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.

Chapter 3 Education in the slums
[pages 17 - 26]

52. There is no need to read the melodramatic novelists to realise that there are areas, often near the decaying centres of big cities, where schools have more to contend with than the schoolboy's traditional reluctance. These are the districts where, as Mr JB Mays puts it (1),

'We find many different kinds of social problems in close association: a high proportion of mental illness, high crime and delinquency rates; and above average figures for infant mortality, tuberculosis, child neglect and cruelty. Here, too the so-called problem families tend to congregate. Life in these localities appears to be confused and disorganised. In and about the squalid streets and narrow courts, along the landings and staircases of massive blocks of tenement flats which are slowly replacing the decayed terraces, outside garish pubs and trim betting shops, in the lights of coffee bars, cafes and chip saloons, the young people gather at night to follow with almost bored casualness the easy goals of group hedonism.'

54. First, the physical surroundings.

From London: The neighbourhood presents a sorry picture of drab tumbledown dwellings in narrow mean little streets, relieved by open spaces made recently by the demolition experts, and the dreary bomb sites that have served as rubbish dumps since the last war. Overcrowding still persists in the remaining slum dwellings where people of all nationalities compete for shelter. The homes of our children are in a deplorable condition. Damp and badly maintained, many of them are over-crowded. Large families live in two or three rooms. Toilet requirements are inadequate, giving rise to difficulties through too much sharing. Slowly the Council building scheme is providing new dwellings in the blocks of flats that are now beginning to rise near the school.

From the Midlands: The school is situated alongside a large sauce and pickle factory, and there is also a large brewery just behind it. The odours of vinegar and beer are constantly present and the air is full of soot particles. Many congested streets converge on the school buildings, the houses in these streets being tightly packed in terraces and courts. They are mainly of the back to back variety and accommodation usually consists of one room down, in which the whole family lives, plus TV, and two to four bedrooms upstairs.

From Yorkshire: The estate was built a generation ago to house the people of the first slum clearance areas of the city. It forms a pocket about one mile from the city centre. The area has no shopping centre, recreation centre or community centre of its own ... Gardens are a good reflector of the attitude and outlook of householders. Here it is obvious that few take any interest whatever in the appearance of the garden. Fences (iron) were removed during the war and that may be a contributory factor in the dilapidated condition of most.

From Yorkshire again: The area has an exceptionally high deposit of industrial dirt. The school itself has for neighbours two works within twenty yards of the playground wall, and three more within a radius of 200 yards. A railway and a canal are also within 50 yards of the school. Houses are terraced in dirty and badly illuminated streets and most are due for demolition. This has, in fact, already started in some streets in which a number of uninhabited houses offer tempting opportunities for mischief. Only one to two per cent of the houses have indoor sanitation and 36 per cent a hot water supply ... A large proportion of fathers spend their working life in an atmosphere of heat, dirt, noise and mechanical violence. Communication can only be carried out by shouting and the effects of this can be noticed in the home, in the street and in places of entertainment. There is, therefore, a great tendency for boys to shout at each other in ordinary conversation.

From the Midlands: The children live in back to back houses which are badly designed, badly lit, and have no indoor sanitation - four or five families share one public toilet in the middle of the yard. Few of the children living here have ever seen a bathroom, and in some homes there is not even a towel and soap. Canals and railway lines run alongside the houses giving bad smells, grime and smoke and noise. All these homes have overcrowded living and sleeping quarters, for example, ten or eleven people may sleep in two beds and one cot. The living room usually measures about 10 x 9 ft. [3.0 x 2.5m] and combines gas stove, cupboard, sink and small table. The children are restricted to playing in the small yard or the pavement of the main road.

From Lancashire: The homes are nearly all tenement flats, erected a generation back, or maisonettes or multi-storey flats built within the last four or five years. Almost all the dwellings are well kept by their own standards, though some of the housecraft ideas are sketchy. A growing number have washing machines in the £80 to £100 class on HP [hire purchase]. All, of course, have TV. Amongst the girls there is still an obvious need for personal hygiene, even at the level of clean necks and brushed hair for school. Some of the mothers make startling objections to school complaints of head lice, fleas, body odour etc. Nevertheless, there is a great improvement on pre-war standards.

