KES: Can Education Compensate for Disadvantage? Chapter 1: Introduction

Blog by Cherry Crowley, Rob Gwynne & Bernard Barker

Chapter 1: Introduction

 

 

This is the story of how three teachers (who became school leaders) devoted their professional careers (1970 – 2014) to overcoming the social disadvantage that harms so many children’s chances of educational success. We begin in a cinema in 1970. Ken Loach’s film KES is on screen and tells the tale of a resilient but seriously disadvantaged secondary modern schoolboy. Fifteen-year old Billy Casper is neglected and bullied at home and school but survives by dodging his way through life in the local mining community. Based on Barry Hines’ novel, Kestrel for a Knave[1], this is a sickening but also humorous portrait of the chronic injustice inflicted by a divided system. Eighty percent of the population, labelled forever as eleven plus failures, is excluded from all but the most basic education. At the bottom of the heap, Billy and his classmates are regarded as delinquents, hopeless cases to be beaten and humiliated into submission. Only Mr Farthing, the English teacher, recognises the gifted youth trapped by the ‘no-hoper’ role his school has given him. Billy has the skill and wit to take a fledgling kestrel from its nest in the country and to research the art of falconry from a book he steals from the library. Mr Farthing watches Billy train the small hawk and encourages him to talk in class about his relationship with this wild, fierce creature.

 

In chapter 2, we explain how the film and novel portray a bleak, deprived world where parents, teachers and the selective system are complicit in wasting the talent and imagination of young people, especially those who end up in the D stream. Vivid scenes illustrate the harmful consequences of emotional and material poverty for learning and life chances. But KES also points to the ‘angels in marble’, to the hidden potential of millions of ordinary girls and boys placed in secondary moderns. Through Mr Farthing we are shown how sympathy, understanding and opportunity can transform what is possible and liberate the disadvantaged from the constraints of poverty and injustice. We encountered these scenes towards the end of our time at school and university and they have haunted us ever since. As we became teachers, KES inspired us to see education as part of a wider campaign for social justice and to demand equal opportunities for everyone. As our careers in secondary education progressed, we aimed to develop teaching methods that built on children’s experience and interests to create engaging and equal opportunities for everyone. Eventually, as leaders of large, inclusive schools, we pressed hard for a unified curriculum and pastoral support for every child’s needs. 

 

We draw on our practical experience as teachers and school leaders to reflect on how far we improved learning for new generations of young people, especially those previously excluded from academic qualifications. Each of us has contributed a memoir of our own education and upbringing (chapter 3), our entry to teaching (chapter 4), the professional challenges we encountered as subject leaders (chapter 5) and school principals (chapter 6), and the solutions we found, including those developed in our final, post-headship phase (chapter 7). Our individual stories are prefaced by an overview of the educational context for each career stage and are followed by a discussion of whether lasting improvements were secured. We compare and contrast our experiences in a variety of schools and circumstances.

 

We aim to answer these questions in chapter 8:

1.  Since 1968, have we observed in our work changes in the proportion of young people

living with disadvantage?

2.  Why have we found disadvantage so hard to overcome in the schools we know?

3. What did we do as teachers and subject leaders to help our schools become more inclusive and effective, especially for less advantaged students?

4.  As secondary heads, how did we interpret and tackle the challenges we faced? When our teaching careers were over, what other ways did we find to help young people succeed?

5.  Would Billy Casper find it easier to escape disadvantage through education in 2020 than in 1968?

6.  What changes in policy and practice are needed to ensure less prosperous and less successful students fulfil their promise?

 

Selection and Disadvantage

Supporters of selection in general, and grammar schools in particular, may disagree with our critical stance towards the divided secondary education regime introduced by the Butler Act in 1944. Critics may further question our emphasis on the ways in which social and economic disadvantage can damage children’s well-being and constrain their learning. But we did not then question the bitter truth of KES because we had negative images of secondary modern schools in our minds already. Although the three of us enjoyed happy lives at home and school, we knew from neighbouring streets and classrooms that many talented contemporaries were much less fortunate. We had friends who failed the eleven plus examination[2] and attended secondary modern schools where all but a tiny minority were denied access to qualifications and universities. Many contemporaries left early because their parents needed the money. We were already prepared to be captivated by the book and film and to campaign for all-ability comprehensives to replace grammar and secondary modern schools[3].

