MHMNtMHM
THE LIBRARY
The Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education
Toronto, Canada
SECONDARY EDUCATION
FOR ALL
A POLICY FOR LABOUR
Edited for
THE EDUCATION ADVISORY COMMITTEE
OF THE LABOUR PARTY
by
R. H. TAWNEY
. -»<.^ji>Liiij«ii LLUi xxarjvr
APR • ^ "S ■i'^^.fc
LONDON : THE LABOUR PARTY
33 ECCLESTON SQUARE, S.W. i
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Summary OF Labour Party's Policy ... ... ... 7
I. Introductory Chapter ... ... ... ... ... 15
II. The Present Position OF Secondary Education ... 34
(i) The Demand for Secondary Education ... ... 85
(ii) The Number ofChildren attending Public Secondary
Schools ... ... ... ... ... ... 42
(iii) The Duration of the School Life 49
III. The Programme OF Labour ... ... ... ... 54
(i) The Need of Increasing the Pupils in Secondary
Schools ... ... ... ... ... ... 54
(ii) Secondary Education for all ... ... ... ... 60
(iii) The Reaction on the Primary School ... ... 72
(iv) Summary of Proposals ... ... ... ... 77
IV. The Freeing OF Secondary Education 79
(i) The Existing System 79
(ii) The Abolition of Fees 83
(iii) The Necessity of an Adequate System of Main-
tenance Allowances ... ... ... ... ... 87
(iv) Teachers and Accommodation ... ... ... 92
V. The Proposed Substitutes for Secondary Education 97
(i) The Main Alternatives 97
(ii) Part-time Continued Education ... ... ... 101
(iii) The Future of Central Schools and similar Institu-
tions 104
VI. The Position OF the Secondary School Teachers ... 114
VII. The Lion IN the Path 124
(i) The Cost of our Proposals ... ... ... ... 124
(ii) Can the Nation " Afford " Education ? 130
(iii) The Conclusion of the Matter ... ... ... 141
Appendices 149
SUMMARY OF LABOUR PARTY'S
POLICY
I
THE GENERAL OBJECTIVE
THE Labour Party is convinced that the only
policy which is at once educationally sound
and suited to a democratic communitv
is one under which primary education and
secondary education are organised as two stages in a
single and continuous process ; secondary education being
the education of the adolescent and primary education
being education preparatory thereto. Its objective,
therefore, is both the iviprovement of primary education
and the development of public secondary education to
such a point that all normal children, irrespective of the
income, class, or occupation of their parents, may be
transferred at the age of eleven -\- from, the primary or
preparatory school to one type or another of secondary
school, and remain in the latter till sixteen. It holds
that all immediate reforms should be carried out with
that general objective in view and in such a way as to
contribute to its attainment. It recognises that the
more secondary education is developed, the more
essential will it be that there should be the widest possible
variety of type among secondary schools. It therefore
looks forward to the time when Central Schools and
Junior Technical Schools will be transformed into one
part of a system of free and universal Secondary
Education.
The creation of such a system must, however, be a
matter of time, and must depend largely upon local
initiative. In order to prepare the way for it,
Labour should throw its whole weight, nationally and
locally, into securing the instalments of reform which
are set out below.
7
8 SECONDARY EDUCATION
II
THE REMOVAL OF FINANCIAL BARRIERS
At the present time large numbers of children are pre-
vented from entering a secondary school at all by the
poverty of their parents. In the year 1919-20 11,134
children in England and Wales were refused admission to
secondary schools because there were no free places avail-
able for them, though they reached the intellectual
standard required by the school authorities.' Of the
small percentage of children who do pass from the
primary to the secondary schools a large proportion leave
at, or soon after, their fifteenth birthday because their
parents cannot afford to keep them at school longer.
In order that the financial barriers which make
secondary education inaccessible may be removed : —
(i) Fees at grant-aided secondary schools should be
abolished by Local Education Authorities, either
at one stroke (as at Bradford) or by increasing the
number of free places from year to year, as is
proposed by the County of Durham, until by 1924
all are free,
(ii) Pending the complete abolition of fees, the Board
of Education should at once carry out the recom-
mendation of the Departmental Committee on
Scholarships and Free Places to increase the per-
centage of free places in grant-aided secondary
schools from twenty-five to forty per cent,
(iii) Local Education Authorities should revise their
system of maintenance allowances with a view
(a) To a large increase in their number.
(a) To an increase in their value.
(c) To grading them in such a way that there
may be a progressive increase in their value
from twelve to eighteen.
(d) To taking immediately full advantage of the
Board's Maintenance Allowance Regulations.
1 Keport of the Departmental Committee on Scholarships and
Free Places (Cmd. 908), 1020, App. I, Table D.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 9
III
THE PROVISION OF ADEQUATE SECONDARY
SCHOOL ACCOMMODATION
In the year 1919-20, in addition to the children
excluded through lack of free places, 10,076 children tvere
refused adrnission to secondary schools because there was
not sufficient accommodation to receive them.^ In order
that this grave scandal may be remedied, Labour should
press for the adoption of the following measures : —
(i) Each Local Education Authority should take as
its immediate programme, to be carried out at the
earliest possible date, the provision of secondary
school places for not less than twenty per 1,000 of
the population. This standard (which was
recommended by the Departmental Committee on
Scholarships and Free Places) is, however,
far behind that already obtaining in the
more progressive States of America, and should
be regarded as purely provisional. At the same
time, therefore. Local Education Authorities
should prepare an estimate of the number
of secondary school places required in order
to provide for twenty-five per cent., fifty
per cent., and seventy -five per cent, of the
children leaving the primary schools. On the
basis of it a programme should be begun which
will ensure that within ten years secondary school
places are provided to accommodate not less than
seventy-five per cent, of the children.
(ii) The carrying out of such a programme will
obviously necessitate the erection of new schools.
It is important that the planning of these schools
should not be such as to perpetuate the existing
vicious division between "elementary" and
"secondary" education. They should be
designed in such a way as to make it evident that
primary and secondary education are successive
2 Ibid.
10 SECONDARY EDUCATION
stages in a single continuous system, and that the
primary school is simply the preparatory school,
from which, at the appropriate age, the majority
of children will pass, as a matter of course, to the
secondary school,
(iii) In the meantime, in order partially to meet the
immediate shortage of secondary school places,
this programme should be accompanied by the
following transitional measures and, when neces-
sary, by such a temporary modification of the
Secondary School Regulations of the Board of
Education as may permit of their being
adopted : —
(a) The Preparatory Departments in grant-aided
secondary schools should (as recommended by
the Departmental Committee on Scholarships
and Free Places) be discontinued. These
departments now contain some 26,000 fee-
paying children, the majority under the age
of ten. Their accommodation can be put to
better use in providing school places for chil-
dren of eleven and over.
(b) Central Schools and Junior Technical Schools
are important, as representing a type of
higher education designed to meet the needs
of those children who progress most easily
by means of a curriculum containing a con-
siderable infusion of practical work appealing
to their creative instincts. It ought to be
recognised, however, that they are not
a mere continuation of primary education,
but part of the secondary system, and,
wherever possible, they should be remodelled
so as to become grant-earning intermediate or
secondary schools.
(c) Such primary schools as are suitable should
he converted to the same purpose, whenever
the change can be carried out without undue
pressure upon the primary school accom-
modation.
SECONDARY EDUCATION tl
(d) In rural districts, where distance often makes
the secondary school inaccessible to many
children, the Local Education Authority
should organise a motor transport service for
the conveyance of children to and from school.
IV
THE REGRADING OF EDUCATION
The division of education into "elementary" and
"secondary," as interpreted and organised hitherto, is
educationally unsound and socially obnoxious. It
results in (a) a grave waste of talent, (b) the exclusion
from the secondary schools of children who ought
to enter them, (c) the imposition on the primary
schools of the task of educating children between twelve
and fourteen, for which they may not be specially fitted,
(d) waste and inefficiency arising from overlapping.
It should therefore be abolished, and in place of it
schools shouM be graded as follows : —
(i) Primary, for all children up to eleven to twelve.
Subdivided into —
(a) Nursery and Infant Schools for all children
up to the age of seven.
(b) Preparatory schools, for all children between
ages of seven and twelve.
(ii) Secondary, for boys and girls between the age of
twelve and sixteen-eighteen.
(iii) Higher, providing education of a University type.
All normal children should pass from the primary to one
type or other of secondary school at the age of eleven +
and should remain in it, with the aid of adequate
maintenance allowances, to the age of sixteen.
12 SECONDARY EDUCATION
THE TRANSFERENCE FROM THE PRIMARY TO
THE SECONDARY SCHOOL
(1) Transference from the primary school to higher
education should depend solely upon whether it is likely
to be for the benefit of the children concerned.
(2) Transference should normally take place at the
age of eleven to twelve, but there should be provision by
which **late-developers" can pass to a secondary school
up to the age of fourteen.
(3) As long as the number of school places is
inadequate, competition for admission to the secondary
school is inevitable. But examinations should be supple-
mentary and subsidiary to the use of school records and
of reports by teachers.
(4) The test of admission for children applying for free
places and for fee-paying pupils should be the same.
Nor should further intellectual tests be imposed as a
condition of receiving a maintenance allowance. Labour
should resist strongly the policy of admitting fee-paying
pupils on easier terms than free-place pupils, and free-
place pupils who do not receive a maintenance allowance
on easier terms than those who do.
VI
THE SUBSTITUTES FOR SECONDARY
EDUCATION
(1) Part-time continued education between fourteen
and sixteen, while an improvement on the present posi-
tion, cannot be accepted as a substitute for the develop-
ment of a system of secondary education. The policy
on which Labour should insist is the development (as
already proposed by certain authorities) of full-time
secondary education — interpreted in such a way as to
include a wider variety of curriculum than is normally
the case at present — for boys and girls between twelve
and sixteen. The continuation school should "continue"
SECONDARY EDUCATION 13
secondary, not primary or preparatory, education, and its
proper sphere is the provision of part-time education for
those who leave the secondary school at sixteen.
(2) Central Schools of the type which is most common
to-day, while possessing certain advantages, do not
supply a satisfactory alternative to secondary education.
In staffing and equipment they are normally part of the
''elementary" system, and their curriculum is sometimes
unduly and prematurely specialised. They ought to be
reorganised in such a way as to become part of the
secondary system.
(3) The Board of Education should hasten the con-
version of such schools into secondary schools by (a)
recognising as secondary schools all schools that provide
a course of full-time instruction between eleven + and
sixteen years of age, (b) requiring that such schools shall
comply in respect of staffing and equipment with the
regulations for secondary schools, (c) paying grants on
account of them on the secondary scale.
VII
THE NEED FOR KNOWLEDGE
If an intelligent public opinion is to be formed on
educational questions, it is essential that full information
with regard to the progress of education in the United
Kingdom and in other countries should be made regularly
and easily accessible. At the present time such informa-
tion is provided only in a piecemeal and haphazard
manner. Whereas the student of economic questions can
find in official documents the data for an examination of
foreign trade, unemployment, movements of wages, and
similar questions, to obtain equally authoritative
evidence about the educational situation is difficult or
impossible. The result is that, when educational con-
troversies arise, the community has not got before it the
facts on which alone an intelligent judgment can be
based.
14 SECONDARY EDUCATION
In order that such facts may be available with regard
to secondary education, it is suggested that the Board of
Education should publish annually figures showing : —
(i) The number of children (a) leaving primary
schools in the area of each authority, (6) passing
from primary schools to grant-aided secondary
schools, with and without free places, (c) passing
to secondary schools from private schools.
(ii) The number of pupils per 1,000 of the population
in grant-aided secondary schools in England and
Wales, and in corresponding schools in Scotland,
the principal European countries, and the U.S.A.
(iii) The number of children excluded from secondary
schools in England and Wales (a) through lack of
accommodation, (6) through lack of sufficient
free places.
(iv) The school life and leaving age of pupils in grant-
aided secondary schools, distinguishing between
free-placers and fee-paying pupils.
(v) The expenditure of Local Education Authorities
on (a) free places, (h) maintenance allowances.
(vi) The number of pupils (a) leaving grant-aided
secondary schools, (b) passing from secondary
schools to Universities.
Further, Labour members of Local Education Authori-
ties should press them to publish corresponding figures
with regard to their different areas.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
WHATEVER may be the fate of the Educa-
tion Act of 1918, it has had one effect which
will survive its suspension. It has
compelled the nation to face the whole
jH-oblem of secondary education, and to face it in its
relation to other parts of the educational system. The
creation of a structure of part-time education for young
persons between fourteen and eighteen, the establishment
of which was the most novel and most hotly contested
part of the Act, has been, at least temporarily, postponed.
But the problem of adolescent education, with which
section 10 was concerned, has been, ever since 1902,
in one form or another, the centre of educational dis-
cussion. It will not lose its prominence merely because
the particular method of dealing with it which was
proposed in 1918 has been for the time being abandoned.
Industrial interests could scrap the work of Parliament,
but not even the Federation of British Industries can
abolish the children. In spite of the apostles of
"economy," the perversity of human nature will con-
tinue to cause some 650,000 young persons every year
to reach fourteen and to leave the primary schools with
the inevitable regularity of a recurring decimal. As long
as ninety per cent, of the 2,500,000 young persons
between fourteen and eighteen are receiving no kind of
education, the question which the Act tried to answer
remains. Its answer has been negatived. It remains
either to insist that it is the right answer, or to find a
better one.
"Or to find a better one." For the Act of 1918, with
all its advantages, had one defect. It did not really
face the questions : What is the function of primary
15
B
16 SECONDARY EDUCATION
education? What is the function of secondary educa-
tion? What ought to be the relations between thera?
But, as half a century of bitter experience ought to have
taught us, it is just these questions which are vital.
Less than any other human activity can education be
handled effectively if it is handled piecemeal. Neither
primary, nor secondary, nor continued, nor — it may be
added — university education can function unless their
objects are cleariy conceived and their relations deter-
mined upon some intelligible principle. And if the
failure to bring into operation section 10 is used as an
opportunity to reconsider the larger problems of post-
primary education, with which the Act dealt, admittedly,
by way of compromise, then that failure, discreditable
though it is to our common sense and our humanity,
may prove in the long run not to have been wholly a
misfortune.
The truth is, the continuation schools were a make-
shift—a makeshift which, while preferable to the
existing neglect of boys and girls who have left the
primary school, was not the solution which would have
been chosen either by most educationalists or by the
Labour movement, had their hands been free. Part-
time continued education was to be welcomed as
establishing some measure of educational supervision
over the critical years of adolescence, and it is important
that Local Education Authorities should use their powers
under the Act of 1918 to obtain all the light that
experiment can throw upon it. But the weakness
of our present arrangements is a matter not merely of
quantity, but, still more, of quality. It is not simply
that the vast majority of children receive no further
education beyond fourteen, but that, because there is
no vital and systematic relation between primary and
secondary education— because the crucial problem of so
grading education that it may correspond with the natural
development of children has never been seriously faced
in England — the secondary schools are starved of able
pupils, and the primary schools, which ought to be pre-
paratory schools, are driven to undertake the work of
SECONDARY EDUCATION 17
adolescent education for which they may not be specially
suited. What is needed, in fact, is not merely an
extension or continuation of education, but a reclassifi-
cation or regrading of education. In the attempt to
prevent the higher education of most children altogether,
the opponents of the Act have raised the question
whether, in the form proposed, the part-time schools of
section 10 represent quite the form of higher education
which we need most. Acting with the worst intentions,
they have saved us from the blunder of merely tacking
a system of continuation classes on to the present elemen-
tary schools. They have given us, in fact, an opportunity
for second thoughts, and the proposals before some Local
Education Authorities show that it is being taken. We
ought to use it to reconsider the most vital and hitherto
the most neglected question of educational policy, the
establishment of a living and organic connection between
primary and secondary education.
It is the purpose of this book to suggest the
practical steps to which such a reconsideration would
lead. There are aspects of education, and its most
important aspects, which elude analysis, and which,
because they are essentially individual, cannot usefully
be discussed in terms of policy and organisation. "We
do it wrong, being so majestical. To offer it the show of
violence" — lew persons can have felt the influence of a
good school or a great teacher and then turned to read,
say, a debate upon education in the House of Commons,
without experiencing something of the sensation which
these lines evoke. We do not forget the imponderables
of personality and spirit and atmosphere; they are the
root of the whole matter. But even education works
within the limits set by a material scaffolding of policy,
administrative organisation, and finance. It is with
that scaffolding that this book is concerned.
Its proposals, at least in principle, are not novel. But in
the last twenty years several causes have combined at
once to strengthen the case for the reorganisation which
we advocate and to increase its feasibility, and, if our
18 SECONDARY EDUCATION
recommendations are disputed, few will deny the urgency
of the problem with which they deal. Both in the
criticisms passed upon the present system and in the
proposals for improving it there are signs of a funda-
mental agreement which did not exist ten, or even five,
years ago. In England it is not ungentlemanly to steal
halfpennies from children, and industrial interests, it may
be assumed, will oppose any reform which interferes with
the supply of cheap juvenile labour. But among
educationalists and teachers, economists and social
workers, administrators and, not least, the parents them-
selves, there is not a wide diversity as to the main weak-
nesses of the existing arrangements or as to the principles
upon which they should be reformed, provided that the
difficulties of finance — cost to the taxpayer and cost to
the parent — can be satisfactorily overcome.
Primary and secondary education have grown up in
England as two separate systems, between which, since
1902, partly as a result of the Education Act of that
year, partly through the development of the Free Place
system, partly through the wise insistence of the Board
of Education that intending teachers should spend four
years in a secondary school, an increasing, if sadly
inadequate, number of bridges have been cast. The
time has now come for a radical reconstruction of the
relations between them. "It may be hoped," writes
Dr. Hendy, Director of Training in the University of
Oxford, "that the old misleading parliamentary distinc-
tion between elementary and secondary may disappear,
and that we may see a new grouping of schools on a
genuinely educational basis, into primary, educating
to the age of ten to eleven, and secondary, educating
beyond that age.'" That sentiment will be echoed by all
serious reformers. What they would desire is that the
wide gulf which still divides the two should be closed,
that primary education should be so planned as to lead,
in the case of all normal children, to one type or another
of secondary education, that secondary education should
1 " TheHniversities and the Training of Teachers. An Inaugural
Lecture by F. J. R. Hendy.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 19
begin at eleven + £ind be built on the foundations of
primary education, instead of side by side with it, and
that part-time continued education should follow at least
four years' full-time secondary education, instead of
being offered, as the Act of 1918 proposed, as a substi-
tute for it.
Continuation schools. Central schools. Junior Tech-
nical schools, or at any rate the last two, have a future
before them if they are organised frankly as part of
the secondary system. But, except in so far as
that is the case, they are at best — what the able
educationalists of The Times have described them —
mere "transitional phenomena." At worst, we may add,
they are one more blind alley from which a generation
hence, after a heavy expenditure of money and effort
diverted from more important educational tasks, we shall
be obliged to return. We have half a century of
experience of cheap substitutes. To invest in yet
another of them, when the genuine article is obtainable,
would be insanity. What we require is to recognise
boldly that nothing less than general secondary educa-
tion will either stand the criticism of the educationalists,
or satisfy the demands of a working class that has tasted
of the tree of knowledge and does not intend that its
children should be fobbed off with the educational shoddy
which was foisted upon itself. In place, in short, of
"elementary" education for nine-tenths of the children
and "secondary" education for the exceptionally
fortunate or the exceptionally able, we need to envisage
education as two stages in a single course which will
embrace the whole development of childhood and adoles-
cence up to sixteen, and obliterate the vulgar irrelevances
of class inequality and economic pressure in a new
educational synthesis.
It is not suggested, of course, that the practical
application of such principles can be other than gradual.
Educational reforms are limited — to mention no other
conditions — by the supply of teachers and of school
accommodation. Neither can be improvised. When we
speak of "general secondary education" as the goal of
20 SECONDARY EDUCATION
educational policy, we do not in the least ignore these
well-worn truisms. If the direction is agreed upon, the
precise speed at which different stages on the road are to
be reached is a question which must be solved in the light
of the varying circumstances of different authorities. All,
we may take it, will begin by increasing the provision of
secondary school accommodation sufficiently to make up
the gross and admitted shortage which exists at present.
All will reject the odious and short-sighted policy of
making secondary education scarce and dear by raising
fees. All will free it, as soon as practicable, in the
schools provided by them, and will greatly develop their
system of maintenance allowances. But naturally the
scale on which they provide facilities will depend on the
extent and growth of the local demand. In some places
accommodation at the rate of fifteen to twenty per 1,000
will meet it for the time being ; in others something more
will be required almost immediately. In each case they
will proceed, therefore, experimentally. What they will
not do is to acquiesce — as in the past — in the idea that
the normal and inevitable thing is for only a small
fraction of the children leaving the primary schools to
pass to any kind whatever of secondary school. They
will accept, as the object to be aimed at, the establish-
ment of a system under which the majority of children
will receive a secondary education from eleven -f to six-
teen, and will plan their immediate developments with a
view to attaining it at the earliest moment that circum-
stances allow.
Such a policy is idealistic but it is not visionary. It is
no part of the purpose of this book to attempt, even
in outline, to summarise the recent history of secondary
education in England. But it is permissible to
emphasise that our proposals, so far from involving a leap
in the dark, are the natural culmination of the main
developments which have taken place in the world of
public education during the last twenty years. The
number both of pupils and school places in 1922 is, as we
show below, all too small. But, inadequate as they are,
they represent something like an educational revolution
SECONDARY EDUCATION 21
compared with the almost complete absence of
public provision which existed prior to 1902. When in
1895 the Royal Commission, of which Lord Bryce was
chairman, investigated secondary education, it found
that the pupils in secondary schools did not exceed 2.5
per 1,000 of the population — in Lancashire they
actually amounted only to 1.1 per 1,000 — as against the
figure of 8.7 per 1,000 in the year 1918-19. When, in
1897, the Education Department took a census of
secondary schools, it found that of 6,209 schools, attended
by 158,502 boys and 133,402 girls, more than two-thirds
were conducted by private enterprise, that more than a
quarter were endowed schools, embracing every variety
of foundation from the wealthy boarding school to the
local grammar school with an income from its endow-
ments of a few pounds a year, and that actually less than
two per cent, were owned and controlled by public
authorities.^ Apart from the activities of the Charity
Commissioners, the intervention of the State in Secondary
Education was represented mainly by the Science and
Art Department. In so far as School Boards and County
Councils had entered the field, they had done so piece-
meal and almost furtively, sometimes by straining their
powers and almost always in such a way as to compete
with each other. Of any conception of the meaning of
secondary education, of any central unifying purpose, of
any philosophy of its function in society and of its
relation to other parts of the educational system^ in spite
of the teaching of distinguished theorists, there was
hardly a trace. The full comedy of the situation was
revealed in 1900, when, nearly a century after France
and Germany had laid the foundations of a public system
of secondary education, the Court of Appeal virtually
decided that there was no Public Authority in England
with legal power to establish and maintain secondary
schools.
* For a convenient summary of the results of this inquiry see
Norwood & Hope, " The Higher Education of Boys in England,"
pp. 39-40.
22 SECONDARY EDUCATION
Of all the medley of schools which could be regarded as
giving secondary education twenty years ago, there is
probably only one group which can be said to-day to
stand approximately where it did. The institutions con-
ventionally described by the comically inappropriate
name of Public Schools, and the private schools which
prepare boys for them, have doubtless improved their
methods and curriculum. Further — an important
development — it is probable that the majority of the
former are now open to inspection by the Board. But
in their dominant characteristics — the classes they serve
and the objects at which they aim — they are still much
what they were in 1897. In the main, except in the
matter of inspection, they stand by their own choice apart
from the general system of public secondary education,
and need not be taken into account in considering how
that system can be improved and extended.
"While, however, the great boarding schools, though
educationally more efficient, remain in their general
purpose and character much what they were, a new
system of public secondary education has been brought
into existence in the course of the present generation, if
not out of nothing, at least out of chaos. It has been
built up partly by the entry into a national system of
schools already in existence, partly by the establishment
of new schools by Local Education Authorities. The intel-
lectual foundations of it were laid by the Royal Com-
mission of 1895. In 1901 the newly established Board
of Education began the system of paying grants to such
schools as would comply with its regulations, and
"recognising as efficient" those which, without accept-
ing grants, submitted to inspection. In 1902 elementary
and secondary education were united in the hands of the
county and county borough councils. The most obvious
quantitative measurement of the movement is the
increase in the number of schools on the grant list of
the Board of Education. In 1902-3 there were only
thirty -one schools in receipt of grants, and the Board
still grouped schools of science and secondary schools
together under the general name of higher education.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 28
In 1904-5, 482 schools, with 63,782 pupils, were receiving
grants; in 1907-8, 742 schools, with 124,110 pupils; by
1914-15, 929 schools, with 180,507 pupils. The war
naturally arrested the building of new schools. But in
1919-20 the number of grant-aided secondary schools in
England and Wales had risen to 1,140, and the number
of pupils to 307,759, or, in England alone to 282,005.-'
It is true, of course, that this increase in schools and
in the school population must not be interpreted as
representing anything like an equivalent net increase in
the educational resources of the country, or in the
number of children profiting by them, since a large pro-
portion of the schools had been in existence before they
became eligible for grants from the Board. The variety
of institutions included in the system is one of its merits.
It is an amalgam of schools old and new, endowed and
proprietary, established by public authorities and taken
over by them from other bodies. Even so, however,
the development, though only the beginning of the pro-
vision which requires to be made, is impressive. It is
noticeable that, apart from the endowed and other
schools which have entered the public system by comply-
ing with the Board's regulations and receiving grants,
municipal and county authorities have created in the last
twenty years a fabric of secondary education which owes
nothing to pre-existing institutions. In 1897 less than
two per cent, of the secondary schools of the country
belonged to Local Authorities. In 1904 Municipal and
County Schools numbered sixty-one. By 1912 Local
Authorities had established 329 secondary schools and
taken over fifty-three. In 1919-20, 487 out of 1,021 grant-
aided secondary schools in England were controlled by
'Report of the Board of Education for the year 1919-1920
(Cmd. 1451), pp. 30 and 36.
In this Memorandum, both here and below, we are concerned
only with schools on the grant list of the Board. The schools
" recognised as efficient " by the Board are, of course, more
numerous. They numbered in 1919-20, 1,346 in England and
Wales, with 344,818 pupils. In addition to these there are
" private " schools, of which there appears — a singular fact — to be
no correct record.
24 SECONDARY EDUCATION
Local Authorities. In fifteen years, therefore, the schools
owned and managed by them had been multiplied
approximately eight times. As secondary education
develops^ it is these schools which will more and more
be the dominant and typical element in the system.
Apart from them, the schools which in a more general
sense are Public Secondary Schools, because they comply
with the regulations of the Board and receive grants from
it, increased twenty-fold between 1902 and 1914. The
number of children educated in them to-day is consider-
ably larger than the number educated in secondary
schools of all kinds a generation ago.
Since 1902, therefore, we have nationalised the greater
part of secondary education, though the service which we
provide is still on a scale quite incommensurate both with
the effective demand and— still more — with the educa-
tional needs of the community. Not only so, we have
begun to communalise it. England has not yet imitated
the example set by America and by most of the British
Dominions in making public secondary education free.