55. Next, then, the population.

From London: In recent years there has been a comparatively large immigration into the area especially from the West Indies, Southern Ireland and Cyprus.

From the Midlands: In most cases the parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents of the present boys are old scholars. The area is a very tightly knit community, and, in some respects, there is a genuine pride in the old school. An increasing number of families are being rehoused on the outskirts of the city, but many of the houses are being repaired to accommodate coloured immigrants from India, Pakistan and the West Indies.

From Yorkshire: The estate was given a great deal of unfavourable publicity at the outset and the impression made on the rest of the city remains. A clannish attitude tended to develop; strangers were not readily accepted. People who come to live here and have initiative and drive find little cooperation from the remainder so, whenever the opportunity comes, they leave. Replacements are invariably poor both financially and intellectually.

From Lancashire: We have a mixed population of white and coloured people dependent on industries and services closely connected with the port. The coloured population is very mixed from pure coloureds from the West Indies, Africa, India and Malaya to various half-caste groups ... Families frequently change their address. This is especially true of the coloured children, but on the whole they seem to come from better cared for homes than others.

From Lancashire again: The girls are all drawn from the immediate neighbourhood within an area of a half square mile, all of the same racial and religious stock, Irish and Catholic, and almost all are the children of unskilled labourers who are in full employment. The community is very stable despite recent slum clearance and most of the children are descended from former pupils.

56. This brings us on to family life and general social behaviour.

From London: The children are generally exceptionally friendly, very generous and sympathetic towards one another. On the other hand, some quarrel readily. Tempers flare up instantly on very little provocation and die down just as quickly. Others resort to blows and lose all self-control ... There is no participation in hooliganism. Very rarely do we find pornographic drawings or remarks in books or on walls. Living in the middle of one of the worst vice areas in London, it is very remarkable indeed to note that the children are surprisingly clean in thought and word and deed ... Discipline at home seems to come about not so much through any governing principle or convictions, as perhaps by expediency, and is attained largely through fear of punishment, loss of temper, bad language, threats and over-indulgence. The children are often confused and bewildered by these various means ... Any sort of physical approach, even as slight as a touch on the shoulder, can be received with great resentment and quick defensive action - possibly due to severe and repeated corporal punishment from dad at home. If dad is too heavy-handed, mum often protects the child from such punishment by lying or making light of certain misdeeds. In either case the child soon accepts the fact that he is 'getting away with it'. Naturally he strongly resents it when he is found out at school.

From London again: The Victorian concept of father still persists. He is the supreme head of the household, his wants are the first attended to, then come those of the sons, then of the mother, and finally, those of daughters. The boys will have a spare-time job and guaranteed pocket money, for the girls pocket money can be a matter of chance or the result of domestic work in the home.

From Yorkshire: The girls accept drunkenness as part of the normal pattern. They are amused by it; regard it as the normal way in which to celebrate. Even in good homes the parents will provide cases of beer for a 15 year old's birthday party. The first form will give detailed accounts in essays of the quite revolting scenes when father comes home drunk. One dainty and sensitive little girl wrote: 'You'd have died with laughing at my Dad ...' In the same way they regard bad language as the normal. When we say that many men do not swear in their homes etc. they accuse us of teasing, or lying. They know that we are wrong and say so. Any real man swears and drinks. I think many of the 'fringe' group of girls are saved from sexual intercourse by the fact that the young men who approach them do so quite openly. They make their requests in the first moment after meeting the girls in the street; and, unless the girls give immediate consent, they leave them to find a more readily obliging partner. If there were 'petting parties' first the situation could be very different. At home washing is a real difficulty. The girls have what may seem to the outsider a foolish modesty in these matters. I have learned to see that in some cases they are wise not to undress to wash properly in front of brothers and fathers.

