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I agree emphatically, there is no need for this article and another with a different capatilisation. Davidkinnen 18:06, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Agreed. Go ahead and merge. Shropshire Lad 19:20, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Previous debates on old article removed.
My apologies to anyone who feels I have overstepped my mark by replacing the old article. I felt that it made sense in the light of the widespread changes currently being introduced on the Tripartite System as a whole. I would take no offense if anyone were to take sections of previous editions and reintroduce them- I have only implemented a full change to ensure the text scans, and have done my best to include all information mentioned before. -- Evil Capitalist 21:21, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
A few corrections I will make later - as there are still Secondary Modern schools today - in those LEA's that still have the 11+ and selective education.
Davidkinnen 07:28, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
I didn't think they still went by the same name- there are about 250 schools that the government classifies as 'Secondary Modern', but I couldn't find evidence of a single one that still actually went by that name. As such, I thought the last paragraph covered modern usage. Looking at it, however, I can see that it could do with being in a good deal more detail. -- Evil Capitalist 09:11, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
This article says that secondary moderns prepared their students for the CSE, but the Certificate of Secondary Education article says it was introduced in 1965, so it was presumably only used in the final years. Kanguole ( talk) 13:12, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
And of course CSE's were taught and examined in grammar schools. I attended Calday Grange Grammar School (which still exists and is still a grammar school) 1979-1986 and a significant proportion of pupils took at least one CSE. Even in my class (top stream, top sets) some pupils took CSE's in subject they found very taxing. Contrariwise, when I did teaching practice in a secondary modern in Wirral (which still exists) the 6th form was small but there were certainly a reasonable number of children taking A-levels, so many of these remarks may reflect much older history but are no contemporary. When I was teaching secondary moderns in wirral tended to perform very well on educational league tables and there was no evidence that I could see of their being poorly resourced (which tended to be a political/sub-district phenomenon). Whether or not its a "good thing" (and who knows) the article doesn't perhaps tell the whole story. Francis Davey ( talk) 00:01, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
This article is very biased and gives a false view of secondary moderns. They were simply mainstream schools. The idea that they were some sort of Dickensian nightmare given here, is just a modern (mainly leftwing) delusion.
FOR EXAMPLE: "Those who were thought unsuitable for either an academic curriculum or a technical one, were to be sent to the secondary modern, where they would receive training in simple, practical skills. Education here was to focus on training in basic subjects such as arithmetic, mechanical skills such as woodworking and domestic skills, such as cookery."
This is nonsense. They were just mainstream schools. Children studied for their 'O' and 'A' levels like everywhere else.
"In an age before the advent of the National Curriculum, the specific subjects taught were chosen by the individual school. " That's misleading. There was a normal standard education/curriculum for all state schools in Britain. 212.219.249.5 ( talk) 18:04, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
It's perhaps a large topic. But still, I went to one in 1969 and, as I say, anyone from that era will be shocked at the false picture painted of the subject - and that's not encyclopedic. People on University Challenge haven't a clue sometimes about things that were standard first year knowledge in my day. And that point applies to society in general. I went later to a supposedly superior posh school and academically and in every way it was inferior to the sec. mod. We studied Vaughan Williams's works in first year just as one example.
Sec. mods. were just mainstream schools and people definitely did go there to work towards their ')'and 'A' levels, the same as anywhere else. They were mainstream education with grammars for the posh kids. I re-iterate my point about the curricula too. The article shouldn't push the standard Blair, leftwing anti-the people view that is the establishment view today. It should be non-POV. 212.219.249.5 ( talk) 19:24, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
Answering malarky: Can you tell me when they finished then. How long must something last before it should be excluded from a wkip article? Pennypennypennypenny ( talk) 20:12, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Answering clemrutter: Do u mean the discussion or the article is finished? It says above "This article is related to WikiProject Schools, an attempt to write quality articles about schools around the world. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
This article has been marked as needing an infobox." so somebody else including me must not think no more can be added. Pennypennypennypenny ( talk) 20:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
-- ClemRutter ( talk) 12:42, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
(The above is now very long to read on a screen - and so I'm starting this subsection for any further discussion of this point.)