But since 1907 it has been the law of the land that all
grant-aided secondary schools, in the absence of special
permission by the Board of Education, must admit one
quarter of their entrants without payment of fees. As
far as some 73,000 children are concerned — nearly one-
third of all the pupils in public secondary schools —
secondary education is already, like primary educa-
tion, free. Certain authorities have gone further and
abolished fees altogether in the secondary schools pro-
vided by them, and certain others propose to do so in
the near future. The Departmental Committee on
Scholarships and Free Places has just recommended that
the payment of fees at grant-aided secondary schools
shall be brought to an end as soon as the financial cir-
cumstances of the nation allow of that reform being
introduced.
Not less important, the quality of secondary education
has improved as well as its quantity. It is probably true
that in the process of organising secondary education the
danger of over-organisation has not been altogether
SECONDARY EDUCATION 25
avoided, that the time of teachers is too often wasted
in clerical duties which, however administratively neces-
sary, are certainly not the business of a headmaster or
headmistress, and that there is a danger of fettering
initiative by insistence that a time table once arranged
shall not be modified. But when over-organisation is
criticised (as it should be), it ought to be compared with
the chaos which existed prior to 1902. No one who will
examine English secondary education to-day in the light
of the conditions revealed, for example, by the census of
1897, in the "private venture" schools, which formed
two-thirds of the total, and the majority of which appear
to have been giving, under the name of "secondary," a
bad elementary education, will be disposed to question
the immense progress which has been made in improving
the quality of the staff, in liberalising the curriculum,
and in encouraging the advanced work which ought to
be the crown of secondary education. So far, indeed,
from the supervision of it by a public department pro-
ducing the deadening uniformity which was dreaded
twenty years ago, most candid observers would agree
that the Board's regulations, by prescribing a minimum
standard as the condition of grant, have brought the
laggards and the eccentric into line and raised the general
average of efficiency, without seriously cramping the
activities of the most enlightened and progressive.
All this means that even before 1918 we had travelled
far from the doctrine of 1870, that "elementary" educa-
tion was the education of a special class which would
obtain no other — what the Committee of Council called in
1839 education "suited to the condition of workmen and
servants" — and secondary education that of their masters.
We had travelled far, but we had not then, and we have
not now, travelled far enough. Slender hand-rails — how
slender we show below — have been built between the
primary and the secondary school. But there is still no
vital or organic connection between them. They remain,
what they were in origin, two separate systems, and the
educational considerations which would unite them have
even yet not been strong enough to overcome the social
26 SECONDARY EDUCATION
traditions and class organisation — the fatal legacy of
English education — which keep them asunder. It is
still true, therefore, that instead of secondary education
being, what it ought to be, the education of the adoles-
cent and primary education preparatory education, the
former too often is a landing without a staircase, and the
latter a staircase without a landing. It is still true that,
as far as more than ninety per cent, of the children are
concerned, the primary school is like the rope which
the Indian ]uggler throws into the air to end in vacancy ;
that while in the United States some twenty-eight per
cent, of the children entering the primary schools pass to
high schools, in England the percentage passing from
elementary to secondary schools is less than ten, and that
of those who do, the majority have hitherto left at, or soon
after, their fifteenth birthday and after a school course
of less than three years.
Nor can it be said that there is at present any clear con-
viction in England as to the part which secondary educa-
tion should play in the life of the community or as to the
lines upon which it should develop in the future. There
are some signs, indeed, as we point out below, that the
policy advocated in this pamphlet has commended itself
to certain of the more progressive Local Education
Authorities, several of whom — we need mention only the
West Riding and Durham among the counties, and
Darlington and West Ham among the county boroughs —
appear to envisage as their goal the development of full-
time secondary education to such a point that the
majority of children may be transferred to a secondary
school at eleven, and remain in it to the age of sixteen.
But the earlier tradition, which subordinated educational
to social and economic considerations, dies hard. Apart
from the children of the well-to-do, who receive secondary
education almost as a matter of course, and whose parents
appear usually, though quite mistakenly, to believe that
they pay the whole cost of it, secondary education is still
commonly regarded as a "privilege" to be conceded only
to the exceptionally brilliant or fortunate. It is still
SECONDARY EDUCATION 27
possible for an association of manufacturers to protest
against any wide extension of it for the rank and file of
children on the ground that it is likely to be "unsuitable
for the employment which they eventually enter."* It
is still possible for the largest education authority in the
country to propose to erect inequality of educational
opportunity into a principle of public policy by solemnly
suggesting, with much parade of philosophical argu-
ments, that the interests of the community require that
the children of well-to-do parents, who pay fees, should
be admitted to public secondary schools on easier intel-
lectual terms than the children of poor parents who can
enter them only with free places, and that the children
who are so contemptible as to be unable to afford second-
ary education without assistance in the form of main-
tenance allowances shall not be admitted unless they
reach a higher intellectual standard still !'
These survivals from the doctrines of 1870 have their
significance. But they need not disturb us overmuch.
It would be a grave injustice to employers to assume
that the pronouncement of the Federation of British
Industries represents the views of a majority even of its
own members : as a matter of fact, indeed, it was immedi-
ately repudiated by a considerable proportion of them.
Against the special pleading of the London County
Council can be set the declarations of Directors of Educa-
tion and of educational theorists, the policy of twenty
other Local Education Authorities, the policy of Parlia-
ment itself. For, whatever the shortcomings of the Educa-
tion Act of 1918, it did two things of capital importance.
For the first time in English history it imposed on Local
Education Authorities the duty of organising higher
* Federation of British Industries Memorandum on Education
(January, 1918), p. 4 : —
At the same time they would very strongly advise that in
selecting children for higher education care should be taken
to avoid creating, as was done, for example, in India, a large
class of persons whose education is unsuitable for the
employment they eventually enter,
s Scheme of the London County Council (July 21, 1920), pp. 81-83.
28 SECONDARY EDUCATION
education ; for the first time it declared that no child
capable of profiting by higher education should be pre-
vented from obtaining it by inability to pay fees. But
in effect this last provision concedes in principle the very
demand for universal secondary education which is
urged by the educationalists and which has been for a
generation the policy of the Labour movement. For
what the most recent expert inquiry tells us is that
seventy-five per cent, of the children in the primary
schools are intellectually capable of profiting by full-
time education up to sixteen.® If secondary education
is to be so organised that three-quarters of the children
are to pass from the primary school to one type or another
of secondary school, then clearly the old conception
both of "elementary" and of secondary education vanishes
for good and all. The latter becomes the education of
all normal children during the years of adolescence from
eleven to sixteen ; the former the preparatory education
of children of whom three out of four will continue it
in a secondary school. The doctrine of the parallel
systems with links between them disappears. The
doctrine of the single system, with two stages embracing
various types of institution, takes its place.
It is such a system which it is the policy of the Labour
movement to establish and of this book to commend.
In doing so, we would emphasise the word "various."
There must be local initiative and experiment. There
is no probability that what suits Lancashire or the
West Riding will appeal equally to London or Glouces-
tershire or Cornwall, and if education is to be an inspira-
tion, not a machine, it must reflect the varying social
traditions, and moral atmospheres, and economic condi-
tions of different localities. And within the secondary
system of each there must be more than one type of
school. Like most of our educational terminology, the
phrase "secondary education" is not free from ambiguity.
No statutory definition of it, so far as we are aware, has
ever been given. But, for our purpose, it is sufficient to
• Report of the Departmental Committee on Scholarships and
Free Places, 1920 (Cmd. 968), p. 9.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 29
adopt the extremely catholic definition of a secondary
school given by the Board as *'a school which provides
a progressive course of general education suitable for
pupils of an age range at least as wide as from twelve
to seventeen."^ Defined by the stage of life for which it
provides, it is the education of the adolescent. Defined
by its curriculum, it assumes that the preparatory work
of developing the simpler processes of thought and
expression has already been accomplished, and that its
pupils are ready to be introduced, at least in outline and
by degrees, to the subjects which will interest them as
adults and an acquaintance with which may reasonably
be expected from educated men and women. Defined
by its purpose, its main aim is not to impart the special-
ised technique of any particular trade or profession, but
to develop the faculties which, because they are the
attribute of man, are not peculiar to any particular class
or profession of men, and to build up the interests which,
while they may become the basis of specialisation at a
later stage, have a value extending beyond their utility
for any particular vocation, because they are the condi-
tion of a rational and responsible life in society.
These general characteristics distinguish the work of
the secondary school from other types of education and
determine its essential quality. As compared with
primary education, it is concerned with children at an
age when they are conscious of new powers and eager to
come into contact with "real" interests. As compared
with technical education, it aims not at the intensive
cultivation of some particular aptitude, but, especially
in its earlier stages, at laying broad foundations of know-
ledge by "a curriculum sufficiently comprehensive in
range to avoid undue narrowing of outlook, and suffi-
ciently varied in character to arouse latent interests and
dormant capacities." It must, in short, be liberal in
spirit, must develop so as to keep pace with the develop-
ment of the pupils, and must retain them sufficiently
^ Regulations for Secondary Schools, 1921 (Cmd. 1399), chap. I,
par. 1.
80 SECONDARY EDUCATION
long to enable the course not merely to be a truncated
fragment, but to possess, on its own plane, some degree
of unity and completeness.
Provided, however, that these general characteristics
are present, the greater the variety among secondary
schools the better for education. They will naturally con-
tinue to differ in the future, though not, if may be hoped,
so widely as to-day, in the length of the school life of their
pupils, and therefore in the nature of the course which
can be offered them, some leaving at sixteen, others
remaining till seventeen or eighteen. Though the subjects
required by the Board, English, one foreign language,
geography, history, mathematics, science, and drawing,
may provide a common nucleus of study, the degree of
emphasis laid on the linguistic, as compared with the
mathematical and scientific side, will naturally vary from
school to school. There will be schools which, without
sacrificing the main object of providing a good general
education, will properly develop a rural or an indus-
trial "bias," and which will make a generous use of
the interest of boys and girls in "practical" work.
There will be others which make a speciality f
humanistic studies. The demand of Labour for the
democratising of secondary education implies no wish to
sacrifice the peculiar excellence of particular institutions
to a pedantic State-imposed uniformity, still less to
forgo the amenities of culture for the sake of a utilitarian
efficiency. The Labour movement may reasonably claim,
indeed, that those for whom it speaks have been freer from
educational Philistinism than many whose educational
opportunities have been greater. Its desire is that what
is weak in the higher education of the country should be
strengthened, and that what is already excellent should
be made accessible to all.
That task will demand the continuous effort of a
generation. It is for the Labour movement to see that
the new order is brought into existence with the utmost
possible rapidity, and that no proposal of cheap alterna-
tives is allowed to divert effort and money from its
SECONDARY EDUCATION 31
creation. Thanks to the educational and social develop-
ments of the last generation, the time has come when
Matthew Arnold's warning, "organise your secondary
education," can be given a wider application than it
could bear in the seventies of last century. What is
needed now is to provide it not merely for the middle
classes, to whom his appeal was primarily addressed,
but for the children of the whole nation. In pressing
for a general system of full-time education up, at least,
to sixteen. Labour can claim with some confidence that
it is both voicing the demands of nearly all enlightened
educationalists and working for the only organisation
of education which will enable the community to make
the best use of the most precious of its natural resources
— the endowments of its children.
We are far, indeed, from making the best use of it to-
day. "The fact to bear in mind at present," The Times
has truly said, "is that the highway which Mr. Fisher
himself helped to construct is effectively blocked. . . .
Our educational system is not economical because of the
waste of power in the elementary schools. The whole
'elementary system' imposes a wrong upon the
2,000,000 children who are ripe for secondary education
and are denied it. Mr. Fisher, at Romford, talked of
there being no need for an official definition of elementary
and secondary education. We entirely agree ; but in fact
there is in existence 'elementary' education whether it
is defined or not, a type of education which is not second-
ary, which does not supply an outfit for life, a truncated
type of instruction which is condemned on all hands and
is responsible for a truncated type of training for
teachers. The whole system is wrong and cannot be
made right by waiving aside definitions. The country
wants no definitions, it wants to be rid, once and for all,
of 'elementary' education. Every child in this country
who is intellectually fit for secondary education is
entitled to it under the express provisions of the Act of
1918, and yet 2,000,000 children are clamouring for it
only to meet ivith a blank refusal, not really on the
ground of economy at all but because ive insist on
c
82 SECONDARY EDUCATION
maintaining an ^elementary' system supplemented by a
totally inadeqiiate number of so-called secondary schools,
containing a large percentage of children who have no
capacity for secondary education at all. The whole
system is wrong, costly, and inefficient. If the Washing-
ton Conference succeeds in realising money for 'the pro-
gress of civilisation,' the first claim on its use is surely
possessed by the children of England. Reconstruction
and a better world have been promised to the nation as
a reward for the losses and tireless labours of the Great
War. There is one supreme way of reconstruction : the
creation of such a system of education as will secure the
physical, the mental, and the spiritual uplifting of the
present generation of children. Those children will
determine the whole character of the world, and moneys
that can be saved from war should be devoted to this,
the main, security for peace. But no money spent will
make the present educational system efficient or effective.
The system has got to be transformed, and every child
has to be assured of the certainty that his capacities will
be wrought into their true values. That cannot be the
case while local authorities have to work under the Act
of 1870. America has no system of 'elementary' educa-
tion. It stands for primary education followed by
universal secondary education, and all that springs from
such a basis. Germany, it is true, still holds down the
children of the agricultural and industrial classes to a
specific limited education. Yet even in Germany the
barriers are falling and the highway is opening. In
England at present the highway is closed. The most
that can be hoped under the present system is an
increased drift of children of uncertain intelligence into
the overcrowded and unorganised secondary schools,
which are devoted according to Mr. Fisher *to the active
business of getting over the examination stile.' Even
if the active business were carried on with any clear
measure of success, it is not true secondary education.
A true secondary system, part and parcel of the people's
schools, is yet to be found.""
8 The Times Educational Supplement, November 9, 1921.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 33
For the Labour movement itself the issue is
vital. The organisation of education on lines of
class, which, though quahfied in the last twenty-
years, has characterised the English system of
public education since its very inception, has been at
once a symptom, an effect, and a cause of the control
of the lives of the mass of men and women by a privi-
leged minority. The very assumption on which it is
based, that all that the child of the workers needs is
"elementary education" — as though the mass of the
people, like anthropoid apes, had fewer convolutions in
their brains than the rich — is in itself a piece of insolence.
It has been maintained, in spite of repeated demands by
the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress for
free and universal secondary education, because those
who have hitherto governed the nation, believing, and
believing with justice, that ignorance and docility go
hand in hand, have taken care to ration the education
of the workers in doses small enough to be innocuous to
the established order. Organised Labour has fought
many ringing battles against that odious doctrine of
class domination in the world of industry, and will fight
more in the future. But, if it is to liberate the lives of
the rising generation, it must also emancipate their
minds. It must lay the foimdations of a democratic
society not only in the workshop and in Parliament, but
in the schools.
CHAPTER II
THE PRESENT POSITION OF
SECONDARY EDUCATION
IN the present chapter we endeavour to present in a
summary form certain broad and elementary facts
as to public secondary education in England, in
particular the evidence as to the unsatisfied demand
for secondary education, the number of children entering
secondary schools, and the length of the school life. The
questions involved are obviously of the first importance.
If there is a keen demand among parents for higher
education, then the community can proceed to increase
the facilities for obtaining it without any anxiety lest
they should not be utilised. If children pass easily to a
secondary school, and neither are refused because there
are no available school places nor prevented from enter-
ing by the poverty of their parents, then, other things
being equal, educational opportunities are widely
distributed, and the nation is making an intelligent use of
its human resources. If, having entered a secondary
school, nearly all of them remain till sixteen and a sub-
stantial proportion to seventeen or eighteen, then not
only is the school course long enough to have a profound
effect on the character and intellect of the vast majority
of children, but there is a large reservoir in the public
secondary schools, fed from all classes of the community,
upon which the Universities and the professions can draw
for recruits. If the majority of boys and girls receive a
full-time education up to sixteen, then, what is even more
important, quite apart from the selection of special talent
for special cultivation, the rank and file of the community
will carry into their v/orking lives the idealism, the
corporate loyalty, the intellectual alertness which are
SECONDARY EDUCATION 35
fostered during the impressionable years of adolescence
by the life of a good school, and their outlook will
gradually permeate and transform the whole structure
of society, as, with all the difficulties which have con-
fronted the primary school, it has been largely trans-
formed since 1870 by primary education. To some of
these larger considerations we return in a later chapter.
At present we are concerned only to set out the facts, and,
where possible, the figures, with such comments as may
be needed to explain them.
THE DEMAND FOR SECONDARY EDUCATION
The most obvious of the facts revealed by an inquiry
into secondary education is the growth which has taken
I place in the last ten years in the public demand for it.
It is sometimes suggested that if the percentage of chil-
dren who pass from primary to secondary schools is small
— a point to which we return later* — the explanation is to
be found, not in any lack of facilities, but in the indif-
ference of the parents. Whether there has even been in
recent times a period in which, given a sufficient number
of school places and adequate machinery for overcoming
the economic obstacles to higher education, there were
not a large number of parents eager to secure it for their
children, is a point which we need not discuss, since it is
only in the last twenty years that these conditions have
begun to be brought into existence. Before 1902 a
system of public secondary education hardly existed.
Before 1907 there was no compulsory provision of free
places. Public policy was dominated by what may be
called the doctrine of 1870, according to which
"elementary" education was not one stage in a course
extending from childhood through adolescence, but a
special and self-sufficient kind of education designed for
a particular section of the community, and that attitude
met, if not with approval, at least with acquiescence, on
the part of the great mass of working class opinion. The
1 See Section II of this chapter and Chapter III.
36 SECONDARY EDUCATION
result was that the advantages of secondary education,
which in any case was almost unobtainable, were hardly
considered, and that a generation ago working class
parents, with rare exceptions, no more thought of sending
their children to a secondary school than they thought
of sending them to Oxford or Cambridge.
The change in the supply of secondary education
which has taken place since 1902 has already been
described. But it is not always realised, except by those
directly engaged in educational administration, that,
greatly as it has increased, it is far from having kept pace
with the growth of the demand. Almost the most
impressive feature of the world of public education to-day
is the fact that, in spite of the economic obstacles which
prevent many children, as to whose ability there is no
doubt, from entering secondary schools, of the serious
difficulties arising, especially in rural districts, from the
distance which must often be travelled in order to reach
school, and of the competitive examination which is the
normal test of admission, the number of children applying
for admission to secondary schools to-day largely exceeds
the accommodation available for receiving them.
The fact is that in the last fifteen years a revolution has
taken place in the educational outlook of a considerable
section of the population, the effects of which are only
now beginnmg to be felt. On the one hand, the increase
in the number of secondary schools, the recjuirement by
the Board since 1905 that intending teachers should have
a secondary education at least up to sixteen, and the
establishment since 1907 of a system of free places for
children from the primary schools, have all combined to
make secondary education a familiar idea among classes
who thirty years ago had hardly heard of it. On the
other hand, during the years from 1914 to 1918 a con-
siderable number of families found themselves,
temporarily at least, in improved economic circum-
stances, and used part of such margin of income as they
possessed to send their children to a secondary school, or,
if they were attending one already, to keep them there
longer. When in Bradford a plebiscite was taken of the
SECONDARY EDUCATION 37
parents of children who, after entering for the scholar-
ship examination, had failed to secure admission to a
secondary school, in order to ascertain whether, if
secondary school accommodation were available,
they would be prepared to keep their children
at school to fifteen-!, more than 1,000 out of
2,800 replied in the affirmative. That result is typical
of the degree to which the provision of a secondary
education for one or more of their children has to-day
become the aspiration of families who, tv/enty years ago,
would have withdrawn them from school at the earliest
age which the law allowed. One consequence is that,
though the secondary school population has more than
doubled within the last twelve years, the increase, so far
from satisfying the demand, has given it an additional
impetus by spreading more widely the knowledge both of
the meaning of secondary education and of the possibility,
under favourable circumstances, of obtaining it. In the
words of the Scheme of Education prepared by the
London County Council : *'It is perhaps the best testi-
mony to the influence of the secondary schools that at the
present time they cannot accommodate the large number
who are seeking admission to them. They have helped
to create a demand which has outrun the supply. "-
How widespread that demand is, is emphasised again
and again in the schemes prepared by Local Education
Authorities under the Act of 1918. In London, where
in March, 1919, there was accommodation for 18,315
boys in the public secondary schools, the numbers
actually in attendance were 18,882. "One of the out-
standing features in connection with education," states
the Birmingham Education Authority, "is the great
increase in the numbers of children anxious to enter
secondary schools and capable of profiting thereby. To
meet the demand, the various schools, with the permis-
sion of the Board, have granted admission almost to the
point of overcrowding. Despite this the Authority has
ijeen reluctantly compelled to refuse admission to numbers
« Scheme of the London County Council (July 21, 1921), p. 28.
88 SECONDARY EDUCATION
of well qualified children." From Leeds comes the
statement that "it seems impossible just now to meet
adequately the demand for secondary education . . . . ;
it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that during the
next ten years there will be required at least 2,000
additional secondary school places." Manchester,
Salford, Bradford, Stockport, Liverpool, Wallasey,
Wakefield, Southampton — to mention only a few towns
out of many — all call attention to the increased number
of applicants for admission to secondary schools and the
present shortage of accommodation. Nor is it only the
large urban authorities with whom the problem is acute.
It is emphasised by the authorities of Staffordshire,
where the director speaks of "the sudden outburst of zeal
for secondary education," of Kent, Devonshire, Essex,
Rutland, Warwickshire, and Lancashire. In the County
of Durham^ states the Director of Education, where the
existing secondary schools provide for 3,000 children,
"although the amount of secondary school accommoda-
tion is so restricted, and many of the parents know how
difficult it is to secure admission on account of the
dearth, about 5,000 elementary school scholars apply
annually for admission to secondary schools."^
The clearest indication of the growing appetite for
secondary education is the fact that large numbers of
children are at present refused admission to secondary
schools, not because they do not reach the intellectual
standard demanded, but because there is no accommoda-
tion for them. The gravity of the present situation is
shown by the following table* : —
" For the facts and quotations in this paragraph the reader is
referred to the schemes prepared under the Act of 1918 for the
authorities of the areas mentioned. The more elaborate of them —
mention may be made in particuhvr of those of London, Kent,
Staffordsliire, Durham, and Birmingham — contain a mine of
valuable information as to the present position of English education.
* Report of the Departmental Committee on Scholarships and
Free Places, 1920 (Cmd. 968), App. I, Table D. (It should be
noted that some imsuccessful candidates for free places are after-
wards admitted as fee-paying pupils.) For fuller particulars see
App. to this Memorandum, Table II.
SECONDARY EDUCATION
89
(iv)
No. of free
places not
taken up at
beginning
of 1919-20
>o CO
00
CD
o 1
in \
05
in
(iii)
Total of (i) and (ii)
10,581
7,470
in
1-^
1,804
1,355
05
rH
co"
'6
4,308
3,908
CO
oo"
in 05
05 O
CO
o
6,273
3,562
in
CO
00
05"
so CO
in CO
X I-
CO
rH
CO__
(ii)
No. of applicants to
same whom school
authorities would have
been ready to admit
had free places been
available
"cS
o
H
5,386
3,394
o
CO
I-
00
1,343
1,011
»0
CO
of
i2
2,265
1,595
o
CO
00
co"
o ■<?
CO ■*
CO
q_
rH
O
CQ
3,121
1,799
o
01
05
CO i^
O 00
l> >0
rH
(i)
No. of applicants for
admission as fee-
paying pupils to
grant-aided secondary
schools excluded at
beginning of 1919-20
for want of
accommodation
5,195
4,076
rH
oT
1-H •»«
CO -4
■* CO
"0
o
00
CO
o
2,043
2,313
CO
CO
rH CC
T^ CD
CO rH
05
I-
O
w
ir
r"
o;
1 CO
) CO
J. i".,
r-{
rH
05
o o
CO
01
CO
Q.i
'. !»
. JS
do
3
. 2
o
> 4->
3
3
O
c
It
•i
W c
W 3
►4 C
ID
Xi
3
2
o
XI
c
3
o
'a
4-
C
40 SECONDARY EDUCATION
It will be seen from these figures that, quite apart from
any proposed extension of secondary education, the
existing accommodation is gravely inadequate even to the
present demand. Actually 9,271 children were excluded
from secondary schools in England at the beginning of
1919-20 because there was no accommodation of any
kind for them, and a further 8,780 because, though they
reached the standard required, there were not sufficient
free places to make it possible to take them in. In
1919-20, therefore, had the necessary provision been
available, the secondary school population of England
would have been increased by something over 18,000
children, a number equal to between seven and eight
per cent, of the existing population of grant-aided
secondary schools, and rather more than the total popu-
lation in grant-aided secondary schools in the counties
and county boroughs of Cumberland, Durham, Northum-
berland, and Westmoreland. If 500 is taken as the
number of children in a secondary school, then, in order
merely to meet the demand actually made in 1919-20,
thirty-six more such schools would have been needed.
In reality, of course, the number rejected is not an
accurate measure of the number desirous of obtaining
secondary education. On the one hand, as is pointed
out by the Director of Education for the County of
Durham in the passage quoted above, a considerable,
though uncertain, number of parents refrain from apply-
ing for the admission of their children to secondary
schools, because they know that, in the present shortage
of accommodation, their application is almost certain
to be refused. On the other hand, these figures relate
to England as a whole, and thus conceal the special
deficiencies of the more backward areas. In South
Staffordshire, for example, the Director of Education for
the county states that the present secondary school popu-
lation (to be increased by the creation of five new
schools) is at what he describes as "the scandalously low
rate"^ of 2.03 boys and 2.08 girls per 1,000 of the
population. It is no consolation to a parent who sees
* Scheme of Education, Staffordshire County Council l<2ducation
Committee, p. 21 .
SECONDARY EDUCATION 41
his child deprived of a secondary education because he
is not within reach of any school, in, say, Herefordshire
or Huntingdon, to know that in Lancashire or the West
Riding or London secondary schools are more abund-
ant. The amount of accommodation must necessarily
vary from area to area. But it would obviously be desir-
able that it should bear some definite relation to the
child population. The ideal to be aimed at, in short,
would be that there should be a minimum standard of
secondary school places based on the number of children
in attendance at the primary schools. It would appear
from the figures given in the Appendix, Tables I. and
III., that that result is very far from being attained.
These figures do not pretend to complete accuracy.
But even when allowance is made for a considerable
margin of error, it will be seen that there is nothing
approaching a constant relation between the primary
school population and the number of children attending
public secondary schools, which, owing to the fact that
the secondary schools are almost everywhere full to over-
crowding, is for practical purposes equivalent to the
secondary school accommodation. Broadly speaking,
it would probably be true to say that the factors
determining the supply of secondary school accom-
modation are partly historical, partly economic,
some districts which have to-day a relatively
small population possessing a comparatively large number
of old endowed schools, which have been converted since
1902 into grant-earning secondary schools, others having
made up for the lack of old foundations by possessing
resources which enabled them to build county and
municipal secondary schools. To some extent these two
factors balance each other. But they are far from doing
so entirely. West Ham is populous but poor; Cornwall
sparsely populated but relatively well supplied with
secondary schools.