 

The film was fiction but felt like a documentary exposé of neglect and injustice. The secondary modern was portrayed as letting down young people who failed the eleven-plus, so blocking their paths to higher-level skills and jobs. KESwas set near Barnsley, a geographically isolated mining district where employment opportunities for young people were limited, but similar scenes appeared elsewhere in fiction and memoir, including Edward Blishen’s 1955 book Roaring Boys[4] and E.R. Braithwaite’s 1959 film To Sir With Love. Braithwaite’s story was set in London’s East End and made into a 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier and the singer Lulu. For us, Billy’s experience in KES embodied the injustices of the pre-comprehensive era and we were determined to enhance children’s lives by introducing better ways of organising the curriculum and teaching lessons.

 

Sociologists like Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden[5] confirmed Loach’s bleak picture of education for working class children. They found that young people from lower class backgrounds were very much less likely than their middle class peers to achieve academic success at grammar schools. David Hargreaves’ study of Lumley Secondary Modern examined the underlying social relations behind the behaviour of pupils like Billy, and teachers like Mr Sugden. He noted terrifying, and possibly insoluble social and educational problems in twenty percent of secondary moderns[6]. Poor children tended to drift to the bottom stream in these schools and were often treated harshly by teachers who saw them as beyond redemption. Hargreaves’ findings appeared in 1967 and confirm the authenticity of Billy Casper’s secondary modern schooling. In chapter 2, as we identify and reflect on the themes that have given Billy Casper’s story its enduring appeal, we use Hargreaves’ analysis of Lumley Secondary Modern to validate the essential truth of Loach’s film. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb[7] have also identified working class cultures that resist the middle class norms found at many schools, a discovery consistent with the response of lower stream students in Hines’ novel and Hargreaves’ study. Basil Bernstein[8], a prominent sociologist, said ‘education cannot compensate for society’, so challenging the popular assumption that the combination of talent, hard work and education is an irresistible formula for social improvement.

 

As young teachers growing up in the sixties, we were not dismayed. As readers with our own experiences of streaming and disadvantage, we were well-prepared to embrace Hines’ portrait of deprivation, poor parenting and inadequate schooling. The novel, further dramatized by the film, helped shape the moral compass we brought with us into teaching and provided a store of impressions or mental images that we could use as reference points for judging the success of new methods and approaches. We saw Billy Casper and his hawk as emblematic of the learning and freedom that are possible in the most unpromising circumstances. Billy Casper’s story moved and motivated us by providing poignant reminders of the consequences when schools lack vision and lose faith in their students. We also felt that if we could only get it right for children like Billy, we would have a good chance of getting it right for everyone else. 

 

Comprehensive Future?

At the time, policy-makers believed comprehensive reorganization by itself would remove the barriers that were hindering disadvantaged children’s progress and so ensure equal opportunities for all. We were excited by the new opportunities opening for us in the comprehensive era, initially as the first members of our families to have access to sixth forms and universities, then as teachers eager to encourage others to follow our trail-blazing path. 

 

Once established across the country, we believed comprehensive schools would forge a fairer, more equal and more democratic society. We absorbed the subliminal message of the comprehensive movement that every child was equally valuable and possessed a unique human potential that should be the primary concern of teachers and schools. We picked up on the idea of mixed ability teaching as a means of reducing social divisions and removing the D stream mentality from the minds of teachers and children alike. Government policies, like the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) introduced in 1983 and reports such as Peter Mortimore and Geoff Whitty’s 1997 review of strategies for overcoming disadvantage[9], acted as catalysts that stimulated us to consider new ideas and approaches.

 

There was a tendency in the 1960s and early 1970s, however, to underestimate the pervasive impact of disadvantage on students’ life chances in any school system, as well as the sheer difficulty of progressing from equal access to genuinely equal opportunities. Comprehensive reorganisation alone proved an inadequate solution to the barriers of poverty and deprivation, both relative and absolute. As our careers progressed, we improvised pragmatic improvements but began to question whether we were making a major difference to children’s lives after all. There is growing evidence of a persistent, endemic gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers. The Education Policy Institute, for example, reports that despite sustained endeavours to improve education, learning gaps evident in the early years grow throughout young people’s schooling. By the end of secondary, disadvantaged pupils are on average 19 months behind their peers[10]. As we write, we are uncomfortable with the cruel irony that although average real incomes today are many times higher than in the 1960s, the number of children living in relative poverty has grown[11]. Inequality is much greater than it was in the 1970s and has a powerful negative influence on examination and test results[12].

 

Our stories reflect the period and places in which we grew up and served as teachers and school leaders. Our ideas about disadvantage were by modern standards unsophisticated. As comprehensive reorganisation edged forward in the 1960s and 1970s, we were primarily concerned with the mainly working-class boys and girls who were sent to low status secondary modern schools. Although they comprised 80 percent of the population, these young people were subject to a selective regime that labelled them as failures and obstructed their route to qualifications of any kind. 

