HC Deb 20 March 1953 vol 513 cc434-47

3.26 p.m.

Dr. Horace King (Southampton. Test)

I beg to move, That this House expresses its concern at the fact that most of the so-called public schools of this country are, in reality, exclusive private schools catering for children drawn from a narrow social group and outside the State system of education; and, believing that education ought to be provided for children according to their educational needs and not according to the financial resources of their parents, would welcome further measures designed to achieve that object. The public school system has been regularly criticised during the past 100 years not only by many of the greatest men in the country but by many ex-public school boys, but it has very rarely been debated in this House, and I am very pleased to have the opportunity of at least moving my Motion. I do not wish to quote any of the peevish criticisms made by disappointed ex-public schoolboys or the more virulent criticisms made by great men such as Shaw or H. G. Wells, but I would content myself with quoting just one, Dr. Gray, himself a very great public school master, who spent some 50 years in the public schools.

He said: To men who have been face to face with the stern realities of life, the public school and university bred man appears an artificial product, full of pose and affectation and swank. The word is a public school man's, and I would not use it myself. Even his drawl and the soft-hued tones of his voice offend. I believe that many of the criticisms and many of the things criticised in the public schools have been remedied by the arrival of more humane times and by the splendid work of outstanding public school headmasters, but the main defect of the public school system is fundamental and demands radical reform. The most famous and most exclusive and most expensive public schools were stolen from the nation and its poor children a long time ago.

The early Christian, William of Wykeham, founded Winchester College for the education of 70 poor scholars. He did permit 10, in his own words, "of wealth and rank" to belong, so that originally it had 88 per cent. free places. King Henry VI founded Eton for 25 "poor and needy scholars to learn grammar there freely, without money or anything else"—to quote from the old Charter. There were 20 fee payers, so Eton had 55 per cent. free places.

John Lyon founded Harrow as a free grammar school for the townsfolk, and there were 100 per cent. free places. Queen Elizabeth I founded Westminster with 40 boys chosen for their "disposition, knowledge and poverty." Merchant Taylors was a school of liberty most free, being open especially for poor men's children. Sutton founded Charterhouse for poor children, and King Edward VI founded Christ's Hospital to take out of the streets all the fatherless children and other poor men's children that are not able to keep them. As British society became less Christian and more class conscious these original foundations were diverted. The methods of confiscation varied. William of Wyke-ham, who had said that his descendants could acquire free education at Winchester, would find through the ages that he had a fantastic number of relatives.

Mr. Godfrey Nicholson (Farnham)

His descendants?

Dr. King

I should have said his kinsfolk.

Teachers were badly paid, and so the number of fee-payers was allowed to expand. School masters became boarding-house keepers to supplement their miserable wages. Scholarship holders paid all kinds of "extras," so that the poorest children could no longer afford to take up a scholarship. Influential people had the right of nominating candidates to these schools. The schools were run by closed corporations, and they still are, almost. They could interpret their own charters as they liked and finally they arrived at a stage when they could prove that the words "poor and indigent" were to be taken in a Pickwickian sense and really meant the sons of gentlefolk.

With the emergence of the new wealthy class in the last century there was a tussle, and the public schools were made to receive in that century, as they have done ever since, not only the sons of gentlefolk but also the sons of the merely rich. A Royal Commission in 1864 and an Act in 1868 tidied up some of the more flagrant abuses and the corruption that existed, but despite the famous Report of the Royal Commission it made its main contribution the effective clearing out of any really poor scholars who had survived.

The town of Harrow, for example, was deprived of its local claims to the school, despite the protests of the citizens. At the same time, a host of new public schools were created by the well-to-do. So we began this century with an incredible cleavage between the nation's children—a cleavage that was even physical. Indeed, as late as 1929 the present Lord Boyd-Orr, who was then Sir John Boyd-Orr, showed that boys of Christ's Hospital at the age of 13 were two-and-a-half inches taller than the average 13-year-old elementary schoolboy, and that public school youths were on the whole five inches taller than the average youth outside the public schools.

I believe that the Welfare State is narrowing this physical disparity between our children. If anyone doubts that he has only to look at the playgrounds of secondary modern schools today. So far as education was concerned there was for a favoured few public school education to the age of 18. For a second small group drawn from the lower middle class there was education to the age of 16 or more in the grammar schools. For the rest, apart from a handful of bright children or lucky children like myself, there was elementary school education to the age of 13.