The result is that educational opportunities vary
widely from district to district. As between urban and
rural districts, in spite of the higher proportion of
secondary to primary scholars shown by certain
42 SECONDARY EDUCATION
county authorities, it is normally the rural districts
in which secondary education is least accessible. It is
not merely that the proportion of children in secondary
schools per 1,000 of the population is, on the whole,
higher in county boroughs than in counties, but that the
population of an agricultural district is not concentrated,
and that therefore, even when a county is relatively well
supplied with schools, their distance from the homes of
many of the children is a serious obstacle. A single
example may serve to illustrate the conditions which, in
some rural areas, still make secondary education almost
unobtainable by a considerable proportion of the popula-
tion. Gloucestershire (thanks to the piety and wool
trade of the later middle ages) is by no means badly
supplied with secondary schools. But out of its eleven
urban districts there is one, and out of its twenty-two
rural districts there are actually ten, in which no
secondary school at all is in existence. For a population,
in fact, of over 50,000 persons, with some 5,000 children
between eleven and fifteen years of age, secondary educa-
tion is out of the question. It is obviously impossible
to state what its demand for secondary education would
be in different circumstances, because the demand does
not become vocal till facilities for satisfying it are brought
into existence. What is clear is that to the unsatisfied
demand, which, as proved by applications for admission
to secondary schools, already exists, must be added a
large potential demand which only requires opportunity
to find expression. If the experience during the last
decade of those areas which are relatively well equipped
with secondary schools is a safe indication, the first result
of bringing secondary education within reach of sections
of the population to whom it is at present almost inaccess-
ible will be to create a demand for it with which only the
most strenuous effort will enable the supply to keep pace.
II
THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN ATTENDING
PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS
We turn next to the question of the diffusion of
secondary education — the question, that is to say, of the
SECONDARY EDUCATION 43
number of children who, at one time and another, for
a shorter or longer period, do in fact enter a secondary
school, and of the proportion which such children form
of those leaving the primary schools.®
The latest estimate is that contained in the report of
the Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free
Places,' which gives the number of children in grant-
aided secondary, junior technical, and similar schools
per 1,000 of the population.
The figures are as follows : —
• This question is crucial, but the answer to it is not easy. It is
not merely that no reliable information exists as to the endowed
boarding schools and private schools preparatory to them, with
which we are not concerned. It is that no satisfactory figures are
available even as to those schools which are part of the system of
public education. The Board publishes statistics of the number of
boys and girls in schools aided by grants and schools recognised as
efficient. But it does not state how many children are in secondary
schools per thousand of the population in each area ; still less does
it reveal, what is more important, the number of children in each
area annually leaving primary schools, and the number of children
entering secondary schools from them and from other sources.
Figures have from time to time been published by private
investigators, by official committees and commissions, and by
Local Education Authorities. But they have the disadvantage
that they appear rarely to be collected on the same basis. Some
inquiries estimate the number of children in secondary schools
per thousand of population, some the number per thousand children
in the corresponding age groups, some the number per thousand
children between ten and eleven in the elementary schools, and some
the percentage of children leaving the primary schools who
enter secondary schools in a given year. The commonest basis is
probably the first. It is also the least illuminating, but has the
advantage of making possible a comparison with foreign countries,
where it appears to be usually adopted. The most useful, if it were
available, would be the last. In view of the great importance of
the subject, it may be suggested that the Board should publish
every year, in its annual report, figures (a) of the children leaving
the primary schools in the area of each authority, (6) the number
of children from primary schools entering secondary schools
with and without free places, (c) the number of children entering
secondary schools from private schools. Labour members of Local
Education Authorities should press for the annual publication of
similar figures for their respective areas.
^ Report of the Departmental Committee on Scholarships and
Free Places, 1920 (Cmd. 968), App. I, Table A.
44
SECONDARY EDUCATION
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SECONDARY EDUCATION 45
It will be seen from this table that, in the first term
of the year 1919-20, the proportion of children
in grant-aided secondary schools (including pre-
paratory departments), junior technical, and similar
schools was 8.7 per 1^000 of the population in England
and 10.2 in Wales. If preparatory departments and
junior technical and similar schools are excluded, it was
7.6 per 1,000 in England and 10.05 per 1,000 in Wales.
Between different parts of the country there are consider-
able variations. Everywhere, except in the East Central
Division, the number of children per 1,000 in secondary
schools was higher in the county boroughs than in the
counties. The area in which it was greatest was in the
county boroughs of the South-Westem Division, where
it was 12.8, and of the North-Eastem Division, where it
was 12.2. It was lowest in the counties of the Northern
Division (6.1), and of the North-Western Division (6.2).
Statistics of the number of children per 1,000 attend-
ing a secondary school are useful for the purpose of
comparison with foreign countries, and for offering a
simple standard by which Local Education Authorities can
work. They do not, however, answer the question : How
many children pass from primary to secondary schools ?
And this question is vital, since upon the answer to it
depends whether equality of educational Opportunity
is a reality or a fiction. Unfortunately, no entirely
satisfactory evidence on this point is available. The
figures as to the composition of the population of second-
ary schools, which are sometimes quoted as proving that
secondary education is easily accessible, are not, of
course, relevant. What they show is that of the children
who enter a secondary school roughly sixty to seventy
per cent, have come from a primary school. But,
in so far as secondary school accommodation is deficient,
or as parents of small means are unable to send their
children to secondary schools, the fact that about two-
thirds of the pupils in them have previously attended
primary schools would be quite compatible with
secondary education being — what in fact it still very
largely is — a luxury obtained by only an insignificant
46 SECONDARY EDUCATION
percentage of children. What it is important to know,
and what these figures do not tell us, is not merely what
proportion of secondary school pupils have attended a
primary school, but what proportioyi of children leav-
ing the primary school begin, at any rate, a secondary
education.
While, however, no exact answer can be given to this
question, estimates have from time to time been put
forward by means of which an approximate judgment of
the situation can be formed. In 1912, in a memorandum
prepared for the Royal Commission on the Civil Service,
the Board of Education stated that "from calculations
recently made by the Board for other purposes it appears
that of the children leaving the public elementary schools
in that year (i.e., in 1911) about one child in twenty-three
goes to a public secondary school." The Departmental
Committee on Juvenile Education in Relation to Employ-
ment after the War made the following estimate of the
number and percentage of children in each age group
"under full-time instruction in State-aided and other*
secondary schools recognised by the Board of
Education" : —
12-13 13-14 14-15 15-16 16-17 17-18
32,709 36,455 30,722 20,628 11,522 4,005
(4-68) (5-28) (4-47) (3-08) (1-71) (0-74)
Finally, in 1920 the Departmental Committee on
Scholarships and Free Places published figures of the
number of children admitted to grant-aided secondary
schools, junior technical schools, and similar institutions
during 1918-19, compared with the number of children
between the ages of ten and eleven in the primary
* Final Report of the Departmental Committee on Juvenile
Education in Relation to Employment after the War, 1017 (Cmd,
8512). The " other secondary schools " were presumably schools
" recognised as eflicicnt " by the Board. The figures were probably
out of date when they appeared, as they seem to have been based
on returns relating to the year 1911 (sec Report, p. 31).
SECONDARY EDUCATION
47
schools on January 31, 1919. The most important facts
which they reveal are set out in the follo^\dng table" : —
Percentage of admis-
sions of children/rom
Percentage of total
public elementary
admissions to grant-
schools into grant-
aided secondary
earning secondary
schools, junior tech-
schools, junior tech-
nical schools, and
nical institutes, and
similar schools to
similar schools to
numbers in public
number in public
elementary schools
elementary schools
between ten and
between ten and
eleven
eleven
England—
■
Counties
8-8
13-3
County boroughs .
10-7
150
Total
9-5
13-9
Wales —
Counties
14-6
16-3
County boroughs .
12-3
140
Total
14-4
15-8
These figures do not show with precision the propor-
tion of cliildren who pass from primary schools to
secondary schools. But they make possible an approxi-
mate estimate. The Board's calculation for the year
1911 may be taken as a minimutn, which is now
out of date. In that year the proportion of
ex-elementary school children entering secondary
schools was 4.3 per cent., and since the popula-
tion of English grant-a ided secondary schools increased
» Cmd. 968, App. I, Table B. The first column in the table
printed above (percentage of admissions from pubHc elementary
schools, (fee.) does not appear in Table B of the Report, but has been
calculated from the figures contained in it. For the figures on
which those given above are based see Table II in Appendix of the
present Memorandum^ ^
48 SECONDARY EDUCATION
from 151,045 in 1911 to 308,372 in 1919, it may be
assumed that the proportion has increased. On the
other hand, the figure given by the Departmental Com-
mittee on Scholarships and Free Places is a maximum^
and it would not be correct to suppose that the proportion
borne by entrants to secondary schools to children leaving
primary schools was in fact represented by it. It will
be seen that in the year 1918-1919 the entrants from
primary schools to grant-aided secondary schools, junior
technical schools, and similar institutions stood to each
100 of the boys and girls in primary schools between
ten and eleven (at which age entrance to secondary
schools begins) in the proportion of 9.5 in England and
of 14.4 in Wales. This proportion is obviously higher
than that which would be reached by taking the figure
of entrants into grant-aided secondary schools alone.
Further, as up to 1921 children left the primary
schools from the age groups thirteen to fourteen and
fourteen to fifteen, in addition to entering part-time
employment at twelve, this figure is also higher than
that which would result from comparing entrants to
secondary schools with all children leaving primary
schools.
Where exactly between the minimum of 4.3 per cent,
and the maximum of 9.5 per cent, the figure ought at
the present moment actually to be placed it is not easy
to determine. In Manchester, which is certainly not
abnormally backward, the Director of Education states
that "it would be approximately correct to say that out
of 12,000 children finally leaving the Manchester elemen-
tary schools every year only about GOO enter the
Manchester secondary schools.'" It must, of course, be
borne in mind that the number of C7it rants is not to be
read as implying that an equivalent number of children
remain under education in secondary schools for any
considerable length of time — a point to which we return
later. As is shown by the figures quoted above from the
"Spurley Hey, Director of FAucatlon, Manchester Educational
Problems (December, 1918), p. 24,
SECONDARY EDUCATION 49
Report on Juvenile Education in Relation to Employment
after the War, the school life of most of them is deplor-
ably short; the percentage of each age group receiving
secondary education is, in fact, at its maximum between
thirteen and fourteen, and falls rapidly after fourteen.
Further, it must be remembered that of the pupils in
secondary schools a considerable proportion have sought
admission to them with a view to becoming qualified as
teachers. It is, of course, eminently desirable that
intending teachers should receive a secondary school
education. But in considering the influence of public
secondary education on national life, it is proper to
remember that hitherto it has been largely, though not
predominantly, occupied with providing recruits for a
single profession, that of teaching.
Ill
THE DURATION OF THE SCHOOL LIFE
In the preceding section we have been concerned with
the entrants to public secondary schools. But obviously,
in order to form an opinion of the diffusion of secondary
education, it is necessary to know not only the numbers
entering the secondary schools in the first instance, but
the average length of their school life. Between about
five and nine per cent, of the children leaving the primary
schools are admitted to secondary schools. How long
do they remain in them?
The short duration of the school life among boys and
girls admitted to secondary schools has been a constant
complaint of educational reformers for the past twenty
years. The advantage of even a short period of attend-
ance at a secondary school must not, it is true, be under-
estimated, nor must remedies be proposed which would
lengthen it only at the cost of drastically reducing the
number entering secondary schools in the first instance.
Even if the supply of free places and maintenance allow-
ances is very largely increased, economic pressure will
continue to compel a large number of parents to with-
draw their children from school at, or soon after, their
50 SECONDARY EDUCATION
fifteenth birthday. To lay down (as was suggested by
the Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free
Places) that only those children should enter a secondary
school who are prepared to remain in it to at least sixteen
would be, in effect, to deprive a considerable number of
children of any secondary education at all on the ground
that it is desirable for them to obtain more of it. We
are inclined, therefore, to question the wisdom of the
paragraph (chapter I., paragraph 2) introduced into the
Regulations of 1921, which declares that a school will not
be recognised for payment of grants unless . . . ."the
school life of the pupils normally extends to at least the
age of sixteen." It is, of course, most desirable that
children should remain at school till that age. But
can it honestly be said that the community has
taken sufficient pains to smooth the road to higher educa-
tion to be in a position to impose disabilities on those
who travel only part of the way along it ?
While, however, the expediency of insisting that all
children entering a secondary school shall remain till at
least sixteen may be doubted, the emphasis of the Board
of Education on the importance of lengthening the school
life will command general approval. However much
value may be attached to even a short period spent in
the environment of a good secondary school, it will be
generally agreed that, up, at least, to sixteen, each
successive year gives a more than proportionate
return. It is in the later parts of the school course that
a child reaps much of the benefit of the work which has
gone before, and every pupil who leaves before the age
of sixteen represents, if not, as is sometimes said, a waste
of educational resources, at least a plan of development
which has been interrupted before it could mature.
The following figures'' show (i) the average leaving age
of boys and girls attending grant-aided secondary schools
from 1907-1913; (ii) the average length of their school
life ; (iii) their age distribution.
^^ See the unuual reports of the Board of Education.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 51
Average Leaving Age
1907-10 1908-11 1909-12 1910-13
Boys 15-6 15-7 15-7 15-7
Girls 160 160 160 160
Average Length of School Life
1907-10 1908-11 1909-12 1910-13
Boys 2-7 2-8 2-8 2-9
Girls 2-7 2-9 2-10 21 1
Age Distribution of Secondary School Pupils
October 1 Under 10 10-12 12-16 16-18 18+ Total
1914 14,385 30,468 120,176 14,488 090 180,507
1915 15,710 33,213 124,910 14,646 858 189,487
1916 17,225 36,317 130,306 14,096 815 198,759
1917 19,577 40,709 141,498 14,506 689 216,979
1918 23,187 48,723 157,559 16,018 703 246,190
1919 27,027 56,359 177,988 19,593 1,038 282,005
1920 29,232 60,505 194,665 22,762 1,208 308,372
These figures show that, while the school life had some-
what lengthened between 1907 and 1913, it was still
lamentably short. On the average, boys left at just over
fifteen and a half, after spending two and three-quarter
years in school, girls at sixteen, after spending just under
three years. Complete figures for a later date than 1913
are not obtainable, but such information as is available
does not suggest that there has been any substantial
change. It should be observed, further, that in so far
as a lengthening of the school life has taken place, it has
been due rather to a reduction of the age of admission
than to a postponement of the age of leaving, children
under ten forming 7.9 per cent, of all secondary school
pupils in 1914, and 9.4 per cent, in 1920. The result is
deplorable. It is that, as the following figures show,'^
the age group containing the largest number of second-
ary school children is actually that from thirteen to
fourteen, and that the smallest is between sixteen and
seventeen.
*^ Final Report of the Departmental Committee on Juvenile
Education in Relation to Employment after the War, 1917
(Cmd. 8512).
52
SECONDARY EDUCATION
Age group 12-13 18-14 14-15 15-16 16-17 17-18
Number 32,709 36,455 30,722 20,628 11,522 4,905
Percentage of
all children in
same age -
group 4-68 5-28 4-47 3-08 1-71 0-74
In other words wastage begins immediately after the
fourteenth birthday, and at the age of sixteen to seven-
teen, the age immediately preceding entry into a Univer-
sity, less than two per cent, of the boys and girls of the
country were receiving, when these figures were pub-
lished, a full-time education in a public secondary school.
One other point deserves attention, because it reveals
the economic reasons which shorten the school life. The
following figures give the average school life and leaving
age of a group of boys and girls in the year 1912-13,
distinguishing between fee-paying and free pupils : —
TOMTIT AVTl
Number who
left under
twelve years
of age
Pupils who left after r
twelve years of a
eaching
AND Wales
Total
No.
Average school
life (omitting
school life below
age of twelve)
Average
age
at
leaving
Boys —
(i) Fee-paying
pupils . . .
(ii) Free pupils
1,981
86
16,588
8,319
2-6
3-3
15-5
1510
(iii) Total
2,067
24,907
2-9
157
Girls—
(i) Fee-paying
pupils . . .
(ii) Free pupils
1,376
39
12,088
7,253
2-6
310
15-8
16-6
(iii) Total
1,415
19,341
30
160
It will be seen that among the boys the free pupils
remained at school on the average nine months, and
among the girls sixteen months, longer than the fee-pay-
ing pupils. The moral is obvious. If the community
SECONDARY EDUCATION 53
desire to increase the number of children in the advanced
stages of secondary education, it must increase the
provision of free places. If the public will find the
money the pupils will find themselves. ^^
^' It should be noted, however, that the discrepancy is somewhat
exaggerated in the figures given above, since some Authorities
require free-placers to sign an agreement to remain at school till a
certain age.
CHAPTER III
THE PROGRAMME OF LABOUR
THE NEED OF INCREASING THE PUPILS IN
SECONDARY SCHOOLS
THE evidence summarised in the preceding
chapter shows that the pupils in grant-aided
secondary schools, junior technical schools,
and similar institutions form about 8.7 per
1,000 of the population in England and 10.2 in Wales,
and that of the children leaving primary schools in
England something over five per cent, and under nine
per cent, are admitted for a shorter or longer period
to secondary schools. It is evident that, compared with
the conditions of thirty years ago, these figures repre-
sent a genuine movement in the direction of democratis-
ing secondary education. But it is evident also that
that movement has hardly more than begun. As long
as more than seven-eighths of the children who leave the
primary schools do not even begin a course of higher
education, and of those who begin it the majority end it
before the age of fifteen, the waste of human capacity
suffered by the community is as tragic as the baulked
aspirations of children and their parents, and the so-
called "educational ladder" is, not a ladder, but a greasy
pole. The most urgent educational task before the
nation is to take at the earliest possible date the
measures needed to secure a large increase in the
secondary school population.
The paramount importance of securing a far wider
diffusion of secondary education than exists to-day is
probably, indeed, the point upon which there is at pre-
sent the most general agreement among educationalists.
It has been emphasised by Parliament, by Local Educa-
tion Authorities, and by the Board of Education, as well
54
SECONDARY EDUCATION 65
as by students of education. The Act of 1918, which
for the first time has made the provision of secondary
education a statutory duty, has laid upon Education
Authorities the obligation of using their powers in such
a way that "adequate provision shall be made to secure
that children and young persons shall not be debarred
from receiving the benefits of any form of education of
which they are capable of profiting through inability to
pay fees." Education Authorities themselves, as has
been shown in a preceding chapter, have, with hardly an
exception, stated that the provision for secondary
education in their areas is gravely deficient. The most
recent expert inquiry has stated that the secondary
school population ought to be more than doubled, and,
possibly, in a more distant future multiplied eight-fold,
and has urged a large increase in the number of free
places. The Times has pleaded for universal secondary
education. The President of the Board of Education
has stated that "the primary need of the moment is the
multiplication of secondary schools."^
Nor can we afford to neglect the experience of other
nations. England has gone farther than France and
Germany to bridge the gulf between primary and
secondary education. In most parts of the United
States- and of the British Dominions it has never existed
to the same extent. In the former in 1913, 14.4 per
1,000 of the population were attending high schools,
compared with 8.7 in England, and while less than nine
per cent, of children leaving primary schools entered
grant-aided secondary schools in England, the percentage
of children entering primary schools in the United States
who passed from them to high schools was actually
twenty-eight. In the United States, as in England, the
wastage during the secondary school course is heavy,
and less than one-third of those who entered the high
school appear to remain in it until their fourth year. But
1 House of Commons, August 12, 1919.
2 For facts and figures as to the United States of America see
Sandiford, Comparative Education, pp. 58 seq., and for Canada,
ibid., pp. 402 seq.
66 SECONDARY EDUCATION
in the United States secondary education is normally a
continuation of primary education, not, as in England,
a separate and parallel system, to which some slender
bridges have been thrown. For a child to pass from
the latter to the former is not an achievement attained
only by exceptional ability or good fortune, but a
common, and, in certain States, almost a normal,
incident.'
There is, therefore, a general agreement as to the
necessity of increasing the number of pupils in secondary
schools and, in particular, of smoothing the passage
from primary to secondary education. In practice,
however, that agreement is compatible with the widest
diversity of opinion as to the extent of the provi-
sion to be made. The Departmental Committee
on Scholarships and Free Places,* while declining
to commit itself positively to any definite figure,
mentioned three standards as having been submitted
to it, that of ten secondary school places per 1,000
of the population proposed by the London County
Council, which it regarded as a minimum ; that of twenty
per 1,000, which it regarded itself as "a better basis for
reasonable development," and that based on the opinion
of educational experts that seventy-five per cent, of the
children in the primary schools, roughly 2,250,000
children, apart from those who have not attended a
secondary school, were "intellectually capable of profit-
ing by full-time instruction up to or beyond sixteen." If
the first standard were adopted, the number of children
attending secondary schools in England and Wales would
be 360,000, or only 05,000 more than it is to-day; if the
second, it would be 720,000; on the view that three-
quarters of the children should attend secondary schools,
■ Table III in the Appendix sliows (i) the number of children
enrolled in grant-aided secondary schools in certain counties and
county boroughs in England for each thousand in the primary
schools ; (ii) the number of children enrolled in high schools in
different States of the Union for each thousand in the primary
schools.
* Op. cit., pp. 9-10.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 57
the ratio of school places to the population would not,
as now, be 8.7 per 1,000, nor even, as the committee think
should be the standard for the immediate future, twenty
per 1,000, but 62.5 per 1,000. The secondary school
population would, in fact, be increased about eight-fold.
The schemes of development submitted by Local
Education Authorities show a similar diversity of opinion.
Virtually all are agreed that, in order to be reasonably
adequate, secondary school accommodation must be
largely increased. But here their agreement ceases, and
to the question, "What is adequate?" a variety of
answers is given. The scheme of Gloucestershire looks
forward to the time when secondary education will be
universal — *'free and compulsory up to the age of six-
teen." West Ham, while stating that "free full-time
education for all to the age of sixteen" is "the goal of
the development of the stage of educational advance with
which the present scheme is concerned," proposes that
in the immediate future secondary school accommodation
shall be provided for the comparatively modest number
of 8,000 children, or slightly over ten per 1,000 of the
population. The London County Council is content to
reaffirm the standard of ten per 1,000 of the population
which was stated to be necessary as long ago as 1909,
and proposes, as an alternative to further increasing
secondary schools, to raise the accommodation of the
central schools from 23,000 to 40,000 places. The
counties of Durham and Devonshire propose to take as
the guide to their immediate policy the ratio of twelve
per 1,000 ; Kent of fifteen per 1,000 ; Norwich of eighteen
per 1,000, and York of twenty per 1,000.®
So far as the immediate task of meeting the demand
for secondary education is concerned, these differences
of opinion are not for the moment of any very great
practical importance. The significant fact is that a large
increase in the secondary school population is generally
recognised to be essential. Even if the standard
taken were only sixteen per 1,000, the effect would be
* See the schemes of the authorities mentioned.
58 SECONDARY EDUCATION
approximately to double it. To find school places and to
provide teachers for some 570,000 instead of 294,000
children will demand all the energies of Local Educa-
tional Authorities during the next five or ten years. To
secure that, when provided, the places are occupied, that
children are not debarred from secondary education by
"inability to pay fees," and that a larger proportion
remain to the age of sixteen will raise the whole ques-
tion of the desirability of freeing secondary education.
To that question we turn in a subsequent chapter.
But opinion both as to the desirability of freeing
secondary education and as to the figure to be
taken as the standard of adequacy in the pro-
vision of school places depends in the last resort upon
the view which is held of the place of the secondary
school in the educational system and of the proper
relation between primary and secondary education.
The different standards to which different authorities
propose to work are due not merely to the varying econo-
mic circumstances of different localities, but, at any
rate, in some cases, to a radical, if sometimes not fully
realised, divergence of educational and social theory.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the general
agreement as to the urgency of an immediate extension
of secondary education makes it superfluous to consider
the larger questions of policy involved. We ought in this
matter to learn from past experience. The refusal to
view the different stages of education as a unified whole,
which was almost a principle (if not, indeed, the only
principle) of public policy down to 1902, resulted in an
unnatural division of primary from secondary education,
in the starving of the secondary schools and the perver-
sion of the primary schools from their proper function
of providing a preparatory education, and in the multi-
plication of makeshifts — higher grade schools, higher
elementary schools, higher tops, evening classes — to
repair the mischief caused by a divorce which should
never have existed.
What we have to ensure now is that, in the development
of a system of higher education, that mistake is not
SECONDARY EDUCATION 59
repeated. There is ample room for variety of institu-
tions, and no one would propose that experiment should
be sacrificed to any pedantic passion for uniformity.
But between the policy of what is virtually universal
secondary education, urged by some Local Education
Authorities and supported by the statement of the
Departmental Committee that seventy-live per cent, of
the children in the primary schools are capable of
profiting by full time instruction up to sixteen or beyond,
and the policy of providing secondary school places for a
smaller fraction of the children leaving the primary
schools and acconamo dating the remainder in central
schools organised as part of the elementary system, and
part time continuation classes, there is a clear gulf of
principle. If the latter policy is adopted, vested in-
terests will inevitably be created, which will make it diffi-
cult at a later date to recur to the former ; if the former,
then effort should not be wasted on creating institutions
appropriate only to the latter. In the words of the
Director of Education for the County of Gloucestershire :
"When secondary education becomes free and com-
pulsory up to the age of sixteen, as no doubt it will
within such time as Authorities in their schemes should
survey and provide for, then inferior substitutes (central
schools and continuation schools) will have to be re-
placed ; and either they will be scrapped and there will
be great waste, or they will be absorbed into the new
system, which henceforth will be handicapped by all the
disadvantages of unsuitable buildings designed for
another purpose, and not easily adaptable to a new one,
and staffs of teachers selected for entirely different work
and trained under conditions foreign to those of the
secondary school.'"^
This forecast may be thought to be unduly
optimistic, but its emphasis on the need of planning
development with a definite object is sound. Whether
the policy, already adopted by the London County
* Gloucestershire Education Committee, Interim Scheme in
Respect of Secondary Education (January 31, 1920).
60 SECONDARY EDUCATION
Council, of fixing a comparatively low standard
of secondary school accommodation, and providing for
other children by means of central schools and continua-
tion classes is wise or not, clearly, once it is generally
adopted, it will be difficult to reverse it. It is of para-
mount importance, therefore, that, in planning educa-
tional policy under the Act of 1918, an attempt should
be made to take into account the longer future. We have
to consider, not merely the immediate necessity of
increasing the provision for secondary education, but
the relations which, when schemes have had time to
work themselves out, it is desired to establish between
the primary and the secondary school.
II
SECONDARY EDUCATION FOR ALL
The principal views which have been taken of the place
of the secondary school in the educational system are
three. They may be called respectively the doctrine of
the two systems or of separation, the doctrine of selec-
tion or of the educational ladder, and the doctrine of the
single system. From the time when in 1839 the Com-
mittee of the Privy Council expressed the wish that ele-
mentary instruction should be kept in close touch with
"the condition of workmen and servants" down almost
to the end of the nineteenth century, public education in
England developed as a class institution. "Elementary"
education was the education of "the independent poor,"
established for them by the governing classes for
religious, economic, and humanitarian reasons.
Secondary education was the education of the well-to-do.
The most obvious fact about the system was that the divi-
sion between them was based, not on educational, but
on social and economic, considerations. Educational
differentiation began not after the primary school, but
beknc it, and was related not to the future of the chil-
dren but to the position of the parents. Secondary
education was not built upon primary education, but was
parallel to it. They were, in short, not different stages
SECONDARY EDUCATION 61
in a single system, but different systems of education
designed for classes whose capacities, needs, and social
functions were supposed to be necessarily so different as
to make a unified system at once impracticable and
disastrous.
