SECONDARY EDUCATION

HL Deb 26 February 1959 vol 214 cc544-645

3.7 p.m.

LORD SILKIN rose to draw attention to secondary education in England and Wales, with particular reference to selection at the age of 11-plus and the comprehensive system of education; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I believe that this is the first time for many years that we in your Lordships' House have had an opportunity of discussing secondary education. We should have had this debate last Wednesday but, unfortunately, it had to be postponed on account of the indisposition of the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Hailsham. I hope that he has now fully recovered and is feeling fighting fit. In considering secondary education we have to bear in mind that it is merely one link in the chain of formal education, which begins normally at the age of five and may go on until the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, in the case of those who go to places of higher education or undertake a course of apprenticeship. It is an important link in the chain, but I would not say that it is necessarily the most important. In my view, probably the most important part of education is primary education, when a child's character and attainments are actually formed.

To-day, however, we are not discussing primary education, although at some time I should like to do so. I feel that perhaps we have not been very fortunate in our primary education, judging by some of the results that we are achieving at the present day. I do not say necessarily that there is no improvement, for of course there is considerable improvement as compared with years gone by; but I feel that the question of primary education is one which would be deserving of the close consideration of your Lordships at some future time, and I hope that it may be possible to have that examination.

To-day we are discussing secondary education and I have deliberately confined my Motion to the restricted terms in which it is down on the Paper: virtually, to the two aspects of secondary education—the question of selection at the age of 11 and comprehensive schools. I feel that there is so much misunderstanding about the functions, purposes and character of our comprehensive schools and the point of the 11-plus examination that it is worth restricting the debate to that particular aspect of education; and I hope that it may be possible to confine discussion to that aspect. It is not for me, of course, to dictate to your Lordships how you should conduct this debate, but I regard this aspect as so important that in my view it would be rendering a disservice to the House if we detracted from this particular aspect and went on to others.

The question of universal compulsory education up to the age of 15 is a relatively new one. It results from the passing of the Education Act, 1944. That Act, passed by the Coalition Government during the war, was a great act of faith. It was a revolutionary measure—I believe one of the best educational milestones in the history of this country. It was quite revolutionary to adopt a system of compulsory education up to the age of 15 and to set up the different types of secondary education, as was done. Before the 1944 Act was passed a number of Committees had been appointed at different times, some of them having sat before the war, for the purpose of considering the best form that secondary education should take.

Those who were interested in these matters will remember the Hadow Committee, the Spens Committee and, primarily, the Norwood Committee, which all applied themselves to the question of how secondary education should be conducted. Probably the most important Report was the Norwood Report and that virtually recommended the system which was ultimately adopted. The system was that the children, like Gaul, should be divided into three parts. The very bright would go to a grammar school, the less bright would go to a modern school, and the others, who were neither bright nor very bright but handy, would go to a technical school. The theory was that they would all neatly fit into the various categories, they were selected at the age of 11, and there it was—that decided things for all time. This Report was accepted by the Minister and, accordingly, the local education authorities were encouraged to provide the three different types of schools. Probably the education authorities have been a little slow in providing the technical schools, but every local authority has provided, either by adapting existing buildings or by building new ones, the modern school and a type of grammar school.

I want to say a word about the method of selection. Children have to undergo an examination between the ages of 10 and 11. It is called the "11-plus" because, I understand, they enter the secondary school after attaining the age of 11, but actually the examination takes place between the ages of 10 and 11. The nature of the examination is not uniform, but, broadly speaking, it is based on an intelligence test, on written papers in English and arithmetic, on a report of the teachers, on the school record generally and on formal or informal interviews. If we are to make a selection at the age of 11 or at the age of 10-ptus, I would say that, broadly speaking, I can think of no better method of selecting children than the method which is at present adopted.