I've just re-read the article and I still say the same. Someone coming to it with no knowledge - say a kid at school researching this matter - will get a wholly false view of Sec. Mod. schools. And anyone who attended them - at least in later years - will be offended by the false Dickensian depiction of them. Pennypennypennypenny ( talk) 19:24, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
I had neard that the percentage of kids who went to grammar school was not fixed nationally but varied with local authority. 25% seems very high to me - I thought it was more like 10% in many places. 92.24.181.78 ( talk) 14:01, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be hardly any analytic content either in the article or the discussion page - this includes ignoring a flexibility of policy and practice.
There is research to suggest that when the pass rate for 11-Plus exceeded the places available in local grammar schools the pass mark was re-adjusted to a higher level in order to make sure a more manageable size was deemed to have passed the exam. Secondly, my secondary modern school offered 'O' Levels after which some pupils went on to a comprehensive school 6th form or FE college for their 'A' Level studies.There were many examples of 13-Plus also being offered to some students because either they were adjudged to be more suited for grammar schooling or it was felt that their 11-Plus performance must have been an off day for them. So please be a little more critical in your approach to the topic in hand.
I strongly believe that, as has been suggested above, the article needs to be divided chronologically if it is to describe the secondary modern school over its entire existence (i.e. 1944 to the present day) This would allow many of the issues that are currently contentious to be resolved. There are a number of statements with highly time-dependent validity- for example "Secondary moderns prepared students for the CSE examination ..." which is untrue prior to the introduction of the CSE in 1965, partly true between 1965 and 1972 while the 5th year in which the CSE was examined remained optional, and true from 1973 until the CSE gave way to the GCSE in 1988.
The article does not even mention the significant dates in this sort of progression or give any statistics relating to them. For example, the proportion of secondary modern leavers with some sort of qualification was almost zero in 1944. By 1970 (when approximately 56% of all school leavers had some qualification) somewhat over 40% of secondary modern levers must have obtained some qualification. Given that only about 1% of today's school leavers are unqualified the qualification rate in secondary moderns probably continued to rise. In its current form it would be difficult to incorporate this sort of information without casting each statement with time-line related caveats and rendering the thing almost unreadable.
As an aside, there seem to have been a number of euphemisms used for secondary mods. even in their hay-day. Mine, for example was a "county secondary" and became a "community college". I'm sure this adds to the difficulty of properly allocating schools to this category.-- ColinSMill ( talk) 16:06, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
The article currently states These schools may be known colloquially (though not officially) as high schools (Medway and Trafford), upper schools (Buckinghamshire) or simply all-ability. What other terms were used elsewhere and does anyone know what the official equivalent replacement term was/is? Do we have any refs for this? -- Trevj ( talk) 19:36, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
Hi, I see you are being bold and attempting to edit Sec Mods- this is a difficult one as it is so politically charged. Words like evil and deceit are not allowed here- which limits the options! I have looked at this in the past and not had enough time to sort the article. Also I dont have enough of the books I need to give the references.
I am currently working up the Abraham Moss Learning Centre which similarly needed love and attention. But what is wrong with this piece. * Structure. * Content and * References. * Breadth and Perspective. It lacks all four, Look at AMC to see how each fact is referenced. Look at the {{ sfn}} system (short foot note)
Peter Toft CDT piece answers the question- What do schools do-- teach the plebs to be compliant, teach the manual labourer to read/rite/and rithmetic but no more, provide the compliant bureaucrats ands clerks needed to work in a bank..... The English heritage book on school design in the last century is rich in insights and references.
Here are the two starting point
{{
cite book}}
: Check |isbn=
value: invalid character (
help); Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Unknown parameter |coauthors=
ignored (|author=
suggested) (
help)
I have transfered the unencycylopedic comments below, from a previous version of the article where they were inappropriate, to here -so they can be considered. -- Clem Rutter ( talk) 14:15, 13 November 2013 (UTC) −
The Secondary Modern system has not been judged either fairly or objectively, nor too Grammar Schools for that matter. There is no data, so far as I am aware, that has attempted to quantify or measure the comparative outcomes for secondary modern and grammar school students relative to their respective potentials.
