I was watching the documentary 7 Plus Seven and the point was made that certain girls decided to attend a comprehensive school while another decided to attend a Grammar school. For those unfamiliar with the British school system, what did this mean, and what would be the significance of this choice to a 14 year old girl in England in 1971?
Thanks in advance for your replies.
In the sixties, the British government introduced what it called Comprehensive Education to replace a three-tiered system. In the prior system children were sent or guided into grammar schools, which focused on academics and university preparation, or vocational training. Comprehensive education incorporated both and was broadly designed to do two things: (1) reduce costs by herding everyone into a single school system, and (2) reduce class distinction and increase social mobility.
Grammar schools continued to exist alongside comprehensive schools and are selective, whereas everyone gets to go to comprehensive schools. If you went to a grammar school you were probably a better student and you had vastly greater future educational prospects. I don’t know if that’s still true today. There’s also the public (private) schools which are selective and cost money.
In short, a comprehensive school functions more or less like a US high school, though they start and finish earlier (11-16 age group).
The difference starts well before students are enrolled.
Prior to comprehensive schools, we had two main types of teenager education, the secondary modern and the Grammar school.
Before that, we also had the indentured apprentice - which was a trade skills apprenticeship starting at age 14, however that really was a long while ago.
There was a selection process to differentiate between the secondary modern and the grammar school.
This was known as the 11 plus exam, if you passed then you went to Grammar school. In later years a second chance was offered called the 13 plus exam.
These were not exams in the current sense of the word, it was not just case of attaining a certain mark to pass, this was a competition, so the top 5% would go to the very highest and most academically desirable Grammar schools, and the next tranche of maybe 25% went to the other Grammar schools - all schools had some sort of perception by the public.
If you went to those Grammar schools you would be chalked up for higher education, by being streamed into the old O-Level and A-Levels, that top tranche of Grammar schools were pretty much the golden path to the highest universities, it was very much an expectation that you would be in the running for the professional classes. The other Grammar schools would offer the same qualifications, and a path to university, but they didn’t quite have the same reputation - especially if you wanted to try for Oxbridge. Grammar schools were very much designed for academic education.
Secondary moderns varied in quality immensely, far too many were just dumping grounds for parents to leave their children whilst they went out to work. Those schools would generally be found in the catchment areas of the sink hole council estates and had absolutely terrible reputations. Parents often had little choice but to send their children there because they were unfortunate enough to live in the catchment areas - at that time parents were not offered a choice in where they could send their children to school, and many able students lost out on life chances by being made to attend these educational waste pits.
Not all secondary moderns were this bad, indeed many of the inner city ones had very good reputations and many notable alumni. You could take on the academic qualifications in many secondary modern schools but this was reserved only for the highest performing minority, and the remainder would be enrolled for the lower standard CSE qualifications.
The requirement that students gain qualifications was not anything like a significant priority in secondary modern schools, and the majority left those schools with not one academic qualification whatsoever.
During all this time, schools were almost exclusively single sex.
Those who went to grammar and then on to university tended to be from the children of the professional classes, with a smattering of others from the rest of the workforce, and their university fees were covered by public funding.
It was really pretty obvious by the late 1960’ that this was grossly unfair, that grammar school pupils had more resources ploughed into their education, and that one exam at 11 years old could set the entire life chances for an individual.
Its was also obvious that we were really only educating a small part of our population academically, and that the rest of the world was making far better use of their education systems to produce a workforce that was capable of responding to change.
The comprehensive was aimed at getting rid of the 11+ competition, and instead all students were to be streamed according to their abilities, rather than a one off test. The idea was that able students could be moved into higher streams at any time no matter what their background, and at the same time there was a great increase in the use of mixed gender schooling too.
The idea had been that the good students would drag along the poorer performing ones upwards, but of course the exact opposite happened in many cases. Sink hole schools remained sink hole schools, which they still do right up to this day maybe 40 years later.
There are those who yearn for the grammar school as a means of keeping the best performers in an environment and academic culture of performance, when the reality is that Grammar schools were always a form of social apartheid that helped ensure that those from the lower order remained there, no matter what their natural abilities.
nm
May I point out that the OP misspelt “Grammar” in his thread title??
::ducks and runs::
Tripler
We now return you to the original thread.
I thought maybe Kelsey Grammer had opened an acting school. 
Who is Kelsey Grammer?
Tripler
I don’t get out much. . .
The name “Grammar” may have just been the old name for the school. It may have turned comprehensive , and just been “the local high school”.
But probably there was a comprehensive school that was closer, and the Grammar school may have been selective - as in the applicant would have to pass tests to get into Grammar school. Grammar school may also have higher fees and other expenses such as uniforms.
The benefit would be the Grammer school focused on academic excellence, so the pressure is to choose, is she worth sending to grammar school , and risk her dropping out and wasting all money and ruining her life ? or is the local comprehensive school the better choice, cheaper and safer ?
… fees?
Grammar schools are not fee paying.
In Australia, Grammar schools are fee paying, and are often the most expensive schools around.
In queensland, the Grammar Schools Act established Grammar schools in towns of a certain size, and most of those are still around today.
I’m just sitting here waiting for the OP.
Actually we had three types of school codified in the 1944 Education Act: Grammar schools for the academically able who might have a chance to go to university, secondary technical schools for those best suited to some trade or profession, such as engineering, and secondary modern schools for the common herd, who were expected to take few, if any public examinations and would leave school at 14 (later raised to 15 and eventually 16) and go into mundane labouring or factory jobs.
