Comprehensive school

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A Comprehensive school is a type of school providing secondary level education in England and Wales. It was introduced in the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Some 90% of British pupils are educated at Comprehensive schools. Children are not selected on the basis of academic aptitude.

A "Comprehensive" school is a school which teaches a comprehensive range of subjects across the academic and vocational spectrum. In order to achieve this it is commonly understood that the school will need to be of a large size and to take children from a wide ability range.

Operation

Comprehensive schools are usually neighborhood schools taking their students from a defined local catchment area. Parents have an element of choice in choosing a secondary school and it is not uncommon, especially in towns and cities, for students to travel some distance to school.

Most schools use streaming to group children by ability in individual subjects. There has been a recent trend to designate Comprehensive schools as specializing in particular areas e.g. technology.

All comprehensive schools take pupils from the age of 11 to at least 16. Some have a sixth form, entry to which is often on an open basis, with some pupils taking A levels, whilst others follow vocational programs.

History and politics

Origins

Before the Second World War, secondary education provision was both patchy and expensive. After the war secondary education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland was provided free to at least the age of 14 and managed under the Tripartite System introduced by Conservative secretary of state for education Rab Butler. Children took the eleven plus examination in their last year of primary education and were sent to secondary modern, secondary technical or grammar schools, depending on their perceived ability. In the event technical schools were never widely implemented, and for 20 years there was a virtual bipartite system, with fierce competition for the available grammar school places, which varied between 15% and 25% depending on location.

Controversy around the eleven plus exam combined with increasing dissatisfaction with the education offered by the secondary modern schools led to experiments with Comprehensive Schools from the early 1950s. In some low-population areas of Britain - such as the town of Settle the creation of a tripartite structure was not physically viable and comprehensive schools had been gradually spreading across the country, from Anglesey to the West Riding.

These schools were an obvious alternative to the Tripartite System, and had already proven successful in Sweden and parts of the US. Political and administrative support for general introduction of comprehensive schools was strongest in London: London County Council (LCC) Education Officer Graham Savage, influenced by the US High School system, was a powerful advocate.

Early comprehensives

The first comprehensive school was Holyhead County School in Anglesey in 1954. Other places that experimented with comprehensives included Coventry, Sheffield, Leicestershire, West Riding.

In London, the LCC sought to build an entire system of equal-access secondary schools. The first purpose-built comprehensive in the country, Kidbrooke School in Greenwich, was opened in 1954 at a cost of £560,000. The first purpose-built comprehensive school in Wales was Sandfields Comprehensive School which opened in 1958.

These early comprehensives modelled themselves firmly on the grammar school, with teachers in gowns and lessons in a very formal style. The opening of the Risinghill Comprehensive School in Islington in 1960 offered an alternative to this model. Embracing the progressive ideals of sixties education, the school abandoned corporal punishment and brought in a much more liberal attitude to discipline.

Nationwide implementation

The largest expansion of Comprehensive schools resulted from a policy decision taken in 1965 by Anthony Crosland, secretary of state for education in the 1964-1970 Labour government, a fervent supporter of Comprehensive education. The policy decision was implemented by Circular 10/65, an instruction to local education authorities to plan for conversion.

In 1970 the Conservative party re-entered government. Margaret Thatcher became secretary of state for education and ended the compulsion on local authorities to convert. However, many local authorities were so far down the path that it would have been prohibitively expensive to attempt to reverse the process, and more comprehensive schools were established under Mrs Thatcher than any other education secretary. However, she went on to be a vociferous critic of comprehensive education. By 1975 the majority of local authorities in England and Wales had abandoned the 11 plus examination and moved to a comprehensive system.

Over that 10 year period many secondary modern schools and grammar schools were amalgamated to form large neighbourhood comprehensives, whilst a number of new schools were built to accommodate a growing school population. By 1968 around 20% of children had been in comprehensives, and by the mid seventies, the system had been almost fully implemented. Nearly all new schools were built as comprehensives, and existing grammar and modern schools had either been closed (see for example the Liverpool Institute) or amalgamated with neighbouring secondary moderns to produce comprehensive schools.

Callaghan's Great Debate

In 1976 the future Labour prime minister James Callaghan gave a speech at Oxford's Ruskin College. He launched what became known as the 'great debate' on the education system. He went on to list the areas he felt needed closest scrutiny: the case for a core curriculum, the validity and use of informal teaching methods, the role of school inspection and the future of the examination system. Callaghan was not the first to raise these questions. A 'black paper' attacking liberal theories in education and poor standards in comprehensive schools had appeared in 1969, to be followed by a second in 1971. The authors were the academics Brian Cox and A E Dyson. They were supported by ex-head teachers, led by Dr. Rhodes Boyson, who later became a Conservative MP. The black papers called for a return to traditional teaching methods and an end to the comprehensive experiment.

Current status

Comprehensive schools remain the most common type of state secondary school in England, and the only type in Wales. They account for around 90% of pupils, or 64% if one does not count schools with low-level selection. This figure varies by region.