I admit that it probably has the effect—but it is not universal—of picking out the exceptional child on the one hand and of weeding out the exceptional child at the other extreme. But in the very big range between the exceptional child on each side I would myself say that it has not been very effective. This system has now been in operation for about fourteen years, and there is a growing dissatisfaction among parents, children, teachers and educationalists generally with a policy of selection at this early age. I want to try to give to the House some of the reasons why this dissatisfaction has arisen.

First as to the effects on the child, there is no doubt at all that the examination itself and, even more, the prospect of the examination do impose a great strain on the child, which, in the opinion of many people who are in a position to know, has resulted in nervous troubles, even in speech defects, in insomnia and various other difficulties of that kind, both before and after the examination. Incidentally, in a good many cases there have been similar effects on the parents as well, because if the child suffers from anxiety in connection with the 11-plus examination many parents suffer even more greatly. The effect of failure is a serious one and it is frequently impressed upon children, in many cases in the schools themselves but certainly by their parents, and if a child fails in the 11-plus this child tends to get an inferiority complex. It is his first experience of failure. This is particularly so where there are several members of one family and some of the children have passed the 11-plus examination and are going to a grammar school and others fail.

Educationally it is in my view a very unsatisfactory means of selection. First, there is the finality at the age of 11, the fact that children's fate is decided as a result of this examination. It is true that, at the age of 13, there are opportunities to take another examination, and that where a child has failed to get to a grammar school at the age of 11 that child may, at the age of 13, be transferred to a grammar school. But in practice it does not work out in that way, Only 2 per cent. of all children are transferred from secondary modern schools to grammar schools at the age of 13; and by the time children have reached the age of 13 and have become settled in a secondary modern school, they are actively discouraged from making the change.

I should like to tell the House of an experience of my own—that of a girl I was interested in, who undoubtedly had the ability to go to a grammar school. She failed in her 11-plus, and she went to a secondary modern school. She was told that if she did well she would be transferred. For the first year she consistently came top of her class. She was not transferred at 12. In the following year, also, she came top of her class for three terms; and she was also very good at games—in fact, very good all round. At the age of 13, when normally she would have been transferred to a grammar school she we not transferred. The headmaster took the view that she was doing very well where she was, and that there was no particular point in transferring her. I took up the matter, and eventually she was transferred to a grammar school, where she is now doing extremely well: she is a credit to the school, and the school is proud of her. That is the sort of thing that happens. I should not like to say publicly why this girl was not transferred. If I had to guess, I would say that it was because it was thought she would not fit in, by reason of her social origin, with the girls with whom she would have to mix at the grammar school. That has turned out to be quite untrue. She is mixing extremely well, and she is a great favourite at the school. I instance this case to show the great difficulty that exists in getting children transferred.

Going on to the educational disadvantages of selection at the age of 11, there is the actual difficulty of making the selection. Far too many children are of roughly the same ability. I have said that there are children at each extreme, but when you take the children in between there is so little between them that there must be an enormous difficulty in making this selection. In the days before the 11-plus examination there used to be a scholarship examination, which I imagine some of my noble friends must have gone in for. I did myself. One mark made all the difference between getting a scholarship and not getting one, and there were so many within this range of one mark that it really was a toss of the coin whether you got the scholarship or whether you did not: and the situation is much the same to-day.

Then circumstances differ according to the locality in which the child lives. In some localities there is a high percentage of grammar school places, and there the number of children who are able to go to the grammar schools is large. In Wales, for instance, something like 30 to 40 per cent. of all places are grammar school places. In some English boroughs, on the other hand, there are only 10 per cent. of places. It is therefore quite fortuitous, depending on whether a child happens to be living in one area or another whether he or she gets the same opportunity. Further, there are unequal opportunities as between boys and girls. There are far more places at grammar schools for boys than for girls; and so, if you take a boy and a girl of equal ability, the boy has a far better chance of getting into a grammar school than the girl.

