ABSTRACT
Ours was a flagship of the comprehensive movement. The headmaster was something of a media performer, who regularly took part in televised spats with Tory sympathiser and subsequent government minister, Rhodes Boyson, then a headmaster in London. At our school we pursued a particularly progressive version of the kind of education which comprehensive devotees expected to overcome the experiences of failure, unfulfilled potential and negative expectations associated with working class children’s experience in the secondary modern schools to which they were invariably consigned. A decade of sociological research had revealed the connection between social class and educational failure. Some attributed primary responsibility to ill-informed parenting, restricted language codes, and cultural poverty associated with working class families (Davie et al. 1972). Others examined the ways in which streaming and the hidden curriculum of values and assumptions operating in schools meant that teachers unconsciously favoured middle class children and discriminated against working class children (Douglas 1964). Schools were depicted as training grounds, sorting offices and selection agencies for the class and capitalist systems (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Whitty and Young 1977). Educational prerequisites fostered by, or absent from, the home-front were consolidated by schools into patterns of achievement and failure that were extensively class related. This was an analysis that relied heavily on the evidence of quantitative research methods and some participant observation in a variety of schools. Considerable attention was paid to class background and institutional cultures, rather less to the white and gendered nature of most of the research. Almost no significance was attached to the consequences that might be mediated by differences deriving from ‘race’ and gender. The solution to working class under-achievement was seen to lie in the abolition of selection. The Conservative party and Tory local authorities fought long and hard on behalf of their middle class constituents in defence of grammar schools, but Labour government initiatives, backed by Liberal left wing academic research, accelerated the pace of comprehensive reorganisation.
