ABSTRACT
The Labour government of 1964, the first for thirteen years, outlined its intention to reorganise Secondary-Education on comprehensive lines in two circulars, Circular 10/65 to the English local authorities (Department of Education and Science, 1965) and Circular 600 to those in Scotland (Scottish Education Department, 1965a). With only the half-hearted mention of a possibility of experiment with a middle-school system ‘in a few areas’, Circular 600 recommended the ‘all-through’ comprehensive school as the only acceptable form of secondary provision for Scotland. Such schools were to provide courses for all six of the secondary-school years, including courses that led to presentation at the SCE 0-grade and H-grade. Where distance and accommodation allowed, all pupils from the local area were to attend, and only those pupils. In 1965, roughly a fifth of Scottish education-authority (EA) secondary-schools were already comprehensive in this omnibus sense (although pupils were streamed on entry) and roughly a third of EA pupils attended them (Scottish Education Department, 1966a, pp. 33–4). Circular 10/65, by contrast, recommended no less than six models to the English local authorities where only 4 per cent of local education authority secondary-schools were already comprehensive and only 8 per cent of state-school pupils attended them (Department of Education and Science, 1974, table 3(3)). By 1971, 40 per cent of Scotland’s EA schools were officially designated as all-through comprehensives in that they offered five- or six-year courses to an entry from a fixed catchment area, an entry that had not been formally selected in terms of attainment or intelligence. A further 21 per cent of EA schools had comprehensive intakes, but transferred some or all of their certificate pupils to other schools, usually after second year (Scottish Education Department, 1972b, table 4.4). In England and Wales in 1971, only 29 per cent of local education-authority secondary-schools were comprehensive (Department of Education and Science, 1974, table 3(3)). By the mid-1970s, nearly all of Scotland’s EA schools were either all-through comprehensives or four-year comprehensive schools serving isolated communities, but with the possibility of transfer to a neighbouring all-through comprehensive. In 1974, 98 per cent of all pupils in Scottish EA secondary-schools attended schools with a comprehensive intake (Scottish Education Department, 1975, p. 1) and the grant-aided (GA) sector accounted for only 3 per cent of all EA and GA secondary-school pupils (Scottish Education Department, 1977e, table 1(4)).
