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 3 What the survey shows

Chapter 21 The 1961 Survey
[pages 183 - 188]

A. THE NATURE OF THE INFORMATION

550. Repeated references have been made in earlier chapters of this report to the survey carried out for the Council in 1961 in modern and comprehensive schools. The purpose of this part of the report is to set out in non-technical language the nature of the enquiries and the main conclusions. It is followed by a Statistical Appendix containing a fuller description of the methods used, of some of the results and a justification of the judgements made.

551. Surveys were arranged in a representative sample of modern and comprehensive schools with the cooperation of the local education authorities and by the willing help of the headmasters and headmistresses. The amount of work falling on the schools was heavy, and the Council is greatly indebted to them for all the trouble they took. The few remaining all-age schools (which educated only 2.7 per cent of the age group in 1962) were excluded as were the grammar and technical schools in which are to be found a small proportion of the abler boys and girls within our terms of reference.

552. Our terms of reference are to advise on the education of pupils aged 13 to 16 and the survey was arranged to throw light on conditions affecting them. We were not concerned with the younger pupils in secondary schools. The enquiries fell into three main parts. In the first, the heads were asked to write freely about their problems, the background of their pupils, their schools and their staff; about their methods, their difficulties and their successes. We have quoted freely from what they wrote in earlier parts of the report, especially in chapters 2, 3 and 8, and wish we could have quoted more. The second section of the survey took the form of four exacting questionnaires. The first was concerned with an analysis of the timetable of pupils in their fourth year. This is summarised in chapter 23. Another questionnaire dealt with particulars of staffing and provided the material for chapter 24. We asked for particulars of the school premises; the answers form the basis of chapter 25. The last of these four questionnaires enquired about examination and non-examination candidates. This information, together with the data about individual boys and girls, described in paragraph 554, is used in the next chapter.

553. Our terms of reference rightly separate pupils of average from those of below-average ability. Most members of both groups - most in fact of the secondary school population - are in modern schools. National educational statistics and some educational writing treat the modern schools as if each was homogeneous and as if all were roughly uniform. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was, then, implicit in our task that we should dispel this illusory unity. The means we used was the administration of a standardised test which enabled us to compare pupil with pupil and school with school. If we had only been concerned with comparing the pupils inside their own schools, we could have relied on the head's estimates of their relative attainments; but a comparison of these estimates with the results of the standardised tests shows that any generalised statements about pupils in modern schools made on this basis would have been most misleading because schools differ so much in the quality of their intake. The test used was the one which has been employed for the Ministry's reading ability surveys of 1948, 1952 and 1956. In addition to the simple ability to read words a fairly extensive vocabulary is required to do well in this test, and we have felt justified in using it as a general measure of where boys and girls stand in their school work in regard to one another. It has helped us to identify the pupils with whom we are particularly concerned, and to see how they differ among themselves as well as by contrast with others. This test was taken by all fourth year pupils in the samples of modern and comprehensive schools. The latter of course included a due proportion of abler boys and girls who in other areas would have formed the grammar school population.

554. The last source of information available for our survey was a questionnaire about individual pupils which was completed for every third boy and girl in the fourth year in the survey schools. This gave us some strictly objective information about the pupils - their attendance record, their height, and whether or not they received free school dinners, for instance; some indirect objective reporting - the forms were completed by teachers, not pupils - about such matters as belonging to youth clubs and delivering newspapers; and some subjective judgements of attitudes such as amenability to school discipline.

555. In addition to this new material we have drawn also on some of the information gathered for the Council's previous report, Fifteen to Eighteen. The material used was that collected in the National Service Survey of 1957-58 which is fully described in Part II of Volume II of Fifteen to Eighteen. This National Service Survey took place immediately before the end of conscription. It could not be repeated now. A representative sample of nearly 7,000 recruits were interviewed after they had taken the normal army intelligence and attainment tests. They proved to be very nearly a true cross-section of the whole population of young men. From this survey we have drawn information about the occupational and family background of former modern school pupils of three levels of ability. No questions were asked in 1961 about home background.

B. RISING AVERAGES

556. The detailed results of the survey are the subject of the following four chapters, but two general conclusions are given here and in the following section. The first is that, although this report is about the academically less successful, it is a success story that we have to tell. In interpreting our terms of reference perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind is that what an average boy or girl knows is not a fixed quantum for all generations, but something liable to change. There are indications of marked improvement over the last fifteen years. There is opportunity for more improvement to come and reason to expect it. The four reading test surveys and the National Service Survey tell the same story of rising averages. The army's measure of ability is a battery of intelligence and attainment tests. The tests were standardised in 1947 and recorded in a form in which the top and bottom group each represented ten per cent of the population and the intervening four groups twenty per cent each. But ten years later, when these tests were used for our National Service Survey, 58 per cent of the intake instead of 50 per cent fell into the top three groups, and the bottom two groups comprised only 21 per cent of the intake instead of the original 30. It is true that men who were 18 in 1947 had spent their later years of elementary education (secondary education for all was yet unborn) in the disorder of the war years so that something would clearly have been wrong if there had not been a sensible improvement in attainment test results between 1947 and 1958. The same argument would apply to the improvement in the reading test results between 1948 and 1952. We were making up obviously lost ground. But the later tests of 1956 and 1961 show that we are now going forward into new territory. The position of pupils aged 14 years 8 months in modern schools at the four dates is shown in the following table, and diagrams 7A and 7B at the end of this chapter illustrate the same point.