Since the 1988 Education Reform Act, parents have a right to choose which school their child should go to. Government policy is currently promoting 'specialization' where parents choose a secondary school appropriate for their child's interests and skills. Most initiatives focus on parental choice and information, implementing a pseudo-market incentive to encourage good schools. This logic has underpinned the controversial league tables of school performance.

Both Conservative and Labour governments have been experimenting with alternatives to the original neighborhood Comprehensive since the mid 1980s.

Experiments have included:

• partnerships where successful schools share knowledge and best practice with nearby schools
• federations of schools, where a partnership is formalized through joint governance arrangements
• closing and reopening 'failing schools'
• city technology colleges
• city academies

Currently, following the advice of Sir Cyril Taylor - former businessman and Conservative politician and chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) - in the mid 1990s, both major parties have backed the creation of a specialist schools, which focus on excellence in a particular subject and are theoretically allowed to select up to 10% of their intake. This policy consensus rejects the original logic of the neighborhood comprehensive - that all children will go to their local school - and assume that parents will send their child to the school they feel they are most suited to.

These new school types mean that it is open to debate whether the Comprehensive system is still in operation; but it could be argued that the new forms of school are best characterized as developments from, rather than challenges to, Comprehensive education.

Debate and issues

Supporters of Comprehensive education argue that it is unacceptable on both moral and practical grounds to select or reject children on the basis of their ability. They also argue that comprehensive schools in the UK have allowed millions of children to gain access to further and higher education, and that the previous selective system relegated children who failed the eleven plus examination to a second class and inferior education.

Critics of comprehensive schools argue that the reality has been a leveling down of provision and a denial of opportunity to able children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who might once have expected to pass the eleven plus exam and have the advantage of a grammar school education. The most straightforward way for parents to ensure that their children attend what is perceived to be a "good" school, is to purchase a house within the catchment area of that school. This has led to selection by financial means of parents rather than ability at passing exams.

During the late sixties there was heated debate about the merits of streaming pupils. In grammar schools pupils were taught in different classes according to their perceived ability. At first the comprehensives copied this structure, but the failings of streaming, principally that it failed to reflect the spread of abilities in different subjects, led to experiments with other methods. One controversial method, mixed ability teaching, was widely adopted. Over time however it was supplanted in many schools by 'setting', where children are grouped by ability in different subjects, allowing the possibility of being in the 'top' set for mathematics, but the bottom set for History.

Other nations

Scotland

In Scotland a very different system is used, which, whilst based on comprehensive education, has different ages of transfer, different examinations and a different philosophy of choice and provision.

In Scotland all publicly funded primary and secondary schools are comprehensive. The Scottish Executive has rejected plans for specialist schools as of 2005.

Republic of Ireland

These schools were introduced into the Republic of Ireland in 1966 by an initiative by Patrick Hillery, Minister for Education, to give a broader range of education compared to that of the vocational school system which was then the only system of schools completely controlled by the state. Until this time education in Ireland was largely dominated by religious persuasion, and in particular the voluntary secondary school system was a particular realization of this. The comprehensive school system is still relatively small and to an extent has been superseded by the community school concept.

In Ireland comprehensive schools were an earlier model of State schools introduced in the late 1960s and largely replaced by the secular community model of the 1970s. The comprehensive model generally incorporated older schools which were under Roman Catholic or Protestant ownership and the various denominations continued, and continue, to manage the school as patrons or trustees. The State owns the school property, but it is vested in the trustees in perpetuity. The model was adopted to make State schools more acceptable to a largely conservative society of the time. The last proposed comprehensive school in Ireland was Gonzaga College SJ in Dublin^{[citation needed]}. However late in the negotiations the Department of Education declined to extend this model to the Society of Jesus and the proposal was dropped.

The introduction of community school model in the 1970s controversially removed the denominational basis of the schools, though religious interests were invited to be represented on the Boards of Management. Community schools are divided into two models, the community school vested in the Minister for Education and Science, and the community college vested in the local Vocational Education Committee. Community colleges tended to be amalgamations of unviable local schools under the umbrella of a new community school model, whereas community colleges have tended to be entirely new foundations.

Sweden

Sweden had used mixed-ability schools for some years before they were introduced into England and Wales, and was chosen as one of the models.

Reputation

Comprehensive education has been controversial from its inception, and there has been considerable discussion about what it has achieved. For debates about its merits against the system it replaced, see the article on debates about the grammar school. For more information on the development of comprehensive schools, see the main article on that subject.

External links

• Center for the Study of Comprehensive Schools Retrieved November 9, 2007.
• Campaign for State Education Retrieved November 9, 2007.
• Secretary of State for Education Ruth Kelly on comprehensive education Retrieved November 9, 2007.
• Comp, a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the creation of comprehensive schools. Retrieved November 9, 2007.
• Discussions in 2002 about the future of comprehensives Retrieved November 9, 2007.
• Educational Inequality and Sociological Models Retrieved November 9, 2007.

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