 

Our mission was to replace the divided system with good comprehensive schools and to ensure these were organised to meet the needs of all their children. But in the absence of national testing for primary school pupils and a common examination system for sixteen-year-olds, we lacked the national data sets that today reveal important differences in achievement between schools and children with contrasting background characteristics. We had no tools to track student performance and progress or to measure outcomes. We were passionately opposed to discrimination in any form of course, but questions of ability and social class absorbed most of our professional attention. We worried about streaming and setting; and doubted whether an academic curriculum and formal teaching methods could arouse the interest and emotional engagement of students from less literate backgrounds. 

 

Our narratives are almost silent about other themes around disadvantage that have received greater attention in recent years, including gender and race. We suspect big improvements in female participation (and success) in almost every dimension of secondary and higher education caused us to become complacent about the role of schools, and to underestimate the constraints on women’s career progression. Disadvantage doesn’t stop at the school gate or even the graduation ceremony. The eminent scientist Susan Greenfield[13] has said nothing will change, especially in terms of promotion at senior levels, until much more money is invested in maternity and childcare schemes and crèches are readily available near workplaces. There is a better understanding today that gender, class and race combine in complex ways to weaken aspirations and restrict access to higher level opportunities, though action to counter bias and prejudice has achieved less than we desire.

 

Our overall perspective was also influenced by working in shire counties, at a time when diversity was limited. We met few children from ethnic minority backgrounds and did not fully recognise ethnicity as a dimension of disadvantage. We were children of our time and responded practically to pressures and problems as they presented themselves. Social class was tangible in our classrooms and continued to have a profound impact on life chances. We knew this and continued to find ways to adapt the curriculum to our students’ needs and to reduce the negative impact of premature setting. We worked in schools to solve problems with the resources available to us, not to change influences from the wider society that were beyond our command.

 

Comparisons

We acknowledge freely, therefore, that our outlook is relatively narrow and constrained by the circumstances in which we were educated, grew to maturity and worked as teachers and school leaders. We are not a representative sample of our own generation and cannot speak for the fine teachers who have followed us. The very act of researching, remembering and writing about education makes us atypical, ex-headteachers who are reluctant to leave their enjoyable schooldays behind. But we have told our stories as honestly as possible. In our serious discussions we have also subjected ourselves and our assumptions to rigorous critical scrutiny. 

 

Britain has, of course, changed enormously since 1968 and our evaluations must take this into account. The country is much wealthier but earns its living in radically different ways. The pits fell silent almost 30 years ago; manufacturing has contracted dramatically; and new service industries have evolved in ways unimaginable at the start of our teaching careers. People’s lives are not the same and who is to say whether changes have been for better or worse? Education in 2020 is organised in radically new ways, with academies and league tables generating demands unknown in Billy’s day. But however unsatisfactory the answers, we believe it is legitimate to ask the questions on page 2. The questions enable us to examine our narratives and to assess progress towards a goal that was profoundly important to us at the beginning of our teaching lives and continues as a haunting theme in our discussions of English society in the modern era. 

 

Chapter Overview

This introduction outlines the shape and purpose of the book; and emphasises the role of the film KES in shaping our development as teachers. Personal narratives about our professional lives are presented in chapters 3 – 7 and yield evidence for a critical review of our efforts to build inclusive schools. We outline the essential issues that have limited progress towards genuinely equal opportunities for everyone and identify six key questions to guide our discussion in later chapters. 

Chapter 2 (Reading KES, 1970) revisits Barry Hines’ novel and reflects on the characters and events that illustrate the injustice of a divided education system. We explore dramatic incidents and consider the attitudes and behaviours of teachers and students that impinge on Billy Casper and undermine his learning. We draw on David Hargreaves’ study of Lumley Secondary Modern for contemporary evidence that the novel is grounded in reality; and to clarify the educational logic of the eleven plus. We explain the influence of the book and film on our vision of ‘a good school’.

 

Chapter 3 (Growing Up, 1945 - 1965) presents memoirs (from Bernard, Cherry and Rob) that explore the family, community and school influences on their development, especially those that encouraged their passionate idealism and desire to become teachers and reformers. We discuss dispositions and attitudes (well-attuned to the spirit of the times) that helped equip us to take advantage of the new opportunities flowing from the welfare state. Our narratives are prefaced by an historical overview of relevant economic, social and political developments, including the educational arrangements introduced by the 1944 Education Act.

