Secondary moderns, cranks and men of good sense

PE teacher Miss Allcock and Educational Psychiatrist Mr Grigg with his last book, The Child is Always Right, Carry on Teacher (1959)

In the 1959 film Carry on Teacher Leslie Phillips (above with Joan Sim) plays Alistair Grigg, an educational psychiatrist who has been deployed by the Ministry of Education to conduct a week of observations at Maudlin Secondary Modern School as research for his forthcoming book Contemporary Juvenile Behaviour Patterns.’ He is accompanied by one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors, Felicity Wheeler, whose views on the causes of and remedies for children’s disruptive behaviour are quite different to Wheeler’s.  The staff likewise have conflicting views on ‘behaviour management’. The Head, Wakie (played by Ted Ray) is opposed to corporal punishment while the Maths teacher Grace Short (played by Hattie Jacques) is a strict disciplinarian. While corporal punishment is no longer an option in our schools, the arguments about ‘behaviour management’ are alive and well, and like many aspects of education debate bear the traces of ideas from the 1940s and 1950s.

The real focus of Carry on Teacher of course is not behaviour management but the ‘hilarious’ impact of the slapstick pranks of the children who are trying to sabotage beloved Wakie’s application to another post in a shiny new rural school. There are also ‘romantic’ subplots involving the two visitors, the PE teacher Sarah Allcock, played by Joan Sim and science teacher Gregory Adams (Kenneth Connor). However, it is not an irrelevance that the psychiatrist and the inspector drive the plot and that the setting is a secondary modern school. The secondary modern school was the invention of the 1944 Butler Education Act. Before the war, education for most children in England had been provided in all through elementary schools (up until age 14) or grammar schools for those who had the means to pass the eleven plus or those who could afford to accept free places instead of starting work. The Act opened up secondary education for all to age 15, provided wider access to grammars and established short-lived technical schools and longer-lasting secondary moderns for those who failed the eleven plus.

The ’shock’ of the shift to secondary education for all is registered in the popularity of stories about secondary modern schools in the 1950s. A flurry of such stories were written by men who had gone through post-war emergency teacher training schemes and had found themselves, briefly, teaching in the new schools. They include Michael Croft’s Spare the Rod (1954), Edward Blishen’s Roaring Boys (1955), John Townsend’s The Young Devils (1958) and ER Braithwaite’s To Sir With Love (1959). There were films adapted from Croft’s and Braithwaite’s stories produced in 1961 and 1967. Secondary moderns are framed in these stories as a floundering social experiment (even by the writers who are sympathetic to the broadening of the educational franchise). They are narrated by teachers who are new to their schools and who represent a middle ground between the old, authoritarian ways of pre-war schooling and the wilder edges of progressive thought on child development and teaching. Croft’s John Sanders, for instance, is presented to us in the books blurb as ‘neither a theorist nor a crank, but a man of practical good sense’ (1954 edition).

The teacher protagonists bring ‘good sense’ to the secondary modern experiment in which they are themselves observed by a variety of inspectors, like Carry on Teacher’s Felicity Wheeler. They resist pressure to put into practice the so-called ‘crank psychology’ taught in teacher training colleges, epitomised in Carry on Teacher by Alistair Grigg’s first book The Child is Always Right. Grigg delights in the pranks of Maudlin School’s fifth formers as supportive evidence for his research into disruptive juvenile behaviour. Staff, meanwhile, are driven to the point of hysteria.

Mr Bean, Miss Short and Mr Milton dealing with itching powder planted by the student ‘sabateurs’, CoT

While the secondary modern novels are not as caricatured as Carry On Teacher, a similar tension exists in them between the theory of psychologists and pedagogues (promoted by local authority inspectors) and the ‘reality’ of classroom management. Blishen’s narrator reflects on such difficulties when he notes that the raising of the school leaving age ‘was still a raw issue with most of the Stonehill Street boys and their parents… We had snatched a year’s earnings from their pockets … detaining them in a child’s world of school’ (RB, 10).  In these narratives, the psychological and pedagogical ‘theory’ of which the teachers of ‘good sense’ are sceptical seems to stand for the questionable nature of the whole post-war educational project, with its potential to infantilise potential workers.