Table 1 The reading tests 1948-1961

*7 months = 1 point

557. Today's average boys and girls are better at their books than their predecessors half a generation ago. There are reasons to expect that their successors will be better still. One is the working out of the social handicaps which are so marked in their influence on present educational achievements. A fifth of the boys with whom we are concerned have fathers who are unskilled manual workers; (1) only eleven per cent come from the homes of non-manual workers. In this very disparity there is hope. It is difficult to believe that a good many children in middle-class homes, where educational sights are set on a reasonably high standard of attainment, would not have done much worse at school if they had been born in homes where there was no tradition of homework and where the social and marketable value of education was not fully realised. Pretty certainly, too, more unskilled workers' children would do better at school if they had the persistent encouragement of parents who believe that their children can and must reach a reasonably high educational standard. The National Service Survey strongly suggests this. One would expect a man in the top ten per cent in ability to obtain at least four passes in GCE at ordinary level. Most of the recruits in this category did so, but the proportion who did not grows steadily from left to right of this profile:

Table 2 Proportion of men in the top 10 per cent in ability who had not achieved 4 Ordinary Level passes in GCE (National Service Survey)

Similarly men whose test results place them in the middle of the ability range must be unusually persistent and diligent if they are to pass four subjects in GCE. Recruits who achieved this are found in significant numbers on the left of this profile but dwindle to a handful on the right.

Table 3 Proportion of men in the middle of the ability range who achieved at least 4 Ordinary Level passes in GCE (National Service Survey)

558. The gap between the ends in each of these two profiles is wide, but it is narrowing. Unfortunately there is no statistical evidence from modern schools, but we can illustrate the process from the grammar schools. What can be proved to be happening there is reported by the heads we consulted to be true also of modern schools. One of the outstanding factors in the maintained grammar school situation as it existed in 1953, when our Early Leaving survey was made, was the way in which the children of manual workers, and especially of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, lost ground during the course compared with the children of non-manual workers. (2) Between 1953 and 1961 there has been a general improvement in standards in which all occupational groups have shared. There is also, and it is this which is particularly important, a tendency for the lower occupational groups to show a somewhat greater improvement than the higher ones. The evidence is given in the Statistical Appendix [Appendix V Section V]. This is a first instalment of what can be expected as manual workers become increasingly familiar with what secondary education offers their children.

C. CONTRASTING ATTAINMENTS

559. The second general conclusion from the survey evidence is the contrasts which exist between school and school. It is obviously important to pin-point these differences as far as possible and for this purpose two methods of classification were used. The first was an analysis in terms of the neighbourhoods served by schools. From the evidence provided by their heads, schools were divided into groups according to the type of neighbourhood they predominantly served:

Table 4 Distribution of pupils by neighbourhoods

To make certain that we had a sufficient number of schools in the most difficult possible neighbourhoods a special group of twenty schools in slums was added. This group stands outside the representative sample and is never included with it in tabulations.

560. The second classification was into geographical regions. When information from individual pupils' questionnaires was being analysed the geographical classification was by Ministry of Education Divisions - a Northern group comprising the Northern, East and West Ridings and North-Western Divisions; a Midland group comprising the Midland, North Midland and South-Western Divisions (more of the people in this division live in the Bristol, Somerset and Gloucester area than in Devon and Cornwall); and a Home Counties group comprising the four Divisions which include and touch London - Eastern, Metropolitan, South-Eastern and Southern. Where the schools' as opposed to the pupils' questionnaires were being analysed the schools were divided into three zones - those within 80 miles of London; those between 80 and 160 miles from London and those beyond this distance. This method of classification could not be used for the pupils' questionnaires because it had not been punched on the Hollerith cards used for analysis. Neither basis is free from inconsistencies, but the method of zones seemed to be less awkward than the divisional one. The outer zone includes all the North Country on both sides of the Pennines down to Sheffield and Manchester, while very few of the schools in the sample are in the extreme south west. The middle zone includes the Black Country, the Potteries, the Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire industrial areas, the Bristol and Gloucestershire industrial belt and many rural districts. The inner zone includes all the home counties and extends to Ipswich, Oxford and Southampton. Its schools have a distinctly better record in the test than the schools in the middle and outer zones. The range between zones is 1.6 points.

561. Other methods of classification were used and are described in succeeding chapters such as the condition of the buildings and the staffing position in the schools. Of all these groupings the classification by neighbourhood was the one which proved most enlightening. The range in the mean test score between the five groups was 1.8 points, equivalent to a range of 12 months in reading age. The special group of schools in slums had a mean score which was a further 1.28 points below that in the problem areas, the lowest scoring neighbourhood in the sample. Diagrams 8A and 8B at the end of this chapter illustrate this.

562. Far more significant, however, was the range in the means between individual schools. Nine points, equivalent to five and a quarter years, separated the schools with the highest and the lowest reading test scores. Within each neighbourhood group, the range was considerable. This can be illustrated by comparing the distribution among schools in the problem areas, where the group average is lowest, with that in the mixed neighbourhoods where the group average is highest.

Table 5 Comparative test scores in problem areas and mixed neighbourhoods

563. It is important to remember that the reading test represents attainments after nine years of education, not only three years in a secondary school. It is a cumulative achievement that is being measured. Setting test scores against factors such as staff ratio (which may change overnight) or even staff turnover (of which we had only three years' knowledge) was not likely to prove highly significant, and did not do so, though differences there were in the case of turnover. The neighbourhood in which a boy or girl lives, however, is usually a constant throughout his life and could be expected to be more meaningful, as it was. The most striking thing, however, is the way in which individual schools differ. There is no need to be a fatalist.

Diagram 7a Scores in the reading test: boys in secondary modern schools

Diagram 7b Scores in the reading test: girls in secondary modern schools

Diagram 8a Scores in the reading test: boys

Diagram 8b Scores in the reading test: girls

Footnotes

(1) Two thirds of the children of unskilled manual workers fall into the test groups clearly within our terms of reference.

(2) Early Leaving p. 18.