ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s I was teaching religious studies in an English secondary modern school (Evans 2005),1 a type of school that admitted all those pupils who had failed the entrance test into grammar (i.e. academic secondary) schools. At first, secondary modern schools offered a diluted, watered-down version of the grammar school curriculum plus an additional diet of practical subjects such as wood and metalwork, needlecraft and cookery, rural studies, etc. By the time I began teaching in one, the alienation of the pupils was becoming increasingly clear to the majority of teachers. Some responded by adopting evermore repressive measures of control. Some secondary modern schools became little more than concentration camps in which to contain, rather than educate, the vast majority of the nation’s children. As one senior teacher instructed me when I was a student teacher, ‘Your job is to keep the lid on the garbage can’. Other teachers responded to the alienation they faced daily by asking the question, ‘What does it mean to educate these pupils?’ The answers they generated created the ‘innovatory secondary modern school’. I taught in one and it was a formative experience.