− In defense of secondary moderns it has to be remembered that the vast majority of teachers in secondary moderns were professionally qualified unlike the vast majority of teachers in grammar schools. A great many of the teachers who attended the two year emergency teacher training courses after world war two were those students who had themselves been deprived of a university education themselves by virtue of the war. These courses were demanding and challenging and reflected a renaissance in education and pedagogy shared amonst the country's schools of education in our universities. As well as the practice of education in trainee's particular subject specialism there was the study of the history, sociology and philosophy of education. Because so many grammar school staff passed directly from their degree studies into teaching they missed out on this all important training. Their practice was, in effect, to teach in the same way as they had been taught, whether it worked or not.
− There was a great deal of bad practice in grammar schools as there was good practice in secondary moderns. What each had in common, however, was streaming. Streaming in itself is a form of segregation, whether in a secondary modern or in a grammar and carries with it it's negative consequences of success v. failure.
− Anecdotal evidence suggests that as many pupils suffered the fate of not achieving their potential after a grammar school education as did those leaving after five years in a secondary modern.
−
Secondary moderns did offer academically able students routes to pursue their own paths both through the 13+ examination and or at post 16 studies. Typically secondary moderns offered CSE examinations in the fifth year withe option to take O levels in an optional sixth year.
This article is very misleading. I was a "baby boomer" who found himself shunted off to a secondary modern in 1960, along with some very bright children, simply because there were so few grammar school places for us all. Selection for secondary modern education had little to do with ability, it was a product of rationing the very limited number of grammar places. Pupils within secondary moderns were streamed. In our school (in Surrey) the top stream all went on to take GCE O levels and had done for many years. The second stream took the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) school leaver exam, replaced by CSE in 1965. The school had a sixth form offering A levels and some pupils went on to university. Hardly the dumping ground for factory-fodder which this article suggests. I do agree, however, about the lack of encouragement to take A levels or progress beyond O levels. I bitterly regret the fact that no teacher invested so much as one minute of their time post-GCE to advise me on further education options. We were just left to leave and find a job.
In my opinion the failure to realize the vision of the Butler Act stemmed from two factors: a. The reluctance of local authorities, for a variety of reasons, to build Technical Schools b. Failure to plan adequately for the post-war birth-rate spike. As I understand it, the intention of the 1944 Act was to provide academic, technical and general education school places in line with the ability-mix of the school population. There was intended to be a pyramid structure with around 20% of pupils receiving academic education, a further 30% receiving technical/scientific education and 50% receiving general education; broadly in line with the work-force which post-war industrial Britain would need. However, the “baby-boom” spike greatly increased the size of the pyramid without a corresponding increase in the number of grammar places. As a result there were enough grammar school places for only about 10% of the school-age population, and in the absence of the technical schools, around 90% of children were forced into the over-crowded and under-resourced secondary moderns. This included a very large number of children for whom a grammar school education would have been more appropriate. As a result, classes of 40+ were the norm in the early '60s. The secondary moderns’ response was to replicate the intentions of the Butler Act by creating their own pyramid structure through streaming children into academic, technical and general streams. Duncanharrington ( talk) 16:34, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
Duncanharrington---- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Duncanharrington ( talk • contribs) 16:23, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
I attended Glastonbury High a secondary modern school from 1977 to 1982. It was located on the St Helier estate in the London borough of Sutton. I must say it provided limited opportunities and had an academically low achieving curriculum. The school suffered from disorderly classrooms and frequent bouts of teacher issued corporal punishment which were used to restore order. Glastonbury high school closed in 1989. Edit by @ Neil Tierney: Thank you it just got put in the wrong place. If you have any more opinions about St Helier estate or Glastonbury, or details of what happened to it, can you post them here or on my talk page @ Alarics: I wish you had done what I have just done and TX to the talk page. These comments can provide useful clues when searching for references and building up the two articles I have flagged. Happy New Year- ClemRutter ( talk) 14:24, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
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Just cleaning up some errors in the uncited history section at the start.