Still on the educational disadvantages of this 11-plus, I want to refer to the wastefulness of the system. It is a fact—and most people with experience will confirm this—that something like 30 per cent. (and some people say even 40 per cent.) of those who get grammar school places turn out to be unsuitable for grammar school education, and just drift away at the age of 15—the earliest possible opportunity. There is no practical method of transferring a grammar school scholar to a secondary modern school. I say "no practical method", and I shall be very interested, when the noble Viscount conies to speak, if he will tell me how many are so transferred each year. I shall be most surprised if any appreciable number are transferred from grammar schools to secondary modern schools. It would be regarded as equivalent to expulsion, and I imagine that many parents would regard it as a disgrace for their children to be transfered in that way from a grammar school to a secondary modern.

I have said that about 30 to 40 per cent. turn out to be unsuitable for a grammar school education, but curiously enough, about the same proportion—30 to 40 per cent.—of those who go to secondary modern schools would have been suitable for a grammar school education; and, as I have said, only a small percentage ever get the opportunity of being transferred. So I submit that this system is wasteful of talent and wasteful of school places, in that such a high proportion of the children, both in the grammar schools and in the secondary modern schools, turn out to be unsuitable for the education which is provided. These are the reasons which, in my view, make segregation at 11-plus both cruel and socially wrong, as well as educationally wasteful.

Your Lordships may ask: "Is it not inevitable that some selection of children should take place? Can it possibly be avoided?" I would agree that children are not of equal ability; that what is suitable for one child is not necessarily suitable for another, and that there has to be some form of selection at some time. But I contend that to divide children into three groups, more or less irrevocably, at the age of 11 on the basis of tests and examinations, is wrong and wasteful; some better way has got to be found, and has been found. Much thought has been given by many local education authorities to this problem—notably in London, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Staffordshire, and in other places—and there has been evolved what has become known as the "comprehensive school". That is an unfortunate term, perhaps— only slightly less unfortunate than the term "conurbation" which we were discussing yesterday. I should have preferred to call them "secondary colleges", or some name such as that. However, they are now known as comprehensive schools, and I suppose that it would be wrong at this stage to rechristen them.

Now, may I tell the House what are the common features of the comprehensive school? First, all children within a certain geographical area are admitted to the school without distinction and without examination; without distinction of ability, social standing, or attainments. In the larger schools they come in at the rate of, possibly, 300 or 400 each year, and they are put into different classes. The idea is that for the first two or three years (the period varies according to the school) they all get, up to the age of 13 or 14, the same general education in the same subjects. There are varying methods of distributing children. Some schools try to single out children according to ability. I think possibly that is a mistake. I believe that most schools would get a fair balance of children into each of the classes. If 300 children were admitted to a school in any one year—that is the intake—there would be something like ten classes, and I think that most schools would try to get a balanced child population in each of these ten classes. And they would do that even though they would be aware, through reports from the schools, which children were the brightest or would have been best suited to grammar school places if they had taken the examination; or even if they have taken the examination and been recommended for grammar school.

The general idea is that one should not segregate all the bright children, putting them in grammar schools, and then try to grade them down, so that each knows where he is placed in the hierarchy of the school. While these children do their normal subjects together for the first two or three years, generally there are sets in special subjects. The sets most favoured are mathematics, science, English and modern languages, and there the children are placed according to their ability in these particular subjects; so a child who is particularly good at maths. would go into a set corresponding to that child's ability, regardless of the particular class in which that child was. And the same applies to the other subjects comprising the sets. But in the general subjects the child would remain in that class.

LORD HAWKE

May I ask what the general subjects are, because it is difficult to follow how brilliant children and great dunces can be educated in the same class?

LORD SILKIN

Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history—and, of course, when you get to a certain point you get on to maths.; but the ordinary arithmetic which most of us had to do until 13 or 14 would be done in the form. I am not laying down a rigid pattern: I am giving only a broad description of how these comprehensive schools are run—and different teachers have different conceptions.

