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 15 Attainments and achievement
[pages 119 - 123]

331. An education which is practical, realistic and vocational must send boys and girls out into the world literate and able to perform simple calculations with confidence and accuracy. Such simple minimum demands present no difficulty to most children, but they are still a hard task for many of the boys and girls with whom this report is concerned. This chapter is about the simple educational equipment which everybody needs. One point cannot be made too soon or too strongly. An exclusive diet of the 'Three Rs' just does not work. Boys and girls brought up in this way disappoint their teachers by failing at the end to have acquired the equivalent, so to speak, of even one R.

332. But in fact restricted teaching of this kind is not what most schools do, though it is what some older people would like to see. And, partly at least because they do much more than this, standards of reading are in fact rising. The reading test which has been given at intervals since the war records a steady rise in literacy. This test is not a simple measure of ability to read; it requires for success a fairly wide and precise knowledge of words many of which belong to the kind of work which is done in secondary but not in primary schools. This is as it should be. Literacy is not a single skill, something achieved once for all with the power to translate written symbols into sounds. It involves the power to invest words with meaning, to recognise the ideas which somebody else wishes them to convey and to use them oneself to express the thoughts which without their help would remain fleeting and inchoate. 'How do I know what I want to say until I've said it?' is a childish but not a foolish, remark.

333. 'What I want to say' will not be the same at the age of eleven and of sixteen. What most people needed to say in 1863 was on the whole a good deal less complicated than what they say in 1963, and even more so than what they will be saying in 1983. Literacy then in its full sense is not a package deal which the primary school can hand over complete to the secondary school. It is something which ought to grow with the pupil, and go on growing after school days are over whenever new situations are encountered demanding a more developed language.

334. The gain in literacy since the war, as far as it can be measured by the reading test, is set out in this table:

These are figures in which teachers may well take pride. But they are not the whole story, and the part which they conceal is the part with which we are especially concerned. Roughly a quarter of the modern school population aged fifteen have a reading age of thirteen years or less. One in seven modern schools, largely for social reasons, has a median reading age which is fourteen months below the median reading age for all modern schools. This chapter is largely concerned with these minorities whose numbers at present leave school without reaching an acceptable fifteen year old degree of literacy, and then rapidly forget much of what they did learn at school through sheer lack of use.

335. An increasing number of jobs require a reasonable grounding in elementary mathematics. Running a technologically advanced society requires some mathematical skill from a long line of workers ranging from administrative and professional staff to craftsmen and operatives. More competence in this field is required today from the abler boys of this report than would have been needed only a few years ago. But a lower standard of numeracy than of literacy will do as a bare minimum. For the least able it will be sufficient if they can apply the arithmetical rules, which average children have mastered by the end of the junior school, with confidence and understanding to the situations involved in running a home or earning a living in a simple routine job. Of course more than this is desirable and we believe could more often be attained than it is; but many of the boys and girls of this report will always find it hard to reach even this bare minimum standard.

336. Some ways in which the various subjects of the curriculum can best help these important minorities who find literacy and numeracy difficult are discussed in chapters 17,18 and 19. Here, and in chapters 16 and 20, the accent is on general factors in the experience of the pupils and the organisation of the school which hinder or help their development.

337. The first step is to recognise some of the consequences of poor ability. The less successful a pupil is, the more courage he needs to keep working. The temptation to give up trying grows year by year because the older he is the more clearly he realises that he will never produce as good work as abler pupils. Each term he falls a little further behind. He makes more mistakes than they do, and therefore has more practice in getting things wrong and less in doing them properly. If he is working carefully, he works slowly. He is likely to be helped with the harder parts of the work - to be told instead of having to work it out. He learns by heart, but not to use his head. His lesson books are simpler, shorter and more profusely illustrated. His written work unfortunately more often takes the form of filling in a missing word instead of writing a sentence, or drawing a picture instead of writing a paragraph, so that he has less experience of using words than his abler contemporaries although he needs more. He probably has less experience of education altogether since he certainly has less homework to do and may very well have none. (1)

338. Some of these additional handicaps are unnecessary. There is no reason for instance, why those who are poorer at school work should give less time to it. In Chapter 6 we have argued in favour of some form of homework, liberally interpreted, for all. Many schools which have successfully introduced it have found that parents welcome it and pupils realise its necessity once they see that to do more work is almost certainly to accomplish more.

