Grammar schools? The best thing about our grammar school was the railway society

“We will build a better Britain not just for the privileged few.” So said Mrs May in her first speech as Prime Minister. Yet, ever since she took office we have heard rumblings that those who favour the expansion of grammar schools are expecting her to lend a sympathetic ear to the cause. What could fly in the face of her stated intention more than the resurrection of an education system that was past its sell-by date in the 1960s?

You could just about argue up until then that a management class needed treating differently from those who were destined for the mass-employer heavy industries of the past [coal mining, ship building, steel making, dock labouring, railways and their attendant services]. In our lifetime, the industrial landscape has been transformed and now everyone needs a different kind of education.

Far from providing a vehicle for disadvantaged pupils to excel, grammar schools existed to perpetuate the advantage of the middle classes. Our grammar school was full of them, and working class kids were but a small and actually - though admittedly anecdotally - a generally less successful minority.

In my book Train Spotters [Countyvise, 2010, p.10] I put it like this:

“I started train spotting soon after I began secondary school in 1960. It proved to be an excellent reason for passing the eleven plus exams.

What an abomination they were. To issue life chances at such a ridiculously young age, to separate brothers and sisters, split up friendship groups and to do unimaginable damage to the self-esteem of a majority of each year group beggars belief. I believe they still sit it in some parts of the country, though, overall, the blatantly bi-partite system of my youth has disappeared.

I suspect that specialist schools and academies and a range of other initiatives serve to obfuscate. They baffle the unwary and by-pass those with no realistic alternative to their community school and they effectively maintain an advantage for more discriminating parents and those who can afford to move catchment area.

Oblivious to how some of my peers in the last year of the juniors were feeling at being labelled as failures, I was dead chuffed to pass it at the time, political awareness being a year or two down the line yet. The one member of our group to fail actually only became a close friend a couple of years later, by which time his parents had done what was quite common in our relatively middle class enclave and sent him to private school instead, to rescue him from the ignominy of having to attend the local secondary modern.

However, I was delighted, along with all of my carefully groomed class, which was already streamed by ability at the age of nine, to be an official success.

On a purely selfish level the transfer at eleven turned out to be a majorly critical event, because at that time our grammar school had a railway society, which I and my friends, old and new, were quick to join. I bet the secondary modern did not even have a railway club, never mind a society.

Better still, this group went on trips to railway sheds and works, in addition to putting on film shows after lessons, in a blacked out geography class room. There, we saw whatever the society was able to get hold of, mainly, I think, British Transport Commission advertising and promotional films.

Instead of relying on Dad to put trains in my way in a rather intermittent fashion, mainly at holiday times, the railway world suddenly got a whole lot bigger for me and a lot more accessible.”

I continued my discussion with myself about grammar schools in the, as yet, unpublished memoirs of my time as a teacher – in comprehensive schools, of course:

“I had passed the eleven plus exam, but at the grammar school I attended I failed most of the “O” levels that I sat. Had I taken art instead of trying to please my dad by taking Latin, I would have sailed seamlessly into the sixth form with the required four passes needed to progress to “A” levels. Instead, I wasted a further year, languishing in what was laughably called “Remove,” a sort of half way staging post between the fifth form and the sixth, but demonstrating in their choice of a name for it what they actually thought of us. The term actually has its derivation deeply set in the public school system of the past. They were probably only too pleased to have had an opportunity to resurrect it for that reason alone. Our classroom was carefully placed in a little annexe to the main building and adjacent to the toilets. When the classroom door was left open on a warm day I could smell the loos from my seat.

What a bunch of second chancers we were in there. Some had already been there a whole year and were planning to go around again. The year before I landed in it, a comparatively dynamic member of Remove had won privileges from the headmaster, in an uncharacteristically radical move, thus allowing us to be treated, on paper at least, like the others of our age who had already moved on to the sixth form proper.

I remember a geography teacher giving us something to do that involved a lot of writing, then putting his feet up on his desk and reading the newspaper. A linguist gave up trying to teach us altogether after receiving a less than enthusiastic response to his instructions and on one occasion he even went to lie down across a row of chairs at the back of the room and feigned going to sleep, in protest at our lack of cooperation.

Serious card games played for money were undertaken in the back corner of the room during some lessons. When they let us out from our den as far as the science laboratory, some lads would entertain themselves by lobbing the house bricks - which were being used as make-shift Bunsen burner stands - across the class room to each other, while the teacher was facing the blackboard. Rule One, I thought. As a teacher, never turn your back on the class for more than a second.

The laboratories always stank of gas when we were in there, as boys constantly fiddled with the gas taps throughout the sessions. Others sometimes splattered ink from their fountain pens down the backs of the masters’ gowns, as they prowled the aisles between the rows of desks, during yet further tedious note copying sessions. It was not great teaching and very little learning took place, in our class, at least.

The overall impression I was left with was that they would have preferred it if we had already left the school at sixteen. I think they regarded us as imposters in their privileged and selective world. We were an embarrassment to them and only two splendid, youthful and inspiring teachers, one of history and one of English, made realistic efforts to engage us properly throughout the whole year. In more modern parlance and for much of the rest of the time, our needs were most definitely not being met.” 

As can be seen, I was not the typical grammar school boy, but neither was I by any means the only failure within that system. The regime was internally, as well as externally, discriminating. If you were no good at games and mediocre at academia, they did not want to know. The whole system was elitist. They were only interested in those whose successes gave the school “a good name.” Though it is hardly fair to measure it by modern standards, had it been OFSTEDed, it would have never have passed in a month of Sundays. It was not inclusive in any way. I have friends who also thought it served them badly.

You may conclude that I am biased because I did not succeed there and that my attitude is one characterised by a feeling of “sour grapes.” Actually, I think my relative failure gave me the opportunity to stand back and analyse what I went through more objectively, rather than being swept along on the tide of acclaim that the top pupils enjoyed. Perhaps this explains perhaps why so many advocates are still around to remember the best days of their lives in a system which selectively and purposefully made successes of them to such a degree that they eulogise about it to this day. They view it through rose tinted spectacles. They see it as encapsulating everything that was good about the good old days. They see it now as some kind of panacea for everything that has gone wrong with society since. Their views are anachronistic. That world has gone.

“You are the cream of the town,” extolled the woodwork teacher. Nothing like inculcating a bit of superiority in a group of eleven year olds, in spite of the fact that he was simultaneously hurling an unfinished tea pot stand to the other end of the room because of the lack of quality in the shaving of its bevelled edges.

We have to make educational success a reality for all, not just the privileged few, and that brings us back to Mrs May. What does she have in mind? Will it be more loopholes - sneaky back door extensions of existing grammar school provision into other nearby towns, in order to circumvent the law which currently prevents new grammar schools being set up, as happened recently in Kent? Will she be upfront and present the case for new grammar schools as a generally good thing and try to persuade the parents of the unselected 80% or so that a system that gives a marked advantage to the selected 20% is an appealing proposition? Voting for that would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

My feeling is that they will try to find another loophole or ruse to make it possible gradually, so as not to attract too much attention.  It will be the drip, drip of change, like the gradual privatisation of the NHS. They will make it as complicated, obscure and piecemeal as possible, designed to confuse and  draw the sting from those opposed to it. Those with the cards in their hands are always on the lookout for ways to maintain their advantage. This is just their latest trick.