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 4 Objectives
[pages 27 - 31]

If your machine was working well ... you went off into pipe-dreams for the rest of the day ... You lived in a compatible world of pictures which passed through your mind like a magic lantern, often in vivid and glorious loony-colour. Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

75. Before they can tackle their problems the schools have to be clear about their ultimate objectives. What ought these to be for our pupils? In any immediately foreseeable future, large numbers of boys and girls who leave school will enter jobs which make as limited demands on them as Arthur Seaton's: can their time in school help them to find more nourishment for the rest of their personal lives than loony-coloured phantasies?

76. Most teachers and parents would agree with us about general objectives. Skills, qualities of character, knowledge, physical well-being, are all to be desired. Boys and girls need to be helped to develop certain skills of communication in speech and in writing, in reading with understanding, and in calculations involving numbers and measurement: these skills are basic, in that they are tools to other learning and without some mastery of them the pupils will be cut off from whole areas of human thought and experience. But they do not by themselves represent an adequate minimum education at which to aim. All boys and girls need to develop, as well as skills, capacities for thought, judgement, enjoyment, curiosity. They need to develop a sense of responsibility for their work and towards other people, and to begin to arrive at some code of moral and social behaviour which is self-imposed. It is important that they should have some understanding of the physical world and of the human society in which they are growing up.

77. Our pupils, because some of them acquire skills slowly, and others only with the utmost difficulty, may be in danger of spending their whole time at school in continual efforts to sharpen tools which they never have opportunity enough to use. They may be kept busy, and yet never have their minds and imaginations fully engaged; and leave school very ill-equipped in knowledge and personal resources. Again, because many of them do not acquire or retain factual knowledge easily, the range of information and ideas to which they are introduced may be seriously inadequate. Yet it does not follow that because they will not long remember everything they have thought and talked about in school - who does? - the experience will be of no value. How is it possible to devise for pupils of only moderate, and in some cases very limited, skills, a content of education which exercises their minds and emotions and feeds their imagination? What kinds of experiences will help them to develop their full capacities for thought and taste and feeling? Without some satisfactory answers, both the individual and society remain that much the more impoverished.

78. There are some aspects of our times which must affect anyone growing up today, and of which education ought to take account. This is a world in which science and technology are making spectacular extensions to human experience; it is also a world in which the threat of nuclear war has been present ever since the boys and girls now in school were born. At homely levels, machines and tools enter increasingly into everyday living. The conditions under which our pupils will work and live out their lives may be very different, even from what their parents now know. All this requires at least a vocabulary for discussion, at many different levels of understanding.

79. This too is a time when economic interdependence is bringing the countries of the world much closer together, and sheer factual knowledge of how people of other nations and races and religions live is becoming urgently necessary. For the boy and girl at school, this need not be a matter of geographical and economic abstractions, but of achieving, for example, some compassionate insight into what it means to say that half the world is undernourished, or of learning how to get along with foreign neighbours.

80. This is a century which has seen, and is still seeing, marked changes in the status and economic role of women. Girls themselves need to be made aware of the new opportunities which may be open to them, and both boys and girls will be faced with evolving a new concept of partnership in their personal relations, at work and in marriage.

81. In western industrialised countries, the hours which must necessarily be spent in earning a living are likely to be markedly reduced during the working lifetime of children now in school. The responsibility for ensuring that this new leisure is the source of enjoyment and benefit it ought to be, and not of demoralising boredom, is not the schools' alone, but clearly education can play a key part. A great deal has been written elsewhere about the impact of all the vastly extended means of mass communication and entertainment. Certainly everybody needs, as never before, some capacity to select, if only in the interests of fuller enjoyment, from the flood of experience continually presented. Our pupils, more than most, need training in discrimination.

82. These are issues especially relevant to the present day. Clearly, there are others, of great importance, particularly those concerned with conduct and with religion, which recur to some extent for every generation. But it is surely not necessary to labour further the point, that there are public events and fields of ideas and of knowledge which have significance for everyone. To ignore them is not only to do a disservice to all young people, but to throw away many obvious sources of interest and stimulus to learning. The experience of some of the most successful teachers confirms that boys and girls can enjoy intellectual effort and respond to aesthetic experiences, even though their own attainments, assessed in terms of 'basic skills', may be very modest. Adolescents, at any level of ability, are not indifferent to important aspects of human life and behaviour. They may ask searching questions about the most profound problems. The fourteen year old boy, from the lowest fourth year class, who wrote the words quoted below, needed more than help with spelling and punctuation:

'I have many times thought about religion I have gone to many churches and gone to many meetings to find out the truth about God. I think there is a God but I do not think he his in heaven because men have studied science and found out the moon his far away it his cold and dead and the sun his burning and the stars are billions of years away and the sky is just space so where can God be.'

84. That is why it is not possible to offer a short and simple formula for the education of our pupils, in terms of additional lessons in English or more time in the workshop or extra bits of knowledge in this subject or that. The significant thing is the total impact. What will these young people be, and know, and be capable of doing, as a result of their time in school? No sixteen year old, or even eighteen year old, is a fully finished product as a human being; but each additional year in full-time education ought to be assisting the pupils in their progress towards maturity, and equipping them a little better to play their part in the world.