I'm preparing the 1940s sub-article of Rab Butler's biog at the moment, so have been doing a fair bit of reading about this.
Specifically:
I'm not aware that the Fisher Act of 1918 had anything to do with setting up selection for the secondary level. It extended the school leaving age to 14, but most kids in state and voluntary (i.e. church) schools were educated from infancy through to 14 at that stage. Hiving off older kids into separate schools from the age of 11 was recommended by the Hadow Report of 1926 and was only very slowly implemented because of financial cuts in the early 1930s.
The Butler Act of 1944 was mainly concerned with nationalising the church schools, appeasing the CofE by making RE compulsory, and enshrining that there should be separate state schools from the age of 11, with an aspiration to get the school leaving age up to 15 (a move postponed from the 1936 Act) and then to 16 eventually (not implemented until the early 1970s). However, contrary to myth, it did not say anything about separate schools. Selection was simply the educational doctrine of the time (Butler later wrote in his memoirs - 1971 - that he approved of academic selection but that he had never said that the 3 "types" of kids necessarily had to be educated in different schools).
Citations please, if somebody thinks otherwise. Paulturtle ( talk) 04:02, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
My dad was, for what it's worth, a secondary modern headmaster .... Paulturtle ( talk) 04:06, 12 June 2019 (UTC) He was a Congregationalist by upbringing (lots of the NUT were nonconformists in those days) although he upgraded himself to CofE during the war when he earned a commission. He's been dead over 30 years, but I remember him talking about how he had helped to prove that kids' perfomance at IQ tests could be improved by coaching (presumably proving that they were not a magic bullet to eliminate middle-class privilege from selection) and how provision had to be made for kids who blossomed academically in their teens to sit O-Levels rather than CSEs. I think he supported the existence of grammar schools though. Paulturtle ( talk) 02:06, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
The so-called "Green Book", prepared under Butler's predecessor Herwald Ramsbotham and published in June 1941, recommended separate grammar, technical and "modern" schools (s.5)
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/greenbook.html#01
There was then a "White Memorandum" early in 1942, after Nonconformist lobbying (the NUT was heavily influenced by nonconformists in those days), but I can't find the text of that online.
The 1943 White Paper, from which the 1944 Butler Act was prepared, stated (s.31) that there should be three types of "school" but that they could in principle be on the same site or even in the same building. That is the passage which Butler later quoted in his memoirs, and it reads like an elastic compromise drafted after lobbying.
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/wp1943/educational-reconstruction.html#02
However, who did the lobbying, or why, I couldn't say. Paulturtle ( talk) 02:06, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
When we get to discussing the reliability of sources the talk page is very helpful. The facts are in the wrong paragraph. The addition of the stats is useful- especially to those of our readers who weren't there at the time. I have seen those figures before but can't remember where: I threw out all my History of Education books and notes in 1978.-- ClemRutter ( talk) 14:56, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
This edit has been reverted back in despite my challenge [2] and despite my pointing the editor to what is required per WP:ONUS on my talk page [3]. The section is about the tripartite system and the 11+ exam, which is, to my knowledge, always called the 11+ (and that is how our Eleven-plus page describes it, with no exception for Buckinghamshire). Moreover, Buckinghamshire was by no means unique in having middle schools with a later changeover. As per my reply to the editor, Surrey also used this system and other places did too. Why an exception in the text just for Bucks? The Hansard debate is talking about school entry at 12 but not the name of the exam, and at a time where secondary modern schools had long since been abandoned in other counties, so the discussion is exceptional in that regard and does not evidence this anyway. Thus we have no evidence that the exam was called 12+ in Buckinghamshire at the time. I will revert this again now, and unless proper evidence is presented that (a) it was called that and (b) it was an exception only in Buckinghamshire, this edit must not be reasserted. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 08:13, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
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I agree emphatically, there is no need for this article and another with a different capatilisation. Davidkinnen 18:06, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Agreed. Go ahead and merge. Shropshire Lad 19:20, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Previous debates on old article removed.
