This piece was written by a former headteacher who spent his career working across both selective and comprehensive schools, including overseeing the transition from selective to comprehensive education in his local area. Now in his late eighties, he remains a thoughtful observer of education and fairness.
He has chosen to remain anonymous, but his experience offers a valuable long-view perspective on debates that are still very much alive today.
In my early years, I lived a few doors away from a senior education officer who took a keen interest in my plans to teach in secondary education. His firm advice was to teach in three schools in the first ten years and, assuming I had done so with reasonable success, it would then be possible to make an informed judgement on what might lie ahead.
My first two schools were mixed grammar schools in areas where parents were, understandably, delighted if their children qualified for a place. The second of these schools was even more successful in setting very high academic standards, with quite outstanding results achieved. It took me some time to realise that the results achieved by my pupils were attributable as much, if not more, to their prior attainment and parental support than to my teaching.
On the occasions when I was required to teach the lowest set, the fifth, I was horrified to hear comments in the staff room that pupils in such a group could be regarded as “ineducable”. They had, after all, all been selected for a grammar school education. What does that say about fairness?
This was in the mid-sixties, a time when comprehensive schools were being established in earnest, and I applied successfully for a post in one of them as the head of an academic department. After a few years, other moves led to more pastoral and organisational responsibilities, and, at the end of my career, I had the opportunity to serve as headteacher of two very different comprehensive schools. Both roles involved reorganisation along comprehensive lines, and both were on split sites with separate buildings.
We tried never to hide things from prospective parents. Firstly, that the school was inevitably large, with occasional problems as a result; secondly, that not all students were enthusiastic about academic work, though our aim was to encourage them all to do their very best; and finally, that split sites involved a great deal of hard work for teaching and other staff. The presence of senior staff around the school was felt to be crucially important, as were the many extra-curricular activities and personal knowledge of students and their families. All this is much easier to write about than to achieve, needless to say. Others would be more qualified to judge how much we as a staff achieved.
I am personally aware of schools in a selective system which are greatly to be admired, and which have achieved the aims described above with quite outstanding success, suggesting that while systems matter, what ultimately makes the difference is the priorities of school leaders and staff. To treat students equally, and to know them as individuals, should remain at the heart of any good school.