At the end of the two or three years, as the case may be, of the general education, there is consultation among those teachers who know the child: and there are quite a number of consultations among the teachers and parents. The child's own wishes and aptitude have been studied and a decision is then made as to what are his particular characteristics—whether he is most suited to advance along academic lines, or science, or handicraft, a vocation of some kind, whatever the case may be. For the remainder of the school life of the child, subject to transfers wherever necessary (and it is very easy to transfer within the same school), that child develops along the lines most suitable for him.

This is done internally, by agreement, with the minimum of fuss, without the child getting any sense of inferiority, and at the age of 13 or 14 when the ability and aptitude of the child can be more accurately assessed than at the age of 11; and also in conditions where any mistake on the part of the parents or the teachers can be easily rectified. These are, broadly, the common features of the comprehensive school, but there is considerable variety among them and a great deal of experiment. There are now something like fifty of them throughout the country. They vary in size, ranging from schools for something like 800 children up to schools for over 2,000. Some are coeducational, some of one sex alone. They vary in their curriculum, in the nature of the sixth form, in the type of sets they have, in their methods of grouping and in all kinds of ways, and I think it is a very healthy thing that there should be this variety among the comprehensive schools.

Your Lordships may ask what are the advantages of the comprehensive school, and I would submit that there are a very large number. First, there is no satisfactory alternative method which removes the evil of selection at the age of 11 which I have described. It provides what was the favourite idea in the 1944 Act: that the three different types of schools that were visualised in that Act should have what was called parity of esteem. It was always intended, but unfortunately something went astray, that each of the three types should be of equal esteem. It should not be regarded as a sign of inferiority to be sent to one school as against another. The comprehensive school provides this parity of esteem. It largely eliminates the wastage to which I have referred. The ease of transfer within the same school makes it possible to rectify mistakes that might be made during the educational life of the child.

It is socially desirable that different types of children with different abilities and different home background should mix together in class, in games and outside the school in various forms of activity; in educational visits, and, in a great many cases, in holidays abroad. Many schools organise fortnightly trips abroad. It provides a wider range of studies than is possible in a school of one type, and it is, of course, more convenient geographically foe the majority of the children, because the school is much nearer their home. It provides opportunities for social intercourse outside the schools between different types of children, in the form of clubs and societies to which by far the majority of the children belong. It brings the parents together, and in a number of schools that I have visited I have found that 95 per cent. of the parents visit the schools fairly regularly and attend the various meetings, functions and social conventions held there. On the moral side, I understand that there has been a general raising of the tone of these children as compared with those who would have gone to a secondary modern school, and something like 70 per cent. of the children who are able to leave at the age of 15 voluntarily decide to stay on for another year to do more. Many of the teachers, although I would not say all of them yet, are dedicated to the cause of comprehensive schools; they have entered into the spirit of these schools and there is at them a most devoted type of teacher.

It would be wrong of me to pretend that, on the other hand, there are not serious critics of these schools, and I want to run through some of the criticisms which I have heard. The first is that children not possessing academic gifts will hold back the more gifted and there will be a levelling down. This argument was put forward in its most extreme form by the President of the Incorporated Association of Headmasters in a speech at the annual meeting of the Association, and reported in The Times of January 2 last. That says: Children were different in personality, in character and in intellectual attainment. I must say that that is a profound discovery. It persuades the general public that the curriculum alone could transform any boy or girl into a don, a poet or a research scientist. For about three-quarters of the school population a purely academic training would be a form of cruelty which, if imposed regardless of capacity, would produce effects on the mind comparable to the bodily deformation of the most mediaeval tortures. That, as I say, is a criticism of the comprehensive schools by the President of the Incorporated Association of Headmasters. I need hardly say that it is so intemperate, so prejudiced and ill-informed as to what the comprehensive schools are doing and how they are conducted, as really to answer itself.

The whole purpose of the comprehensive school is to try to give to each child the kind of education for which it is most suited and to give it also a solid educational background up to the age of 13 or 14. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that in the same presidential speech, after having condemned the comprehensive school in the way that he did, the President of the Incorporated Association of Headmasters said that the comprehensive school had much to offer rural communities. I find it a little difficult to follow that it has much to offer rural communities after this criticism, unless he means to suggest that it does not matter about rural communities; they axe not very important. But I leave that to the gentleman himself to reconcile.