This conception of secondary education has long been
abandoned by such educationalists (if any) as ever held
it, and has ceased for nearly a generation to be the
dominant force in public policy. But, in spite of the
progress made in the last twenty years, its evil legacy
is not yet exhausted. When after 1902 the nation began
to set in earnest about the creation of a systenti of public
secondary education, the character of "elementary'*
education was already fixed. It was to last till thirteen or
fourteen. It was to be the education of children the
vast majority of whom would receive no further educa-
tion after they had ended it. It was, in short, not pre-
paratory education, but working-class education.
Into these facts and the ideas on which they were based
the new secondary education had to be, or at any rate in
fact was, fitted. It was not considered whether, once
a public system of secondary education were established,
it would not be desirable to modify primary education
in such a way as to make it preparatory to adolescent
education beginning between eleven and twelve. It was
not asked whether, if secondary education was good for
some children, it would not be good for all. It was not
attempted, in short, to make secondary and primary
education successive stages instead of parallel systems.
Nor, had such ideas been mooted, is it probable that they
would have met with anything but derision, or that, had
they commanded support, it would have been possible
in the circumstances of the time to give effect to them.
What was actually done was to establish an empirical
compromise between the traditional conception of
"elementary" education as the education of a class and
the new demand that opportunities of full-time secondary
education should be given to some of the more intelli-
gent of the children attending the primary schools.
The practical form which that compromise assumed Wf^s
62 SECONDARY EDUCATION
a system of selection. The existing assumptions and
organisation of "elementary" education were retained
intact. But, by means of scholarships, free places, and
maintenance allowances, bridges were thrown — how
slender they still are has been shown in a preceding
chapter — between it and the newly-organised system of
public secondary education.
Selection for higher education by means of scholar-
ships has been for the last twenty years the accepted
policy of English education. The number of children pass-
ing by means of them from primary to secondary schools,
though still small, has steadily increased, and if the
schemes prepared by Local Education Authorities under
the Act of 1918 are carried out, it will increase more
rapidly in the future. But the policy of selection may
obviously be given two opposite interpretations. If, as is
hinted miglit be the case by the Departmental Com-
mittee on Scholarships and Free Places, the effect of it
were that seventy-five per cent, of the children in primary
schools passed to secondary schools, then selection
would be hardly distinguishable from universal provision.
When it results, as in certain areas to-day, in the
pupils in the secondary schools amounting to less than
two per 1,000 of the population, selection is hardly dis-
tinguishable from no provision at all.
One may, in fact, proceed either by inclusion or
by exclusion, either by endeavouring to ensure
that all children other than the obviously sub-
normal shall pass at adolescence to some form of
secondary school, or by treating full-time second-
ary education as an exceptional privilege to be reserved
for children of exceptional capacity. The plan of
development suggested in the schemes of West Ham and
of Gloucestershire would lead in the first direction. The
scheme of the London County Council, or the views
expressed in the scheme of the Education Authority of
Salford that a "secondary school is intended for those
who will prepare for some of the more responsible posi-
tions in after life," or the opposition of the Federation
of British Industries to a wide diffusion of higher
SECONDARY EDUCATION 68
education on the ground that it would "unfit children for
the employments they eventually enter," or the proposal
of the Select Committee on Educational Expenditure to
restrict the access to secondary schools by raising their
fees, would lead to the second/
On the one view, primary and secondary education
are stages in a single process through which all
normal children ought to pass, because all, though
in different degrees, will respond to them ; the
measure of the success of both is the heightened human
capacity which they evoke. On the other view, the
primary and secondary school represent, not stages
of education, but systems of education. There must be
facilities for passing from the one to the other, for the
brighter children of the working classes are needed to
supply the educated personnel — the "intellectual prole-
tariat" — which modem industry, in its higher ranges,
requires. But equality of educational provision up to
sixteen is impossible of attainment and mischievous
could it be attained. Industry needs cannon fodder as
well as staff officers, and it is not desirable that the
minds of the rank and file, even if capable of develop-
ment (which the Federation of British Industries doubt),
should be unduly developed. When the cream of intelli-
gence has been skimmed off by scholarships, the mass of
children must pass at fourteen to the factory with such
part-time continued education (if any) as the exigencies
of industry may permit.
The choice between these two views is the most
momentous issue of educational policy before the nation.
As far as the workers of the country are concerned, their
decision has already been made. They demand neither
' Seventh Report from the Select Committee on National
Expenditure (December, 1920), p. xiv. The committee appears
to have been much shocked by the fact that " the fees charged for
secondary and higher education are very low, in fact far below
the cost of the education which is afforded," It apparently did
not occur to it to inquire whether in any country, at any time, the
policy of selling higher education at cost price (or, as the committee
would presumably prefer, at a profit) has ever been adopted, and
if not, why not ?
E
64 SECONDARY EDUCATION
central schools, nor part-time continuation schools, nor
any other of the makeshifts by which it is sought to
mitigate in detail the evil results of that organisation on
lines of class which is the tragedy of English education,
while maintaining it in principle and in substance. They
demand full-time secondary education for all normal chil-
dren up to the age of sixteen. So to increase the provision
for secondary education as to enable the majority of chil-
dren to pass to a secondary school at eleven will obviously
require an effort extending over a period of several
years. But the measures taken now will depend upon
the goal which is envisaged, and in insisting that the aim
of development must be a universal system of secondaiy
education up to sixteen, in insisting that it shall be, in
the words of the Director of Education for Gloucester-
shire, "a scheme which shall ultimately bring a complete
secondary education within reach of everybody," the
Labour Party is recommending nothing either extrava-
gant or impracticable. It has on its side the expert
opinion of many teachers, of educationalists, of a con-
siderable number of those who are engaged in the
practical work of educational administration. Its policy
is framed not for the advantage of any single class, but
to develop the human resources of the whole community.
The case for a development of education on these lines
advanced by the educationalist is simple. From his
point of view the intrusion into educational organisation
of the vulgarities of the class system is an irrelevance as
mischievous in effect as it is odious in conception.
"Secondary education of the best kind," states the
Executive Committee of the Incorporated Association of
Assistant Masters in Secondary Schools, "should be oi)en
to all ; and the time is long overdue for the removal of
any restriction of opportunity for secondary education
through accident of birth, social position, or financial
means. The removal of such restrictions we regard as
an act of social justice."* What the educationalist
means by "secondary" and "primary" education has
« Resolution of March 14, 1921.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 65
nothing to do with class stratification and the curious
educational ritual which in England is annexed to it. It
is adolescent education, and education which is prepara-
tory to adolescent education. The capital message of
educational theory, he would argue, is that the success
of education is proportionate to the degree to which it is
related to the facts of natural development. Hence it
must be envisaged as a whole. The crucial point in
development is adolescence. Hence the years from
eleven should not be the fag-end of the primary school
course, but a period marked by new beginnings in educa-
tion as in life. The foundations for specialisation must
be laid by a sound general education. Hence, general
education should last to sixteen, and children should not
be encouraged to specialise, still less to enter industry,
before it. The younger the children the more precarious
and unreliable the classification of them according to the
test of examination. Hence all classifications made (as
in examinations for free places) should be purely pro-
visional ; no child should be excluded from a secondary
education as a result of them ; all children should pass as
a matter of course at the appropriate age to the secondary
school, just as all children have passed up to that age
through the primary school. The educationalist, in
short, looks forward with Professor Adams to develop-
ments under which, "in twenty years' time, there would
be one system of free education from the cradle to the
grave, or for as long as we should desire it."" He
urges, in the words of Professor Nunn's report to the
Education Reform Council, that "though schemes of
education necessarily take account of varying social
conditions, their essential lines must follow the true lines
of growth of human nature," that "the present break at
fourteen should not be regarded as an unalterable feature
of the social system," and that "the years from twelve to
fourteen must be treated as part of a continuous course
that in no case reaches its end earlier than the age of
sixteen."^"
• Lecture by Professor Adams, reported in The Times Educational
Supplement, November 12, 1921.
^'' Education Reform, 1917. Report of Committee E,
66 SECONDARY EDUCATION
These general considerations are reinforced by the
evidence resulting from the development of more exact
measurements of intelligence than could be applied till
recently. It is sometimes objected by persons without
practical experience of educational questions that a
wide extension of secondary education up to sixteen is
not desirable, because all but a small minority of children
— usually, it may be observed, a minority not in excess
of the number being educated at the time when the
objection is advanced — are not, as it is said, "worth
educating." It is not necessary to point out that those
who use this argument do not, apparently, regard it as
applicable to themselves or to their own children, whose
absolute "worth" is assumed to be self-evident, or to
emphasise the obvious fallacy of assuming that the value
of education can be reduced to the terms of a profit and
loss account, or to inquire into the precise nature of the
calculus which decides that the child of, say, a mine
owner is "worth educating" up to twenty-one and that
of a miner not "worth educating" beyond fourteen, or
to ask why, if it is worth while for the community to pro-
vide full-time education for a child up to fourteen, the age
when it leaves the primary school, it suddenly ceases to
be worth whole for it to provide any further education
whatever when that momentous date is passed. To those
who ask, "What use is secondary education to a working-
class child?" the most obvious answer would appear to
be to ask, "What use" (since that is the formula
favoured) their education has been to them ?
In reality, however, absurd as this view is on other
grounds, the whole tendency of recent educational investi-
gation has been still further to discredit it by emphasising
the immense mass, not only of average talent — and
average talent is worth cultivating — but of exceptional
talent, which is sterilised for lack of educational oppor-
tunities. It is true, of course, that not all children
respond equally to the same methods and curriculum.
Equality of educational provision is not identity of
educational provision, and it is important that there
should be the greatest possible diversity of type among
SECONDARY EDUCATION 67
secondary schools. But the theory that money spent on
developing secondary education is likely to be wasted
because the majority of children are not "capable of
profiting" by it finds no confirmation among educa-
tionalists or administrators. We have already referred
to the statement of the Departmental Committee that
"practically all children, except the subnormal, are intel-
lectually capable of profiting by full-time instruction up
to sixteen or beyond." Inspectors familiar with
primary schools are stated to regard twenty-five per
cent, of the children as above normal, fifty per cent, as
normal, and twenty-five per cent, as below normal. Such
estimates are obviously very rough. But they show at
any rate that there is a widespread opinion among
persons of experience that a great deal of educable
capacity misses education. Since the entrants to public
secondary schools from primary schools formed in
1918-19 only 9.4 per cent, of the children between ten
and eleven in the latter, it is evident that not only are
we failing to cultivate the intelligence of all the children
described as normal, but we are actually failing to pro-
vide higher education for almost two-thirds of those who
are of exceptional intelligence !
The evidence on this point is overwhelming. "The
results of nine years' experience in examining elementary
school candidates for scholarships to secondary schools,"
states the Director of Education of a county borough,
"has led me to the conclusion that between forty and
fifty per cent, of the candidates would undoubtedly profit
well by a course of secondary school education." Greater
precision has been given to these estimates by the investi-
gations of Mr. Burt," the distinguished psychologist
employed by the London County Council, who recently
made a survey of the educational abilities of £.11
the children — in number 31,965 — in the schools of a
single London borough. The course followed was to
11 London County Council Report by the education officer
submitting three preUminary memorasida by Mr. Cyril Burt, M.A.,
psychologist, on The Distribution and Relations of Educational
Abilities (1917).
68 SECONDARY EDUCATION
ascertain the degree of correspondence or deviation
between age and attainment, children who entered
standard I. at the age of seven and advanced a standard
a year till they reached standard VII. in their last school
year being treated as normal, children whose ability
corresponded to standards higher or lower than this being
treated respectively as backward or advanced. The
result of the investigations was to show that, of 19,645
children between eight and thirteen, attainments were on
a level of age in the case of thirty-seven per cent., were
one year in advance of age in the case of twenty-five
per cent., and in the case of 6.4 per cent, were more than
one year in advance of age. These results, it must be
remembered, were obtained after the brightest children
in the later years had already passed out of the primary
schools by means of scholarships. London has a
relatively efficient scholarship system. But that, even
in spite of it, a very large proportion of able children
fail to attain post-primary education is shown by the fact
that the standard required for success in it is estimated
to be that of a child two and a half years in advance of
the normal at the age of ten. The children in the age
group ten to eleven in the schools which Mr. Burt investi-
gated numbered 3,319, of whom 1,060 or thirty-two per
cent, were classed as supernormal, and 1,196 or thirty-
six per cent, as normal. If, therefore, higher education
were provided for all children of supernormal attain-
ments, nearly a third of the children of ten to eleven in
the primary schools ought to receive it ; if for all normal
children as well, then the proportion receiving it should
have been between two-thirds and three-quarters. In
reality the proportion of children of the age group ten
and eleven who passed with scholarships to secondary
schools was ten per cent.
It would be a mistake, no doubt, to lay too much
weight on the precise degree of our failure to cultivate
ability suggested by quantitative estimates of this kind.
The results of statistical investigations depend partly on
the definitions from which they start, and it is possible
that the proportion of "normal" and "supernormal"
SECONDARY EDUCATION 69
children should be written down from two-thirds to one-
half. Since either figure is greatly in excess of the
percentage of children passing to any fonn of higher
education, the lower estimate has the same significance
for immediate educational policy as the higher. Evidence
such as this is a striking testimony to the educational
wisdom of the Labour Party's demand for free and
universal secondary education. It suggests that, so far
from there being any foundation for the fear that money
may be wasted in providing higher education for children
who cannot make good use of it, the actual fact is that not
only money, but brains and character, are being wasted
through our failure to provide it for those who can.
And, of course, there are considerations of social well-
being and efficiency to be taken into account, which are
not less material than those of educational expediency.
The evils which flow from the neglect of the community
in the past to make any provision for the needs of the
adolescent are a commonplace, and we need not re-tell at
length a miserable and thrice-told tale. From the Poor
Law Commission of 1908 to the Report on Juvenile Educa-
tion in Relation to Employment after the War which
appeared in 1917, one official inquiry after another has
insisted that, in abdicating its responsibilities at fourteen,
the community is not only condemning many hundred
thousand boys and girls to lose half the benefit of
their previous training, by withdrawing them from the
influence of education at the moment when its fruits
are beginning to be garnered, but is exposing them, alert,
plastic, still sensitive and unformed, to a physical and
moral strain which only the strongest, or least impres-
sionable, or most fortunate, can hope to withstand. If
the educationalists tell us that our present arrangements
sin against every canon of education, the investigators
of social conditions repeat with no uncertain voice that
the fruits of "this educational and moral chaos" have
been disaster. ^^
1* The official documents on this subject are numerous. The most
important are the Majority and Minority Reports of the Poor Law
70 SECONDARY EDUCATION
What is a less noticed, but ultimately a not less
important, fact is that in starving the education of the
adolescent the nation is sterilising itself. If all that a
community demands is orderliness, docility, a capacity
to understand orders and obey them, then it may be
satisfied with a primary education which ends at fourteen,
or which is followed' by some small degree of vocational
training. But in reality, though that conception of
education might be natural enough in the seventies of the
last century, no lengthy argument is needed to show that
it is inadequate to-day. What society requires for the
sake both of economic efficiency and of social amenity, is
educated intelligence. But it cannot obtain educated
intelligence unless it will bear the cost of educating it.
And the result of its failure to educate it is that it arrests
the flow of intelligence midway in its career. By a
singular irony, at the very moment when it is notorious
that some industries are congested with youths who have
been thrown prematurely into industry, the teaching pro-
fession, though no longer actually, as it was a few years
ago, a "decaying trade," is starved of the recruits who
might have entered it. In the impressive words of the
Birmingham Education Authority : "When it is remem-
bered that industry and commerce are calling for a great
increase in the number of highly trained workers . . .,
when it is realised that all the secondary schools in the
country could not furnish the number of teachers required
in the immediate future by the various local authorities,
and when it is recalled how great are the necessities of
the community for increased education in view of the
complexity of the problems now to be faced, it cannot be
regarded as other than disastrous that the Authority is
unable to provide the necessary facilities for training for
Commission (1909), the Report of Mr. Cyril .Taekson on Boy Labour
to that commission, the Report of the Consultative Committee of
the Board of Education on Attendance, Compulsory or Otherwise,
at Contiiuiatlon Schools (1909, Cmd. 4757), the Report of the Select
Committee on Juvenile Education in Relation to Employment after
the War (1917, Cmd. 8512), the Report of the Ministry of Recon-
struction on Juvenile Employment during the War and After (1918).
SECONDARY EDUCATION 71
those of proved ability keenly desirous of taking advan-
tage thereof."
Nor must it be forgotten that the intelligence which
the community can command will rise with every
widening of the area of selection and fall as that area
contracts. Granted that capacity and incapacity — to use
colourless words — tend to reproduce themselves, there
seems little reason to suppose that nature is so obliging
as to follow the lines of the social and educational divi-
sions which exist to-day, and hardly more for suggesting
that the latter, depending, as they do, on economic condi-
tions and legal institutions, have any close correlation
with natural differences of capacity. Ability, 't
appears, is probably dispersed more or less at random
over the whole population, in the sense that its distribu-
tion follows laws of its own which have little discernible
relation to differences of class or income. The potential
scientist or poet or inventor or statesman is as likely to
be born in West Ham as in Westminster. He is as likely
to be born there, but he is most unlikely to be developed
there. For, on the one hand, special capacity is
neither discovered nor cultivated without an education
extending beyond the primary school, nor, on the other
hand, is it likely without such an education to find
the opening best suited to it, since all the professions
and an increasing number of branches of industry are
recruited from those who had a full-time education to, at
least, sixteen. Hence the direction of ability into the
channels in which it can best serve the community
depends upon the existence of such abundant oppor-
tunities of higher education that every child can be fitted
to the service which it can best render. "There is in the
elementary schools," states a Director of Education, "a
vast reservoir of intellectual power in pupils of conspicu-
ous ability. But, owing to the absence of an adequate
system of maintenance grants, the wrong sluice is
opened, and the pupils flow out into industrial careers
of a mechanical nature. . . . The highest output of the
nation .... demands the best brains which the country
can produce. And yet head teachers of elementary
72 SECONDARY EDUCATION
schools aver that, year by year, boys of exceptional
promise, who are potentially valuable assets to the com-
munity, are lost in the vast industrial whirlpool."
In so far as such statements are true — and evidence to
the same effect could easily be multiplied — the fear that
a wide extension of secondary education may "lower
the standard" is obviously groundless. It is notorious,
indeed, that at the present time some children who
receive secondary education are, judged by accepted
standards, less able than some of those who are excluded
from it : we need mention only the well-known fact that
some of those who have failed in the examination for free
places are subsequently admitted as fee-paying pupils,
while others, who may have succeeded in the examina-
tion, enter industry because their parents cannot afford
to dispense with their earnings. Apart from all other
considerations, the wider the field the better the candi-
dates. We have not such a plethora of ability in the
wealthier classes that we can afford to starve the talent
of the mass of the people. And the field can only be a
wide one if the majority of children receive a secondary
education. As long as so small a proportion as at present
of the children leaving the primary schools pass to
secondary schools, the community must continue to
draw for its leadership upon an insignificant fraction of
the whole population.
Ill
THE REACTION ON THE PRIMARY SCHOOL
Wc are not directly concerned in this book with
•primary education, but we may point out that not
the least of the advantages of the Labour Party's pro-
posal to aim at an organisation of education, under
which ultimately all normal children will pass at eleven -|-
to a post-primary course lasting to sixteen, appears
likely to be the reaction of such a change upon the
primary school. The arrangement under which children
remain in the primary school till the age of fourteen was
natural as long as "elementary" education was regarded,
SECONDARY EDUCATION 73
as in the nineteenth century, as the discipline of a class
for whom the very idea of providing higher education
was an absurdity. But once that odious doctrine is dis-
carded, once it is recognised that the normal thing will
be for the child of working-class parents to pass to some
form of higher education, the primary school will be
free, as it has not been free in the past, to undertake its
proper work of providing preparatory education for chil-
dren who will begin their secondary education about
eleven. It will cease, in short, to be an "elementary"
and will become a "preparatory" school.
What this will mean in practice will naturally vary
from school to school. But its general effect will be
that the transition in education, as the transition in the
physical and mental development of the children, will
take place with adolescence — somewhere between the
ages of eleven and twelve. The work of the secondary
school will begin at a moment when the child itself is
conscious of new needs and new powers ; the work of the
primary school will be lightened and simplified because
it will no longer be faced with the problem of providing
education suitable to children who have passed out of
the stage of growth of most of its pupils. Such a revision
of the school course — the transference from primary to
secondary school at eleven + taking the place of elemen-
tary education up to fourteen, followed by a plunge into
the industrial whirlpool — is only possible if it is recog-
nised that, as the Labour Party proposes, all normal
children are to receive a secondary education — that in
the words of The Times, "The doctrine of universal
secondary education does away with that distinction
(between elementary and secondary education) and gives
every child the education best suited for the development
of his or her personality." It is urged by educational-
ists — we need only refer to the already quoted words of
Professor Nunn. It will commend itself to teachers,
who are only too conscious of the waste of capacity
arising from the present arrangements. It is already
envisaged by administrators and Local Education
Authorities.
74 SECONDARY EDUCATION
It is significant, indeed, of the change which has over-
taken educational opinion in the course of the last fifteen
years— a change, the result partly of the teaching of
educationalists, partly of the very development of public
secondary education which we have already described —
that at the present time there seems to be something
like a consensus of opinion that the time has come for a
radical regrading of primary and post-primary educa-
tion. "It is necessary to distinguish," states an experi-
enced official, "between the elementary school as it has
been understood in the past and elementary education.
The elementary school has kept its pupils till about four-
teen years of age, but for the normal boy elementary
education stops at about eleven. Beyond that stage the
pupil, on account of the great physical changes through
which he passes, becomes in reality a new being with
new powers, new desires, and a new outlook. It is a
mistake to continue after this stage the educational
methods that are suitable for the preceding stage. It
would be a great gain if it were definitely recognised that
elementary education stops at eleven." "It seems to
be very generally agreed," writes a correspondent in The
Times Educational Supplement,^^ "that the existijig rigid
division of schools into elementary, secondary, and higher
is both wasteful and lacking in efficiency by reason of
the overlapping that it causes of expenditure and effort
— that it is largely a concession to social prejudices and
opposed to the spirit of the age. It is further widely
agreed that the present class denomination 'elementaiy'
should be abolished, and that schools should be broadly
divided into : —
(i) Primary, for all children up to eleven to twelve.
Subdivided into : —
(a) Nursery and infant for all children up to the
ages of seven to eight.
{b) Preparatory for all children between the ages
of eight and twelve,
(ii) Secondary, for boys and girls between the ages of
twelve and sixteen to eighteen ; and
1* October 8, 1921 .
SECONDARY EDUCATION 75
(iii) Higher, providing education of a University
type."
Such criticisms by educationalists on the traditional
system of "elementary" education up to fourteen could
be multiplied. What is even more significant is that all
over the country schemes are being prepared for turning
the work of the upper standards of "elementary" schools
into intermediate education. In the words of the scheme
of the Kent Education Authority : "By general consent
the normal age of transition from the strictly elementary
to the advanced forms of education is eleven or there-
abouts. Reform lies in adopting the corollaries that
follow from this. ... It is no longer a question of
determining whether some or all should enjoy the benefits
of a secondary education. The deciding factor is whether
the special aptitude of a group of pupils will enable them
to profit most by this course or by that." The same
point is put with even greater emphasis by the Essex
Education Committee. "The committee proposes,"
they state, "gradually to transform the existing elemen-
tary school system into a preparatory or true primary
school system, and to arrange that the normal elementary
school pupil shall leave the elementary school at the end
of the school year in which he attains the age of eleven
years, and pass on to a school giving secondary or higher
education, where, at a critical point in his school life, he
will have a new outlook, a different atmosphere, fresh
interests, and a curriculum specially adapted to his
needs."
Nor, once the object of such a reorganisation is made
clear, is it to be feared that parents will not welcome it.
True, many children to-day, by the eagerness with which
they leave school, and some parents, by their comments
upon it, seem to be, if not a lion, at least a dormouse in
the path of the reformer. But consider what this atti-
tude means. Is not their scepticism about education — a
result, not of educational theories, but of practical experi-
ence—directed against precisely those features of our
present system about which the educationalist himself
is most sceptical ? Is not the burden of the parent's
76 SECONDARY EDUCATION
complaint that between twelve and fourteen the child
is marking time in the primary school; that the child
himself (as he well may be) is sick of schooUng; and that
it is no good raising the school age because, as it is,
the later years are largely wasted ? If he desires his child
to receive a secondary education, is it not notorious that
he finds it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to secure
its admission to an already overcrowded secondary
school, still more difficult to secure a free place, most
difficult of all to get a maintenance allowance which will
keep it at school to the age of sixteen without causing
its young brothers and sisters to be stinted ? And is not
all this a practical comment upon our educational system
which is much to the point, from which its organisers
should learn, and from which, instead of railing at
popular apathy, they should start in devising their
reforms? Why, the child's desire to be making a new
start, and the parents' dissatisfaction with the later stages
of the "elementary" school, so far from being unreason-
able, touch the very points which have evoked the criti-
cism of educationalists. If, with those defects what they
are, parents and children think that they do not care about
education, that is a tribute to their good sense, for, in
these respects, the education offered them has not been of
a kind which any sensible person should care about.
The truth is that, if education is to be loved, and not
merely tolerated, it must be seen, at any rate in outline,
as an intelligible whole. It must give a sense of move-
ment, of growth, of continuous progress towards expand-
ing horizons. Too often, at present, public education
does none of these things. Too often it is in the nature
of a course which must be covered because the law
requires it, but which ends in a cid de sac, and leaves the
child eager to start its real life elsewhere, when school
is happily over. Too often, in fact, the public school
is neither venerable like a college, nor popular like a
club, but merely indispensable like a pillar box. And
if we are to overcome such indifference when it exists, we
can only overcome it by relating the organisation of our
educational system to the natural development of the
SECONDARY EDUCATION 77
child, so that at eleven to twelve, when his primary
school course is over, his parents know that he is going,
not to mark time till the age for leaving school arrives,
but to make a momentous departure and to enter on the
real business of higher education which will carry him
forward till he knows himself and what he is fit for. If
we are to make education appeal with force we must take
care that the arrangement of education shall make
evident what education is for — that it is not a mere dis-
cipline or ritual, but that it is vitally connected with the
life and growth of those who are being educated. We
must give meaning to our primary education by mak-
ing plain to what it leads, and substance to our secondary
education by supplying it, not with a trickle of "bright"
children, but with the great mass of the nation's youth
to help forward in their growth to manhood. We must,
in short, work for a new connection of primary — no longer
"elementary" — with secondary education; a new educa-
tional synthesis planned to embrace the whole period of
growth from five to sixteen.
IV
SUMMARY OF PROPOSALS
What we propose, then, is that the nation should take
as the objective of its educational effort the creation of a
system of universal secondary education extending
from the age of eleven to that of sixteen. Nothing
less than this will satisfy the demands of the workers of
the country ; nothing less is urged by the most eminent
educationalists ; nothing less will enable the community
to make the best use of its human resources, the
development of which is at once the goal of economic
effort and the source of all wealth which is produced.