From Lancashire: There are many broken homes. Twenty-two per cent have no father, 5 per cent no mother; these figures may be higher in reality. At home corporal punishment (belting, a crack, a good hiding) is a common punishment. Some of it is severe and I have known a boy run away and sleep out for several nights for fear of the beating which he expected ... Gambling is common in phases among the boys, with cards, tossing coins etc. Betting on horses and pools is not infrequent, but then fathers send their sons to the local bookmakers to lay bets and collect winnings, even pursuing them into school to retrieve the money. Obtaining money by violence or threat is a fairly common form of bullying younger children.

From Lancashire again: The (Roman Catholic) parish clergy hold a unique position in dockside parishes, however relaxed some parishioners may be in religious observance. The parents are amenable to quite slight pressure from the school, perhaps because the school has been under the Sisters for nearly a century, though the general moral standpoint which we all share has a good deal to do with it. The people are decent and good-living; there are strikingly few broken homes and illegitimate children. Families are still fairly large, and there is a great family sense so that, even when mothers are out at work, there is always some relative, usually the grandmother, to turn to ... Although there is a great deal of talk of 'murdering' and 'battering', I have only come across two cases in six years of girls severely beaten by father or mother. The parents are foolishly generous and quite inconsistent in their treatment of the children who are adept at evading consequences. The bad language shrieked from the top balcony of the tenements sounds appalling but appears to be rather a maternal safety valve than a heartfelt threat. Indeed, the children are very much loved and secure in their family affection. Every new baby is welcomed to an extraordinary extent. The girls are very kind to little ones and to the old. I have never come across an instance of rudeness or unwillingness to oblige an old person, though this may be due to caution, since grandparents are still powerful. They are rude to neighbours, carrying on family quarrels with gusto, and fights are common. I have much work in keeping fights out of school, and it is horrifying how even 'good' girls all flock to watch a fight anywhere. The girls will fight as fiercely as the boys if they get the chance. Most girls stay up very late but few stay out. Those who do, stay on the tenement landings in the semi-darkness with the boys. Their main amusements are gambling, singing or cat-calling, horse-play and some sex-play. Sexual laxity is rare in this district under school leaving age. I have had no schoolgirl mothers and only three girls who tried their hand at soliciting or got into the company of a prostitute by choice. Girls marry very young, so, whilst doing all we can to deter them from marriage before 18, we do our best in the fourth year course to give them some training for their career as wife and mother.

A final contribution from Yorkshire: What can we do about rehabilitation when girls have got into serious trouble of some kind? In school we have little difficulty. It is easy to pick them up and let them begin again, as regards those who have left we cannot do a great deal. Certainly the fact that Old Girls (especially the weaker brethren) are encouraged to come back to school whatever has happened seems to have been useful. We are often able to try to do that part of the task of rehabilitation for both young and old which would have been the business of the local priest or doctor at one time. In these days very few will go to the clergyman - they do not know him. And the doctor is now one of a team - and often they do not know him either. So they come to school, sure at least of a hearing and - 'no gossip afterwards'.

57. The picture which these heads have so movingly drawn for us make it clear that the social challenge they have to meet comes from the whole neighbourhood in which they work and not, as in most modern schools, from a handful of difficult families. The difference is so great as to constitute a difference in kind. Inevitably their pupils as a whole are not as good at school work as those from more fortunately placed homes. Inevitably, too, their general level of manners is lower and the risk of their falling into delinquency is greater than average. Considering the base line from which schools in slums start, their achievements in formal, personal and social education often equal the achievements of schools in better neighbourhoods. Sometimes indeed they are better. The strict objective test of reading which we applied shows that although the average reading age of their pupils is seventeen months below the average, a quarter of the schools in the worst areas scored an average mark which was at or above the mean for all modern schools in the country. This is a splendid achievement. In the slums, as everywhere else, there are good, bad and indifferent schools. No doubt the failure of a bad school in a slum is more total and more spectacular than in a middle class suburb because of the lack of parental and community support to bolster up the industry and moderate the behaviour of the pupils. But we have no reason to suppose that bad schools are more frequent in slums than elsewhere.