Experience shows that the brighter and more able children are not in fact held back by the presence of less bright children, but that they are even stimulated by their presence; and, vice versa, the less bright ones are stimulated by the presence of the brighter ones. I could give example after example of the achievements of these comprehensive schools, the standard of their education and what they have done in the General Certificate of Education; but I will not trouble the House with them, because I am bound to admit that, on the highest level—that is, the open university scholarship, and so on—these schools are not yet old enough to be able to demonstrate what they can do; the number of sixth forms is too few to reach any final conclusions. But, so far as they have gone, there is no doubt that their achievements have been considerable and are quite comparable with those of the grammar schools.

The next criticism is that the comprehensive school cannot provide a good enough sixth form. I have, in a sense, answered that. The main critic in this respect, curiously enough, is the High Master of the Manchester Grammar School. If I had deferred this debate for a month or so it might have been possible that the High Master would have made his maiden speech on this subject in this House, and we should have been most interested. I feel it is almost taking an unfair advantage to comment on his view in his absence. Most people recognise that the standard of the Manchester Grammar School is one of the highest in the country, and I do not pretend for one moment that in the early years the comprehensive schools are going to produce as good sixth forms as you get at the Manchester Grammar School, which has the pick of the boys from the North of England and a tremendously high tradition, and, as many noble Lords know, provides more open scholarships than any other school in the country. But I have high hopes—and I see no reason why they should not be realised—that in due course the comprehensive schools will be comparable with the best of the grammar schools, even in the case of sixth forms. And if the comparison is not with schools of the type of the Manchester Grammar School, but with the normal grammar school, then I think that to-day they can stand comparison, even on the potentialities of the sixth form.

A further criticism is that the establishment of the comprehensive school involves the abolition of the grammar school. It does nothing of the kind. The comprehensive school is not intended to compete with, to abolish or to interfere with the grammar school in any way; and I say that quite categorically. But let us remember that we are living in times of change; and nothing, not even the grammar schools, can remain unaffected by the times in which we live. Even to-day they are much different from what they were when they first started and from what they were when most of us were boys. Many have changed in recent years from being largely schools where the classics predominated and have had to develop scientific, technical, and even commercial and modern sides: indeed, they have become in themselves among the best of comprehensive schools.

By no means the majority of boys at Eton, Harrow, Winchester and so on are of the academic type; they are not all dons, poets, musicians or research scientists—and I doubt whether the gentleman who used that expression is himself one of those. Some of the products of these grammar schools are industrialists, technicians, civil servants and Servicemen, and some are even Members of this House and of another place. I imagine that the number of dons, musicians and poets in this House must be extremely limited. I believe that the march of events will naturally determine the future of the grammar school. Those of us who advocate the cause of the comprehensive school recognise the value of the great traditions of the best of the grammar schools, and I am confident that all that is best in them will be found in the comprehensive schools as they develop.

Many of the modern schools are developing along the same lines by widening their scope, so that in the technical schools and modern schools you may get an academic side, and likewise in the secondary modern school you may get a technical and commercial side. The general trend is to get a much wider form of education in all our secondary schools than has been the case hitherto. Indeed, I believe that the comprehensive system is gradually extending, the tripartite system is gradually breaking down and the future will tend towards educational organisation in one school. When I say, "one school" I mean one school. I do not mean three separate schools at some distance, even though they are organised and administered as one. I would not call that a comprehensive school. A comprehensive school should be a school where all departments are within one curtilage. Where you have an attempt to combine schools at some distance apart under one head you are getting the worst of all worlds; you are retaining the separateness of the children and getting none of the advantages of the comprehensive school.