We are aware, of course, that such a programme can be
realised only over a period of years. But it is the end
towards which policy should be directed, and, in the
meantime, the reforms of the transition period should be
planned with that end in view.
78 SECONDARY EDUCATION
Were these proposals carried out, primary and
secondary education, instead of forming, as now, two
separate systems with frail handrails thrown from one to
the other, would form two parts of a harmonious whole.
Secondary schools would be various in type, and not all
children would pass to the same kind of school. But all
children would pass to some kind of secondary school and
would spend the critical years from eleven to sixteen
under the invigorating influence of a progressive course
of full time education.
In the following chapters we proceed to consider in
greater detail some of the questions raised by this
programme.
CHAPTER IV
THE FREEING OF SECONDARY
EDUCATION
THE development of post-primary education on
the lines suggested in the preceding chapter
will involve (1) the removal of the financial
obstacles which at present prevent parents
from sending their children to a secondary school and
keeping them there as long as is desirable, (2) the provi-
sion of sufficient school places and the recruitment of the
necessary number of teachers. Neither of these
measures can produce their full effect immediately.
A movement in the direction of both can, and should, be
made at once. We proceed in this chapter to consider
them.
THE EXISTING SYSTEM
Unlike secondary education in the United States and
some of the British Dominions, education in public
secondary schools in England is not free, but is condi-
tional, with the qualifications described below, on the
payment of fees. Subject to the provision that they must
be approved as suitable by the Board of Education, the
fees charged are in the discretion of the school authorities.
Of the total income of grant-aided secondary schools in
England in 1912-13 roughly forty-one per cent.,
£1,100,245 out of £2,668,661, was derived from
fees.^ The last volume of educational statistics,
in which schools are classified according to the fees
charged to pupils of twelve years of age, shows that in
1 Report of Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free
Places, 1920 (Cmd. 968), p. 12.
79 F
80 SECONDARY EDUCATION
1913-14, out of 1,025 schools 6 charged no fee, while of
the remainder 242 charged from one to five guineas a
year, 623 from five to ten, 107 from ten to fifteen, and
47 over fifteen guineas. Since that date fees have been
widely, if not universally, revised." The average fee per
pupil (free and fee paying) in attendance appears to have
been about £5 10s. in English schools in 1912, which
probably meant that for fee-paying pupils only it might
be put at that date at something between eight and ten
guineas. At the present day the corresponding figure is
probably something between eleven and thirteen guineas.
It should be observed that even the fee-paying pupil does
not pay the full cost of his education ; to the extent of
rather more than half of it he is subsidised out of public
funds.
If secondary education were obtainable only on these
conditions it would have remained to the present day
inaccessible to almost all working-class children, since
their parents would have had to pay an annual fee of
anything from one to ten guineas for each child receiving
it. As it is, the financial obstacles in the way of
secondary education remain, as we show later, serious.
But a scholarship system, in one form or another, is as
old as secondary education itself. Apart from endow-
ments, the Commission on Secondary Education found
that as long ago as 1895 some 2,500 scholarships tenable
at secondary schools were provided by Local Authorities.
By 1900 they had risen to between 5,000 and 5,500. By
190G they numbered approximately 24,000, and were held
by nearly a quarter of the children. It is only, however,
since 1907 that the provision of a certain minimum of
free places has been obligatory upon all secondary
schools receiving grants from the State. By Article 20 of
the Regulations of that year, the Board required that ot
the beginning of each school year all schools charging fees
* Between 1913-14 and the end of 1919 some 206 schools would
have appeared to have raised their niiniinuni fees, and some 242
their maximum fees. In the ease of liio former GO raised it less
than one guinea, 61 by one and under two fruineas, 40 by two and
under three guineas, and only .'J9 by three guineas or more.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 81
should, as a condition of eligibility for grant, offer a per-
centage of free places to candidates for admission enter-
ing from the public elementary schools, a percentage
which should normally be fixed at twenty -five, but which
might be reduced in the case of any particular school at
the discretion of the Board. According to the most
recent returns it would appear that some 127 schools are
permitted to offer less than the full minimum. The
remainder are required to offer not less than twenty-five
per cent., and in practice some among them offer con-
siderably more. It should be observed that both the
character and the value of free places vary. They may
be provided either by Local Education Authorities, or by
the school governors, or by other endowments. They
may cover either the remission of fees only, i.e., free
tuition, or free tuition phis the cost of books, travelling
and other incidental expenses, or free tuition plus a grant
of money for the purposes of maintenance.
The system thus developed has been the principal
means of bridging the gulf between primary and
secondary education. In 1919-20, 82,630 children out of
282,005 in the grant-aided secondary schools of England
held free places. As far, therefore, as one-third of the
children in public secondary schools are concerned, free
secondary education has already been established. The
objections to the arrangement advanced by some schools
and Local Education Authorities when it was first intro-
duced appear virtually to have ceased. By common
consent the free-place system has both brought
secondary education within reach of thousands of children
to whom otherwise it Avould have been inaccessible, and
raised the intellectual standard of the schools by irrigat-
ing them with a stream of talent upon which othei-wise
they could not have drawn. ^
3 For the figures see Report of the Board of Education for the
year 1919-20, and Report of Departmental Committee on Scholarships
and Free Places, App. I, Table B. The history and working of the
system is discussed ibid., pp. 2-7, and in the Report of the Committee
of the British Association upon The Effects of the Free-Place
System upon Secondary Education, 1918.
82 SECONDARY EDUCATION
It has done this so far as it goes. But it does not go
far; and if the figure of 82,030 free-placers seems impos-
ing, it must be remembered that, compared either with
the demand for secondary education or the number of
children "capable of profiting," it is insignificant. The
important comparison is not between the number of free-
placers and the number of pupils in the secondary
schools, but between the number of free-placers and the
number of children in the primary schools from whom
the secondary schools are recruited. Judged by that
standard, the number of free places is lamentably
deficient. The children admitted to secondary schools
without payment of fees in 1918-19 amounted to 3.0 per
cent, of the children between ten and eleven in the
primary schools of England and 0.02 per cent, of those
of the same age in the primary schools of Wales, which
means in effect that at that age a child in England had
three chances in 100 of getting a free secondary education.
So grave is the deficiency of free places compared with
the expressed demand, that, at the beginning of 1919-20,
actually 8,780 children in England and 2,354 in Wales
were refused admission to secondary schools, though they
had reached the required intellectual standard, and
though the school authorities, had free places existed,
would have been prepared to receive them.^
The effect of this shortage has been, in many
places, to give a quite different significance to the
free place from that which was originally contem-
plated. When, in 1907, Article 20 was first introduced
into the Regulations, its object was to ensure that
secondary schools aided by grants should be made
fully accessible to the children of all classes, and the
intention of the Board was that the standard of admis-
sion for free-place children should be the same as for fee-
paying children of the same age. What has actually
happened is that, in many areas, owing to the shortage
of provision, the competition for free places is such that
* Report of Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free
Places, App. I, Table D. It should be noted that these figures are
only approximate (see note at end of Tabic 1) in the Report).
SECONDARY EDUCATION 83
they can be obtained only by children who reach what is,
in effect^ a scholarship standard, and not by all of them.
The London County Council, for example, throws over-
board the spirit and purpose of the free-place system,
and declares in its scheme that "it has felt itself justified
in applying a test for free higher education different from
the ordinary admission test."^ As long as the number of
free places is so gravely inadequate to the demand as it
is at present, it may be almost impossible for a Local
Education Authority to refrain from slipping into this
policy. But obviously, in so far as it is adopted, it
defeats the object for which Article 20 was introduced
into the Regulations. So far from equalising opportuni-
ties of higher education, it creates one standard for the
children of well-to-do parents, and another and higher
standard for the children of parents of small means.
II
THE ABOLITION OF FEES
In view of facts such as these there can be no doubt
that, as long as fees continue to be charged in public
secondary schools, there should be a large and immediate
increase in the number of free places. The figure pro-
posed by the Departmental Committee on Scholarships
and Free Places was forty per cent., instead of, as now,
twenty-five per cent., which, on the basis of the present
secondary school population, would result in increasing
the number of free-place pupils in England from 82,630
to 112,800, and (since the required number is likely, as
now, to be somewhat exceeded in practice) to something
more. But evidently such a figure, like the original
figure of twenty-five per cent., is both arbitrary and pro-
visional. It cannot seriously be argued that out of the
6,000,000 children in the public elementary schools only
112,000, or even 200,000, are "capable of profiting" by
secondary education.
The truth is that the free-place system, though useful
as making a breach, if a small one, in the walls of
* Scheme of the London County Council, p. 81.
84 SECONDARY EDUCATION
educational exclusiveness, was really the product of an
age in which secondary education was regarded as an ex-
ceptional privilege to be strained through a sieve, and
reserved, so far as the mass of the people were concerned,
for children of exceptional capacity. The Labour
Movement cannot accept that position, and it has long
been abandoned by educationalists. We agree, therefore,
with the Departmental Committee that the goal to be
aimed at is not merely an increase in the number of free
places, but free secondary education, and that, in the
meanwhile, all steps for the immediate improvement of
the financial basis of our secondary system, particularly
in the matter of scholarships and free places, should be
taken with that end in view.
In America and in some British Dominions free second-
ary education already exists. It has long been demanded
by the British Labour Movement. When, as President of
the Board of Education, Mr. McKenna explained the
proposals as to free places to the House of Commons, he
stated that he trusted that in secondary schools provided
by Local Authorities all places would be free.® But in
spite of that declaration free secondary education
has not yet proceeded far in this country. In 1913-11'
six grant-aided secondary schools charged no fees,
and since that time, in particular areas, further
steps have been taken in the same direction.
Bradford established free secondary education during
the war. The County of Glamorganshire has done
the same. The scheme of the Durham County Council
provides that from September, 1920, forty-five per cent,
of the vacancies shall be awarded as free places, from
September, 1921, sixty per cent., from September, 1922,
eighty per cent., and from September, 1923, 100 per cent.
Clearly, if the proposal for something like universal
secondary education from eleven to sixteen, advanced in
the preceding chapter, is accepted, the abolition of fees is
a necessary corollary. But secondary education can be
• Hansard, May 15, 1907 : " The schools might have as many
more free places as they liked, ami xvhere the schools were prortded Inj
the local education authority he trusted they tvould all be freer
SECONDARY EDUCATION 85
made free before it becomes universal, and, even though
it should continue to be the case that only a minority of
children pass through the secondary schools, the argu-
ments for free secondary education, as the Departmental
Committee points out, remain, nevertheless, extremely
strong. No form of education has ever been able to
"pay for itself" nor do sensible persons expect that it
should/ Primary education for which fees were
originally charged has been predominantly free since
1891, and there is no question of charging fees for the
part-time education up to eighteen contemplated by the
Act of 1918. It may, indeed, be replied that these forms
of education are compulsory, but the answer is largely
irrelevant. The ground of making them compulsory was
the same as the ground for making them free, that it was
regarded as in the interests of the community that
children and young persons should receive them. The
ground for freeing secondary education is the same, and
though it would be illogical to make it compulsory with-
out making it free, there is nothing unreasonable in
making it free without at the same time making it
compulsory.
Even if the argument from the analogy of other forms
of education be rejected, both the educational and the
practical reasons for free secondary education remain
overwhelming. On the one hand, the present arrange-
ment, a compromise between the 1870 conception of
"elementary" education as designed for a special class
and the modern view of it as preparatory education,
emphasises precisely that divorce between primary and
secondary education which it is the object of all reformers
to abolish. By making the former free and charging fees
for the latter, it suggests that one is a necessity and the
other a luxury. But, in reality, of course, that arbitrary
division is either meaningless or mischievous. Education,
^ The Select Committee en National Expenditure proposed that
fees should be increased. But perhaps that body was not an
exception to the statement made above. The education given in
the so-called " public " school^ is normally subsidised out of
endowments.
86 SECONDARY EDUCATION
if it is to be effective, is not a medley of unrelated
systems, but a continuous process. To charge a fee
before a child is permitted to enter for the second stage in
its educational development is about as reasonable as it
would be to impose a tax upon it merely because it had
reached the age of eleven. On the other hand, from the
point of view of the administrator, the present arrange-
ment is hardly less unsatisfactory than from that of the
educationalist. As long as free places are conceded only
to a minority of children, it will remain necessary to use
a competitive examination to discriminate between those
who are to be admitted to them and those who are not.
However skilfully it may be employed, and however it
may be supplemented by provisions enabling children
who have failed once to be admitted later, to decide the
educational future of children by competitive examina-
tion held at the age of eleven — the age when, it is agreed,
transference of children to the secondary school should
normally take place — is not a satisfactory procedure.*
Section 4 (4) of the Education Act of 1918, which provides
that "children and young persons shall not be debarred
from the benefit of any form of education by which they
are capable of profiting through inability to pay fees,"
has increased the practical difficulties. As long as fees
are charged, an education authority, in order to carry
it out, must ascertain (a) how many children are
"capable of profiting," (b) how many parents of such
children are unable to pay fees. What it must not do,
if it is to comply with the Act, is — what is often done now
— to hold a competitive examination for a limited number
of free places, since obviously, if that is done, some of
the children who show by success in the examination
that they are "capable of profiting" will be excluded
because the free places are not sufficient. But, clearly,
to discover who exactly are the parents unable to pay
fees is not an easy task, and will become more difficult
* Even if fees are abolished selection by competitive examination
or some analagous means will continue as long as the number of
secondary school places is so gravely deficient as it is at present.
But to abolish fees would obviously make it a less crucial factor in
deciding a child's future.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 87
with the inevitable and much to be desired increase in
the number of children seeking admission to secondary
schools. Once the principle of free secondary education
is established, the difficulty of discriminating between
those parents who can, and those who cannot, afford to
pay fees vanishes.
In view of these advantages it is not surprising that the
Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free Places
should have endorsed, with only one dissentient, the
Labour Party's programme of free secondary education.
Nor is the cost of abolishing fees such as to create any
very great difficulty. In 1912-13, the last year for which
figures were available, they contributed £1,100,245 out
of a total revenue received by secondary schools of
£2,663,661. Owing to increases which have taken place
since that date, they may now perhaps be put at
£2,000,000. That, therefore, would be the cost of
freeing secondary education, on the basis of the present
number attending the schools. If, as is to be hoped, the
secondary school population increases, there will, of
course, be a corresponding addition to it.
Ill
THE NECESSITY OF AN ADEQUATE SYSTEM OF
MAINTENANCE ALLOWANCES
The abolition of fees is the first step towards the
creation of a democratic system of secondary education.
But the fact must be faced that it will not by itself
remove the economic disabilities which at present thwart
the development of the children of parents of small
means. Quite apart from the charge made by the school
or the Education Authority, a hardly less serious obstacle
is offered by the difficulty of dispensing with the addition
to the family income made by the earnings of a child
when the age of compulsory attendance is past. In many
cases, indeed, the word difficulty is inadequate.
It is an impossibility. There are only too many districts
to which the statement of the West Ham education
88 SECONDARY EDUCATION
scheme is applicable. "Experience has shown that the
average income in the districts is so low that without
some financial assistance boys and girls oould not usually
be sent to, or kept at, the secondary and higher elemen-
tary schools.'" "Shall I let my child accept the scholar-
ship he has won at the secondary school ? If I don't it
is unfair on him. If I do, it is unfair on his younger
brothers and sisters, who will go short of food" — such a
dilemma is one which is within the experience of all who
have practical contact with the working of the educa-
tional system to-day. It can only be overcome by a
really adequate system of maintenance allowances.
Maintenance allowances, in one form or another, are
as old as scholarships. But they do not appear in recent
years to have kept pace with the developments of a
system of free places. In the year 1911-12 the
total expenditure of Local Education Authorities upon
maintenance allowances was estimated to be £150,000.
In 1918-19 it was £244,679'" in England on account of
children in grant-aided secondary schools and £8,470 in
Wales. The total number of children holding them was
26,912 in England and 2,882 in Wales. In other words
in England 37.2 per cent, of the children with free places
and 10.9 per cent, of all the children in grant-aided
secondary schools held maintenance allowances awarded
by Local Education Authorities. In Wales the corres-
ponding figures were 29 and 11.2 per cent.
It should be observed that there appears to be a
remarkable discrepancy between the provision made in
this respect by the county and that made by the county
boroughs. In England the counties accounted in 1919
for 154,248 children, out of 254,720, in grant-aided
secondary schools and the county boroughs for 100,472.
The former, however, provided maintenance allowance
» Proposed West Ham Education Scheme (1920), pp. 13-14.
1" In addition £17,442 was spent in England on maintenance
allowances in junior technical and similar schools, and £23 in Wales.
Of the sum of £244.,07n mentioned above, £9,998 came, not from
local education authorities, but from school foundations. Tlic
corresponding figure in Wales was £731.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 89
for 20,428 out of the 26,912 children in receipt of them,
and spent £185,913 in doing so; the latter provided for
only 6,484 children at a cost of £58,766.
The practice of Local Education Authorities in pro-
viding maintenance allowances varies. There are areas
in which both the remission of tuition fees and the
provision of some sum towards maintenance is covered
by the word "scholarship," and other areas in which the
maintenance allowance is given separately. Some
authorities, for example, Durham, "deal with necessitous
cases as they arise." Others, like West Ham, hold that
it is "difficult and undesirable to discriminate by
inquiries between individual cases," and therefore
provide a uniform maintenance allowance to all scholar-
ship holders — in West Ham £15 for the years following
the fourteenth birthday. Others, like London, have a
scale of maintenance allowances varying according to the
income and size of the family. In London, the further
condition is proposed (if not actually at present in force)
that "a higher intellectual standard (or other condition)
should be required for the payments of maintenance
beyond 'capacity to profit' by the education given."
Hence from thirteen onwards maintenance allowances
are, it is proposed, to be given only to "(i) those who
reach a certain standard in the examinations higher than
that required for free places, (ii) those who reach the
standard for free places and undertake to become
teachers." How prominent, indeed, the latter motive —
the desire to recruit future teachers — has been in the
development of a system of maintenance allowances is
shown by the fact that in England actually nearly a third
of the children in receipt of them in 1910 — 8,668 out of
26,912 — were intending teachers. ^^
The recent regulations ^- as to the conditions upon
11 Report of Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free
Places, App. I, Tables E i and E ii. Proposed Scheme for the County
of Durham, p. .33. Proposed West Ham Education Scheme, pp. 13-14.
Scheme of the London County Council, p. 38.
12 Cmd. 425, The Higher Education (Maintenance Allowance Grant)
Regulations, 1919.
90 SECONDARY EDUCATION
which grants in aid of maintenance allowances will be
available show that the importance of developing them is
appreciated by the Board, and, if secondary education is
to be made freely accessible to all children capable of
naakmg good use of it, it is clear that maintenance
allowances must be extended on a scale far beyond any
yet introduced, even by the most enlightened Education
Authorities. They must be regarded neither as a
charitable concession to exceptional misfortune, nor
merely as a bounty paid on the manufacture of
teachers, but as an essential element in the creation of a
system of higher education which shall be accessible to all
members of the community.
The scheme of the London County Council supplies an
instructive example of precisely the kind of restrictions
by which they should not be accompanied. It proposes
in fact a double barrier ; first, because the child admitted
to a free place must reach a higher standard than that
demanded of the fee-paying child, second, because the
child granted a maintenance allowance must reach a
higher standard than the child awarded a free place.
But as, by the Council's own declaration, the test of
admission to a free place is "capacity to profit," it
inevitably follows that maintenance allowances are to
be refused to some children "capable of profiting" by
secondary education, and that as a result such children
will be deprived of it. The truth is that conditions of
this kind are derived ultimately from the view that while
the well-to-do child has a right to secondary education,
whatever its capacity, the child of poor parents
is to receive it only as a special favour and in virtue
of displaying a degree of intellectual ability
which no one dreams of demanding from his richer
neighbour. Clearly, both on educational and on social
grounds, such a view is indefensible. We arc not pre-
pared to say that the policy advocated by West Ham ot
paying maintenance allowances to all children holding
free places should be universally adopted. But, if it is
not, maintenance allowances must be based on the needs
of the family, and no higher intellectual standard must
SECONDARY EDUCATION 91
be demanded from children whose parents require them
than from those whose parents do not.
But it is not enough merely to ensure that the grant
of maintenance allowances is not accompanied by
arbitraiy restrictions such as those proposed in this
scheme of the London County Council. It is necessary
also greatly to increase their number, to make sure that
they cover the expenses — books, travelling, stationery,
and other items — incidental to secondary education, and
to grade them in such a way that they may increase with
age. It has been pointed out above that in 1918-19 over
8,000 children were unable to enter secondary schools
because free places were not available for them. No
similar statistics exist showing the number of children
who, while qualifying for a free place, were unable to
accept it through lack of maintenance allowances
sufficient in number and amount. But it is within the
knowledge of most persons of experience that a con-
siderable number of parents are compelled to refuse free
places because the earnings of the child are necessary to
the family. Even at the present time it can hardly be
supposed that the county boroughs of England, in pro-
viding maintenance allowances for 6,484 children, as they
did in 1918, are smoothing difficulties from the path of all
the children qualified and willing, if economic circum-
stances allowed, to take advantage of secondary
education, or that a sum of £58,766 represents all that
they could with advantage, and without imposing a
crushing burden on the ratepayer, spend in doing so. In
the future, at any rate, if the secondary schools are to
be made freely accessible to all classes, it is essential
that the sum should be substantially increased.
It is essential also that maintenance allowances
should be graduated in such a way as to advance with
the age of the children receiving them. Weak as public
secondary education in England is throughout, it is
weakest, as has often been pointed out, in its upper ranges.
By general consent, one of the capital reforms needed is
to retain at school a substantial proportion of the
deplorably large number of children who at present leave
92 SECONDARY EDUCATION
before the age of sixteen, and to do so without discourag-
ing the child of poor parents from entering a secondary
school in the first instance. But to retain them at school
it is necessary to remove the cause which takes them
away from it, and the cause which takes them away is, in
a large proportion of cases, economic pressure. The
simplest way of lightening that pressure is by an
intelligent use of the maintenance allowance. The sum
of £8 19s. Id., which is the average value of a main-
tenance allowance in the county boroughs of England,
may be adequate for a child of eleven. But it is scarcely
adequate even then, and it is obviously quite dispro-
portionate to the cost of keeping a child of fifteen or
sixteen. The proper policyj, already pursued by some
authorities, but not, apparently, by the majority, is to
increase the value of the maintenance allowance year by
year up to eighteen. ^^
IV
TEACHERS AND ACCOMMODATION
In proposing as the goal a system of universal
secondary education, we do not forget the difficulties
arising from the shortage of accommodation and of
teachers. Merely to provide increased free places, with-
out increasing the school accommodation available, would
result in excluding fee-paying pupils without adding to
the total number of children receiving a secondary
education. Nor is it necessary to emphasise that the
quality and number of the tesichers are the most vital
element in education^ and that the process of secondary,
as of other kinds of education, is obviously limited by
them.
^'A practicalexample is given by the Proposed Scheme of Education
for the County of Durham, p. 44 : " Maintenance grants to pupils
engaged upon advanced work in secondary schools, intended to
enable secondary school pupils to prolong their school life. . . .
They are awarded to such pupils as, being over sixteen, are classified
and' taught in advanced classes, and are payable at the following
rates : Boys, first year £15, second year £20 ; girls, first year £10,
second year £15."
SECONDARY EDUCATION 93
These difficulties are serious, but they must be seen in
the right perspective. It must be remembered, in the
first place, that they are not in any way peculiar to the
programme urged in these pages. The continuation
schools to be established under Section 10 of the Act of
1918 would, it is estimated, require 16,000 teachers
within two years of their creation and ultimately 32,000.
In the years following 1870 School Boards were engaged
in building up a service and finding accommodation for a
generation after the provision of elementary education
had become a statutory obligation. The development
of a universal system of secondary education is a larger
problem than the first, but a smaller problem than the
second. It will proceed gradually, and the personnel
and equipment which it requires will be created as it
develops. Nor, in fact, can they be created in any other
way. If the lack of teachers were an insuperable barrier
to any new departure in education, no new departure
would ever have taken place; for not only in England,
but in all other countries, the State has not created a
supply of potential teachers and then used them to do the
work it wants. It has created work for them to do and
then taken steps to find the necessary teachers. Indeed,
so long as secondary education is confined to so small a
fraction of the population as is the case to-day, no other
course is open to it. If it will not "grow" teachers, it is
inevitably driven to "force" them.
While, therefore, it is true that the shortage of teachers
and of accommodation makes inevitable the lapse of a
period of years before our full programme can be realised,
that is no reason for not moving towards its realisation
with such speed as is practicable. For, in the second
place, as the Act of 1918 requires, and as the schemes of
Local Education Authorities make clear, there will, in any
case, be a large addition to the number of teachers and to
the school buildings in the near future. The question is
not tvhether we shall provide more accommodation and
recruit additional teachers, but for xvhat purpose both
are to be employed, and rvhat standard of quality is as a
consequence to be created. It is submitted that it would
94 SECONDARY EDUCATION
be the height of unwisdom to mortgage the resources
available for education to provision of a kind which,
because it is in the nature of a makeshift, is likely in ten
or fifteen years to be superseded. Instead, for example,
of providing fifty-nine additional central schools with
twenty-three thousand more school places, it would be
wiser, it may be suggested, for the London County
Council to spend the same sum on developing secondary
education. The foraier have their merits, but it
would probably not be unfair to say that they
are often regarded both by educationalists and by
the workers of the country as a cheap substitute, to
be tolerated only so long as nothing better can
be provided. The latter would be a step towards
meeting the demands for secondary education which must
be met sooner or later, and which will be met most
economically if^ in the interval, money has not been
diverted to inferior institutions which satisfy no one.
Instead of providing part-time continued education, Local
Authorities had much better begin to face in earnest the
question of full-time secondary education. The former
is preferable to the economic and moral chaos in which
boys and girls who leave the primary schools are
plunged at present. But few informed observers regard
them as other than a transition stage on the road to
secondary education for all. To invest heavily in a
depreciating, if widely advertised, stock of the kind is,
both from an educational and from an economic point of
view, an error of judgment.
In the meantime, even with the existing resources,
something can be done to move in the right direction.
The preparatory departments of grant-aided secondary
schools, containing some 26,944 children, of whom the
greater number are under the age of ten, have certain
advantages for the children— all children of fee-paying
parents- admitted to them. But in view of the grave
shortage of school places, it can hardly be doubted that
the Departmental Committee was right in stating that the
accommodation which they represent would be better
SECONDARY EDUCATION 95
employed in providing for children entering at eleven.
Central schools, whenever possible, should be converted
as soon as practicable into secondary schools. In urban
areas there are probably a certain number of primary
schools which might similarly be scheduled for conversion,
and, more rarely, it will be possible to acquire suitable
buildings which are now used for other than educational
purposes. Is it even too revolutionary to suggest that a
small step towards a S'olution of the problem of school
accommodation might be taken by a change in the pre-
vailing fashion of school architecture ? "It is not bricks
and mortar," to adapt a famous saying, "which make a
school, but children and teachers." In Wales, we under-
stand, the earlier public secondary schools were housed in
temporary buildings. It is conceivable, at least, that in
England school buildings might be erected both more
cheaply and more expyeditiously if they were designed to
follow somewhat more closely the plan of the "open-air"
school, and somewhat less closely that of a fortress
designed to resist both the ravages and the improvements
of time.