As the years went by the system came to be increasingly criticised for sorting children out into the sheep and the goats at such an early age, leaving no scope for late developers; also the secondary technical schools, meant to be the ‘third leg’ of the Tripartite System, were never actually built in any numbers. The Eleven Plus examination, taken around age 11, was meant as a sorting exercise, but the trouble was that the secondary modern schools never achieved parity of esteem, and also had less money allocated to them. Also as mentioned, in many areas there were no technical modern schools and the exam came to be seen as a ‘pass/fail’ event rather than a grading exercise. In the 1950s ‘Comprehensive’ education came to be seen as the panacea, where children of all abilities would be educated in the same school and the weaker ones would benefit from having the more able ones in the same class. In 1965 the Labour Government issued a circular to Local Education Authorities ‘requesting’ them to draw up plans for converting to comprehensive education. It was not an compulsory instruction, but there was a certain amount of funding ‘carrot’ applied to those who would change, and no funding for those who would not. Many LEAs enthusiastically changed, some more reluctantly, a smallish number refused to change at all and held out in the hope of another Conservative government, which duly returned in 1971. Margaret Thatcher was the new Education Minister, and cancelled the ‘request’ immediately, but the policy had such a head of steam behind it by now that it continued and many more LEAs changed over during the 1970s, especially as the Labour party returned to government in 1974. Comprehensives had been sold to the public as ‘grammar schools for all’ but they were becoming perceived as overly large, ill-disciplined, dumbing-down-to-the-lowest-common-denominator establishments that held back the brightest, or left them to sink or swim.
Woah, mate, paragraph breaks are your friend.
Those are only available in Mk VIII which will be coming out shortly. The team is still working on it but they’ve made a lot of progress; Mk VI didn’t even use proper punctuation.
Note that the 1944 Act applied only to England and Wales … Scotland has never had the divisiveness of secondary modern v grammar school.
I am actually the same age as the subjects of the ‘Seven Up’ series of documentaries, and find it all very interesting for that reason. Every seven years during my lifetime a new documentary has been made about a diverse group of people who are the same age as me. The next one will be when we are 63.
I went to a grammar school, but it became comprehensive halfway through my period there, although that did not impact on my education. In fact I remain an enthusiast for the idea of comprehensive education as opposed to the half-hearted elitism of a grammar school.
Recently I met someone who went to a secondary technical school - these were so few and far between that I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly met such a person before.
It’s probably worth mentioning that the British system of secondary qualifications is very different from the US model. In the US, students typically attend a “high school” that is authorized (“accredited”) to evaluate their knowledge and achievement and award them a diploma. In the British system, the school is there to teach you the material. You don’t get a diploma for graduating, you are given the knowledge and skills necessary to undertake public examinations that grant the “real” qualifications. Obviously, some schools are better at this than others, but there’s nothing inherent in the system that says that you have to attend a Grammar School in order to qualify to take A-Levels. An 80 year old who never attended a formal school after age 10 can, in theory, register for the exams for as many qualifications as they desire. If they pass, they get the qualification.
A rough US analogy to the British system could be a high school that didn’t actually grant diplomas but that simply prepared students to take the GED equivalency exam.
Of course, just like the US system, “old boys networks” (and “old girls networks”) would arise, but they were a side effect to the system.
Brits: please do feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here on any point.
As a Brit and former grammar school student - I finally feel fairly well qualified for a question here!
You’re right, most British students take GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exams (usually) at 16 and A Levels (usually) at 18. The majority of Scottish students take “Highers” at 18 - probably someone from Scotland better suited to outline those.
Anyone can take these exams at any time, correct. Typically though they would be taken at 16 or 18 respectively with usually students sitting 8-11 GCSE’s and 3-4 A Levels.
these are in each individual subject.
GCSE’s replaced O levels around 25 years ago (I took O Levels) and before that CSE’s. The exams are set by various education boards, who are effectively authorized companies/organisations who would set the syllabus and exams (obviously following a general Government policy).
Grammar schools, as mentioned above are selective with the schools taking students with the best results at aged 11 (think it’s now a SAT exam aged 11) . the other pupils go to other schools. There are very few selective state Grammar Schools left, South Buckinghamshire is where I went (Royal Grammar School High Wycombe) and a couple of other pockets.
There are some Grammar Schools that turned private, rather than be abolished/changed, Manchester Grammar is one that springs to mind.
Not all other schools are comprehensive. There are lots of religious schools Catholic & Church of England, mostly. There are also new Academy Schools which try and specialize in an area, computing for instance.
lastly you have the private schools, which being the UK are usually called Public Schools. Public means private!
hope that helps
Thanks! I’m glad to know that I’m on the right track.
How does it typically work when people cross the pond? E.g. if someone with a US-style general studies high school diploma moves to the UK, does that correspond to some level of GCSE or A-level equivalency? Do immigrants typically sit for GCSE’s and/or A-levels as part of their assimilation, or would a university registrar e.g. say that “oh, you have a US diploma, that’s equivalent to, uhh (looks at chart and examines student’s transcript and grades) A-levels in English and Mathematics and GCSE’s in Chemistry, Physics, and History”.
How about the other way? Any Brits move to the US and find that their qualifications were or were not recognized as equivalent to a high school diploma or GED?