I should like to refer for a moment to the White Paper published by the Minister of Education called Secondary Education for All. That says: The Government do not wish to rule out experiments with comprehensive or similar schools proposed on genuine educational grounds. There are two types of area, in particular, where local authorities have been able to satisfy the Minister that there was a case for such schools. The first is in country districts, in both England and Wales, where the population is comparatively sparse. The second is in areas of extensive new housing where there are no existing schools with a well-established tradition as grammar or technical or modern schools. I leave the sparsely populated country districts and take the second category, the areas of extensive new housing or where there are no existing schemes. I take the policy to be that no one would to-day start up a system of three different types of school.

THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (VISCOUNT HAILSHAM)

My Lords, for reasons which I shall give in due course, I do not think it to be a fair inference that the tripartite arrangement is obviously obsolete. I do not think it would be fair to infer, leaving that point aside, that my right honourable friend's policy was to say that nowhere would people think of starting from a clean sheet a system where there were two different types of schools. I think that that would be a false inference. What the White Paper says is that there is a case for a comprehensive school there. The noble Lord will remember that educational policy is administered by local education authorities, and where the Minister says there is a case it means that local authorities would be entitled, if they accepted that particular case, to put it forward as a reasonable proposal, and not that the Minister would think it was the only case which could be put forward.

LORD SILKIN

I am quite content with the noble Viscount's way of putting it. I do not want to strain the language at all—it would be quite improper of me—but I read it to mean that where you are starting with a clean sheet there is definitely a case for these schools, and I am content to leave it there. That is the view of the Minister.

Moreover in paragraph 9 of the corresponding Scottish White Paper it says: Comprehensive schools are no novelty in Scotland: they have for long been the normal type in communities of moderate size and have also been provided in some more populous centres. I hope I am not going too far in saying that these quotations concede in principle the case on educational grounds—not necessarily that in the view of the Minister the comprehensive school is the only kind of school, but that there is a case for them in areas of these types.

From what I have said about the development of these schools—with the fifty or more schools already in existence, with a substantial number under construction and with the considerable popularity of these schools throughout the country—it would be unrealistic still to regard the comprehensive school idea as experimental. Possibly that is the main difference between the Government and those who advocate these comprehensive schools. We believe that not only is it in the best interests of secondary education but that it is the only one which meets all the objections to the existing system of selection at the age of eleven. It is certainly unthinkable that we should go back along the existing lines; and, as I have said, in my view all the trends in the present grammar school and secondary modern education are in the direction of comprehensiveness. By all means let us experiment within the system—experiment in size, curriculum, organisation, entry, sex separation and many other ways. But it seems to me that the time has come for the general acceptance of the principle that at the end of the primary school education all children should go to the one school, there for the first two or three years receive the same form of education.

and thereafter be selected in accordance with their various aptitudes and abilities.

I hope I have satisfied the House that these schools, rightly or wrongly, if you like, have been established on genuine educational grounds in the sincere conviction that selection at the age of 11 is harmful to the child and not in the best interests of education. Those who have provided these schools genuinely hold that that is the best solution of the difficulties which I have described, and that while there may be various types of comprehensive schools, broadly it is the only solution. If I am asked whether I would insist that in future all secondary schools should be comprehensive, I am bound to say that, provided the iniquitous system of selection of the child's future at the age of 11 is abandoned, I would give to local education authorities freedom to initiate alternative systems of secondary education. In some cases, as in Leicestershire, this has been done with encouraging results. But on the other hand there must equally be no pressure to prevent local education authorities from providing comprehensive schools if they so desire. If you take the view that the local education authorities are to be the judges, let them be the judges both ways; put no pressure on them to prevent them from building comprehensive schools, just as no pressure should be put upon them to build them. In the end I am convinced that public opinion will decide the issue in favour of the comprehensive school.