It has been suggested to us, indeed, that a still more
radical departure might usefully be contemplated. If the
object aimed at is to make primary and secondary educa-
tion continuous, one way of doing so would be to group
them as two divisions within a single school. After all,
it is urged, whether education is "secondary" or not
does not depend upon the particular building in which it
is carried on. Why not frankly recognise that what is
now the public elementary school, if it is educating
children of eleven4- to fourteen effectively, must neces-
sarily be doing a good deal of "secondary" work?
Why not take account of that fact in the organisation of
future schools, and, wherever it is possible, reorganise
existing schools on that basis ? The practical difficulties
of such a proposal — the fact that the whole standard of
staffing, air-space, playing fields, amenities in general is
lower in existing primary schools than is required by the
Board in secondary schools — are obvious. The existence
of that dual standard is indeed one of the evils arising
o
96 SECONDARY EDUCATION
from the division between them. Nor, of course,
would the suggestion solve by itself the problem of
accommodation, since the primary schools themselves
are already overcrowded. The practical advantages,
however, would also be considerable. In so far as the
proposal could be carried out, there would be an addition,
at least, to secondary school accommodation. The diffi-
culty caused in many areas by the distance of the
secondary school from the homes of the children would
disappear. The thoroughly vicious idea that primary
and secondary education form two systems of education
would be destroyed in the most effective possible manner
— by making it obvious that they were parts of a single
whole.
Which, if any, of these practical measures is to be
adopted must be decided in the Hght of the varying
circumstances of different localities. The point of
principle to be insisted upon is that the objective —
universal secondary education — should be kept steadily
in view, and that the educational effort of the next
fifteen years should be concentrated on attaining it, not
dissipated on plans which, even if laudable in them-
selves, are of inferior importance.
CHAPTER V
THE PROPOSED SUBSTITUTES FOR
SECONDARY EDUCATION
WE have urged in our preceding chapters
that the main educational effort of the
nation should be directed to building up a
system of secondary education for all
children from eleven to sixteen, and that our immediate
measures of reform should be inspired by that object
and should be designed to bring nearer its realisation.
But the policy for which we have pleaded is not the only
possible one. It is confronted not merely by a blank
opposition to educational improvements of any kind, but
by proposals for improvement which are advanced as
alternatives to it. It has, in short, to face competitors.
In the present chapter we proceed to consider shortly
these rival policies and to state why, after considering
them, we still insist that the main energies of all good
citizens, and of organised labour in particular, must be
devoted to giving effect, doubtless with improvements in
detail, and with due allowance for the varying circum-
stances of different localities, to the general principles
which are stated above.
I
THE MAIN ALTERNATIVES
It is the more necessary to examine these alternative
schemes because "public secondary education" is a
phrase which is not free from ambiguity. In its strictest
sense it might be confined to education given in in-
stitutions complying with the Board's regulations for
97
98 SECONDARY EDUCATION
secondary schools and receiving grants from it. In its
broadest sense, it might be extended to cover almost any
kind of post-primary education lasting over the period of
adolescence, including part-time continuation schools
and evening schools. In the past it has been very far
from true that all education given in secondary schools
could property be described as "secondary." In the
future, it might be asked, may not a good deal of what is
really secondary education be given in institutions other
than secondary schools ? It was the realisation of that
possibility which underlay, we think, the welcome given
by many persons to Section 10 of the Act of 1918. They
hoped that the continuation schools might in time
become, in all but name, a system of part-time secondary
education.
There would appear, in fact, to be two alternative
lines of development towards a more adequate system of
higher education. On the one hand, it may take
place by the extension of these other types of post-
primary education, without any attempt being made
either largely to increase the provision of secondary
education or to merge them in it. On the other hand, it
may proceed by taking the secondary school, in the
stricter sense of the word "secondary," as the standard
at which adolescent education must aim, by increasing
the provision of varying types of secondary schools as
rapidly as possible, and by seeking so to raise the
standard of the other and less adequate forms of post-
primary education as ultimately to make them, not an
alternative to secondary education, but an integral part
of it.
Which of these alternative channels educational pro-
gress is to follow is obviously a matter of the gravest
practical moment. In the latter case the line between
primary and secondary education will be re-drawn, and
the great majority of children will ultimately pass to
some kind, though neither necessarily nor probably the
same kind, of full-time secondary education about
eleven -f-. In the former case the secondary schools, while
recruiting an increased number of pupils, will remain
SECONDARY EDUCATION 99
the schools of a small minority, and primary education
will not be an avenue to secondary education, but will
overlap it. In so far as post-primary education is
developed at all, the rank and file of children in the
elementary schools will either remain in them till fourteen
and then enter a secondary school, or will pass between
eleven and fourteen to some other institution, designed
to give, like, for example, some "central" schools, a more
or less specialised preparation for commerce or industry.
The attempt to organise some kind of advanced instruc-
tion for the older or brighter pupils in the primary
schools without transferring them to secondary schools
is almost as old as a public system of primary education.
It is significant, indeed, of the instability of any
arrangement which attempts to grade education without
close reference to the natural facts of child development,
that, almost in spite of themselves, by a strained con-
struction of the Education Acts, and sometimes, as
finally appeared, in defiance of them, authorities charged
with the provision of primary education had hardly come
into existence before they found themselves committed by
the mere practical necessities of the situation to the
organisation of education other than primary. The
expedients adopted were numerous and have continued,
in one shape or another, up to the present day. At one
time they took the form of higher grade schools, at
another of higher elementary schools, at k third of
"higher tops," while side by side with the outgrowths
of the primary school went on the development of a
system of evening classes. The problem raised in this
pamphlet is not, in short, an artificial one. It has
haunted public education ever since its commencement.
These attempts to provide some kind of "advanced"
or "continued" instruction for primary school children
who would not pass to a secondary school had their
origin long before the recent great development of public
secondary education. In their inception they repre-
sented the only type of higher education available for
them. At the present time they represent one type, full
secondary education being the other. But educational
100 SECONDARY EDUCATION
traditions, once established, die hard. In the days before
a public system of secondary schools existed, the primary
schools pushed out their own tentacles into the upper air
of advanced education, because, while an extension of
some form of post-primary education was obviously
necessary, it was less troublesome to effect it by attach-
ing certain forms of higher education as a kind of appen-
dix to primary education than to undertake the effort of
imagination and organisation involved in reconsidering
the whole scheme of primary and secondary education
from its foundations. Now that the nucleus, at least, of
a public secondary system has been created, the earlier
policy still proceeds by its already acquired momentum.
Hence it is only rarely, it would seem, that Local Educa-
tion Authorities have asked themselves, with Gloucester-
shire, Darlington, and West Ham, whether, if secondary
education develops in the next generation as rapidly as
in the last, it will not result in making these alternative
types of post-primary education superfluous. In many
cases, at least, it would not be fair to criticise them for
that attitude. They may reasonably urge that hitherto
the great majority of children have left school alto-
gether at, or below, fourteen, and that, in such circum-
stances, the immediately urgent problem is to improve
the quality of the higher ranges of primary education.
Such improvement, it need hardly be said, is much to be
welcomed, whatever the particular organisation used to
effect it. At the same time, it ought to be possible to
combine it with a policy which looks beyond the immedi-
ate exigencies of the next five years. What is needed,
in short, is both to secure the more effective education
of children who will leave school at fourteen, and also
to develop secondary education on a scale adequate to
the demand for it, which, as has been shown above,
already exists, and which is likely, if experience may be
trusted, to increase largely in the near future.
At the present time the most important of the alterna-
tives to secondary education consists of (i) junior techni-
cal schools and central schools ; (ii) part-time continued
education, in the forms either, as in the past, of evening
SECONDARY EDUCATION 101
classes, or, as under Section 10 of the Education Act,
1918, of day continuation schools. Neither of these has
as yet developed on any very large scale. The junior
technical schools numbered in 1918-19 only sixty-nine,
and included some 9,422 children. The number of
children in central schools was probably even smaller.
The total number of persons under instruction in evening
classes during some part of the year 1918-19 was in
England 465,119. The intention of the Education Act,
1918, was, of course, both to develop advanced full-time
instruction and to create a new system of part-time con-
tinued education, which was to be compulsory and
universal. Section 2 (i) of the Act provides that "it
shall be the duty of a Local Education Authority so to
exercise their powers ... as to make, or otherwise to
secure, adequate and suitable provision, by means of
central schools, central or special classes, or otherwise
. . . for organising in public elementary schools courses
of advanced instruction for the older or more intelligent
children in attendance at such schools, including children
who stay at such schools beyond the age of fourteen."
Section 10 provides for the establishment of a system
of part-time continuation schools for all young persons,
not otherwise being educated, between fourteen and
sixteen, and (after seven years) between fourteen and
eighteen.
II
PART-TIME CONTINUED EDUCATION
On part-time continuation schools as an alternative to
the development of full-time secondary education it is
unnecessary for us to speak at length. The Labour
Movement warmly welcomed the Education Act of 1918,
and it has since made every effort to avert the suspension
of it in deference to the pressure of industrial interests,
which had opposed it when first introduced and which
used the financial panic as a cloak for resisting any inter-
ference with cheap juvenile labour. Though the demand
of Labour was for free and universal secondary education,
102 SECONDARY EDUCATION
not for continuation schools, it recognised gladly that
the latter would do something, at least, to protect
and develop boys and girls during the critical period of
adolescence. In 1919 the Education Advisory Com-
mittee of the Labour Party issued a pamphlet explaining
how Section 10 of the Act might be administered to the
best advantage, and local Labour Parties up and down
the country were zealous to secure its operation.
It is not, therefore, in any spirit of carping criticism or
impracticable idealism that we assert that part-time con-
tinuation schools cannot be accepted by the Labour
Movement as a substitute for the programme of secondary
educatioii set out in this pamphlet. The advantages
of even eight hours a week continued education between
fourteen and sixteen are obvious. But so, except as a
transitional measure, are its weaknesses. The physical
strain of combining forty hours' work in the factory
with eight hours in school may not be too severe at
sixteen or seventeen. At fourteen, except for the very
strongest children and in the very lightest employment,
it is likely to be excessive. The intellectual work of boys
and girls must inevitably suffer from the distraction of
interests involved in the attempt to serve two masters.
The continuation schools will, it is to be hoped, be real
schools, with a corporate life and in time a corporate
tradition ; but, at best, their influence must be weak com-
pared with that of a good secondary school which children
attend full-time for a period of four to five years. Nor
must it be forgotten that the question of the quality of the
educational system is at least as important as that of its
quantity, and that the quality depends largely upon the
relating of primary to post-primary education in such
a way as to correspond more exactly with the natural
facts of child development. "For the normal boy,**
states an official, "elementary education stops at about
eleven. It is a mistake to continue after this stage the
educational methods that are suitable for the preceding
stage." Merely to tack eight hours continued education
on to a primary school system that continues up to
fourteen does not solve the fundamental problem of
SECONDARY EDUCATION 108
scientifically connecting preparatory and adolescent
education. It gives it up.
For these reasons we cannot regard a system of part-
time continued education between fourteen and sixteen
as anything but a temporary arrangement. As a mere
matter of history, it was advocated prior to 1918 more
often on social and moral grounds, as a check on the
exploitation of juvenile labour or as an alternative to the
life of the streets, than because it was thought to possess
any very great educational merits. The real function of
the continuation school seems to us to be somewhat
different from that usually suggested. It ought to be a
continuation, not of primary, but of secondary, educa-
tion, and it will find its proper place in the years between
sixteen and eighteen, when the majority of boys and girls
will have entered some branch of industry but ought still
to be in touch with education. It is significant that
certain administrators appear to prefer to part-time con-
tinuation schools the development of full-time secondary
education up to fifteen or sixteen. "If an intermediate
school system be established," writes the Director of
Education for Darlington, "we shall have solved almost
all our compulsory continued education problems.'"
While, therefore, the reasons given for suspending the
operations of Section 10 of the Act are sufficient in them-
selves to make any person of moderate humanity and
public spirit determined to secure its immediate applica-
tion, part-time education between fourteen and sixteen
must be regarded, at best, as no more than a temporary
arrangement. What is to be hoped is that Local Educa-
tion Authorities will concentrate their energy on
developing full-time secondary education for all children
up to sixteen, and that part-time education will succeed
it in the years between sixteen and eighteen. At the later
age, when boys and girls are physically stronger and when
the foundations of specialised training have been laid by
five years in a secondary school, it should be of the
utmost value. But it cannot take the place of a good
1 Memorandum on " A School Scheme " and questions arising out
of the Education Act, 1918 (Darlington, May, 1919).
104 SECONDARY EDUCATION
general education, and to attempt to use it as a substitute
for the secondary school is only to prepare the way for
another disillusionment. Cheap substitutes, which have
to be abandoned in ten or fifteen years, are apt to be
more expensive than a plan of development which, even
if it costs more at the beginning, can be relied upon to
supply the framework of a permanent system. In the
long run the bolder policy is likely to prove to be, not
merely the only policy which will meet the demands of
Labour and of educationalists, but also the most
economical.
Ill
THE FUTURE OF CENTRAL SCHOOLS AND
SIMILAR INSTITUTIONS
Part-time continuation schools are not the only alterna-
tive to secondary education. There are also central
schools and junior technical schools. The junior
technical school has hitherto usually differed from the
secondary school in purpose, leaving age, and curriculum.
It is designed to offer practical instruction for boys and
girls who will leave school for industry at a younger age
than the majority of secondary school pupils. The age at
which it is entered appears to be usually between twelve
and fourteen, and is thus somewhat higher than that of
entering secondary schools. The curriculum is more highly
specialised, and the elements of "general" education in
it are much reduced. The characteristics of the "central"
schools vary. But their general tendency appears to
be somewhat similar, and the description of them in the
scheme of the London County Council, the pioneer of the
central school system, which established fifty-one such
schools between 1911 and 1919, and which has proposed
to increase them to 100, with accommodation for 40,000
children, is probably fairly typical. "Central schools
have been established with a view to providing for certain
specially selected boys and girls from the age of eleven
upwards a four years' general course of instruction with
a definite commercial or industrial bias."^ They are
^ Scheme of London County Council, pp. 15-16.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 105
definitely part of the primary school system, and, in
London, at any rate, are distinguished from the
secondary schools by several well defined differences.
Thus, (i) they are probably somewhat inferior to them m
respect of buildings, equipment, and ratio of staff to
pupils ; (ii) the curriculum is semi-vocational ; (iii) the
teachers are not paid on a secondary scale or required to
have secondary qualifications ; (iv) the normal leaving age
is lower than that of the secondary school ; (v) no main-
tenance allowances, except in a few cases, are paid ; (vi)
• — a point which is possibly their principal attraction from
the point of view of the Education Authority — they are,
compared with secondary education, cheap. They are, in
fact, an annex to the primary school, distinguished from
it by the fact that they are designed for "selected" chil-
dren, that they are somewhat better staffed and equipped,
and that they are intended to include in the curriculum
specialised instruction to prepare the pupils for entry into
commerce and industry, an entry which, it is con-
templated, will normally take place not later than fifteen.
It is evident from the schemes of Local Education
Authorities that, when the present financial panic has
abated, there is likely to be a movement to develop
central schools and similar institutions. The point upon
which the Labour Movement must make up its mind is
how far it will accept that policy as a substitute for a
wide extension of secondary education. The answer to
that question must largely depend upon the lines upon
which it is proposed to treat them. There appear, in
fact, to be two ways of envisaging the functions of what
are now called central schools. On the one hand, they
may be regarded as giving a somewhat more advanced
type of primary education. On the other hand, they
may be regarded as simply one kind of secondary
school. However secondary education may be organ-
ised, it is necessary to recognise that some boys and girls
will continue it to seventeen or eighteen, while others,
and a larger number, will end it at sixteen, if not before.
It is reasonable that the organisation and curriculum of
secondary schools should take account of this difference,
106 SECONDARY EDUCATION
and also, of course, that it should make provision for the
needs of those children who progress most rapidly when
the curriculum contains a liberal allowance of "practical'*
work. The central schools might conceivably be regarded,
as they appear to be, for instance, in Bradford, as an
addition to the supply of junior secondary schools, taking
the lower form work, and thus leaving existing secondary
school accommodation for the more advanced work,
while acting as "feeders" to secondary schools proper.
In the breadth of their curriculum and in the quality of
their staff and equipment they would, in fact, be
secondary education. But they would be secondary
education designed for children who will normally remain
in them for not more than five years and who will leave
about their sixteenth birthday.
It is towards some such transformation of the central
school and junior technical school that some progressive
Education Authorities seem to be feeling their
way. Thus the scheme of the Kent Education
Committee proposes that "the present junior techni-
cal schools and commercial schools shall be absorbed into
secondary or intermediate schools," and that a system
of intermediate schools shall be established providing
"a course of advanced instruction from three to four
years, capable of extension to a fifth year for
pupils who will remain in full-time attendance at school
until the age of sixteen." A touch of realism is to be
given to the curriculum by relating it to the life of the
neighbourhood. But "in all cases the basis of the curri-
culum will consist of English, history, geography, mathe-
matics, science, handicrafts (for girls domestic subjects),
and physical education."^ Except in the absence from
the curriculum of one foreign language, which is, as a
general rule, required by the regulations of the Board
for secondary schools, such a curriculum is in all essential
respects a secondary curriculum, and, if the highly
important matters of staffing, equipment, and grants are
• Draft Scheme of Education for Kent under the Education Act,
1918, pp. 62-8 and 108.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 107
for the moment put on one side, su'^h intermediate schools
are secondary schools in all but name. The suggestions
made by the Direction of Education for Darlington are
much the same. His proposals are that intermediate
schools should be established to take the place of the
existing central and junior technical schools, that they
should contain sufficient school places to accommodate
all children over twelve, and that the age-period should
be twelve to sixteen. Such "intermediate schools," he
remarks, emphasising the alternative lines of develop-
ment to which we have called attention above, **may be
of the type now represented by our central commercial
and junior technical schools, or preferably follow the same
lines of general education as secondary schools, from
which I believe they xvill be indistinguishable when they
are in full xvorking order. I think they should be voca-
tional only to the extent needed to convince pupils that
much of their learning is capable of practical application.
... To turn these into 'vocational' schools of a type
favoured in certain areas would only result in separating
scholars into groups according to probable occupations,
which would be little, if any, better than grouping accord-
ing to capacity to pay fees. . . . A good general educa-
tion is the first essential whatever calling a boy or girl
proposes to follow.*'*
One line of advance, therefore, is to work for a trans-
formation of central and junior technical schools into
intermediate schools of the type suggested by the
Directors of Education whose views we have quoted. In
so far as that were done, the whole educational system
would be simplified by the merging in the secondary
system of what, with all their merits, are at present
really educational hybrids, the central schools and junior
technical schools. A necessary corollary of the change
would be, of course, that such intermediate schools
should become eligible for secondary school grants and
be made amenable to the Board's regulations for second-
ary schools. In the past, no doubt with wisdom, the
* Memorandum (Darlington), pp. 35-36.
108 SECONDARY EDUCATION
Board has been more anxious tx) maintain the quality of
secondary education than to increase its quantity. The
recognition of such intermediate schools would not, how-
ever, involve any "lowering of the standard." The
need for what may be called junior secondary education
has to be met, and the whole level of the institutions by
which it is partially met at present would be raised if
they were pushed upwards out of the rather ambiguous
position which they occupy to-day into the second-
ary system. There is reason to believe that such
a development would commend itself to many practical
educationalists. "It would be a great gain," writes an
experienced official, "if it were definitely recognised that
elementary education ends at eleven-f . Beyond the age
of eleven 4- we have at present central, secondary, and
junior technical schools. At present only the secondary
school is supposed to belong to higher education. But
are not all three types secondary in the wider acceptance
of the term ? . . . Has 7iot the time come jor recognis-
ing as secondary all schools that provide a course of jiill-
time instruction between eleven and sixteen years of age ?
All such schools should have every encouragement to
develop. There should be no preferential treatment in
respect of grant and expenses of upkeep, //, for example,
classes of twenty-five, highly qualified staff, and spacious
playgrounds are the proper standard for the secondary
school, they are clearly the proper standard for a central
or junior technical school. Just as existing secondary
schools are encouraged to develop, and to retain their
pupils up to eighteen or nineteen years of age, so should
central schools be allowed to develop in the same way
if they are able to do so."
Disputes about words are unprofitable. There is no
mysterious virtue attaching to the mere phrase
"secondary education." What is required is that,
within the elastic frame-work of a national system, each
locality should develop the type of higher education
which best suits its own conditions, and it is quite
possible that in some areas the establishment of a general
system of secondary education up to sixteen can best be
SECONDARY EDUCATION 109
reached through the further development of central and
junior technical schools on the lines indicated by the
official quoted above. The more secondary education
develops, the greater the need for variety among
secondary schools. And with an intermediate
education thus conceived, lasting from twelve to
sixteen, cultural while appealing to practical interests,
with "a highly qualified staff and spacious playgrounds,"
no reformer need quarrel. It should be the aim of the
Labour Movement to hasten the transformation of
central schools and junior technical schools in the direc-
tion suggested by these authorities.
It should be equally its aim, however, to resist their
extension when they are designed, not as part of the
secondary system, but as an alternative to it. For it
must be pointed out that, as they exist to-day, most
central schools and junior technical schools cannot by
any stretch of imagination be described as giving second-
ary education, and that there is a considerable section of
opinion which would be strongly opposed to their develop-
ment on the lines indicated above. Central schools such
as many, if not most, of those hitherto established
neither are, nor are meant to be, a genuine part
of the secondary system. On the contrary, they are
simply an annex to elementary education : in the
words of the scheme of the London County Council, they
are "intended to replace the former higher grade and
higher elementary schools." Their curriculum is framed
"with a view to enabling the pupils to pass direct into
commercial and industrial pursuits." At the age of
twelve or thirteen a child is to plunge, apparently, into
the abstruse sciences of "book-keeping, shorthand, and
typewriting." The buildings and staffing are somewhat
better than those of the ordinary elementary schools.
But they appear sometimes (though not always) to be of a
kind which the Board would not tolerate in a secondary
school.
If central schools of this type are offered as a sub-
stitute for secondary education. Labour can define its
attitude towards them in a sentence. To put the matter
no SECONDARY EDUCATION
bluntly, it "is not having any." It is, of course, of
urgent importance to improve the higher ranges of
primary education. But the danger of central schools
of this kind — a danger which does not seem to have been
wholly avoided — is that they may induce public
opinion to acquiesce in the provision of secondary
school places on a quite inadequate scale, on the ground
that, for all but a small minority of children, secondary
education is neither practicable nor desirable.
That is a position which the Labour Movement cannot
for a moment accept. The objection to central schools
thus conceived is not due, as is sometimes suggested, to
any lack of appreciation of the part which can be played
by "practical" work in the school curriculum. Practical
work in the sense, not of specialised training for a
particular occupation, but of work which is closely
related to the living interests of the children, is
eminently desirable on strictly educational ground.
Wisely used, it is a stimulus, not an impediment, to
intellectual development, and experience shows that it
reacts favourably upon the other subjects studied. It
already has a place in the secondary schools, and will
have a more important place in the future. Nor is the
ground of our criticism merely the commercial and in-
dustrial "bias" which is supposed to colour the work of
the central schools. It is true, indeed, that it appears co
rest upon the mistaken idea that specialisation can use-
fully begin at twelve or thirteen and precede, instead of
following, a good general education. The proper comment
upon that fallacy is that of Mr. Boyde, the Director of
Education for Darlington : "We have not yet gone so far
as to establish 'vocational' schools for intending doctors,
lawyers, or those who intend to take the higher branches
of engineering. A good general education is the first
essential whatever calling a boy or girl proposes to
follow." But, though the conception which regards type-
writing and shorthand as suitable subjects for children
of thirteen is erroneous, the practice may be better than
the theory, and a sensible headmaster will usually be able
to secure that these fantasies are not allowed senously
SECONDARY EDUCATION 111
to interfere with the general education of the chil-
dren. The real defect of the central schools, as some-
times conceived hitherto, is that they propose to offer
what is in essence a cheap and mutilated alternative to
secondary education, and to do so partly for the sake of
economy, partly because of the fundamentally vicious
doctrine that the education of children during the period
of adolescence should be determined by the requirements
of the employment which they will eventually enter.
With the parsimony which offers a sham, because it
grudges, except for a selected minority of children,
expenditure on the reality, Labour can make truce as little
as with the vulgar commercialism which conceives of the
manufacture of efficient typists and mechanics as the
primary object of adolescent education. In this matter,
at least, it can claim with some confidence that educa-
tional theory is on its side. All educationalists are agreed
that classifications of children made at eleven and twelve
should be, at most, provisional, because the younger
the children, the more likely are they to be mistaken. If
the central school system, as it appears to be con-
ceived by some authorities, becomes general, it will
be decided on the strength of an examination held
between eleven and twelve that a child is not "capable
of profiting" by secondary education. Clearly, children
should not be segregated in different institutions at eleven
or twelve merely because at sixteen or seventeen they
may enter different occupations. On the central school
system the future clerk or artisan is detected in the child
of eleven, and he is drafted to a school designed to make
him one. Clearly, if the requirements laid down in the
Regulations of the Board as to organised games and
physical exercises, as to numbers, salaries, and qualifica-
tion of teachers, as to size of classes and school accom-
modation are good for any children, then they are good
for all children.
There was a certain simple, if callous and
fallacious, logic in the policy of providing no higher
education at all for children from the primary schools on
the ground that it was useless or dangerous for them to
H
112 SECONDARY EDUCATION
have it. But to admit children to advanced education
on the ground that they ought to have it, and then to
offer it them under conditions which are admittedly not
good enough for other children of precisely the same age,
the same physical requirements, and, often, the same
intellectual ability, and which in fact the State does not
allow in the schools attended by them, has a good deal of
the callousness and none of the logic. The fact that the
children in central schools are likely to enter trade or
industry (if it is true) is very largely irrelevant to the
question of the curriculum suitable for them, and entirely
irrelevant to the question of staffing, equipment, and
accommodation. A boy does not need less opportunity
for games because he is going to be a blacksmith and not
a business man ; nor has Providence provided the future
clerk with smaller lungs than the future director ; nor
should teachers be paid less for teaching boys and girls
in central schools than for teaching their brothers and
sisters in secondary schools.
The truth is that, as often conceived hitherto, the
central schools are, what The Times has called them, "a
product of the 1870 conception of education."^ They
rest on the assumption that the divorce between primary
and secondary education is to be maintained, and then,
since that divorce creates the insoluble problem
of how to organise advanced insti-uction for the children
excluded from secondary schools, the central school is
introduced as a makeshift partially to fill the gap, as the
higher elementary and higher grade schools were intro-
duced in the past. It is, in short, an inferior substitute
for secondary education. But, as the Director of Educa-
tion for Gloucestershire remarks, *'The worker will not
put up with inferior substitutes. Why should he ? It is
not to the interests of the country at large that he
should. What is good for the children of other people is
good for his. What is necessary for theirs is necessary for
his. He will want the secondary school."*
* The Times Edueational Supplement, May 1, 1919.
