Black Papers and Best Days: The ‘problem’ of the 1970s Comprehensive

Mr Hedges with class 5C, the aged fifth formers of Fenn St Secondary Modern

In February 1972, the last episode of the London Weekend Television sitcom Please Sir! aired after four series. The fictional students of class 5C of Fenn St Secondary Modern had certainly exceeded the compulsory leaving age, which had risen to sixteen just as the series ended. Over four series, Please Sir! followed the predictable  ‘antics’ of newly qualified teacher Bernard Hedges and his implausible fifth formers. Hedges leaves in series four, before the school merges with nearby Weaver Street secondary and is redesignated as a comprehensive, amidst much consternation from staff.

Fenn Street’s ‘merger’ was more than a comic ploy. Since 1965, when Labour Education Secretary Tony Crosland’s circular 10/65 advised local education authorities to replace selective schools with comprehensives, mergers and redesignations were the order of the day. The policy became law under the Labour government in 1976 and was repealed again in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher’s administration. Whatever the legal position, the conversation about comprehensive education was always animated and divisive.

The move towards comprehensive education was motivated politically, for Tony Crosland at least,  by the sense that selective tests were skewed towards middle class children. Further, children in secondary modern schools were increasingly demonstrating the academic ability that had been assumed to be the preserve of grammar school children; O level exams sat in secondary moderns rendered the eleven plus meaningless.

Child centred pedagogy and psychology also fuelled the trend away from selection. It is no coincidence that the first university training course for school counsellors was launched in Keele University in October 1965, inspired by the American high school system of guidance and personal counselling for students. In a 1969 publication of the proceedings of a conference on Guidance and Counselling in British schools (ed. Lytton and Craft), a contributor looks forward to a less stratified society, a more ‘flexible’ education system and a role for counselling in the new schools. He argues, optimistically, that while comprehensives are bigger and more complex systems than their predecessors, school counsellors could provide ‘an all-round view of the whole child in his [sic] total social setting can ensure that human problems do not jam the works’ (25).

The Black Papers

Not everyone was quite so taken with comprehensive education and its egalitarian and humanistic promise. Between 1969 and 1977, Critical Survey (CS), an academic journal edited by Brian Cox and Anthony Dyson (lecturers in English Literature at Manchester University)  launched attacks on comprehensive education, university expansion and progressive educational ideas. Cox and Dyson were not reactionaries: they believed in the potential of grammar schools as engines of social mobility. But the series of Black Papers (so-called as an alternative to official government White Papers) took contributions from across the political spectrum and included some florid predictions about the impact of educational change.

The opening salvo of  the first Black Paper in 1969, directed at Members of Parliament,  conflates ‘the introduction of free play methods in primary schools, comprehensive schemes, the expansion of higher education, the experimental courses at new universities’ with ‘Anarchy’ (exemplified in student protests in Europe and North America). (CS, 1969,  4:1, p.1) The catalyst for this catastrophe was a perceived shift in the ‘student/teachers relationship’. The article opines that the teacher is now follower not leader, ‘decoder’ not exponent.  In the name of social justice and egalitarianism, it claims, schools and universities are undermining accumulated knowledge, academic excellence and reward based on merit. While not named, person-centred psychology is implicated in this collapse of authority and civilization.

As Rhodes Boyson’s article in the second Black Paper (CS, 1969, 4:3) demonstrates, the contributors were not wholeheartedly against comprehensive schools. Boyson, who at the time of writing was head of a comprehensive in London, saw the potential of comps to  increase academic opportunities for more children, but railed against the conflation of educational opportunity and social engineering, arguing that schools cannot remedy social ills or elide class difference. The children of dukes and dockers, he asserts, live different lives and that is that.

A still from The Best Days

The Best Days

In the mid 1970s, Labour education policy, overseen by Education Minister Shirley Williams, continued to champion comprehensive reorganisation. However, the association between comprehensives and academic decline was made from the top of the party. In 1976,  Prime Minister James Callaghan gave a speech to at Ruskin College in October 1976 in which he decried the erosion of educational standards in secondary schools, launching what Waters and Brighouse call ‘the age of accountability’ in secondary education (About our Schools, 2021). Although Callaghan distanced himself from the views of the Black Papers, the media made the connection for him.

Further editions of the Black Papers in 1975 and 1977 fuelled ‘moral panics’ that were circulated by the tabloids, broadsheets, and the BBC.  As Peter Mandler has observed, ‘One or other of the Black Papers themes – student unrest, indiscipline, the abolition of grammar schools – was hardly out of the media at any time during these years.’ (The Crisis of the Meritocracy, 2020, p.101) The most striking example is the BBC ‘s Panorama, ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary The Best Days, about Faraday Comprehensive school in Acton. The documentary, which was  directed by Angela Pope and introduced by David Dimbleby, was screened in March 1977 and prompted a ‘media frenzy’ ( which has been documented by the Cambridge social history of secondary education project). Dimbleby’s sombre introduction announces a change in the regular Panorama format.  The programme proceeds on a grey-tinted route through classrooms dominated by apparently ‘disaffected’ adolescents and exasperated teachers. Like the later generations of school documentaries, the most camera-friendly students make the cut, but unlike those later films, The Best Days provides no back story for students or staff and no cheering narrative arc. There are no interviews or connecting threads, just parts of a system, like amputated limbs. As the viewer pieces them back together, Faraday seems to stand for the starkest fears of the Black Papers : poor discipline, low expectations, collapsing ‘standards’. The final word goes to two cleaners, who bemoan the state of the school gym. ‘It gets worse every day!’, they exclaim, before opening the door to the changing rooms:’ ooh, what a dirty ‘ole!’