My apologies to anyone who feels I have overstepped my mark by replacing the old article. I felt that it made sense in the light of the widespread changes currently being introduced on the Tripartite System as a whole. I would take no offense if anyone were to take sections of previous editions and reintroduce them- I have only implemented a full change to ensure the text scans, and have done my best to include all information mentioned before. -- Evil Capitalist 21:21, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
A few corrections I will make later - as there are still Secondary Modern schools today - in those LEA's that still have the 11+ and selective education.
Davidkinnen 07:28, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
I didn't think they still went by the same name- there are about 250 schools that the government classifies as 'Secondary Modern', but I couldn't find evidence of a single one that still actually went by that name. As such, I thought the last paragraph covered modern usage. Looking at it, however, I can see that it could do with being in a good deal more detail. -- Evil Capitalist 09:11, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
This article says that secondary moderns prepared their students for the CSE, but the Certificate of Secondary Education article says it was introduced in 1965, so it was presumably only used in the final years. Kanguole ( talk) 13:12, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
And of course CSE's were taught and examined in grammar schools. I attended Calday Grange Grammar School (which still exists and is still a grammar school) 1979-1986 and a significant proportion of pupils took at least one CSE. Even in my class (top stream, top sets) some pupils took CSE's in subject they found very taxing. Contrariwise, when I did teaching practice in a secondary modern in Wirral (which still exists) the 6th form was small but there were certainly a reasonable number of children taking A-levels, so many of these remarks may reflect much older history but are no contemporary. When I was teaching secondary moderns in wirral tended to perform very well on educational league tables and there was no evidence that I could see of their being poorly resourced (which tended to be a political/sub-district phenomenon). Whether or not its a "good thing" (and who knows) the article doesn't perhaps tell the whole story. Francis Davey ( talk) 00:01, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
This article is very biased and gives a false view of secondary moderns. They were simply mainstream schools. The idea that they were some sort of Dickensian nightmare given here, is just a modern (mainly leftwing) delusion.
FOR EXAMPLE: "Those who were thought unsuitable for either an academic curriculum or a technical one, were to be sent to the secondary modern, where they would receive training in simple, practical skills. Education here was to focus on training in basic subjects such as arithmetic, mechanical skills such as woodworking and domestic skills, such as cookery."
This is nonsense. They were just mainstream schools. Children studied for their 'O' and 'A' levels like everywhere else.
"In an age before the advent of the National Curriculum, the specific subjects taught were chosen by the individual school. " That's misleading. There was a normal standard education/curriculum for all state schools in Britain. 212.219.249.5 ( talk) 18:04, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
It's perhaps a large topic. But still, I went to one in 1969 and, as I say, anyone from that era will be shocked at the false picture painted of the subject - and that's not encyclopedic. People on University Challenge haven't a clue sometimes about things that were standard first year knowledge in my day. And that point applies to society in general. I went later to a supposedly superior posh school and academically and in every way it was inferior to the sec. mod. We studied Vaughan Williams's works in first year just as one example.
Sec. mods. were just mainstream schools and people definitely did go there to work towards their ')'and 'A' levels, the same as anywhere else. They were mainstream education with grammars for the posh kids. I re-iterate my point about the curricula too. The article shouldn't push the standard Blair, leftwing anti-the people view that is the establishment view today. It should be non-POV. 212.219.249.5 ( talk) 19:24, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
Answering malarky: Can you tell me when they finished then. How long must something last before it should be excluded from a wkip article? Pennypennypennypenny ( talk) 20:12, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Answering clemrutter: Do u mean the discussion or the article is finished? It says above "This article is related to WikiProject Schools, an attempt to write quality articles about schools around the world. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
This article has been marked as needing an infobox." so somebody else including me must not think no more can be added. Pennypennypennypenny ( talk) 20:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
-- ClemRutter ( talk) 12:42, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
(The above is now very long to read on a screen - and so I'm starting this subsection for any further discussion of this point.)