• Gloucestershire Interim Scheme in Respect of Secondary
Education, p. 3.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 113
The course of wisdom is to recognise that fact,
not **to waste half a dozen generations of school
children in the process" of making the central
school a transition stage towards the secondary
school, but to cease building central schools, and
to turn such of the existing central schools as are
suitable into secondary schools at the earliest possible
date. If the Board will let it be known that its policy
is, in the words of the distinguished official quoted above,
*'to recognise as secondary schools all schools that pro-
vide a course of full-time instruction between eleven and
sixteen years of age" ; to require that they shall comply,
in the matter of staffing and equipment, class rooms and
playing fields, with the regulations for secondary schools,
and to pay them grants on the secondary scale, Local
Education Authorities will be led, it may be prophesied,
to consider the wisdom of concentrating their energies,
not on the creation of more "inferior substitutes," like
many central schools and junior technical schools of
to-day, but on the development of a really adequate
system of secondary education.
CHAPTER VI
THE POSITION OF THE SECONDARY
SCHOOL TEACHERS
IT has already been made clear that the necessary
facilities for a large extension of secondary educa-
tion can be made available only if the requisite
number of teachers is forthcoming. It goes with-
out saying that these teachers must have had a University
education and training. In other days it was perhaps the
principal task of the Universities to educate those who
were afterwards to lead the mass of the population.
Although nowadays the functions of the University are
far wider than this — and with free secondary education
for all the demand for University education will become
still more widespread — yet the education and training
of teachers will always be a very important part
of their work, more especially when it comes to
be recognised that the primary schools must be
levelled up to the secondary schools in respect of
buildings, equipment, and status and qualifications of
teachers. It is obvious that the great development of
secondary education which the nation requires will
in years to come give us a very much larger reserve from
which our supply of teachers may be obtained; indeed,
the only way by which the acute problem arising from
the present shortage of teachers can be solved is to break
the vicious circle which causes the extension of secondary
education to be hampered by the scarcity of teachers,
and teachers to be scarce because there are too few boys
and girls in the secondary schools. When a Government is
prepared to undertake in earnest such an extension as
we contemplate, it will no doubt offer special facilities
and inducements to University graduates to undertake
114
SECONDARY EDUCATION 115
the necessary training. Within one year a considerable
number of them could be equipped to take up work
in the new schools, and every succeeding year would
add to their number. Nor must it be forgotten that
there are in the primary schools a large number of
teachers who are specialists in certain subjects, many
of whom would probably be well gratified to teach those
subjects in secondary schools.
This contemplated influx into the profession will only
take place, however, if salaries and conditions of work
are satisfactory. It is, therefore, relevant to inquire
how far existing secondary teachers are satisfied with
their position and prospects, and to what extent recruits
are being attracted into the secondary branch of the
profession.
The lot of the teacher in a secondary school has never
been an enviable one. It is true that the better-paid
posts in the great public schools are normally comfort-
able enough, and that men of little ambition and with
no desire to marry jog along contentedly in preparatory
schools and in a certain number of efficient privately-
owned schools. But in secondary schools aided or main-
tained by Local Education Authorities there has been
during recent years a remarkable manifestation of revolt
against conditions of service that were fast becoming
intolerable. Inadequately paid, and therefore filled with
constant anxiety as to his present position and future
prospects, the teacher in these schools has struggled on,
counting himself fortunate indeed if he has been able to
save enough to provide himself with a small pittance for
his declining years. As there is a very general impres-
sion that recent improvements in salary have given him
substantial benefits, and have even placed him in a
highly-favoured position, it may be worth while to give
the facts of the situation.
The report of the Bumham Committee on Salaries in
Secondary Schools states that the commencing salary of
an assistant master who is a University graduate shall
be £240, rising by increments of £15 per annum to a
maximum of £500. If he has taken a good honours
116 SECONDARY EDUCATION
degree — which means a first class, or, in certain cases,
a second class — he receives an addition of £25 to the
minimum and £50 to the maximum. If he has spent a
year after graduating in being trained for his profession,
he obtains an extra allowance of £20 on the minimum,
but nothing is added to the maximum. Should he be
appointed to a post of special responsibility, his maxi-
mum may be as much as £50 greater. For assistant
mistresses the scale is £225-15-400, with similar extra
allowances. Head masters and head mistresses have no
special scale, but it is recommended that no head master
shall receive less than £600 as a minimum, and no head
mistress less than £500. These scales apply to the whole
country with the exception of London, where men assist-
ants receive an additional £50 and women £40. Neigh-
bouring counties which are partly within the Metropoli-
tan Police district may adopt the London scale, but so
far only Middlesex has done so. There is a "carry-
over" arrangement by which existing teachers will not
reach their proper position on the scale until September,
1922.
The report has been very generally adopted through-
out the country, though some twelve or fifteen authori-
ties have made modifications which unfavourably affect
the teachers working in their area, while a few authori-
ties have not adopted it at all.
It is an open secret that the representatives of the
teachers were only induced to accept these scales in the
hope that a considerable fall in the cost of living would
eventually render them more adequate. It is, therefore,
with considerable apprehension that teachers have seen
the contention being put forward that the present slight
fall in the cost of living justifies a modification of the
Bumham award. It cannot be too widely known that
the scales were agreed upon by Local Authorities and
teachers as a national settlement which would not come
up for revision until 1925, unless, indeed, the cost of
living rises above the index figure 170, in which case the
position will be reconsidered. Thus there is specific
provision for an upward modification of the scale, but in
no case is there to be a reduction.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 117
While, then, teachers have agreed loyally to adhere
to the terms of the report, and while they look forward
to reaching in September, 1922, a position, not indeed
of affluence, but of reasonable satisfaction, they will
resist by every means in their power any attempt to
destroy the report. Such an attempt will revive all the
old unrest, and will have a most disastrous effect. In
various parts of the country those who have always
opposed educational expenditure, reinforced by so-called
"economists" and "anti-wasters," are crying out for
a repudiation of the Burnham scales. But the teachers
have an unanswerable case against reduction. When
the cost of living rose during the war, they were among
the last to receive any relief in the way of bonus — a relief
which was always inadequate. Moreover, their repre-
sentatives have agreed to a national settlement which is
to operate until 1925. Thus if, even before they are
receiving full benefit from the new scales, they are told
that they must submit to reductions, they will justly
complain that they are the victims of a gross breach of
faith.
It remains to be seen whether the new scale will attract
the right type of man and woman into the secondary
schools. A salary of £240 at the age of twenty-two or
twenty-three is not excessive for a man who has had to
spend a large amount of money on University training.
It is urged, of course, that a pension scheme is now in
operation, whereby a teacher can retire at the age of
sixty on as much as half his average salary for his last
five years of service. But, in the case of existing teachers,
much of the value of this is taken away because of the
distinction between qualifying and recognised service.
Put shortly, qualifying service is time but not money.
Service in certain schools may count towards the time
one must serve to secure a pension at all, but it has no
monetary value. Moreover, the value of the Act is
being lessened by certain irritating rulings of the Board
of Education. In the case of broken service, for instance,
they insist on regarding a year's service as 365 days,
whereas everyone knows that a year's service is less than
118 SECONDARY EDUCATION
this period. Again, if a school changes hands (even if
it retains the same head master and staff) it may be
regarded as an entirely new school, and thus the pension
rights of the whole of the staff may be jeopardised.
There is a great need for a short amending Act which
would put right these and other defects. One result of
the establishment of the Burnham scales, to which atten-
tion is now being drawn, is that it is becoming increas-
ingly difficult for any but young teachers to change their
posts. For instance, a man aged thirty-two, with, say,
ten years' experience, will have reached the point £390
(at least) on the Burnham scale. Many Local Authori-
ties will look askance at such a man, however well
qualified by experience and attainments he may be for
a given position, because he is expensive compared with
a young and untried teacher. The result is that the
profession is becoming much less mobile, and conse-
quently educational efficiency is undoubtedly being
impaired. One remedy that is being suggested is a
redistribution of educational expenditure between the
Board and the Local Authorities. There seems to be no
reason why there should not be a uniform local rate for
education throughout the country, the difference being
made up by the Board by means of a deficiency grant.
At any rate, it ought not to be to the financial advantage
of the Local Authority to employ teachers who are for
the most part on the lower rungs of the salary ladder.
From the point of view of the Labour Party the
Secondary Burnham Scale is certainly not too generous.
Moreover, the minimum of the scale ought to be raised,
not only for the purpose of attracting the type of teacher
required, but also because it is inadvisable to perpetuate
such differences in salary as now exist between men doing
essentially the same work. It is true, of course, that
experience does add to a teacher's value, but ten years
should be a period sufficiently long to enable a teacher to
reach the maximum of efficiency and hence to be worthy
of the maximum salary. Further, the Labour Party is
in complete accord with the feeling of teachers that train-
ing for the profession, as distinct from general education,
SECONDARY EDUCATION 119
is essential. This constitutes an additional argument for
raising the minimum salary, for it involves a year of post-
graduate work. All teachers know that training is not a
substitute for experience, for it is only when a teacher
comes to deal unaided with refractory human material
that his real capacity becomes tested. At the same
time, proper training enables him to avoid many pitfalls,
and to become an efficient teacher in a much shorter time
than would otherwise be the case. Even now the
Teachers' Registration Council will not admit an
untrained teacher to its register.
The question of tenure is one that has for a long time
exercised the minds of secondary teachers, for it is not
too much to say that tenure is far less secure in secondary
schools than in primary schools. It is no longer possible
for a head master to inform the staff of a school to which
he has been newly appointed that he proposes to begin
work with an entirely new staff ; nor is it usual to dismiss
a teacher who is nearing the maximum of the scale and at
the same time intimate to him that he is eligible to apply
for the vacancy at the minimum of the scale — cases which
are not imaginary but have both occurred in actual
practice. But what is wanted at the present time is
some method of securing that when a teacher has
accepted a post, and has passed successfully through a
probationary period, he shall be able to feel sure that his
position, so long as his work is efficiently done, shall be
permanent in character. Of course everyone knows that
it is sometimes necessary to reorganise the work of a
school, and perhaps to dispense with the services of a par-
ticular teacher ; but normally it would be easy to arrange
that this teacher should be transferred to another school
imder the same Authority, without loss of salary or
status. This matter of tenure is becoming increasingly
important because of the immobility already spoken of in
the case of teachers of long service. The plain fact is
that, if a teacher over thirty-five is forced to give up his
position, the result may be a tragedy.
In this connection it is necessary to consider the ques-
tion of secret reports. A teacher is sometimes told that
120 SECONDARY EDUCATION
he must leave a school because his work has received
unfavourable comment from an inspector. The report
in question may be six months old, and this may be the
first intimation a teacher has received that his work was
regarded as anything but successful. It is urgently
necessary that every report should be shown at once to
the teacher concerned, and that he should have an oppor-
tunity of replying to any unfavourable criticism. More-
over, it is noteworthy that teachers in conference have for
some time past been claiming a full partnership in educa-
tional administration. This demand arises primarily
from the desire to see the profession become a body of
free men and women bringing enthusiasm and expert
knowledge to bear upon the numerous problems,
administrative as well as purely educational, that still
remain to be solved. In this matter the mind of the
teaching profession is evidently moving in the same direc-
tion as that of other organised workers, who are demand-
ing some share of control over the conditions which
govern their working lives.
Developments of this nature are not the immediate
concern of the Labour Party. It ought, however, to watch
them sympathetically, and to lend its good offices when
the teachers are ready to put forward specific proposals.
It is to be hoped that when this happens many of the
difficulties to which we have referred will become easier
of solution. It may become the function of the profes-
sional body as a whole to set up a standard of
qualifications to which every teacher must attain, and
to decide whether the individual teacher succeeds or falls
short in professional competence. An advance so fraught
with the possibility of good to the children of the country
must proceed from the determined will and intelligent
planning of the teachers themselves.
It will be useful at this point to give some account of
the way in which secondary teachers are organised in
their several Associations. There are four main
Associations of Secondary Teachers, representing respec-
tively the head masters, head mistresses, assistant
masters, and assistant mistresses. All these bodies possess
SECONDARY EDUCATION 121
a charter of incorporation. The National Union of
Teachers also provides for the inclusion of secondary
teachers within its ranks. In addition, there is the
Head Masters' Conference, a body rather more loosely
organised than the Incorporated Association of Head
Masters, and representing in the main the schools
independent of local control. A good many head masters
are members of both bodies. A Joint Committee of the
Four Associations has existed for some years, and has
done very useful work in co-ordinating the interests of
secondary teachers, and in taking joint action on many
matters of common interest. With representatives
sitting side by side on the Secondary Burnham Com-
mittee, this co-operation has tended to become much
closer, and the recent coming together of the head-
quarters of all four Associations under one roof has
distinctly enhanced the possibility of securing authori-
tative pronouncements on the policy of the secondary
branch of the profession as a whole. A similar
co-ordination of secondary interests is also taking place
in the provinces. Local "Joint Four Committees" on
the lines of the main committee have been set up in a
great many districts, and have in many cases taken their
full share in local educational politics, especially in the
matter of securing representation on the Advisory
Committees which have been established by some Local
Authorities.
This particular form of public work, useful as it is in
its way, does not, however, satisfy the legitimate
ambition of secondary teachers to serve not only on
Advisory Committees, but also on the Education
Committees themselves and on other public bodies. It is
a matter for regret that comparatively few Local
Authorities have made much use of that part of the Act
of 1902 which allows them to co-opt teachers. In a
good many cases there is some representation of primary
teachers. But that of secondary teachers, where it
exists, is haphazard in the sense that it is often effected
without consultation with the Secondary Associations
122 SECONDARY EDUCATION
concerned. It is perhaps hardly necessary to urge that
adequate representation of teachers on Local Education
Authorities is necessary if the administrative machine is
to work smoothly. There is no part of the public service
in which unchecked bureaucracy may have a more
disastrous effect than in the domain of education. It is
fatally easy to burden the schools with innumerable
regulations involving an enormous amount of clerical
work, or to check that initiative and sense of freedom
which every real teacher ought to possess. The presence
of teachers on Education Committees does go some way
towards keeping educational administration in touch with
realities, and it is to be hoped that in the future the
claims of secondary teachers in this connection will be
more widely recognised than they have been in the past.
While the secondary teachers have been working
towards a closer federation of interests, they have not
been unmindful of the great impetus given to the idea of
a united profession by the establishment of the Teachers*
Registration Council. Since the setting up of that body,
on which Primary, Secondary, Specialist, and University
teachers are equally represented, the minds of many
teachers have been moving towards finding a method of
enabling all teachers to meet on common ground. Many
of the old prejudices are dying away, and the secondary
teachers for their part would certainly welcome some
plan which, while enabling them to retain their separate
entity, would emphasise the fact that they are members
of a united profession. Signs are not wanting that the
great organisation which represents in the main primary
education — the National Union of Teachers — is also con-
sidering the best means by which the mind of the teaching
profession as a whole can express itself. There are here
great possibilities, not only for united action against the
common enemy, but for considered and constructive
criticism of our educational system.
Once the profession is united, the old anti-social
distinction between primary and secondary teachers will
tend to disappear. The qualifications required from
both kinds of teachers will be similar, and it will therefore
SECONDARY EDUCATION 128
be possible for teachers to pass easily from primary into
secondary schools and vice versa. The aim should be
to make our educational system an organic unity, alive
in every part, served by teachers united, self-governing,
and free.
CHAPTER VII •
THE LION IN THE PATH
I
THE COST OF OUR PROPOSALS
THE exponents of an educational policy may
reasonably be asked to offer some indication of
the expenditure which it will entail. If it is
agreed that a large increase should be made,
both in the provision of secondary education and in the
facilities for rendering it easily accessible to families of
small means, what is the financial cost of such develop-
ments likely to be ?
The answer to that question must depend upon the
degree of rapidity with which the change is introduced.
For the reasons stated above, we agree with those
educationalists who look forward to the time when the
majority of children will spend the years from eleven
to sixteen in one kind or another of secondary school.
But, even if that policy is adopted as the goal at which
to aim, it is obvious that practical considerations, in
particular the shortage of accommodation and teachers,
will prevent it being carried out except by gradual
stages. What we anticipate, in fact, is not any sudden
large addition to the expenditure on secondary
education, but a steady advance. Fees at grant-aided
secondary schools (which, at the moment, with lament-
able shortsightedness, are being raised) will be abolished
and maintenance allowances increased. Local Education
Authorities will meet the present unsatisfied demand for
secondary education by adding to their provision of
secondary school places, as many have already planned
124
SECONDARY EDUCATION 125
to do. Increased facilities for obtaining it will in turn
stimulate a new demand, as it has been stimulated by the
development of secondary education since 1902, and to
meet that demand a further increase in the provision
will be necessary. The end will be envisaged, it is to be
hoped, with comparative clearness. But progress
towards it will be experimental. And just as to-day in
some areas ten per cent, of the children pass from primary
to secondary schools, while in others the proportion is
five or less, so in the future one authority will take fifty
per cent, of them into the secondary schools while
another takes only twenty-five. Expenditure will
increase, but the increase will necessarily be gradual,
and the additional cost at any moment will depend upon
the additional provision which has been made.
With this caution, and with the omission of compli-
cations arising from future changes in the value of money,
it is possible to offer an approximate estimate of the
annual financial expenditure which our policy would
involve. The additions to expenditure needed to carry
it out will fall under three main heads : (i) the abolition
of fees at grant-aided secondary schools ; (ii) the develop-
ment of an enlarged system of maintenance allowances ;
(iii) the provision of additional secondary school places,
the main item in which will consist of the salaries of
teachers. In the following paragraphs we deal with the
annual cost of maintenance under each of these three
heads. The estimate is necessarily very rough. But
we have endeavoured to err, if anything, on the side of
over-statement, and have not taken into account the
economies which can be effected by a better co-ordina-
tion of primary and secondary education, though we
believe them to be considerable.
The cost of abolishing fees can be stated with some
accuracy. The income from fees was £1,100,245 in
1912-13, and was estimated by the Departmental Com-
mittee on Scholarships and Free Places as approximately
£2,000,000 in 1920.' This figure, therefore, or slightly
more, is the sum which it would cost the nation to free
^ Op. cit., p. 16.
126
SECONDARY EDUCATION
existing secondary schools without increasing the present
school population.
The cost of establishing an adequate system of main-
tenance allowances cannot be stated with equal precision,
since it will vary with changes in the cost of living and the
level of earnings. In 1918-19 £253,149 was spent in
England and Wales in providing maintenance allowances
for 29,796 children in secondary schools, who formed
10.6 per cent, of all children in attendance. If, however,
the secondary school population increases, a larger pro-
portion of it, and not merely a larger absolute number,
will require to be assisted by maintenance allowances.
To show the probable cost under this heading, we put
that proportion at an arbitrary figure of thirty per cent,
of the pupils in attendance, which is approximately three
times the present proportion. To provide maintenance
allowances of the same average value (£8 9s.) for thirty
per cent, of the children would cost the following sums
for secondary school populations of different sizes : —
England and Wales
(excluding preparatory
departments)
No. of
children
Cost of providing
maintenance
allowance for
30 per cent, of
children in
attendance
Children in secondary schools in
England, 1919-20'
280,336
360,000
720,000
2,250,000
£710,649
£912,600
Children in secondary schools in
England on scale of 10 per
1.000 of noDulation
Children in secondary schools on
scale of 20 per 1,000 of
population
£1,810,200
£5,703,750
Children in secondary schools on
scale of 75 per cent, of those
leaving elementary schools . . .
Assuming therefore that (i) the proportion of children
receiving maintenance allowances is trebled ; (ii) that the
children in secondary schools are increased from 8.7 per
1,000 to twenty per 1,000, the total cost of maintenance
allowances would be £1,810,200.
SECONDARY EDUCATION
127
So far, we have not been dealing with very large
figures. To free secondary education and to establish
maintenance allowances on the largest scale given in the
above table would cost a good deal less than half one
battleship. The provision of additional school accommo-
dation for a greatly enlarged secondary school population
is, of course, a much more serious matter. The annual
maintenance cost of a secondary school place is, at
present, £28 to £30. The total number of boys and
girls between eleven and sixteen is approximately
3,000,000. Of these the children between eleven and
fourteen would be attending primary schools if they
were not attending secondary schools. In order,
therefore, to ascertain the net addition to the national
expenditure involved in providing secondary education
for them, the cost of educating them in a primary school
must, of course, be deducted. To that point we return
later. In the following table we give the gross annual
expenditure on secondary education on each of three
assumptions : —
(a) That secondary school places are provided on the
scale of ten per 1,000 of the population (instead
of, as now, on that of 8.7 per 1,000) ;
(6) That they are provided on the scale of twenty per
1,000;
(c) That they are provided for seventy-five per cent,
of the children leaving the primary schools.
Gross Cost of Secondary Education at the Rate of
£30 PER School Place
Total gross
Number of
Cost per
cost per
children
child
annum
On scale of 10 per 1,000 . .
380,000
£.30
£10,800,000
On scale of 20 per 1,000 . .
720,000
£30
£21,600,000
On scale of 75 per cent, of
children leaving the
elementary schools . . .
2,250,000
£30
£67,500,000
128
SECONDARY EDUCATION
In order to arrive at the net cost of secondary school
places, it is necessary, as stated above, to deduct from the
gross cost the cost of providing primary school places for
children between the years eleven and fourteen. The
annual maintenance cost of a primary school place is
at present £8 15s. 9d.^ According to the last report
of the Board (October, 1920) out of 308,372 chil-
dren in the secondary schools on the Grant List there
were 60,505 children between ten and twelve, and 194,665
between twelve and sixteen. It is probable that about
half the former and nearly three-quarters of the latter,
had they not been attending secondary schools, would
have been attending primary schools, approximately
150,000 children in all, or forty-eight per cent, of the
total secondary school population. If it is assumed
that, at any one time fifty per cent, of the children
receiving secondary education would otherwise have been
in primary schools, then the net cost will be shown by the
following table : —
On scale of 10 per
1,000
On scale of 20 per
1,000
On scale of 75 jjer
cent, of children
leaving the ele-
mentary schools . .
No. of
children
360,000
720,000
2,250,000
Total
gross
cost of
secondary
education
£10,800,000
£21,500,000
£67,500,000
Deduct cost
of primary
education
(S.8 16s. per
head) for
50% of
children
£1,575,000
£3,150,000
£9,843,750
Total net
cost per
annum of
secondary
education
£9,225,000
£18,350,000
£57,6.57,000
These figures considerably underestimate the deduc-
tions to be made, and therefore overestimate the net cost
of providing additional secondary school places, because
(i) a growing number of children, if not attending
'^ Seventh Report of Select Committee on National Expenditure
(Dec. 1920). The Geddes Report (p. 109) puts it at £12 4s. 4d.
(1921-2). If its figures are right the deduction to be made is, of
course, greater and the net cost of our proposals correspondingly less.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 129
secondary schools, will be, not in primary schools, but in
the more expensive central and intermediate schools,
(ii) as the secondary school population grows, the per-
centage of it drawn from primary schools will increase
more than in proportion. Obviously, when seventy-five
per cent, of the children in primary schools pass to
secondary schools between the ages of eleven and twelve,
the saving on account of primary education will be larger
than that suggested above. The nearest estimate we
can give would be to say that to provide secondary
education on a scale of twenty per thousand of the
population would probably cost something over
£15,000,000 and under £18,000,000 a year, and that to
provide it for seventy-five per cent, of the children
leaving the primary schools would probably cost some-
thing over £50,000,000 and under £55,000,000 a year.
For the reasons stated above, any such development can
take place only gradually, as teachers are found and
accommodation provided. If the former were effected in
a period of five years, the addition to the annual
expenditure made in each year would be approximately
£3,000,000. If the latter were carried out over a period
of ten years, the corresponding figure would be
£5,000,000.
The total net cost of (a) a minimum programme, (h)
a larger programme, based on our policy may, therefore,
be set out in the following estimate : —
(A) Cost of Minimum Programme at end of Five Years
Cost per annum
£
Abolition of fees at grant-aided secondary schools . 2,000,000
Provision of school places on scale of twenty per
1,000 of population 18,350,000
Provision of maintenance allowances for 30 per cent,
of above number of children in grant-aided
secondary schools 1,810,200
Total 22,160,200
Deduct present cost of secondary education (1921-22) 13,468,731 '
Additional cost £8,691,469
' This includes some items which are not strictly " secondary "
education.
130 SECONDARY EDUCATION
(B) Cost of Larger Programme at end of Ten Years
Cost per annum
£
Abolition of fees at grant-aided secondary schools . 2,000,000
Provision of school places on scale of 75 per cent, of
children leaving the elementary schools 57,657,000
Provision of maintenance allowances for 30 per cent,
of above number of children in grant-aided
secondary schools 5,703,750
Total £65,360,750
Deduct present cost of secondary education (1921-22) 13,468,731 *
Additional cost £51,891,919
The additional cost of our minimum programme,
therefore, would be less than that of one battleship. If
the nation "ruined itself" by carrying out the larger
programme, it would ultimately be spending on all kinds
of education (higher and elementary together) about
£50,000,000 less than it now spends (1921-22) on the
army, navy, and air force.
II
CAN THE NATION "AFFORD" EDUCATION?
The comment of the reader who turns from his Daily
Mail to glance for the first time at these figures will be
simple : "Very nice, but the nation cannot afford it."
At a meeting of the Federation of British Industries
a little more than a year ago, held (for the sake
of economy) in the Victoria Room of the Hotel
Cecil, a certain Mr. Lincoln Chandler — apparently
a waggon-builder — is reported, as became one of his
profession, to have driven straight to the point, and like
Jehu, the son of Nimshi, to have driven furiously. "It
was time," he is stated to have said in a series of striking
aphorisms quoted by The Times of December, 1920,
"they came to plain speaking ... we had embarked on
schemes without which we had got on very well. There
was the Education Act, the Health Bill, . . . and various
* See note ' on previous page.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 131
other schemes. He should like to send a strong message
to Mr. Lloyd George that the whole of these schemes
should be dropped and dropped at once." Few will
question this sage's statement that he had *'got on very
well" without education. It is even possible that, were
education more widely diffused, he and his kind might
"get on" somewhat less well in the future. But the
enlightenment even of the reluctant is a meritorious act ;
and, at the risk of boring our readers with common-
places, we propose to set out shortly, without demanding
fees or even engaging the Hotel Cecil, the relevant facts
as to educational finance and expenditure, for the benefit
of those who do not think that a nation is likely to "get
on very well" without education, but who, nevertheless,
are apprehensive that educational progress can be
secured only at a cost which is beyond its financial
resources.
It may be observed, in the first place, that no conclu-
sion can be drawn as to the reasonableness or otherwise of
educational expenditure until that expenditure is brought
into relation with other items in the budgets both of the
State and of private individuals. All magnitudes are
relative — a fact which is common (if it is not profane to
say so) to the cost both of education and of waggons.
Whether a community can or cannot "afford" to arrange
that its children shall grow up under conditions
calculated to promote their physical and mental develop-
ment depends not merely — to use the somewhat absurd
phraseology favoured by a certain school of politicians —
upon the "burden" which such an arrangement will
entail, but upon the nature of the other objects to which
expenditure is directed. Expenditure is neither more
nor less onerous because the money is raised by rates and
taxes, and spent by publicly chosen agents consisting of
Local Education Authorities, than it is when it is incurred
by private individuals upon their own account. V/hether
it is or is not a "burden" depends upon the relative
importance of the objects to which it is assigned. Some
things are desirable in themselves, but must be forgone
because other things are more urgent. Other things are
132 SECONDARY EDUCATION
futile in themselves, but are acquired because some
people have a taste for futilities.