And yet, contemporary psychological and progressive educational theory does find a voice in these stories, especially as the protagonists win over their charges and ‘broaden their horizons’ with theatrical performances, museum excursions and foreign trips. The idea that the provision of what would later be termed ‘cultural capital’ by state schools would be beneficial was based upon assumptions drawn from contemporary developmental psychology.  In the 1940s and 1950s, psychoanalysts, paediatricians and pedagogical theorists like John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott, Susan Isaacs, and Ruth Thomas were developing ideas about the relationship between early childhood and adulthood. Isaacs and Thomas’s work on child-centred and play based learning was taken up in early years education, and the work of Bowlby and Winnicott is implicit in much progressive educational theory. Their research, gleaned in part from their observations of families (particularly mothers and children) in their clinical work, popularised ideas about the impact of childhood deprivation that were particularly relevant after the war and helped to shape the new welfare state. They showed early home life as a potential source of psychological and emotional damage – most notably in Bowlby’s findings of the impact of ‘maternal deprivation’ (see especially ‘Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Character and Home-Life’ (1944) and ‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’ (1952)). Bowlby’s theory of attachment, with its model of the securely attached mother and infant, and Winnicott’s invention of the ‘ordinary devoted mother’, attuned to her child’s development (part of a work which was serialised on Radio Four) were to provide the antidote to post-war family deprivation.

The children in the secondary modern school stories, which were mostly set in war-damaged London, are often from ‘deprived’ homes; their fathers are lost to war and their mothers are either monstrous or broken. In most of the stories, the absence of the father and the ordinary devoted mother is compensated for in school by the attention of the ‘ordinary devoted teacher’ (like Croft’s Sanders, played in the film by Max Bygraves and Braithwaite’s Ricky, immortalised by Sidney Poitier). In these stories, this pastoral relationship comes to define the purpose of the post-war state school; these young teachers are the ‘good enough’ parents, tasked with making up for what the post-war working-class home could not provide. They provide them with broadened cultural experiences and emotional connection.

Max Bygraves as John Sanders in Spare the Rod (1961)

Sidney Poitier as Ricky Braithwaite in To Sir With Love (1967)

Of course, the more regressive aspects of contemporary psychology also find their way into these novels. None of the protagonists really question the premise of the selective test that had failed to select the children in front of them. They liberally use epithets such as ‘backward’, ‘dim’, ‘dull’ to describe their charges, echoing the pathologizing language of contemporary child psychotherapy and the research that had been conducted to justify the ongoing use of the eleven plus. All of the narrators assume there is a naturalness about the segregation of the children at age eleven. The stories do question the efficacy of the increased leaving age for working class children, the value of an increased allocation of resources to state schools in the post-war economy and the existential purpose of the secondary modern school. In Blishen’s Roaring Boys, the protagonist bumps into a former colleague who is teaching at an independent school who puts into words the question which haunts these stories: ‘I mean – this Education Act … Rather like there being classical concerts in sports arenas, don’t you think? Trying to fetch along the wrong people’ (RB, 274).

 While the stories are mostly sympathetic to the extension of secondary education and the new responsibilities that the Butler Act gave to schools, the strains of being part of the welfare ‘experiment’ are satirised. In Townsend’s The Young Devils, one teacher rails against the hypocrisy of parents’ complaints about teachers who administer corporal punishment while they are ‘quite willing to let us supervise their kids’ dinners, give out milk, make sure they eat their vitamin capsules, hand out toilet paper, collect savings, take them on outings and teach’ (TYD,194). Jenks, the head of Spare the Rod’s Worrell Street is so preoccupied with the bureaucracy of the school’s welfare duties – keeping a clean register, distributing milk, taking dinner money - that he by-passes relationships with his students entirely. This is a theme that runs throughout many later state school stories, as teachers bemoan new government policies or local authority initiatives which pile on ‘bureaucracy’ and responsibility that they see exceeds the schools’ ‘core purpose’ (which no one can quite agree upon).

The schools in these secondary modern stories are not the panacea to wartime loss that the Butler Act imagined. Even for the more progressive writers, who are sympathetic to the ‘welfare aims’ of the 1944 Act, these schools are an experiment that ultimately fail. But the failure was not in the extension of the educational franchise but in giving the children who failed the eleven plus the same they had in elementary schools and expecting a different outcome. As I have discovered in looking at later stories about comprehensive schools, there is an intransigent nostalgia for a much more limited educational franchise in narratives about non-selective schools. It is rarely directly expressed, and often comes out as sentimental representations of deprived and unreachable children who need ‘something different’ to what is on offer in mainstream schools and satire about ‘crank’ educational and psychological theory with which non-selective state education is persistently associated.

In the current debates about behaviour management in state education (at least on Twitter), the spirits of Leslie Phillips’ Alistair Grigg and Hattie Jacques’ Grace Short live on: each tribe defines the other as theoretical cranks or close-minded dictators.Nor have we moved far from the idea that mass state secondary education is a risky experiment, which requires ongoing observation, intervention, and readjustment. After nearly eighty years, you’d think we’d have come to terms with it. Carry on Teacher…