When the public school boy was walking out to enter his public school on his first day the working class lad was going down the pit or into the factory to earn his living. This century has seen that gap between our children narrowing. The State took over most of its grammar schools in the first 50 years of the century by first securing a small percentage of places in those schools and then increasing that percentage until it became 100 per cent., and at the same time securing, step by step, public control. Secondly, in the past five years education has become universal to the age of 15. Ultimately it will be so to the age of 16.

But in the meantime privileged schools and privileged children remain outside the national system, and it is time that they came in. There is a lot of exaggera- tion about public schools, in both ways, Their defenders claim that they train the nation's leaders. That is a claim which is often made. I do not believe that it is broadly true. It would be interesting to get somebody to pick out the 100 leaders of Britain today and to trace their education.

Public schools were in their prime in the 19th century, but they did not make such a powerful showing in literature, art or music. Keats, the greatest poet after Shakespeare and Milton, was not there. Nor was Wordsworth, and not even Tennyson.

Mr. Nicholson

Shelley was.

Dr. King

I thank the hon. Member for that interjection, but only a rabid Etonian can claim to find any marks of Shelley's education in his poetry, which was a revolt against everything that Eton stood for.

Lieut-Colonel Marcus Lipton (Brixton)

And he was sent down from Oxford.

Dr. King

Dickens did not wear the old school tie, nor did Wells, Huxley, Faraday, Elgar, Turner, Browning, Spencer, Bagehot, Stubbs, Ruskin, Lister or Simpson. I wish that I had time to explain what a formidable list that is.

I like to be fair. Byron and Coleridge went to public schools but the moral training did not have any effect upon Byron. Darwin went to a public school, where he was rebuked for wasting too much time on science. Burns did not go to a public school, but, if he had done, they would have interfered with his accent, corrected his sentiments and destroyed his poetry. [Interruption.] Yes, and his spelling as well.

With regard to the outstanding Christian figures of the 19th century, of Lord Shaftesbury, Livingstone and Newman, the public schools can claim only Shaftesbury. Recently, I took a list of eminent men of their time—or eminent enough for it to have been thought worth while recording their deaths in an international work of reference—and, out of 25 whose names I chose at random, the public schools claimed Chamberlain, Quiller-Couch, Galsworthy, Baldwin, Allenby, Baden-Powell, Keynes, Whitehead and Kipling, while outside were Lansbury, Rothermere, Stamp, J. J. Thomson, Frazer, Flinders Petrie, Lloyd George, Jacobs, Lavery, Wells, Sir Henry Wood, Eddington, Rothenstein, Sidney Webb, Elgar, Shaw and Hardy. It is a formidable list.

I am not surprised that the majority of the nation's leaders should be outside the public schools list. The nation's great men and its future leaders may be born in any home at any time, but their fathers may be quite unable to pay £345 a year for their education at Harrow, Where, then, do the public schools lead? In politics, first of all, but only up to a point.

We have to exclude in this century Arthur Henderson, Keir Hardie. Ernest Bevin, Ramsay MacDonald and Bonar Law, to mention only the dead. Gladstone was an old public school boy but Disraeli was not. The present Prime Minister's relations with Harrow were not unlike those of Shelley, and an admiring biographer has written: How he got to Harrow is a mystery … and he never rose beyond Junior School. Incidentally, the Duke of Wellington, whose name is associated with the playing fields of Eton, left Eton when he was 15, and what he was probably referring to was his fight in a corner of the playing field with someone called Bobus Smith.

I would admit that, despite exceptions which are growing more numerous in this century, public school boys obtained the dominating position in politics, but it was only because the public schools and the political system were so intertwined that only those who had been to public schools could get into Parliament. The public schools also provided leaders for the Fighting Forces. I yield to no one in my admiration for this, the greatest, service public school boys have rendered to Britain—the inestimable and selfless sacrifices they made, from Byron downwards, in our wars.

But, again, if they provided all the officers, it was because only public school boys could be officers, and, while the courage of our military leadership through history has been superb, its skill in a nation which boasts that it always loses all the battles except the last one in a war is not above question. Whatever we think about the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union, like Napoleon, pro- duced military leaders of genius by opening a career to talent and abolishing an officer-caste. Moreover, it is snobbery of the silliest kind to deny that privates, n.c.os. and ranker-officers have shown exactly the same qualities of selflessness in our wars.