58. What about the schools themselves? We have been careful in this chapter to write of 'schools in slums', not of 'slum schools'. This distinction, however, can hardly be maintained as far as buildings are concerned. Forty per cent of all the modern schools in our sample had buildings which must be condemned as seriously inadequate. The corresponding figure for the slums is 79 per cent. Two illustrations may be given of what 'seriously inadequate' means. The first is a typical example; the second is worse than typical but by no means unique. They have been chosen because these schools happen to have the best attendance figures in this special slum group. The fact that their attendance is up to or above the average for all modern schools, shows how devotion can overcome difficulties.

A boys' school of 284 pupils. Average attendance 91.5 per cent. A very old building with nine large classrooms. In addition there is an art and light craft room. There is a library, but it is smaller than a normal small classroom, and a laboratory, but it can only take 20 boys at a time. There is a very small hall without a stage but no gymnasium, dining room, medical room, or, indeed, any other special room. Two outside centres provide between them 9 sessions of woodwork per week, in addition to what is done in one woodwork room at school. A playing field is being provided for this and neighbouring schools, but was not in full use at the time of the survey. All school matches have had to be played on opponents' grounds. There is an old swimming bath (70 ft. by 30 ft. [21 x 9.0m]) ten minutes away without facilities for diving. Three sessions of 40 minutes are available per week - insufficient for all who wish to swim.

A girls' school of 209 pupils. Average attendance 93.0 per cent. A very old building with 7 classrooms of 480 sq. ft. [44.6m²] each, one of which is at present used for art and music as there is no teacher for the seventh class. Four are separated by moveable wood and glass partitions. There is no hall, gymnasium, dining room or special room of any kind. There is a small roof playground, very exposed to wind and weather but no fixed PE equipment. Netball is played in the courtyard of nearby tenements. Science has to be based on one corridor cupboard. There is a sink, gas and electricity. There are good cupboards, ironing boards, sewing machines and a fitting corner in one classroom. There is no room for light crafts. Class libraries and subject libraries are kept in portable infant type cupboards. There is sufficient time allocation at a housecraft centre to give the 2nd, 3rd and 4th years one session per week. Four forms each week are able to visit an LEA playing field half an hour away by bus. There is a very old swimming bath with poor accommodation near the school which is available for one hour per week (2 classes).

59. Conditions such as these must inevitably have an adverse affect on staffing. As far as the actual ratio of teachers to pupils is concerned these schools are no worse off than the general run: indeed many of them have a marginal advantage. But all our evidence stresses the need for continuity of teaching and stability in staffing. The heads of schools in the slums have nearly all pointed out in their evidence the value of teachers who are now meeting the second and even the third generation of pupils from the same family. But besides the need for such men and women who have won a place in the tradition of the neighbourhood there is an equally great need for what may be called short-term stability - that is to say stability over the period of a pupil's school life. It is this stability which we have tried to measure in our survey.

60. How many teachers who were in the schools in 1958, when the pupils in the survey were admitted, were still there in 1961? How many had come and gone in the interval? How much bigger was the staff in 1961? The following table answers these questions taking the 1958 staff as 100.

The true situation is probably even worse than these figures since a slight ambiguity in one question led some schools to underestimate the number of transients - small wonder, then, if boys and girls eyeing a new teacher are doubtful whether he will stay long enough to make it worth their while to settle down and really work for him. In these slum schools there was only an even chance that a woman who joined the staff later than the beginning of the Christmas term in 1958 would still be there in September 1961; for men the odds were two to one against. Only a third of the women and half the men had been on the staff for more than three years.

61. Four other ways in which schools in slums fall markedly below the general run follow as almost inevitable consequences from poor staffing and poor premises. First, very few boys and girls want to extend their compulsory school life by even one or two terms. Secondly, the less able pupils spend more of their time in ordinary classroom work than in other modern schools. In only ten per cent of the schools in slums compared with 21 per cent of all modern schools, do the less able pupils spend roughly half or more of their time on 'practical subjects', including physical education. Thirdly, only one in eight fourth year pupils belong to school clubs or societies compared with one in four in modern schools generally. Lastly, homework is much less common in schools in slums. Sixty-nine per cent of the fourth year boys and fifty-nine per cent of the girls get no regular homework compared with forty-nine per cent of the boys and forty-three per cent of the girls in modern schools as a whole.