In this matter the only difference between the
conduct of the individual citizen and that of a
nation is that an individual who indulged his
passion for futilities to the point of neglecting his
primary social obligations — who turned his house into a
fortress armed to the teeth in which he swilled alcohol
in the drawing-room and kept his children on short rations
in the coal hole — would become amenable to the law,
while a whole community by doing the same may earn an
agreeablv^ reputation for being practical, high-spirited,
and generally an imperial people entitled to sing "Take
up the white man's burden, and dump it on the child"
to the glory of God and to the exhilaration of all but a few
anaemic sentimentalists. But patriotic tunes butter no
parsnips. A writer who was at one time thought to
know something about business remarked that "what is
prudence in the conduct of every private family can
hardly be folly in that of a great kingdom." And, if a
parent who neglects his children is liable to criminal pro-
ceedings, the burden of proving that the same action is
highly meritorious when done by several million parents,
in the name of economy, appears to rest on those who
support that paradox.
The innocent gentlemen like Sir Eric Geddes, I>ord
Inchcape, and the rest, who suppose that the "tax-
able capacity" of a nation is a fixed quantity,
and that, if more than a certain proportion of
the annual product is taken by the State, disaster must
follow, irrespective of the objects to ivhich the State
applies the vioney raised, may be invited to console them-
selves by reading the Report on Credit, Currency, Fin-
ance, and Foreign Exchanges prepared by Section F of the
British Association. To the question whether the "tax-
able capacity" of Great Britain has been "reached and
passed" the answer given by the majority of economists
appears to be that of Sir Josiah Stamp : "There can be
no absolute answer, because it depends upon the reasons
for, or subjects ^(pon, which the money is to be spent/*
SECONDARY EDUCATION 133
It is, in short, quite idle to discuss expenditure
on education except in connection voith expenditure on
other subjects. Whether a nation can "afford" it or
not, depends upon whether it is or is not more
important than other purposes on which it is spend-
ing money. When, therefore, the Select Committee
on National Expenditure deplored^ the "alarming
increase" in the cost of education, it was not merely
mistaken (though, of course, it was mistaken) as to the
financial facts, it showed a complete ignorance as to
elementary financial principles. It relapsed, in fact,
from the mendacious into the meaningless. To do it
justice, it appears to have been equally at home in both.
The facts as to educational expenditure appear to be
widely misunderstood, and the misunderstanding is not
altogether the fault of the public. It is not merely that,
in the nature of things, no complete estimate of the total
educational expenditure of the country can be given,
since there is no way of ascertaining the expenditure of
private individuals. There is the further, and more sur-
prising fact, that there appears to be no one official
document in which all the facts as to public expenditure
on education are brought together. The figures in
Tables I. -III. below are reprinted, by kind permis-
sion of its authors, from the excellent Bulletin* on Educa-
tion issued by Cambridge House. For an account of
the sources used and for further information on several
points of importance, the reader is referred to the
Bulletin in question. For the use made of the figures,
and for the conclusions drawn from them, we alone, of
course, are responsible.
» Seventh Report from the Select Committee on National
Expenditure (December 21, 1920), p. xiv.
• Cambridge House Bulletins, Education I, to be obtained from
Cambridge House, 131 Camberwell Road, London, S.E.
134
SECONDARY EDUCATION
TABLE I'
Total Public Expenditure (Central and Local) on Education
IN England and Wales
Year
Amount
Percentage
increase
year to year
Percentage
increase
on 1913-14
1913-14
£
33,000,000
45,500,000
78,500,000
84,500,000
38
73
8
1918-19
38
1920-21 (estimated)
1921-22 (estimated)
138
156
This increase is divided between elementary and
higher education as follows : —
' The corresponding figures in the First Interim Report of the
Committee on National Expenditure (p. 107) — the so-called
*' Geddes Report " — are as follows : —
Percentage increase
Percentage increase
£ from year to year
on 1913-14
1918-14
31,510,000 —
—
1918-19
42,110,000 83-6
88-6
1920-21
77,000,000 880
1446
1921-22
84,580,000 9-7
168
The discrepancy between the figures given above and those of the
Geddes Committee is small. According to the former, the increase
in educational expenditure since 1913-14 is 156 per cent. ; according
to the latter, 168 per cent. But it is sulficient to give point to
what is said above on the urgent need that a complete and reliable
report on the cost of education should be published annually by the
Board, instead of this vital question being left to private investigators
or to a committee of business men who are without practical
knowledge of the subject matter. The explanation of the discrepancy
is to be found in the fact that Table I above includes certain small
receipts by Local Education Authorities from fees, the sale of
books, &c., which the Geddes Report excludes, and in certain
minor ambiguities in the educational statistics contained in the
statistical abstract. It may be further observed that the figures
published by the Geddes Committee disagree with those published
in the Seventh Report of the Committee on National Expenditure
(December, 1920).
SECONDARY EDUCATION
135
TABLE II
Year
Expenditure on
elementary
education
(nearest 1,000)
Percentage
increase
on
1913-14
Expenditure
on
higher
education*
Percentage
increase
on
1913-14
1913-14
1921-22
£
26,314,000
63,649,000
142
£
5,248,000
13,469,000
157
It is important to know the main items on which the
increase has been incurred. Light is thrown upon that
point by the following figures, which, however, relate
only to elementary (not to higher) education.
TABLE III
1918-14
Per-
centage
of total
expendi-
ture
1921-22
Per-
centage
of total
expendi-
ture
(1) Loan charges ....
(2) Other expenses of
maintenance . . .
(3) Administration . .
(4) Salaries of teachers
£
3,049,359
4,173,311
1,293,042
16,415,827
110
15-8
4-9
62-4
£
3,115,149
10,443,768
2,974,541
43,296,355
4-9
16-4
4-8
68-0
Finally, it is perhaps worth setting out the proportion
of the national expenditure devoted to education at
different dates (similar figures for local expenditure are
not available) : —
The corresponding figures in the Geddes Report are :
Percentage increase
£ on 1918-14
1918-14 4,402,000 —
1921-22 13,500,000 206-7
186
SECONDARY EDUCATION
TABLE IV
All national services
in the United Kingdom
Proportion of
expenditure devoted
to education in
England and Wales
1913-14
£
197,492,969
1,195,428,000
1,039,728,000
Per cent.
7-28
1920-21
40
1921-22
4-90
From
the
abo\
e tables the foil
owing conclusions
appear to emerge : —
(i) The vioney expenditure on public education
(elementary and higher) is 156 per cent, (or, on
Geddes' figures, 168 per cent.) higher in 1921-22
than it was in 1913-14.
(ii) The main cause of the increase of £51,000,000
(or, on Geddes' figures, £53,070,000) between
those dates is the increase in the salaries
of teachers, those of elementary teachers having
increased by £26,880,528 ; those of secondary and
other teachers by an uncertain, but substantial,
figure. Minor causes of the increase are that
repairs and building, postponed during the war,
have been executed since the Armistice at high
prices, and that the salaries of officials have risen.
It must also be remembered — a fact sometimes
apparently forgotten — that the child population
has been growing since 1913-14 !
(iii) The proportion of the national expenditure
devoted to education fell from 7.28 per cent, in
1913-14 to 4.9 per cent, in 1921-22.
These figures relate only to the money cost of educa-
tion. Before, therefore, any precise significance can be
attached to them, it is necessary to set them in relation to
(1) expenditure on other objects, public and private ; (2)
changes in the general price level, and, in particular, in
the cost of living. This we attempt to do in the follow-
ing table : —
SECONDARY EDUCATION
187
d a
<OrH
rH o
1470
4240
1780
2910
1
o
CO
00
166-0
1750
107-0
114-6
rH
©
£
84,500,000
190,669,467
460,900,585
67,165,000
Figures not
vet
available
" Well over
2d." (estd.)
o
a
available
rH
rH
^ 1
1 1 1 1
1
1
2,500,000,000
6,925,005
rH
£
78,500,000
292,228,000
609,181,953
11,735,840
o"
8
o*
1 III
rH
o
rH
t^ 1
1 1 1 1
1
1
314,060,000
>■
t^ 1
3,001,268
1
1
1 III
-<
1— (
^ 1
87,913,000
1
1
1 III
CO
1-H
Oi
rH
£
33,000,000
77,164,000
14,179,000
0-88d.
(estd.)
166,600,000
CO
I— t
O
rH
^ 1
1 1 1 1
1
1
907,151,813
3,354,476
rH »
rH a
t^ 1
1 1 1 1
1
1
118,000,000
2 ■-
-S :
S :
"a :
1=
"d o
.St)
?§
Army, navy, & air force
Civil service and revenue
department*
Total net expenditure
on posts, telephones,
and telegraphs
Receipts from entertain-
ments duty"
a;
P<
r1
I
a
02
1-
|.=
Pithead value of coal"
Income liable to income
tax before deduction
of allowances <fe relief 8 "
Imperial Tobacco Com-
pany's profits
Cnst of livino"
2
2
a
s
a
a
a
tS
S
<o
13
o
o
>
O
a
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ki o
5 tj
oS CO
Ph «)
is
Si
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•h
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O
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•a -3
t) «
£> <o
p'- »,
&S
^ a
Mid •
<U u .rH
gj'-i ^ c^ o>
I-; >. a 2 "^ -
§3^aoo|
*-* w o 2 >»ca
aj« S art p
a S a
- ° a ^ Eh g
v; rf O <U ^
138 SECONDARY EDUCATION
The first fact which these figures show is that the talk
of the "alarming increase" in the cost of education is
misleading. When account is taken of the devaluation
of money, the increase in educational expenditure since
1913-14, though real, is hardly "alarming," especially
when compared with the increased expenditure
upon other objects. The degree of reliance to
be based upon the widely advertised seventh
report of the Select Committee on National
Expenditure may be judged from the fact that
this elementary point, which lies at the very thres-
hold of the subject, was either unknown to, or deliber-
ately suppressed by, that body of financial experts ! The
truth is that, measured in goods and services, which, of
course, alone matter, the nation was actually applying
a smaller sum to education in December, 1920 — the time
when the committee reported — than it did seven years
ago. It is actually the case, though the reader will
hardly believe it, that the same suppressio veri was
repeated, without a word of caution or explanation, by
the so-called Geddes Committee. Between 1913 and
1921 the income liable to income tax increased from
£907,151,813 to £2,500,000,000. Would Sir Eric Geddes
and Lord Inchcape hold that there had been an "enor-
mous increase" in the real incomes of the wealthier
classes since 1913? If not, why do they suggest that
there has been an "enormous increase" in the real cost
of education ?
It will be observed, in the second place, that the nation
spent in 1920-21 more than five times as much on drink as
it spent on education — the drink bill, indeed, is enormous
partly because the education bill is too small — and that
the expenditure on armaments three years after
the termination of hostilities is considerably more than
twice that on education. The disproportion is so
immense that it would still remain large even if the pro-
posals made in this pamphlet were carried out. In the
event of effect being given to the "minimum programme"
set out above, and of no other changes in expenditure
taking place, the nation would still be spending almost
SECONDARY EDUCATION 139
twice as much on the armed forces as on education. If
the larger programme were realised, its expenditure on
the former would still exceed its expenditure on the
latter by over £50,000,000 a year, or considerably more
than the total sum spent on the army in 1913-14 !
In face of facts of this order it is quite idle for Select
Committees, "business men," or any one else to
deplore "the alarming increase in the cost of
education," because, in reality, when account is
taken of the devaluation of money, no very great
increase has taken place, and, if it had, it would
not be alarming, since (as the figures show) the nation
can meet it by cutting down some of the extravagances
both of its government and of its individual members.
Like the revolutionary Tribunal which told Lavoisier
that "the Republic has no need of chemists," Lord
Inchcape may see in education nothing but economically
unproductive expenditure. It is time, however, that
the business classes and their servants in the Cabinet
and in Parliament stopped mistaking their personal
prejudices for economic facts. By far the largest
item in the increase in the money expenditure
upon education consists of the advance in teachers'
salaries. If a man's heart leaps up at the thought of
employing soldiers, sailors, and publicans, and sinks
to his boots at the thought of employing teachers,
he is entitled to his opinion. One cannot argue with the
choice of a soul, and if he likes that kind of thing then
that is the kind of thing he likes. But his private senti-
ments, even when he sits on a Select Committee or in the
Cabinet, have no more relevance to economic realities
than have those of any other old gentleman who thinks
that the world is coming to an end because he has to pay
more for his cigars. A certain section — happily for the
nation, not the most representative section — of the Eng-
lish governing classes have always thought that the most
desirable way of saving money was to reduce the height,
weight, vitality, and intelligence of the children of people
poorer than themselves, on the groimd, presumably, that
such canaille can hardly be expected to take the same
140 SECONDARY EDUCATION
interest in life as their own. But not every one is an
economist who choosesi to make speeches or issue reports
about "economy," and when these respectable cannibals
propose to "economise" on education, they provoke the
retort that it would be considerably more economical for
the nation to economise on them.
We do not, therefore, ask whether there is not a
certain absurdity in applying the rigours of the economic
calculus to boys and girls of fourteen, whether the policy
of "making the children pay for the war" is quite the most
appropriate tribute to the fathers who fell in it, whether,
if the ship is reaUy sinking, "women and children last"
is the motto by which the British Empire desires to be
remembered. The paladins who are leading the attack
on the schools appeal to economic facts, and to
economic facts they shall go. The total sum spent on
higher education in 1913-14 was slightly less than the sum
paid to rather less than 4,000 owners of mineral royalties,
which (in other connections) we are informed is a
bagatelle, and in 1921-2 is almost exactly equal to the
average annual profits of the ooal industry for the five
years 1909-13. The salaries of 16,000 teachers for con-
tinuation schools under the Act of 1918, at an average of
£300 a year, would have been £4,800,000, or slightly less
than the profits (before deductions for income tax and
excess profits duty) made in a single year — 1919 —
by a single firm — Coats' Combine — more than £2,000,000
less than the profits — £6,925,005— made in 1921
by the Imperial Tobacco Company, and approxi-
mately £2,000,000 less than the expenditure of the
Government on its farcical military preparations for
cowing the miners last summer, when the cutting down
of education, because "the nation could not afford it,"
had already begun. If the Education Act of 1918 had
been brought into operation with the greatest possible
speed, the total additional expenditure on education by
1924 would probably have been something approaching
£10,000,000, or rather more than the cost of one battle-
ship. If the larger of the two programmes outlined
above were to be developed steadily for the next decade.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 141
the additional annual expenditure at the end of it would
be something less than half what has been spent since the
Armistice in financing and arming military adventurers
against Russia, not to mention Mesopotamia and Ireland.
Ill
THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER
So far, then, as the facts of the financial situation
are concerned, the attack on educational expenditure
breaks down in the very court to which it appeals.
The nation is not "crushed by educational expendi-
ture." It has not "reached the limit of what
it can afford." It is not true that "no money is
available for educational improvements." On the
contrary, money which ought to be spent on educa-
tion is being thrown away with both hands on extrava-
gances, both private and public. The critics of education
may be admirable, if somewhat austere, moralists.
But as financiers they do not know the elements of their
subject. If the community is induced, with the object
of effecting what are called (though not by economists)
"economies," to make another raid on the health and
intelligence of its children, it must not lay the flattering
unction to its soul that it does so under the stress of
financial necessity. Whatever the causes of the finan-
cial burden which it bears, they are certainly not to be
found in excessive expenditure on education.
In reality, of course, neither is it a mere objection to
increased expenditure on education which is the impel-
ling cause behind the attack upon it, nor is it a mere
exposure of the hollowness of that objection which will
enable the attack to be defeated. The interests which
are resisting educational progress to-day, on the ground
that "we cannot afford it after the war," are precisely
the same as those which resisted it before the war began.
Their motives are various : partly a fear that more educa-
tion will mean less cheap juvenile labour, partly the idea
that, if they are better educated, working-class children
will forget their place and be less fitted, in the elegant
142 SECONDARY EDUCATION
words of the Federation of British Industries, for "the
employments which they eventually enter," partly a
dislike of any movement which is likely to diminish
economic and social inequalities, partly mere ignorance,
which is not altogether their own fault, of what educa-
tion is and means, and a doubt whether, after all, it is
not a useless luxury invented by faddists for the advan-
tage of teachers and administrators.
With those who are attacking education because it
threatens their personal profit or social position it is
not necessary to argue. The larger number who are
doubtful whether it is "worth it" may be invited to con-
sider both the practice of other countries and the experi-
ence of their own. It is improbable, to put it mildly,
that the whole civilised world is out of step except them-
selves. Thanks to the war and the peace, comparisons
based on money expenditure are almost meaningless. But
if the ingenuous journalists who denounce education as a
"fad" will look at our Allies, they will find that the
expenditure of France on education has increased
since 1913 to a considerably greater extent than has
that of this country. *'In America," stated the
United States Commissioner of Education in 1920,
**it is now generally held that expenditure for education
must be doubled at least before the opportunities for
education can in any adequate measure meet the needs
of the people and the demands of public opinion. "^^
The appropriations in 1920 were approximately
1,000,000,000 dollars or, roughly £200,000,000 to
£250,000,000. If these were doubled, the expenditure
would be between £400,000,000 and £500,000,000; and
it must be remembered that even in 1913 the public
secondary schools in America were almost universally
free, that the education given in the State Universities
was often virtually free, and that the proportion of
children passing from the primary schools to both was
far higher than in England. What precisely is happen-
ing in Germany cannot be stated in figures. But it is
"The Teachers' World, October 20, 1921.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 143
known that since the war there has been in many parts
of the country an educational revival, and that, amid
economic difficulties far exceeding those of this country,
a determined effort is being made to rebuild by means of
education the resources of the nation. ^^
Such facts should remind us that talk about the cost
of education, which ignores the effect of it on character
and intelligence and physical well-being, on the output
of industry and the amenity of social life, is as rational as
a discussion of one side of a balance sheet without refer-
ence to the ether. When it is stated that "taxation s
crushing industry" what actually is supposed to occur?
The phrase appears to be used in several different senses.
But the principal suggestions which it is intended to
convey seem to be two. The first is that taxation
diminishes the incentive to effort, by diminishing the
reward which effort receives. The second is that the
State collects in taxes and spends on current account
wealth which, if left in the hands of the taxpayer, would
have been saved and used as capital, with the result
either that the material equipment of industry is not
improved as quickly as is desirable, or that, in extreme
cases, it actually runs down. "The capital," to quote
Mr. McKenna,'** "which the keen, active, enterprising
man could use to the utmost advantage in developing
trade, is taken from him, and spent unproductively on
one of the manifold activities of the State."
Now, it is true, of course, that both these results are
possibilities, and that both have actually occurred in the
past, though probably not (except in so far as the war is
concerned) in the recent past. But it is evident also that
the appearance of these disastrous consequences depends
on the presence of a factor which most of the popular
complaints of "taxation crushing industry" overlook or
do not mention. It is conditional on the money raised
^' See The O&seruer, January 29, 1922: "Far from wishing to
economise on education, all political parties are encouraging it to
the utmost."
" The Times, January 28, 1922,
144 SECONDARY EDUCATION
by taxation being spent, as Mr. McKenna says, "unpro-
ductively" — on its being used by the State in such a way
as not to increase the resources of the nation or to add
to its capacity for economic effort. Whether taxation
is "crushing" or not cannot, therefore, be decided
merely by pointing to the sums which are raised. It is
equally essential to consider the way in which, when
raised, they are spent. No serious financier has ever
supposed that the effect on industry of spending
£100,000,000 on armaments is the same as that of
spending £100,000,000 in paying off part of the national
debt. No one ought to suppose that it is the same as
that of spending £100,000,000 on education or public
health. In the first case the capacity to produce goods
and services (other than armaments) is diminished : in
the second case that capacity is increased. The truth is
that ill-health and ignorance are an economic burden
which no society can afford to carry once it has learned
how to lighten it. Every one of the 1,000,000 children
in the primary schools suffering from physical ailments
whose health is impaired through failure to provide suit-
able and early treatment for it, or whose mental develop-
ment is arrested because it is prematurely snatched
from school, or whose morale is lowered during the
critical years of adolescence by alternate overwork and
unemployment, represents not an "economy" but the
most unintelligent, as well as the most cruel, of
extravagances. It is possible for the personnel as well
as the material equipment of industry to be under-
capitalised, and a nation which has the courage to invest
generously in its children "saves," in the strictest
economic sense, more "capital" than the most parsi-
monious community which ever lived with its eyes on
the Stock Exchange.
"Never will I believe," said Macaulay in 1846, "that
what makes a population stronger and healthier and
wiser and better can ultimately make it poorer. . . .
If ever we are forced to yield the foremost place among
commercial nations, we shall yield it to some nation pre-
eminently vigorous in body and mind." His words were
SECONDARY EDUCATION 145
spoken in defence of factory legislation, which was
opposed by industrial interests on somewhat the same
grounds as education is opposed to-day. But they are
equally applicable to the questions of educational policy
which are the subject of this memorandum. A
nation can no more impoverish itself by cultivat-
ing the intelligence of its children than by develop-
ing any other of the resources with which nature
has endowed it. From a purely economic
standpoint the most important part of the capital
of a country consists of human beings. Wealth
applied to improving their physical and intellectual
attainments is the most remunerative of all investments,
since it adds to that particular type of productive power
on which the ability to use all other natural advantages,
and to overcome natural disadvantages, ultimately
depends. In the partnership "between those who are
living, those who are dead, and those who are to be
born," which forms the life of society, almost the most
vital link is the provision which each generation makes
for posterity by means of education.
For Great Britain, even on purely economic grounds,
the issue is peculiarly crucial. Fifty years ago, in warn-
ing his fellow countrymen of the future exhaustion of
the coal resources on which for a century and a half the
wealth of this country has rested, Jevons pleaded for "a
general system of education which may effect for the
future generation what is hopeless for this present
generation. ... At present it may almost be said to
be profitable to breed little slaves.'"^ Since Jevons wrote,
there have been three great Education Acts and a host
of minor measures. But the nation is still far from
having made provision for the full development of the
most important of its national resources — the health and
the intelligence of its children. Yet the effect of invest-
ing money in them will endure when other sources of
wealth have begun to fail.
^' Jevons, " The Coal Question," preface to second edition. See
also Money, " The Nation's Wealth."
146 SECONDARY EDUCATION
It is one of the tragedies of English social history that
in the period of swiftly increasing returns between 1850
and 1890, when wealth was growing by leaps and bounds
and taxation was hardly felt, the opportunity of creating
a really effective educational system was missed, because
riches came so easily that education seemed unimportant.
What then could have been done without any consider-
able economic effort requires to-day a larger measure of
foresight and self-discipline. But the need for it is even
more urgent. The course of wisdom for Great Britain,
which owes its modem economic development largely
to a single, and a wasting, asset, and which, even before
the war, had lost some of the adventitious facilities for
industrial leadership which it possessed almost up to
the end of the nineteenth century, woiild be to use a large
part of the wealth of a coal age which will one day draw
to a close to establish the most comprehensive system
of education that educational science can suggest. On
this matter, at any rate, the economists speak with no
uncertain voice. Professor Bowley, who will not be
suspected of under-estimating the importance of economic
considerations, pleads for "better education" as one way
of increasing the output of wealth, by securing "a much
fuller use of the latent abilities of the race than hitherto
has been possible."*" Professor Marshall, in an oft
quoted passage, after stating that "perhaps £100,000,000
annually are spent even by the working class, and
£400,000,000 by the rest of the population of England in
ways that do little or nothing towards making life nobler
or truly happier," urges that "it is the young whose
faculties are of the highest importance both to the
moralist and the economist. The most imperative duty
of this generation is to provide for the young the best
education for the work they have to do as producers and
as men and u'omen, together tcith long continued free-
dom from mechanical toil and abundant leisure for
school.'^-^
*« Bowley, " The Division of the Product of Industry," p. 57.
21 " Principles," pp. 786-7.
SECONDARY EDUCATION 147
Let the reader reflect on the present life of hundreds of
thousands of boys and girls, on the prevalence of physical
ailments among them, on their premature overwork, on
their hurried and truncated schooling, on the waste of
capacity caused by the failure to make smooth the way
to higher education — let him consider that it is on these
boys and girls, on their energy and foresight, their indivi-
dual ability and their capacity for social co-operation,
that the prosperity of the nation in fifteen years will
depend — and he will not think it extravagant to suggest
that they should be educated up to sixteen under the
most favourable conditions that the progress of educa-
tional science can offer. The generation which is now
mature has not left a pleasant world to its successors.
It can at least put into their hands the tools with which
to rebuild the ruins that surround them.
Appendices
150
SECONDARY EDUCATION
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SECONDARY EDUCATION
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APPENDIX— TABLE III
In the following table an attempt is made to show the varying
relation between the elementary and secondary school populations
(a) in certain counties and county boroughs of England, (b) in the
United States. The source used for (a) is the schemes of the local
authorities concerned, for (b) Sandiford, " Comparative Education,"
page 61.
The figures relating to England are not satisfactory, and we
present them only with great hesitation. They are not always
strictly comparable ; some authorities, for example, give figures of
the children on the registers of public elementary schools, others of
average attendance ; some include in the secondary school
population schools recognised, but not aided, by the local authority,
others include only schools aided or maintained ; some appear to
have excluded from their totals children resident outside the area
in which they attend school, others do not. For these and other
reasons they must be regarded as, at best, an approximation.
They may be of some small service pending the publication of more
exact comparative statistics.
(a)
Figures indicating the relation between the elementary and secondary
school population in certain counties and county
boroughs of England and Wales
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
Number
Number
No. of children in
of children
of
secondary' schools
—
in public
children in
per 1,000 of
elementary
secondary
children in public
schools
schools
elenientarj'schools
Counties—
Cornwall
41,000
2,661
64-9
Devon
49,387
2,764
55-9
Durham
150,6.58
5,580
37-3
Essex
63,478
7.186
112-4
Hunts
8,379
514
60-6
Kent
Staffordshire . .
82,177
4,132
40-2
County
Boroughs —
Birmingham . .
148,676
6,055
•40-7
Bradford
34,838
3,500
100-5
Croydon
25,819
2,904
112-4
Leeds
73,269
5,605
76-4
Liverpool
188,823
7,039
60-7
Rochdale
13,550
870
27-3
Stockport ....
18,283
1.050
55-6
Stoke-on-Trent.
44,326
1,257
28-8
SECONDARY EDUCATION
LOO
Pupils in high schools
N.H 118
Cal 114
Mass 110
Wash 101
Ore 95
Ind 95
Maine 93
Vt 90
Utah 90
Iowa 89
R.I 84
Colo 84
Nevada 84
Neb 82
New York 82
Ohio 81
(b)
United States
in various States in
elementary schools
Kansas 79
Mich 77
Conn 76
Minn 74
Wis 73
111 69
N.J 62
Pa 58
Mo 58
S.D 58
Del 56
Mont 51
Md 47
Texas 46
Idaho 45
N.D 44
1910 for each 1,000 in
Va 44
Tenn 40
Wyo 86
N.Mex 35
Fla 31
Ga 80
Ky 30
N.C 29
Ala 26
La 26
Okia 25
Ariz 25
S.C 24
Miss 24
Ark 23
W.Va 22
Printed by the Caledonian Press Limitf.d, 74 Swinton Street,
Gray's Inn Road, London, W.C. 1 — W2227
373. 42
T234S
Tawney
Secondary education for a
Date Due
APR
i tW2
1
373.42 T234SC.1
Tawney # Secondary
education
LU
o
for al
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