I've just re-read the article and I still say the same. Someone coming to it with no knowledge - say a kid at school researching this matter - will get a wholly false view of Sec. Mod. schools. And anyone who attended them - at least in later years - will be offended by the false Dickensian depiction of them. Pennypennypennypenny ( talk) 19:24, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
I had neard that the percentage of kids who went to grammar school was not fixed nationally but varied with local authority. 25% seems very high to me - I thought it was more like 10% in many places. 92.24.181.78 ( talk) 14:01, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be hardly any analytic content either in the article or the discussion page - this includes ignoring a flexibility of policy and practice.
There is research to suggest that when the pass rate for 11-Plus exceeded the places available in local grammar schools the pass mark was re-adjusted to a higher level in order to make sure a more manageable size was deemed to have passed the exam. Secondly, my secondary modern school offered 'O' Levels after which some pupils went on to a comprehensive school 6th form or FE college for their 'A' Level studies.There were many examples of 13-Plus also being offered to some students because either they were adjudged to be more suited for grammar schooling or it was felt that their 11-Plus performance must have been an off day for them. So please be a little more critical in your approach to the topic in hand.
I strongly believe that, as has been suggested above, the article needs to be divided chronologically if it is to describe the secondary modern school over its entire existence (i.e. 1944 to the present day) This would allow many of the issues that are currently contentious to be resolved. There are a number of statements with highly time-dependent validity- for example "Secondary moderns prepared students for the CSE examination ..." which is untrue prior to the introduction of the CSE in 1965, partly true between 1965 and 1972 while the 5th year in which the CSE was examined remained optional, and true from 1973 until the CSE gave way to the GCSE in 1988.
The article does not even mention the significant dates in this sort of progression or give any statistics relating to them. For example, the proportion of secondary modern leavers with some sort of qualification was almost zero in 1944. By 1970 (when approximately 56% of all school leavers had some qualification) somewhat over 40% of secondary modern levers must have obtained some qualification. Given that only about 1% of today's school leavers are unqualified the qualification rate in secondary moderns probably continued to rise. In its current form it would be difficult to incorporate this sort of information without casting each statement with time-line related caveats and rendering the thing almost unreadable.
As an aside, there seem to have been a number of euphemisms used for secondary mods. even in their hay-day. Mine, for example was a "county secondary" and became a "community college". I'm sure this adds to the difficulty of properly allocating schools to this category.-- ColinSMill ( talk) 16:06, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
The article currently states These schools may be known colloquially (though not officially) as high schools (Medway and Trafford), upper schools (Buckinghamshire) or simply all-ability. What other terms were used elsewhere and does anyone know what the official equivalent replacement term was/is? Do we have any refs for this? -- Trevj ( talk) 19:36, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
Hi, I see you are being bold and attempting to edit Sec Mods- this is a difficult one as it is so politically charged. Words like evil and deceit are not allowed here- which limits the options! I have looked at this in the past and not had enough time to sort the article. Also I dont have enough of the books I need to give the references.
I am currently working up the Abraham Moss Learning Centre which similarly needed love and attention. But what is wrong with this piece. * Structure. * Content and * References. * Breadth and Perspective. It lacks all four, Look at AMC to see how each fact is referenced. Look at the {{ sfn}} system (short foot note)
Peter Toft CDT piece answers the question- What do schools do-- teach the plebs to be compliant, teach the manual labourer to read/rite/and rithmetic but no more, provide the compliant bureaucrats ands clerks needed to work in a bank..... The English heritage book on school design in the last century is rich in insights and references.
Here are the two starting point
{{
cite book}}
: Check |isbn=
value: invalid character (
help); Invalid |ref=harv
(
help); Unknown parameter |coauthors=
ignored (|author=
suggested) (
help)
I have transfered the unencycylopedic comments below, from a previous version of the article where they were inappropriate, to here -so they can be considered. -- Clem Rutter ( talk) 14:15, 13 November 2013 (UTC) −
The Secondary Modern system has not been judged either fairly or objectively, nor too Grammar Schools for that matter. There is no data, so far as I am aware, that has attempted to quantify or measure the comparative outcomes for secondary modern and grammar school students relative to their respective potentials.