Public school boys lead in Church, State and Law, but again only because they were the sole recruiting ground for such professions, or, at least, for the higher spheres. In fair competition with the rest of Britain, public school boys take a reasonably good place. If everybody else is excluded and the rules of the game are drawn to their advantage, the public schools win.

Tawney showed how the public schools held almost a complete monopoly of the State apparatus—jobs in which training counted as much as ability, and social connections as much as either. Similar figures in 1949 showed that 56 out of 62 bishops, 21 out of 24 deans—and I believe I know one of the three not in the list—33 out of 37 judges, 190 out of 271 higher civil servants, and 88 out of 103 bank directors were old public school boys.

Our Government is a double one, the amateur elected Government of Parliament and the professional administration. We hear a lot of criticism of bureaucracy, particularly from public school boys of the party opposite, but it is a public school bureaucracy, a caste bureaucracy, and so far it is permanently Tory what-every political party has a majority in the House of Commons.

In the unsheltered world of free competition, where sometimes only ability counts, we get a Nuffield, a Beaverbrook, a Rothermere, a C. P. Scott and a W. T. Stead, and the public school boy has to fight as hard as anybody else. But in the sheltered avenues of the professions. where one old boy said: You need a pleasant mannered yes-man with an executive ability the product of the public schools reigns supreme.

They lead, I will at once say, magnificently in sport and exploration. I have not time to dwell on the good side of the public schools system, on the incorruptibility of our Civil Service and local government officials, on the com- plete democracy that exists inside the charmed circle, the courage and the poise, the courtesy and the loyalty of the best products of the best public schools, nor will I speak of the worst products of the worst public schools.

But even that loyalty functions inside barriers. It is a loyalty to "our school," "our society," "our kind of Britain" and "our kind of world"; and can lead to the acceptance of Franco in that devastating phrase, "A Christian gentleman," and to wrong social and wrong foreign policies. I dismiss as apocryphal the story of the officer who refused to try a former fellow school boy on court martial, and who said: Hang it, you cannot shoot an Old Harrovian. But if people invest their money in their children's education and sometimes cripple themselves in doing so, and even, as we were assured by the hon. Member for Devizes (Mr. Hollis), restrict their families to do so, it is not only out of cultural esteem for the public schools. They know that their investment can bring solid returns—security and a protected career. Some at least want for their children not education, but connections.

Each public school has a narrow private road to the university—the close scholarships. Harrow has 30 leaving scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge of a total value of £10,525. These are awarded not to the best lads in Britain, but to the best lads in Harrow. Last year, 121 close scholarships and exhibitions in Cambridge alone were awarded to certain schools in this earmarked way.

All scholarships to the universities ought to be open, and no one should get there without a scholarship. But even for State and open scholarships the public schoolboy competes on unequal terms with his fellow from the State grammar school, for his school has one teacher for 11 pupils and a battery of specialists for the lad of parts in the sixth form.

This buying of educational privilege is a burden on the professional man of limited means. The very rich—the old rich and the new rich—can always manage. The latter buy themselves, via public school and preparatory school, into society in one generation. Football pools may yet provide the new recruiting ground for the public school clientele.

But those with moderate incomes make mighty sacrifices. They invest in a preparatory school education in the hope of winning a scholarship which will at any rate cover part of the public school fees. They do not always get in. Winchester, in its current handbook, still advises parents to put down a child's name not more than four years nine months in advance. Why? This crystal gazing on the part of examiners puzzles me.

Mr. Nicholson

I would like the hon. Gentleman to tell us what he means by that.

Dr. King

If Winchester is selecting children according to ability, what can the wishes of a parent four years and nine months in advance have to do with that selection?

Mr. Nicholson

Does not the hon. Gentleman understand me? I know what I am talking about in this case. First, there is the very stiff examination to Winchester, and many of the candidates are ploughed. If parents wish their children to go to a particular house they are advised to make contact with the housemaster at a fixed time beforehand. That is all. It is perfectly above-board.

Dr. King

The hon. Gentleman only confirms what I have said, that this kind of arrangement is made.

