 24)

Footnotes

(1) Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Automation 1956.

(2) TB Macaulay (1824) On the Athenian Orators.

(3) In 1962, rather more than one sixth of the age group in secondary modern schools for the country as a whole, and a very much higher percentage for some individual schools and areas. The demand for a longer education is also reflected in the proportion of pupils staying on in the comprehensive schools, and account must be taken of the pupils in full-time courses in further education, particularly in areas where it has been a matter of local policy not to provide fifth year courses in the modern schools. It must be noted, however, that only 45 per cent of all fifteen year olds in 1961-62 were in any kind of full-time education, at school or in colleges of further education, and quite certainly the great majority of these were not the pupils with whom this report is essentially concerned.