− In defense of secondary moderns it has to be remembered that the vast majority of teachers in secondary moderns were professionally qualified unlike the vast majority of teachers in grammar schools. A great many of the teachers who attended the two year emergency teacher training courses after world war two were those students who had themselves been deprived of a university education themselves by virtue of the war. These courses were demanding and challenging and reflected a renaissance in education and pedagogy shared amonst the country's schools of education in our universities. As well as the practice of education in trainee's particular subject specialism there was the study of the history, sociology and philosophy of education. Because so many grammar school staff passed directly from their degree studies into teaching they missed out on this all important training. Their practice was, in effect, to teach in the same way as they had been taught, whether it worked or not.
− There was a great deal of bad practice in grammar schools as there was good practice in secondary moderns. What each had in common, however, was streaming. Streaming in itself is a form of segregation, whether in a secondary modern or in a grammar and carries with it it's negative consequences of success v. failure.
− Anecdotal evidence suggests that as many pupils suffered the fate of not achieving their potential after a grammar school education as did those leaving after five years in a secondary modern.
−
Secondary moderns did offer academically able students routes to pursue their own paths both through the 13+ examination and or at post 16 studies. Typically secondary moderns offered CSE examinations in the fifth year withe option to take O levels in an optional sixth year.
This article is very misleading. I was a "baby boomer" who found himself shunted off to a secondary modern in 1960, along with some very bright children, simply because there were so few grammar school places for us all. Selection for secondary modern education had little to do with ability, it was a product of rationing the very limited number of grammar places. Pupils within secondary moderns were streamed. In our school (in Surrey) the top stream all went on to take GCE O levels and had done for many years. The second stream took the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) school leaver exam, replaced by CSE in 1965. The school had a sixth form offering A levels and some pupils went on to university. Hardly the dumping ground for factory-fodder which this article suggests. I do agree, however, about the lack of encouragement to take A levels or progress beyond O levels. I bitterly regret the fact that no teacher invested so much as one minute of their time post-GCE to advise me on further education options. We were just left to leave and find a job.
In my opinion the failure to realize the vision of the Butler Act stemmed from two factors: a. The reluctance of local authorities, for a variety of reasons, to build Technical Schools b. Failure to plan adequately for the post-war birth-rate spike. As I understand it, the intention of the 1944 Act was to provide academic, technical and general education school places in line with the ability-mix of the school population. There was intended to be a pyramid structure with around 20% of pupils receiving academic education, a further 30% receiving technical/scientific education and 50% receiving general education; broadly in line with the work-force which post-war industrial Britain would need. However, the “baby-boom” spike greatly increased the size of the pyramid without a corresponding increase in the number of grammar places. As a result there were enough grammar school places for only about 10% of the school-age population, and in the absence of the technical schools, around 90% of children were forced into the over-crowded and under-resourced secondary moderns. This included a very large number of children for whom a grammar school education would have been more appropriate. As a result, classes of 40+ were the norm in the early '60s. The secondary moderns’ response was to replicate the intentions of the Butler Act by creating their own pyramid structure through streaming children into academic, technical and general streams. Duncanharrington ( talk) 16:34, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
Duncanharrington---- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Duncanharrington ( talk • contribs) 16:23, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
I attended Glastonbury High a secondary modern school from 1977 to 1982. It was located on the St Helier estate in the London borough of Sutton. I must say it provided limited opportunities and had an academically low achieving curriculum. The school suffered from disorderly classrooms and frequent bouts of teacher issued corporal punishment which were used to restore order. Glastonbury high school closed in 1989. Edit by @ Neil Tierney: Thank you it just got put in the wrong place. If you have any more opinions about St Helier estate or Glastonbury, or details of what happened to it, can you post them here or on my talk page @ Alarics: I wish you had done what I have just done and TX to the talk page. These comments can provide useful clues when searching for references and building up the two articles I have flagged. Happy New Year- ClemRutter ( talk) 14:24, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
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Just cleaning up some errors in the uncited history section at the start.
