Lost promise: the 1960s, the self and state schooling

This doctored still taken from Ken Loach’s 1969 film, Kes, was doing the rounds on social media last year. The image was circulated as a defiant response to Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party and the expulsion of Loach from the party membership. Loach is a totemic figure for ‘the left’ (of the Labour Party and the further fringes, such as Respect and Left Unity, of which Loach had been a member).

The evocation of Billy Caspar in the image – the beleaguered protagonist of Kes - is implicitly shorthand for the defiance of the oppressed working class (for whom Loach speaks in this image). Loach’s Kes is celebrated for its social realism: its thematic exploration of the impact of poverty drawn through the life of a fifteen-year-old boy in a South Yorkshire mining town. The themes are  reinforced by the social realist production values (use of untrained actors from the local community, filming in a location faithful to the locale of the story) and formal conventions (wide shots to place the action in a specific locale, naturalistic lighting and stripped back, documentary style filming to heighten the ’authenticity’ of the story – most famously in a scene where a boy is caned and the director didn’t let the child actor know before it happened so as not to lessen the shock).

The film was based on Barry Hines’s 1968 novel, A Kestrel for a Knave. Billy Caspar is an ‘Easter leaver’ from a secondary modern in a South Yorkshire mining town. The novel is set across a number of days at the end of his school career, and the school comes in and out of focus as the narration moves back and forth in time and location. Billy is bullied by his peers and humiliated by most of his teachers. The only time he comes to life in school is when his English teacher invites him to speak on a subject that interests him. Billy’s subject is the kestrel he took from a nest and reared. For once, in his telling of the story of his relationship with the bird, Billy flies.

Hines’s novel is not like the secondary modern novels of the 1950s which are set exclusively in the schools and narrated by teacher protagonists. A Kestrel is narrated in the third person and focuses exclusively on Billy’s experiences. Episodes in Billy’s brutalising school are as vivid as those when he is flying his bird Kes. Hines, who was educated until age sixteen at a grammar school, had been a secondary school PE teacher and would have been familiar with the shifts in education policy and debate in the 1960s. In 1965, the education minister Tony Crosland pushed through the Circular, ‘The Organisation of Secondary Education’, which recommended that local authorities convert grammars and secondary moderns to comprehensives, on the grounds that selection disproportionately favoured middle class children. Some of the groundwork for the circular was laid in the 1963 Newsom Report, which looked at the provision for children in most secondary moderns and found it wanting.

Billy Caspar bears a striking resemblance to one of the case studies in the report – ‘Bert Robinson,’ a composite character drawn from questionnaires sent out to secondary schools throughout England. Bert represents one of the lowest achieving pupils:

 Bert was only 5 ft. 1½ inches tall and weighed just 7 st. 7 Ibs ... He has one elder brother who went to the same school where he had been a thorough nuisance. Bert himself was a pleasant, cheerful lad on the surface, but inclined to be a troublemaker or so his teachers thought. …He lived in a poor housing area, and he and his brother were left to their own devices in the evening while his parents went out. Neighbours reported that quarrels were a regular and noisy domestic feature. Bert was given to occasional, quite unexplained absences from school... He spent about an hour and a half a day on a paper round but took no part in any voluntary school activities nor did he belong to a youth club (Newsom Report, p.216).

Portraits like Bert’s are included in the report to help nudge ‘public opinion’ in favour of its proposed reforms. Edward Blishen’s 1969 novel, This Right Soft Lot (sequel to Roaring Boys and set in the same secondary modern) explicitly offers his novel to persuade his readership to the cause of the ‘Newsom children’. Blishen ends the novel with the closure of Stonehill Street secondary modern and the opening of a new comprehensive school. Hines avoids this kind of paternalism and offers no consoling promise of a new kind of school for Billy and his peers. Through Billy, however, Hines implicitly imagines another dimension in ‘the ‘Newsom child’s’ life. Billy is a kind of ‘Romantic child,’ who comes wholly and authentically to life outside the institutions of school, family, and work.  

In this respect, Hines’ novel is less informed by class-based ideology than by 1960s educational progressivism, championed by American humanistic psychologists and pedagogues like Carl Rogers (Freedom to Learn, 1969) and John Holt (How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn, 1(967)). (Holt’s work would later influence the creator of Grange Hill, Phil Redmond while he was studying the sociology of education.) The Newsom Report did not go as far as promoting child-centred and discovery learning – so loathed by traditionalists - but its many recommendations upgrade the pragmatic, ‘welfare’ ambitions of the 1944 Education Act. The report acknowledges that ‘whole’ children passed through the gates of state schools. It even went as far as to recommend the introduction of school counsellors into secondary schools, a recommendation that came to fruition when the first full-time training course for school counsellors was launched in Keele University in 1965.

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Hines’ own school days feature in his 1966 novel The Blinder, the story of Lenny Hawk, son of a collier, grammar school sixth former and prodigious footballing talent. Lenny’s story can read as a grandiose fantasy version of Hines’ own life, and of the uncontainable energy of the working-class grammar schoolboy about which the story remains ambivalent. While Billy Caspar is slight, neglected, overlooked, or victimised in school, Hawk is popular and insouciant, giving up his own authority neither to his teachers nor the powers-that-be in the football world. Like Billy, Lenny is nearing the end of his school career but while Billy is looking down the barrel of the mine shaft, Lenny is poised between professional football and a university education.

The heart-breaking finale of Billy’s story, when his brother kills his bird as revenge for Billy not putting on a winning bet, brings him back into the confines of everyday life and the bedroom in which the story begins. Despite Lenny’s apparent power, escape from the colliery looks uncertain for him at the end of The Blinder, as he sabotages his football career and looks set to give up university and marry his pregnant girlfriend. This is the conventional ‘social realist’ ending:  the individual whose story stands for the community cannot transcend that community.

In this context, the doctored image of Billy Caspar stands less for a defiant, collective working class than a dejected individual, offered a glimpse of ‘the self’ but swallowed back into the dehumanising systems of school, family, and future work. Perhaps Billy Caspar is therefore a fitting avatar for Ken Loach. ‘Ken as Billy’ is less a working-class riposte to ‘Keith’ Starmer, than a symbol of the social realist impasse. The story of the individual does not stand for the whole, and Loach the artist cannot speak ‘authentically’ for those he seeks to represent.

This ‘formal’ conundrum goes further than fiction, however. There is a repeated cycle in education policy, from the political left and right, which sees state schools offered glimpses of more enriching, humanistic models only to be thrown back into utilitarianism. The nascent optimism of the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, was shut down in the 1970s with a backlash against ‘progressivism’ and the half-hearted commitment to the spirit of comprehensive education, even though comprehensives schools were replacing grammars and secondary moderns in most of England and Wales throughout the decade. Nearly sixty years on from the Newsom Report and Hines’ novel, there are still Bert Robinsons and Billy Caspars and the political will to consign their stories to history is still to be found.