62. What proportion of all modern schools are what we have called 'schools in slums', and what proportion of boys and girls attend them? There is no satisfactory objective criterion of a slum. In the north of England especially there are still a very large number of highly respectable neighbourhoods in which the buildings are so far below modern standards that the houses may well be considered unfit. These are not slums in our definition. Only where there is an unusually high concentration of social problems as well have we classified a neighbourhood as a slum.

63. The particular schools in slums with which we have been concerned in this chapter are not included in our representative sample of four per cent of all modern schools. They are an additional group which was specially selected so as to make sure that we had adequate information about schools working in the most difficult of all neighbourhoods. This additional group was necessary because, although there was only a one in ten million chance that the worst ten per cent would be totally excluded, there was a one per cent chance that the worst three per cent might be unrepresented.

64. It would, of course, be quite wrong to think of a sharp frontier separating slum from non-slum. The transition is gradual and included in our representative sample there are, as it happens, some schools which appear to be as badly situated as any in the special slum group and others which face nearly, but not quite as difficult a task. Inside the sample we have grouped together all the schools which serve neighbourhoods of bad housing with bad social problems. These we have called 'problem areas' to distinguish them from the special group of schools in slums. We know, therefore, the size of the problem areas. Twenty per cent of the schools served 'problem areas' and were attended by eighteen per cent of all pupils.

65. If the schools in problem areas are compared with modern schools generally, they suffer in much the same kind of ways as the schools in slums, though not to the same extent. Thus, to take one illustration only, the average reading age of the fourth year pupils in the problem area schools was eight months lower than the average for modern schools generally. In the schools in slums it was nine months lower still - seventeen months in all. In paragraph 60 the fact that the schools in slums have less stability and more turnover in staffing emerges clearly. This is evidence that the same thing applies, to a lesser extent, in the problem areas, although if we had no data beyond the sample of 150 modern schools the difference would not stand clear of sampling fluctuation. The special group may be regarded as the tail end of a much larger sample.

66. Had it been practicable to have worked with a much larger sample a fairly close estimate of the total number of schools in slums might have been made. The actual procedure gives a rather loose estimate of between three and ten per cent, say, seven per cent with a further thirteen per cent sharing many of the same disadvantages.

67. Nothing that we have seen or heard leads us to believe that the strictly educational problems of the less able pupils are different in slum schools from other schools. The approach which is most likely to succeed in modern schools generally is the most suitable also in the slums. There is, therefore, no chapter in Part Two of our report dealing with their problems in isolation; all the chapters of that Part in our view apply as much to schools in slums as to schools elsewhere.

68. But schools in slums do require special consideration if they are to have a fair chance of making the best of their pupils. They seem to us, for instance, to need a specially favourable staffing ratio. Even more they need measures which will help them to secure at least as stable a staff as other schools. Perhaps this can be secured simply by making it clear that professionally it is an asset to have served successfully in a difficult area, that work there can be intellectually exciting and spiritually rewarding, that these are schools in which able teachers may want to serve and make their career as so many of their gifted predecessors have done. One headmistress wrote to us 'the staffing of schools in difficult areas is made more difficult by those administratively responsible who take the line, "It's no good asking folks to come down here - they wouldn't put up with it". In fact this is not true. Four able teachers have asked to come to this school, and their request has been ignored.' Perhaps then a change of wind will be sufficient.

69. But perhaps more tangible inducements may be needed. One suggestion is contained in an appendix to this report. Another might be the provision of good residential accommodation for teachers near the schools. This is something which ought to be examined, however, not only as a device for recruiting teachers, but also for its bearing on the whole life of the community in which they would then be living as well as working. In helping to solve a purely school problem we might be slightly relieving that uniform residual nature of the population which helps to make a slum.