In the meantime I would appeal to all educationalists not to be governed by prejudice. It is natural for some people to stand in the way of anything that is new. It has always been so. Every advance in standards, in forms of progress, even every move to greater freedom of opportunity, has been, resisted by reactionaries. I hope that all who have doubts about the policy of the comprehensive school will visit a number of them before voicing a hostile opinion. In my experience everybody who has been to one of those schools has come away tremendously impressed, whatever his previous views may have been—and this applies to parents as well. I would therefore appeal to the Minister of Education and to the informed community as a whole to give every help and encouragement, critical if you like, to this new and developing system of secondary education. Every child—and I mean every child, and not 20 per cent. of children, imperfectly selected at the age of 11—is entitled to the best opportunity of developing his talents, ability, personality and character in the best possible conditions, regardless of his social origin. I am convinced that the new comprehensive system provides this best opportunity. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

4.3 p.m.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, I did not, of course, know before the noble Lord uttered his speech exactly what he was going to say, and as I always try to the best of my ability to answer the arguments as they are presented, it necessarily follows that, although I have a great mass of material here which I could use in reply to him, I must necessarily go perhaps more slowly and extemporise more than I should otherwise have done. Before I start to reply to the noble Lord's speech, I certainly must discharge my own personal debt of gratitude to him for having postponed consideration of this Motion for a week in order to enable me to answer the debate. No doubt there are several noble Lords who sit beside me on the Government Bench who could have answered it as well or better, but I doubt whether there was anybody quite as eager to do so as I was, all the more eager because during my tenure of office as Minister of Education I never had an opportunity in this House of replying to a debate on education. The nearest thing I got to it was to reply as Treasury spokesman to a debate on the universities initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, and as a matter of history I was never given a chance to speak as a Departmental Minister in this House.

My Lords, the experience of having been a Minister for eight months (I do not know what effect it has on the children) has a very educative effect on the Minister. I do not suppose that there are many people who have the chance which is given to a Minister of Education to inform himself about the educational state of the country and to see so many different schools in so many different parts of the country, or to be advised by a group of officials who are more passionately dedicated to their subject or more deeply informed about its intricacies and about the issues involved. To some extent it is the death of many prejudices with which one embarks upon the case. If I am able to convey to the House something of what I learned or tried to learn during my tenure of office as Minister, I shall feel that this debate has been very well worth while from my point of view, because it was an extremely enriching and informing experience, and I certainly shall carry with me for the rest of my life not only an interest in the subject—which I think I can honestly claim always to have had—but also a viewpoint which I believe no one who has not shared the experience of responsibility in the Ministry of Education can really enjoy.

In the course of what I have to say I shall differ a lot in detail from many of the expressions of opinion which have fallen from the noble Lord, but for one thing I should like to thank him: I would thank him for the tone of what he has said, quite irrespective of its content. In matters of education I would respectfully say to the House that, curiously enough, the tone is often more important than the content, although this is something which will both surprise and, I fear, annoy some of the more dogmatic adherents to the different schools of thought in the educational world, of which there are a great number. But when I was Minister I made myself a promise which I have never regretted: that I would try to keep the office of Minister of Education as far as possible out of the more violent realms of Party politics. I know I was right to try, and I believe I succeeded in doing so.

I would say that it should be the aim of every Minister of Education who takes his work seriously to make the same effort. I would go further and say that it is really the duty of those who embark upon debate on this subject to make the same effort. There are—and this is of great relevance to the subject which the noble Lord has raised—two extremely important reasons for this. In the first place, the Minister, or indeed the central authority generally, has to conduct business with a very large number of local authorities of differing political complexions which are elected by the local community over which they are placed. Each of those local authorities is, or at any rate ought to be, entitled to a wide degree of independence in the administration of its own area. It is the duty, I should have thought, of the Minister and of the Parliament to which the Minister is responsible to endeavour to win and to keep the confidence of those local authorities. The Act proclaims it as the duty of the Minister: … to promote the education of the people of England and Wales … and to secure the effective execution by local authorities, under his control and direction, of the national policy for providing a varied and comprehensive educational service in every area. I would stress both words, if I may, to the House, both "varied" and "comprehensive", which in the context of the Act, of course, means all-embracing, and certainly does not mean, although it would not necessarily exclude, the principle to which the noble Lord has referred as comprehensive in the course of his speech.