Mr Briggs with Carol Chalmers in Our Day Out

Our Day Out

While the critique of comprehensives seems to be  sharpest from those nostalgic for grammar schools, those speaking on behalf of students who, in a selective system, would have attended secondary modern schools also found comprehensive school wanting. In Learning to Labour (1977) the sociologist Paul Willis tells the story of a group of ‘lads’ at a single sex comprehensive (former secondary modern)  in the West Midlands. The ‘Hammertown Boys’ (twelve leaving age friends) represent what Willis calls an ‘informal counter-school culture’, inverting the values held up by the authority of the school, which are reinforced by the ‘coercive powers’ of the state (the law and the police). The racism and sexism of the group are all explained in terms of counter school culture and class-based opposition to the dominant culture of the school, albeit one colluded with by some of the staff. Angela McRobbie’s study of Jackie magazine took a similar approach to the leisure time of adolescent girls.  This radical sociology of the 1970s viewed comprehensives as simply reproducing the hierarchies of the selective system and intensifying the sense of alienation in ‘counter school culture’ groups.

Willy Russell’s Our Day Out (screened on BBC2 in December 1977), dramatizes and gives voice to this view through the character of Helen Kay, the teacher of a Merseyside comprehensive school’s ‘remedidal’ class. A day out to Conwy Castle is overseen by the broadly progressive/traditional pairing of Mrs Kay and Mr Briggs. Briggs tries to organise the children into polite, straight lines and while Mrs Kay wants to ‘let them be.’   She challenges Briggs’ determination to get them to pay attention and behave like middle class tourists, and exposes the façade of the educational offer for her low achieving charges. Their fate, she exclaims, is to populate ‘the factories of England.’ 

The play imagines a temporary release from the official purpose, organisation, and hierarchy of school. The children ransack confectionary from a motorway station; smuggle zoo animals onto the coach; and Linda and Reilly make uncomfortable bids for intimacy with teachers Colin and Susan. Carol Chalmers,  a neglected child, contemplates throwing herself off a cliff rather than return home. When she lets Briggs catch her fall, he is temporarily changed. He proposes an impromptu trip to the fair and joins in with sing-song on the way home. His transformation – and by implication the broader release from the order of things - is temporary as he destroys the roll of film that contains the evidence of his  literally and metaphorically exposing his transformation.

Tucker in the biker jacket he earned the right to wear through student democracy.

Grange Hill

Willy Russell was born and educated on Merseyside. He left school at fifteen and after a stint as a hairdresser returned to education to train as a teacher in his early twenties. Merseyside produced a number of school stories and writers in the 1970s. Phil Redmond, the creator of the longest running and most celebrated television school story, Grange Hill, was born and educated in Liverpool.

Redmond had passed the eleven plus but in what, in his memoir Mid-term Report (2013), he refers to ironically as the ‘Socialist Jerusalem of Huyton,’ he was ‘selected to be part of a group that would form the  grammar stream, in the great comprehensive experiment of the 1960s’. (23) When studying the sociology of education some years after his time at St Kevin’s, he reflected on comprehensive education as a ‘tragedy’ (23). Redmond recounts how he was introduced to the ideas of John Holt (How Children Fail, 1964) and Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society 1970), who respectively critiqued ‘a school system that kills children’s innate desire to learn’ (91) and championed ‘a system of self-education driven by interest and need, moderated and mentored by peer networks’ (92)

Redmond wanted Grange Hill to represent the lives of state educated children, but to transcend the comprehensive. The stories were primarily told from the children’s perspective, with cameras at their eye level and unlike Please Sir!, students were played by children. While Redmond was not explicitly an opponent of comprehensives,  Grange Hill dramatizes all the contentions of the Black Papers, voicing their perspective on standards, disruption, permissiveness through overbearing parents, ambivalent teachers, and sometimes overwhelmed students. Teachers draw attention to poor standards; parents compare Grange Hill unfavourably to the local grammar school, fret about mixed ability teaching and the poor quality of the school musical.

 Redmond’s sociologist background  emerges in the depiction of Grange Hill’s  ‘oppositional’ culture. The arrival of a new head sees the teachers work to rule in protest at new timetabling (foreshadowing the action taken by teachers in the 1980s). Students follow suit, pushing against the prescribed forms of democracy. The authorised school council, with its process of one rep for each year and one proposal permitted for discussion frustrates the more egalitarian students. A Student Action Group springs up to protest uniform and segregated seating for children in receipt of free school meals. Eventually, despite the expulsion of the ‘ringleaders,’ pressure wins out. A referendum is called, and school uniforms become optional (allowing our hero Tucker to sport his trademark black biker jacket in form). As Phil Redmond points out, the student demonstrations were viewed by the tabloids as showing ‘a blueprint for how to disrupt schools up and down the country’ (120), even though the plotlines drew on Redmond’s research of what had already happened in schools.

By the time that Tucker Jenkins and Trisha Yates were fastening their Grange Hill ties for the first time in 1977, the local education authority initiatives for training school counsellors were already in  decline. The humanistic ambition of 1965, for comprehensive schools attending to the academic and vocational needs of all children, supported by ‘in-house’ counsellors to keep an eye of the ’whole child’, had foundered under the pressure of ‘accountability’. In England, the scene was set for an incoherent sector of comprehensives, grammars and secondary moderns. Education was not to be held together by the common and complex cause of  ‘the whole child’, but by the double-headed monster of school accountability: the national curriculum and Ofsted. Let the competition commence!