It all began with Tucker Jenkins

Tucker Jenkins started Grange Hill Comprehensive the same year that I started my secondary school. Tucker, of course, is a fictional character in the BBC’s long-running series about a London comprehensive. I first met him in February 1978, after a day as a first year in St Michael’s RC comprehensive in Billingham. He reminded me a bit of some of the boys in my year but the look of the school was alien and though I would have loved to be like Trisha Yates, I didn’t really see myself in those southern kids. It didn’t register that Grange Hill and St Michael’s had in common funding arrangements, admissions policy and inspection regimes. Well, it wouldn’t, would it? I was twelve and there for the stories, not the history of education policy.

A couple of years ago, I was writing a piece for a therapy journal about school counselling - what and who it’s for, the different expectations of and funding for counsellors in different schools in England and the UK - and I started to think about how things got to be as they are. I began to explore the history of school counselling in the UK and the links between that history and other developments in education policy since the Second World War. There’s a story to be told, not just about what and who school counselling is for, but about what and who schools are for. It’s a story I’m still reading and writing about.

Having discovered that training for school counsellors began in England in 1965, I wondered whether there had been a school counsellor in St Michael’s (I think the answer is no). Who, if anyone, was concerned for my ‘wellbeing’ or my personal development in 1977? What assumptions did my teachers make about their responsibilities to me and my peers, beyond teaching us the content of a syllabus? There are answers to be found in tracing the twists and turns of education policy and developmental psychology and I’m taking those journeys in my research. But there are other stories that tell us what society understands and feels about secondary schools, the children in them and the purpose of schooling: stories that try to convey the whole-school drama or the individual experience of being a teacher or pupil. Stories like Grange Hill.

Grange Hill feels very much like my school story, mainly because of the timing of its launch. It was about a school loosely like mine (state comprehensive) and while I didn’t particularly identify with the characters it perhaps reflected back to me some commonplaces about behavioural expectations, relationships with peers and teachers, parent-school interaction and academic expectations. It also offered a fantasy about those aspects of school life, with heightened drama and episodic neatness. I reflected on the school stories that my children may think of as ‘theirs’: they mentioned CBBC’s Four O’Clock Club, Waterloo Road, Ackley Bridge and the Educating series. More TV. When I thought about children’s novels about schools, the first that came to mind were the Harry Potter series and Enid Blytons’ Malory Towers. I wondered whether this was how the ‘school story’ genre divided up: state schools are imagined through television, private schools (and Hogwarts is a private school) through the written medium. On further investigation, the binary is not so neat. There are films and tv series about private and public schools.The 1950s yielded a number of novels (two of which were made into films) about the new secondary modern schools. These were social comedies, written by teacher-writers, aimed primarily at adults (possibly teachers) and which explored schooling from the teacher’s perspective: teachers who were baffled, unprepared but optimistic. In the late 1960s, another former teacher, Barry Hines, wrote A Kestrel for a Knave, which the director Ken Loach turned into the film Kes. The story is told from the perspective of fifteen year old Billy Caspar, who is just about to leave a secondary modern in a South Yorkshire mining town. Hines’ and Loach’s perspectives on the secondary modern is less hopeful, a pessimism which by then was public policy. The Labour Party’s case for non-selective comprehensive schools had been made and grammars and secondary moderns were gradually - but incompletely- phased out.

I have found examples of other state school stories from the 1950s onwards, in novels, plays, films, television drama and comedy and ‘fly-on-the-wall documentary’. I am busy reading them in the context of education policy and ideas about children’s emotional and psychological development (for example the 1944 Education Act and ideas about the mother and child relationship in the work of John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott; the Labour Government’s ‘Circular 10/65’ asking all local education authorities to re-organise secondary schooling along comprehensive lines, and the influence of Carl Rogers’ ideas on child-centred education). The relationship between the ‘stories’, the policies and the theories is multi-directional, sometimes explicitly so. Edward Blishen, one of the ‘teacher-writers’ of the 1950s and 1960s, offered his 1969 secondary modern novel,This Right Soft Lot, as part of an imagined ‘communication service’, in favour of reformed and well-resourced state schooling.

By the time that Tucker Jenkins, tie askew, ran through the gates of Grange Hill, part first year secondary school boy, part union rep for his peers, the numbers of comprehensive schools had increased in number and in notoriety. They were held up by right-wing politicians and press as evidence of the disastrous consequences of child-centred pedagogy and intellectually floppy curricula. Grange Hill’s creator, Phil Redmond, joined the ranks of Blishen’s education communication service when he tried both to represent the lives of working-class children and defend the system that schooled most of them: the comprehensive.

Later decades have brought parental choice, the assisted places scheme, grant maintained schools, academisation, free schools, multi-acdemy trusts, Ofsted, the national currculum, GCSEs, the eradiction of course work…constant shifts between the authority of the policy makers and education providers. Assumptions about children’s needs and rights have shifted too along with the burden of responsibility on schools to uphold them.The ‘stories’ keep coming too: satirical, nostalgic, hostile, feeding into and from our peculiar relationship with the schools that most of us went to and send our children to. I’ll keep posting here as I make sense of how that relationship changes yet stays the same: full of hope and fear, praise and blame, anger and warmth, social concern and individual avarice. And for me, it all began with Tucker Jenkins.