 

Chapter 4 (Becoming Teachers, 1971 - 1979) explains how Bernard, Cherry and Rob prepared to become teachers and learned ‘the craft of the classroom’[1] through training, research and practical experience. This career phase coincided with the prolonged crisis of traditional industries that blighted the 1970s. Economic turmoil prompted a shift from post-war assumptions about the welfare state towards market-based solutions, where the role of the state was to commission and regulate, rather than provide services. Our memoirs for this period reflect an eager engagement with vital pedagogic, curriculum and assessment issues that were neglected during the drive to reorganise on comprehensive lines.

 

Chapter 5 (Curriculum and Subject Leadership, 1973 – 1990) describes our growing professional maturity and increasing desire to take on additional responsibilities, especially for our academic subjects. Our memoirs include detailed accounts of managing reluctant colleagues and successful innovations that improved methods and resources so they were more inclusive and engaging for students. The chapter reflects on the Black Papers, the William Tyndale affair and the death of Rising Hill, early warnings of a new mood in public perceptions of education. But comprehensives consolidated their position in most local authorities and we pursued active learning methods despite Bernard’s dangerous brush with Dr Rhodes Boyson. 

 

Chapter 6 (The Headship Years, 1980 – 2009) follows three contrasting experiences of deputy headship and subsequent progression to the top job. The narratives document the defining episodes of our careers in school leadership, from Bernard’s appointment at Stanground School in 1980 to Cherry’s retirement in 2009. Our longevity in post enables us to illustrate persisting themes in headship, including the micropolitics of managing change and innovation. We reflect on the long swing from budget cuts and youth unemployment in 1980 to investment and support during the Blair years. The chapter concludes we were successful in guiding our schools towards becoming supportive places for students, but also acknowledges that an emphasis on performance data and accountability has achieved little for students like Billy Casper.

 

Chapter 7 (New Careers, 1997 – 2014) describes our post-headship lives. The narratives track Rob and Bernard through early retirement to new opportunities, including taking a school out of special measures, consultancy, higher education and leading on secondary education for the Church of England. This final phase of our professional lives coincided with the New Labour period when education became a national priority and considerable resources were invested in supporting disadvantaged families and children as well as in the schools themselves. We were sceptical, however, about the success of government schemes to overcome disadvantage. As consultants, we encountered heads and dysfunctional schools that seemed little different from David Hargreaves’ Lumley or our own early contacts with Wycliffe and Stanground. Cherry continued as a head through the Blair years and developed student leadership to transform the culture of her school. After headship, she volunteered to continue and led a partnership with Starehe in Kenya, a project eventually ended by terrorist outrages.

 

 Chapter 8 (Conclusion) sets out to answer the questions in chapter 2. We reflect on changes in the incidence and impact of disadvantage through our careers and ask why background variables have proved so powerful and persistent in limiting the transformative potential of education. We draw on research findings to explain how the combination of inequality in child development, family stress and community disadvantage produce long-lasting and often irreversible consequences. We review and reflect on our own efforts to promote inclusive and effective schools. The chapter reports that in general schools have become better in terms of supporting students and caring for their well-being, although current trends in inequality, family stress and community disadvantage continue to have a seriously negative impact in some areas and for some children. We conclude by suggesting that government efforts to enable every child to succeed, regardless of family background, have been unsuccessful and that policy-makers should consider alternative measures of school quality. There is an urgent need to tackle the inequality and disadvantage that undermine many young people throughout their lives.

 

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[1] Barry Hines’ famous novel has been studied by many secondary school students through the years and is now regarded as a classic novel.

[2] The eleven plus (11+) or, scholarship examination, was taken by children during the last year of junior schooling. Success in this examination secured a place at an academic grammar school but failure consigned the child to a non-academic, vocationally oriented secondary modern school. Approximately 80 per cent of students failed, with minor variations in different local authority areas.

[3] A comprehensive school is non-selective and admits pupils of all abilities.

[4] Roaring Boys was Edward Blishen’s best-selling novel about young tearaways at a secondary modern school and their naïve young teacher.

[5] Jackson, B. and Marsden, D. (1962)

[6] Hargreaves, D. (1967)

[7] Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. (1972)

[8] Bernstein, D. (1970)

[9] Mortimore, P. and Whitty, G. (2000; first edition 1997) Can School Improvement Overcome the Effects of Disadvantage? University of London, Institute of Education.

[10] Andrews, J., Robinson, D., & Hutchinson, J. (2017). Closing the Gap? Trends in Educational Attainment and Disadvantage. Education Policy Institute.

[11] Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (SMCPC). (2014). State of the Nation 2014: Social Mobility and Child Poverty in Great Britain, Report Summary.

[12] Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

[13] Attar, N. (2012)

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[1] The phrase is the title of Michael Marland’s (1975) The Craft of the Classroom: A Survival Guide to Classroom Management in the Secondary School, London: Heinemann