A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published around the 3rd December 1986.
Your educational correspondent, David Walker, needs to learn a few facts about foreign educational systems before he extols their virtues. For instance, American public high school education is widely regarded there as a disaster. Talk about their breadth and lack of specialization is the merest tommy rot: lack of anything would be nearer the mark in many cases. The result is patent – American university faculties and laboratories full of the products of other countries’ education systems, especially our own. So far as Japan is concerned its later secondary and tertiary system is atually more specialized that our own at comparable levels of attainment.
Breadth and attainment level in fact must be looked at together. Thus if you examine the content of the 18+ French Baccalaureat or German Abitur examinations you find that their vaunted breadth is at a level which, particularly in the sciences and mathematics, is basically O-level. Of course only a minority anyway of French and German children pass the examination sufficiently well to go on to university successfully, just as only a minority pass a broad range of O-levels adequately in this country. The difference is that in Britain, basically that same minority does it at 15 or 16 and goes on to study in school three or four subjects at a level which in other countries is carried out at university. It is this efficiency which is the reason why our country produces honours degree graduates at 21 who can hold their own with the products of foreign systems who are two to three years older. It is the current inefficiency of their system which is causing the French Government to tighten entry standards to their universities by insisting on a closer match between school and specialist university subject choices.
There is actually no conflict between maintaining A-level and university standards and seeing that the below average part of the population get a decent school education and a work related follow-up, which is what Lord Young’s YTS certificates represent. What is needed is a disciplined effort in the schools to match the efficiency of the A-level system at lower levels, not to wreck the one part of the system which is genuinely world class. The no-fail philosophy of the GCSE is hardly a prescription for taking on the Germans or the Japanese.
There is nothing highfaluting about academic standards, particularly in the technical sphere. As Correlli Barnett has analysed in “Collapse of British Power”, it was the Victorian cult of the “practical man””, bereft of theoretical knowledge, which bears a major responsiblity for the pathetic state of British industry in 1914, from which it has never completely recovered.
A letter to the Reading Chronicle which was published on 18th November 1969.
Mr Hannis in last Friday’s “Chronicle” asserts that my figures on the GCE performance of school leavers are wrong, taking as evidence the oft-quoted Pedley book on comprehensive schools and a recent speech by Lord Butler. I cannot speak for Lord Butler, but unlike Mr Hannis I had before writing looked up the figures in the Department of Education and Science’s official Statistics of Education.
For 1967 (the latest available, 1966 figures are similar) tables 14 and 16 give five or more O-levels or CSE grade 1 as follows: for comprehensive schools 10,320 out of 76,750 leavers, or 13.5 per cent, and for all other maintained schools 86,500 out of 474,620 leavers or 18.2 per cent. Table 18 gives two or more A-levels as follows: for comprehensive schools 5,110 or 6.7 per cent and for all other maintained schools 45,890 or 9.7 per cent. In his book (p. 95) Pedley in fact acknowledges the poor academic performance of comprehensive schools so far and attributes this to the substantial number of newly-formed comprehensive schools. There is clearly something in this, but I have quoted the figures to show that the case for comprehensive schools is not, to say the least, made out and that there are significant pointers against the effectiveness of comprehensive education, particularly from abroad.
Thus in the case of the USA, if Mr Clifton (last Friday) would be satisfied with an academic performance which out of 11 Western countries placed his country bottom by a wide margin (T Husen, International Study of Achievement in Mathematics 1967) and which produced in California only a few teachers apparently able to deal with simple arithmetic (D A Pidgeon, Educational Research 1959), I would not be. In some senses formal academic education in the USA only begins at 18, and in recognition of its comparative failure, some authorities, e.g. Dr Koerner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are actively considering forms of State-maintained selective schooling.
The USA owes its prodigious wealth, not to its formal educational system (it is in fact heavily dependent on the products of European selectively educated talent) but to its great natural resources and to the spirit of enterprise and hard work of its people, neither of which latter attributes is exactly stressed by the comprehensive principle. In fact, in my experience, the spectacle of comprehensively and permissively educated American youth is probably the principal factor in inducing British scientists and engineers and their families to return to this country.
In some parts of the country, where for example there are small numbers of children, comprehensive schools, provided they adhere to scholastic discipline, will probably make the best use of limited educational resources. What the proponents of comprehensive education, aided and abetted by a dictatorial Labour government, will not admit is that academic standards are crucial, and that our selective system has set levels which are outstandingly good by any standards.
Councillor Towner’s remark implying that examinations at 11 to predict the suitability of a child for different forms of education are unreliable is quite untrue. Thus recent large-scale investigations (by e.g. the National Foundation for Education Research) showed an error of about 5 per cent in placing candidates and the errors were confined to borderline cases which could be easily remedied by transfer. In fact many comprehensive schools administer just such tests on admission, for streaming purposes; others however wait a year or two before streaming.