The avenue to the public school by way of the prep, school is equally expensive. It is not merely a question of finding £300 a year for a boy from the time he is 13 until he is 18. There is a similar sum for education from eight years of age to 13, plus the cost of kindergarten fees. The prep, schools are inclined to be judged on their ability to win places in common entrance exams, though I do not think we can now have a prep, textbook like the one of 30 years ago which advertised that it gave the list of English kings in order of their common entrance importance.

The defenders of the public school system, plead that their schools must be free from State control. Let us be quite clear about this. Nowhere in the world is State education freer from State control than in Great Britain. Ministerial books on education are labelled "Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers"; inspectors advise rather than direct. What local education authority interferes with school discipline or school curricula? What has State control done to the nation's grammar schools but good? A tiny little organism at the end of the 19th century has now become vital and dynamic, and has provided new cadres of trained boys and girls without which the State could not exist.

Look at the universities. We have given university grants on an unprecedented scale without tampering with academic freedom. There is an infinite variety of pattern in the State schools. Indeed, it is the public schools which are monolithic. We speak of a "public school type" but not of a "State school type."

The fundamental weakness of the public school system is its perpetuation of a social cleavage between children who have to grow up and work together. For nearly a century Winchester College existed in Winchester within a stone's throw of shockingly inadequate schools for other children, but I have not noticed any record of any worry that it gave the Winchester boys, masters, or governors. Indeed, it was a Winchester School master who, in 1906, gave evidence before the then Board of Education, against elementary schools having large playgrounds, let alone playing fields.

As long as one group of children is protected and the fathers of those children wield power in Parliament, Whitehall and local government, there will always be resistance to spending enough to provide all children with decent schools, decent equipment and decent staffing accommodation. Perhaps the most fantastic feature of the whole thing is that inspectors, education officers, Ministry officials, and all the higher-up State employees who draw their living from running State institutions, take good care that their own children do not go to the schools they run for other people's children.

Major Sydney Markham (Buckingham)

Why, then, do most of the leading members of the Labour Party and the trade union movement send their own children to public schools?

Dr. King

I doubt whether the hon. and gallant Gentleman is right when he says that most do.

Major Markham

That is so.

Dr. King

If individuals do so it is not a matter of public conscience. I am not the guardian of the consciences of any members of my party. What we are trying to alter is a system, to make it impossible for anyone to do that.

What are we going to do about this problem? I have a quaint suspicion that this Government will not do anything. I nave already mentioned one reform long overdue. That is to take over all university scholarships, pool them and make the filling of our universities a national responsibility. This would clip the claws of privilege a little. We might wait until the public schools, as one newspaper said recently, "withered away" and improve our own schools, as we must, steadily. We could deprive the old public schools of their endowments and charge them rent for our property, which they occupy.

Mr. Nicholson

Stealing it.

Dr. King

Fees will rise and middle-class incomes may not rise rapidly enough, but it seems likely that there will always be enough rich people to buy places in education as long as bought places are available.

We might impose the suggestions of the Fleming Report, that is, take 25 per cent. of the places in public schools, at the same time taking a portion of the places on the governing bodies. If we did, then within 50 years we might take over these schools as we did the grammar schools. I do not think that Britain will be prepared to wait as long as that. I would suggest that we take over the major public schools at once—Eton, Harrow and the rest. If a Parliament could do what it did in 1868, vary any old charter, convert scholarships, alter ecclesiastical patronage, even move schools, then a modern Parliament might return the older foundations to their original democratic purpose.

We should also have to do the same to the newer foundations. The difference would be the purely technical one of compensation for those who run any such schools as profit-making institutions. What would one do with them? Some of my hon. Friends would administer them nationally, rather than tie them to a locality. I do not think there is much in that. They have not been truly national for a long time. A geographical limitation of the catchment area is less objectionable than the present social stratification. I would hand them to L.E.A's. The Hampshire authorities might take charge of Winchester, Harrow and so on. Out of the half-million Hampshire children we ought to be able to find an elite—if we want to—as capable as that drawn from a narrow social range.

Some of the big day schools are already almost as democratic as one would desire. I understand that Manchester Grammar School excludes no child for social or financial reasons. Apparently all sit for examination, and the parents pay fees or not according to their means. That is one way. They need not all remain boarding schools. We talk about the supreme importance of home life in education, yet it is just that section of the community which talks about it most, and presumably has the best chance of providing good home life, that deprives its children of all its blessings for most of the year—almost from birth.