85. In trying to fulfil their larger aims, many schools are perplexed by their difficulties over the immediate means. There is potentially a large range of means available, not only in direct lessons of all kinds, but in many out of school activities and in the experiences of social and communal life which the school provides. But not all schools are equally well endowed. Some are lacking in particular kinds of accommodation - library or science laboratories or craft rooms or gymnasium; many others are short of teachers, or lacking in teachers with knowledge and interest in particular subjects. These inadequacies are seriously hampering, and we do not wish to minimise them. But they may be less serious in their consequences if a school can build from strength, giving particular emphasis to those educational experiences which it is best able to provide, but not necessarily assuming that there is a fixed range of subjects which must be included at all times for all pupils. There may be more than one way of attaining the same objective.

86. There are, in any case, some objectives which can and ought deliberately to be pursued through every part of the curriculum. Very high in this list we should place improvement in powers of speech: not simply improvement in the quality and clearness of enunciation, although that is needed, but a general extension of vocabulary, and, with it, a surer command over the structures of spoken English and the expression of ideas. That means seizing the opportunity of every lesson, in engineering or housecraft or science as well as in English, to provide material for discussion - genuine discussion, not mere testing by teacher's question and pupil's answer.

87. Discussion should be used to develop judgement and discrimination. This may apply to enjoyment in music or art or literature; to taste and craftsmanship in the workshop; to a sense of what is appropriate behaviour in a particular situation, which will generally involve some consideration of other people's feelings and points of view; or to an appreciation of what is relevant to the immediate task in hand. It does not follow, because the actual tasks undertaken may be relatively simple, that the pupils cannot be guided into thinking about them critically. They badly need this general strengthening of critical powers. One of the ways in which they are specially vulnerable as young adults is in their inability to see when they are being got at, particularly through some modern sales methods and commercial entertainment. There is much scope for valuable work which schools can undertake with their older pupils, both in consumer studies and in examining the influences extended by newspapers, magazines, comics, advertisement hoardings, films and television. But it would be wrong to leave pupils with the idea that everything they like is bad, or that all criticism is negative. A sound, positive judgement must start with valuing properly the good things they enjoy.

88. Parents and employers are naturally anxious to be assured in all this that sufficient attention is being paid to basic skills. It is sheer common sense to urge that every possible opportunity, throughout the whole of school work, be taken to provide the pupils with practice in reading, writing and elementary mathematics, and in searching out information for themselves. It may be that pupils will gain some of their most helpful practice in writing outside the English lesson, from trying to give in their own words an account of a science experiment or a geographical expedition. In this way, when they have something definite to say, the pupils may learn the difficult art of writing that simple, straightforward English which is always being commended to them as though it were an easy thing. Work in the craftshop or the housecraft room, or on the school farm, or for that matter in designing the scenery and selling the tickets for the school play, may involve practice in arithmetical calculation, and the point of getting the sums right may seem more obvious than if the same sums appeared in a textbook exercise. There are other important aspects of English and mathematics to be covered in school besides these; but every advantage ought to be taken of such direct applications in other subjects.

89. In short, we are saying that whatever lessons appear on the timetable, it is essential that the pupils be helped and stimulated by them to enlarge their understanding and practise their skills; that some direct experience, which can mean, for example, listening to a broadcast or watching a film, as well as actively doing or making things, will often provide the most effective starting point for discussion; that from this they can advance to some critical evaluation, perhaps a search for further knowledge, and to making some written record, where this is appropriate, of what they have been doing. All of this bears a good deal of resemblance, we are aware, to the experience of learning offered in a lively junior school. The main difference at this secondary stage will be that there will be a need to deal with more mature interests and more subtle judgements, and to make more explicit the connections between what is done in one subject and another.

90. There are some teachers who will say that nothing has been stated so far which is not heavily obvious; to them we would reply that there are not enough schools in which these things happen. There are others, including perhaps some parents, who will feel that a target is being set which is quite unattainable by average pupils. Our answer to them is that there are schools in which it is attained, and there ought to be more.

91. In Part Two of this report we are concerned with the detailed content of the school curriculum. We have begun with this general thesis, because discussions of the educational objectives too easily lose themselves in the weighing of rival claims between this subject or that, or in emphasis on the practice of basic skills at the cost of excluding all variety or relevance of interest. We come back to the starting point of this chapter, in affirming that at present many of our boys and girls are educationally undernourished.

92. Some of them are also underestimated and under-employed, in the sense that their occupations in school commonly make insufficient demand on them, and that the total time they actually spend in educational work of any kind may be too little for their age and needs. We shall come back in chapter 6 to the length of the school working day, the need for homework - though not necessarily of a conventional kind - and the role of all those activities which are called extra-curricular; but it may be useful to say at once that we foresee the need, especially as older boys and girls stay on at school, to extend considerably the provision for activities outside the formal lesson programme, and to draw a less sharp line between what is learned in and what is learned outside the classroom.

Recommendations

(a) Basic skills in reading, writing and calculation should be reinforced through every medium of the curriculum. (paras. 76, 88, 89.)

(b) More demands should be made on the pupils, both in the nature and in the amount of work required. There is a need to stimulate intellectual and imaginative effort, and to extend the pupils' range of ideas, in order to promote a fuller literacy. (paras. 77-82.)

(c) The value of the educational experience should be assessed in terms of its total impact on the pupils' skills, qualities and personal development, not by basic attainments alone. (paras. 83, 84.)