70. There is another aspect of the staffing problem which also overlaps strictly education boundaries. There is no doubt at all about the need for a good deal of social work in connection with the pupils. Problems of poverty, health and delinquency are involved. Nearly twice as many fourth year pupils get free dinners as in modern schools as a whole. Twice as many boys are under five foot high, and twice as many under six and a half stone in weight. (2) Among third year pupils, half as many again as in modern schools generally missed more than half a term's work - two thirds of them because of ill health. There is also a worse problem of truancy: half as many again could not satisfactorily explain their absences. One in six of the third year girls were in this category. We have no hesitation in saying that these figures from our survey taken in conjunction with the general picture given by the heads make a good case for the employment of trained social workers. But should they be school-based? This is a different and more difficult problem. Behind each absence there is a story which may well involve several different social agencies.

71. The fact that 79 per cent of the secondary schools in the slums were seriously inadequate points to the need for a bold rebuilding policy which is indeed under way. Several of the schools in our survey have already been replaced. It might be thought that a rebuilding policy at least was something that could be decided on purely educational grounds. It is not so. The general tendency on educational grounds, rightly or wrongly, has been for small schools to give place to larger ones. But the heads of the schools in our special slum group are convinced believers in small schools to meet their special problems which are social, as we have seen, rather than educational. The question of size is also relevant to the problem of how to tackle the welfare of the new immigrants who are often of different ethnic and cultural groups from their neighbours. There are three possible educational solutions. They may attend the local county school in which they will form a distinctive and compact group. If the school is small and draws its pupils from a confined area they may soon provide a quarter to a third of the pupils. Or they may, like the Irish Roman Catholics in many places, attend a voluntary school that is virtually their own. Or they may lose their group identity either by being divided between many small schools, or by being sent to a very big school with a catchment area so large and carefully drawn that they cease to be a conspicuous group. Which is the right decision cannot be settled on purely educational grounds.

72. We are clear, too, that an adequate education cannot be given to boys and girls if it has to be confined to the slums in which they live. They, above all others, need access to the countryside, the experience of living together in civilised and beautiful surroundings, and a chance to respond to the challenge of adventure. They need priority in relation to school journeys, overseas visits, and adventure courses. Clearly this is an educational matter but it is not solely one. Children below school age, young workers, older people - the whole community - need to have a stake in something more than the streets in which they live.

73. In the last four paragraphs we have been concerned with the fact that certain problems which are primarily educational have wider social implications. Whatever is decided by the educational authorities in these matters will have repercussions on other social agencies. It is equally true that decisions made in other fields - in housing, for example, or in public health - will have reactions in the schools. There may well be a case, as has been suggested to us, for really short term residential provision in their own neighbourhood for boys and girls who are in especially difficult or distressing home circumstances, or who may be in danger of lapsing into serious delinquency. If this is so, the relation of such a plan to the schools is something which might be explored jointly by the services which would be involved. In the slums the need for reform is not confined to the schools. It is general. Because no social service is 'an island to itself' there may be a case for an interdepartmental working party to plan the strategy of a grand assault, but not at the expense of postponing the opening of the campaign.

74. Here, then, are some of the things that seem to us need tackling if we are to give the schools in the slums a fair chance. The bill we have presented is large. It is larger than it might have been because the account has been allowed to go too long unpresented. But adequate education in slum areas will always be expensive, more expensive than average. It looks to us as if it has often been less expensive than average, and therefore pitifully inadequate. It is time for a change.

Recommendations

(a) An inter-departmental working party should be set up to deal with the general social problems, including education, in slum areas, (para. 73)

(b) Particular attention should be paid to devising incentives for teachers to serve and stay in these areas, (paras. 68, 69)

Footnotes

(1) Education 15 June 1962.

(2) The average figures for boys, which are free of sampling fluctuation, are
in height:

in weight:

There is no such discrepancy in height or weight for girls. The reasons for this remain a matter for speculation.