339. The second stage in our diagnosis takes us back to the beginning of the secondary school course. On the first day of each autumn term some of the ablest newcomers to a modern school may still be upset because they have disappointed their teachers or their parents. This is not the school they had set their hearts on. But, if the modern school is not a dead end, but has openings beyond it to higher education and to employment which used to be accessible only to grammar school pupils, this initial depression or even resentment will soon vanish. Pupils in the A stream of any school usually work hard and get on. As more and more modern schools are able to provide good fifth year courses there is less and less need to worry about quite able boys and girls finding themselves in a dead end. They soon discover that their new school exceeds their expectations. They become a credit to it, a success.

340. The real worry is for boys and girls who never thought of a grammar school place but who started their secondary school life with enthusiasm for the new and exciting things that the modern school had to offer with its gymnasium and craft rooms, its laboratories and its library. Some of these boys and girls will soon become apathetic because they are defeated by much of their school work, and especially by that which is most directly concerned with literacy and numeracy. They soon discover that their new school falls short of their expectations. They become a failure, the boys and girls about whom the school will report that it 'could do little for them'. What has gone wrong?

341. One reason for failure is likely to lie in the way that the classroom subjects, and especially English and mathematics, have been taught in the first year. Moving to a new school is an unsettling process for all pupils. Often their work marks time or deteriorates for a little. This is particularly likely to happen to the less able. They are liable to misunderstand even familiar questions if the wording is slightly different from what they have been used to. They are at a disadvantage with a new teacher; and their new teacher may well be at a loss with them. He feels that he must find out what they know. On what foundations can he build? They are, therefore, tested and questioned. They get worried. What little confidence they had evaporates. They give a much poorer account of themselves than they need. Their self-esteem suffers. The teacher forms a poor opinion of their work - and justly. But need he have put himself in this position?

342. His conscientious effort to dig down to firm foundations is misplaced because it is based on a false analogy. Learning is not a neat placing of one brick on top of another. The growth of abilities is more like a rising tide which momentarily recedes only to come a little higher up the beach next time. In similar confidence the teacher needs to launch out on a little new work in English and mathematics from the very beginning even with the dullest pupils. If he does, he may gain their interest; their confidence will return and they will begin to make progress again. New work need not at first involve any new techniques. It is what the English and mathematics are about that should have the newness; the level of vocabulary and the arithmetical processes involved may remain the same provided that the subject matter is different. In the course of following up new interests or enquiries the old half-learned techniques will be used time and again, so that their use is revised in a way that is relatively painless because it is concealed. Even the simplest skills are better mastered and remembered when the mind as well as the memory is brought to bear. Revision which brings in the same techniques in different contexts often brings deeper insight or discloses new relationships. If immediate recall of some necessary process fails, then the boy who has the largest number of possible routes back to what he wants to remember has the best chance of succeeding. The less able pupils are never likely to have as many of these routes open as clever ones have just because they work more slowly. It is important that they should have as many as time can be found for.

343. The well-intentioned simplification of the curriculum in the wrong way often persists throughout the secondary school. There is, of course, a necessary and desirable simplification to which we shall return subject by subject; but our concern is here with that simplification which refuses to go on or to branch out until the work already done is so well known that mistakes will not occur. A special form, sometimes described as a remedial class, is set apart for those whose progress is thus halted. Its numbers are kept small; it is usually in charge of a specially devoted teacher. There is clearly need for some remedial teaching in most secondary schools to make up for time lost through long absences, transfer from another school and other casualties which are more serious in their effect on less able boys and girls than on average pupils. But the time spent in a remedial class should be kept to a minimum. It is no good keeping boys or girls there until they have acquired a perfect memory for they will always be quicker at forgetting than their abler contemporaries. But if they cannot remember the little they learn in a remedial class, what is the point of trying to cover more ground?