I have not time to argue the case for or against boarding education. But the Tory teachers, in March, 1948, passed a resolution condemning it, because it shifted parental responsibility on to the school and tended to undermine British home life. I would not go so far as the Tory teachers do. There are obviously children-children of those who serve abroad, and children of unsuitable parents—for whom education must be away from home. I think that we need some boarding schools. As to their use, I think that will vary.

There is an attractive case for junior colleges to which we might transfer children at the age of 16 from secondary schools; and not merely those who are going on to the universities but also those who will take part in the great expansion of technical education that lies ahead of us. We might use the public schools and their healthy surroundings for children who physically need the healthy environment of some of the most famous schools.

Some people would advocate sending children to boarding schools for a term or a year so that many more children in the country might have the benefit of enjoying life in a boarding school. If we are certain that we can select an elite at the age of 13, these schools might be leadership schools of the future. I am doubtful. The school for leaders is dangerously like a Hitler-concept. I believe that we need to educate democrats, and the leaders will emerge.

I would end by saying that I believe we cannot afford the luxury of class-segregation. If we are to survive as a nation, the best must be at the top. To get the best at the top is going to be difficult enough in all conscience, but we make it more difficult if we impose artificial barriers of social status at the moment of a child's birth.

British Parliament has not been impoverished during the last 50 years from the fact that it has drawn its strength from wider sections of the community than ever before in its history. In the same way, I do not think that the Foreign Office, the higher reaches of the Civil Service, the Church, the Law and the military Forces will be weakened at all if we bring into them all the native ability that is produced in this country at any moment.

Mr. Nicholson

Did the hon. Gentleman imply, at the beginning of his speech that the older foundations, such as Winchester, were not using their endowments for education without fees or with very small fees?

Dr. King

No. I said that Winchester, like most of the public schools—they vary—is not using its scholarships for the purpose for which they were intended. Most of the scholarships are won by the children at prep schools, as all the Harrow entrance scholarships were last week. The children who win the scholarships are those from the middle or upper classes.

3.56 p.m.

Mr. James Johnson (Rugby)

I beg to second the Motion.

The Motion has been moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. King) in his usual sincere and pleasing manner. I am pleased to second the Motion if only for the fact that in my division is the well-known school, Rugby, and little more than 100 years ago its headmaster, Thomas Arnold, saved the public schools of that time. We should do all we can now to save the public schools of the present time for the nation.

Everyone who today speaks about this independent sector in our educational system is most uncomfortable, whether it is Karl Mannheim, Sir Richard Livingstone, L. P. Jacks or others who have spoken and written since the war. Debate has been acrimonious, and no solution has yet been found. Wealth carries greater privileges and poverty has greater handicaps in this country than in the case of educational systems such as in Scandinavia. Public schools are the preserve of the rich, and they produce a class which has a better choice socially and economically than the rest of the community.

If the public schools claim that there is a particular and peculiar virtue in their educational system—which I do not doubt they do—all I say to them is that if they produce what might be termed, as with the Guards, a corps d'élile which is so good, why should it not be open to the whole country? If the Fleming Committee would allow a 25 or 50 per cent. entry of elementary school boys to the public schools, why should we not go the whole distance and open up these very fine schools, which have many educational values, to all the children of our society?

If I were the Minister I would call the governors of the public schools together at the Ministry and put up a scheme to them whereby they should accept entrants at 11 years of age on merit and ability and after interview, so that at 11 the future public school population would be determined. If that were tenable and agreeable, I would turn over to the local education authorities certain schools in their area. For instance Lancing might be the school for Sussex and Amplethorpe might be the Roman Catholic school for the North of England.

I would go further and make these public boarding schools into comprehensive schools. I would use them not merely for the purposes of a corps d'élite; many children are not clever on the basis of the intelligence test, and I would use the schools for children selected on a much wider basis. I support what my hon. Friend has said about this, and I suggest that if at some time we take over these old-established schools we should make them geographical schools, giving them a catchment area, and feed them with the best boys and girls in those areas. We might even have co-educational boarding schools.

The public schools claim that they turn out leaders. It would be a miracle if they did not in view of the type of boy they get, the homes from which they come and the financial basis upon which the schools are built, but it is neo-Disraelian mumbo-jumbo to say—

It being Four o'Clock, the debate stood adjourned.