I'm preparing the 1940s sub-article of Rab Butler's biog at the moment, so have been doing a fair bit of reading about this.
Specifically:
I'm not aware that the Fisher Act of 1918 had anything to do with setting up selection for the secondary level. It extended the school leaving age to 14, but most kids in state and voluntary (i.e. church) schools were educated from infancy through to 14 at that stage. Hiving off older kids into separate schools from the age of 11 was recommended by the Hadow Report of 1926 and was only very slowly implemented because of financial cuts in the early 1930s.
The Butler Act of 1944 was mainly concerned with nationalising the church schools, appeasing the CofE by making RE compulsory, and enshrining that there should be separate state schools from the age of 11, with an aspiration to get the school leaving age up to 15 (a move postponed from the 1936 Act) and then to 16 eventually (not implemented until the early 1970s). However, contrary to myth, it did not say anything about separate schools. Selection was simply the educational doctrine of the time (Butler later wrote in his memoirs - 1971 - that he approved of academic selection but that he had never said that the 3 "types" of kids necessarily had to be educated in different schools).
Citations please, if somebody thinks otherwise. Paulturtle ( talk) 04:02, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
My dad was, for what it's worth, a secondary modern headmaster .... Paulturtle ( talk) 04:06, 12 June 2019 (UTC) He was a Congregationalist by upbringing (lots of the NUT were nonconformists in those days) although he upgraded himself to CofE during the war when he earned a commission. He's been dead over 30 years, but I remember him talking about how he had helped to prove that kids' perfomance at IQ tests could be improved by coaching (presumably proving that they were not a magic bullet to eliminate middle-class privilege from selection) and how provision had to be made for kids who blossomed academically in their teens to sit O-Levels rather than CSEs. I think he supported the existence of grammar schools though. Paulturtle ( talk) 02:06, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
The so-called "Green Book", prepared under Butler's predecessor Herwald Ramsbotham and published in June 1941, recommended separate grammar, technical and "modern" schools (s.5)
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/greenbook.html#01
There was then a "White Memorandum" early in 1942, after Nonconformist lobbying (the NUT was heavily influenced by nonconformists in those days), but I can't find the text of that online.
The 1943 White Paper, from which the 1944 Butler Act was prepared, stated (s.31) that there should be three types of "school" but that they could in principle be on the same site or even in the same building. That is the passage which Butler later quoted in his memoirs, and it reads like an elastic compromise drafted after lobbying.
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/wp1943/educational-reconstruction.html#02
However, who did the lobbying, or why, I couldn't say. Paulturtle ( talk) 02:06, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
When we get to discussing the reliability of sources the talk page is very helpful. The facts are in the wrong paragraph. The addition of the stats is useful- especially to those of our readers who weren't there at the time. I have seen those figures before but can't remember where: I threw out all my History of Education books and notes in 1978.-- ClemRutter ( talk) 14:56, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
This edit has been reverted back in despite my challenge [2] and despite my pointing the editor to what is required per WP:ONUS on my talk page [3]. The section is about the tripartite system and the 11+ exam, which is, to my knowledge, always called the 11+ (and that is how our Eleven-plus page describes it, with no exception for Buckinghamshire). Moreover, Buckinghamshire was by no means unique in having middle schools with a later changeover. As per my reply to the editor, Surrey also used this system and other places did too. Why an exception in the text just for Bucks? The Hansard debate is talking about school entry at 12 but not the name of the exam, and at a time where secondary modern schools had long since been abandoned in other counties, so the discussion is exceptional in that regard and does not evidence this anyway. Thus we have no evidence that the exam was called 12+ in Buckinghamshire at the time. I will revert this again now, and unless proper evidence is presented that (a) it was called that and (b) it was an exception only in Buckinghamshire, this edit must not be reasserted. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 08:13, 11 May 2023 (UTC)