344. The answer is that their work ought not to be judged by how much they can remember and how few mistakes they make when tested at the end of a year's work. It should be judged by the quality of the work they are doing at the time it is done. The fact that most of us when brought face to face with our own children's homework have to admit that we 'couldn't do that now' does not mean that it was useless for us to have been taught to do it at school. So it is on a shorter time scale with the boys and girls of our report. They will forget in the sense that they cannot reproduce their best work when they are doing an examination; but, well taught, they do not forget how to look it up again if need arises. They are better people for having had the experience of doing something even if they never do it again.

345. Well taught - and this is something which makes great intellectual and imaginative demands on the teacher - these boys and girls can get both interest in what they are doing and pride in seeing what progress they are making. Their attitude to their work is itself a sound criterion for us that their education is being worthwhile. But it is not a sufficient criterion for them. They need something more objective, more tangible. How is this to be provided? Clearly ordinary examination papers set to all the pupils in each year of the school course could give them no satisfaction at all. They would all be near the bottom. What they need is to measure, or rather see, the progress they have made, to compare their work today with their work last year, and not to see how well (or rather how badly) they do in comparison with their clever contemporaries. There is a sound case for preserving specimens of old written work and, after an interval, comparing it with work now being done. It is worth drawing the attention of both pupils and parents to this cumulative record, which ought to give them the courage to carry on. And if there is not evidence of progress, there is something radically wrong which needs investigation. Besides this long term review there is still, except for the least able, a use for form examinations or tests to see how well the term's assignment of work has been mastered.

346. The boys and girls of this report are, however, at their worst in written work. This does not mean that it is unimportant for them - far from it - but that it would be both depressing and misleading to assess their progress in literacy solely on what they can write. Speech is their main means of communication and always will be. Unfortunately the fact that speech is fleeting and cannot be taken home to be corrected has led to its playing only a small part in taking stock of their educational progress. The mere difficulty, too, of getting sufficient time for oral work with each member of a large class has also led to an unhappy neglect of speech. These difficulties are now on the way to being overcome. Speech on a magnetic tape can become as permanent as writing in a notebook. It should be possible to compare some oral work done last year with some current discussion. For this purpose it is not necessary to preserve much of the past, nor something from every member of the form. A comparison of a group discussion in the second year with a group discussion in the third or fourth year should provide convincing evidence that real progress has been made.

347. In the early and middle years of the secondary course the incentives to perseverance have to be found within the school situation itself. Work that is new, interesting and realistically demanding; opportunities of looking back and seeing how different one is from the small fry of a year ago; quick help to straighten out a difficulty; simple praise whenever possible and justified - these are the means that have to be used. They go on being useful to the end; but in the last years of the course they can be reinforced by external incentives. For some of the boys and girls of this report an external examination may well provide such a target; but for most of those with whom this chapter has been particularly concerned it will not. Either the examination will not be worth holding or they will fail to pass it.

348. But there is still a real vocational incentive to work hard in order to reach some sort of a reasonable minimum standard of literacy and numeracy. There will be interviews with employers to face; many jobs involve the need to talk to the general public - and to add up bills and to give the correct change. What the school has to say about these boys and girls and their work is better given in a personal testimonial or a school leaving certificate than by an external examination. The appropriate form of external incentive varies with the ability of the pupils; but getting ready to go to work is always a valuable spur which can be used in the last year of school to call forth a strong finish to school work. It is astonishing what progress in English and arithmetic this stimulus, applied at the right moment, can produce.

Footnote

(1) Details are in paragraphs 573, 580, 590, 596, 605 and 611.