But, my Lords, there is a second and even more compelling reason why Party politics if they cannot be entirely excluded should be kept at a discreet and, so far as possible, low temperature in this particular aspect of public affairs. Rightly or wrongly, the Minister of Education is looked upon by millions of parents up and down the country as the guardian of the educational future of their children. They are not the Minister's children. The parents are of different social classes, different religions and different political Parties. It is the parents whose wishes should, as a general principle, be respected so far as is compatible with the provision of efficient instruction and training and the avoidance of unreasonable public expenditure, and the parents, whatever their religion or their politics, are entitled to look to a national Minister to safeguard those parental rights. I am not talking now in terms of pious aspirations: the words which I have been using are the words of the law, for I have been quoting Section 76 of the Act.

It is with these thoughts in my mind, my Lords, that I come to the subject which the noble Lord has raised, and it is in that spirit that I desire to interpret the issues involved in what he has had to say. I was grateful to the noble Lord for choosing as his subject secondary education. From one point of view it is, of course, as the noble Lord began by saying, only one link in the chain. Whether it is or is not the most important link is something which it would ill become anyone who has held the office of Minister, or aspires to it, to pronounce on, because there is no more hotly disputed subject between the different classes of teacher. By selecting secondary education as the subject of his Motion, the noble Lord put his finger, I thought, upon what is really the whole essence of the matter of education at the present time—an essence which tends to be obscured by much of the detail in contemporary controversy.

The noble Lord said, and it is admitted from some points of view as a truism, that primary education is the foundation upon which all else is built. With that, I would agree. I would also share his hope that primary education might also be made the subject of debate in this House. But, however much we may reiterate this truth, however much we may be driven to confess, sometimes with shame, sometimes with anxiety, the shortcomings of primary education; or however often we may be led to boast, as I think we legitimately can in another mood, of the immense advances made in primary education; or however much we may draw attention, as we also legitimately can, to our tremendous achievements at the other end of the scale in university and technological training, the essence of our present-day problem, of which we can never lose sight, lies in the fact to which the noble Lord drew attention: that for the first time in the history of this country the Butler Act was designed to provide secondary education for all, up to the age, at first, of fifteen, and then of sixteen, and then through the county colleges and so on to eighteen. And since the war intense efforts have been made by successive Ministers to carry that Act into effect. It is in the light of this central consideration, I believe, that all our educational problems need to be seen in order to give their true context and perspective.

It was for that reason, in a sense, that I was sorry that the noble Lord changed the terms of his Motion and restricted it, as he sought to do, to the problem of selection and the advocacy in which he indulges for one particular principle, the comprehensive principle, in our system of secondary education. I would say to the noble Lord that even if this restriction is right (which I do not think, on the whole, it is), the problem of selection and the problem raised by his advocacy of the comprehensive principle can be understood only in the light of the general context of the provision of secondary education for all up and down the country, and the problems of supply, to which I shall draw attention in some detail later—teacher supply, building supply, equipment supply—to which that situation gives rise. If I were to make a general criticism of the noble Lord's speech to begin with—I know he will forgive me for doing so—I think it was to some extent his failure to stress, out of a desire to stick to the terms of his Motion, the severity and seriousness of these supply problems. I feel that they vitiate a good deal of his argument.

As his Motion originally stood, it drew attention to the problems of secondary education. As it stands now, it draws particular attention to the two problems of selection and the comprehensive principle. But just as I think he was right to draw attention to the central importance of secondary education as the issue before us in the country to-day, I think that that issue tends to be obscured, rather than illustrated, by drawing particular attention to the problems of selection and the rival merits of different types of school. I must tell the House that eight months at the Ministry of Education led me to believe without doubt that to concentrate at his end of the problem is to confuse symptoms with causes. If I may put it in a sentence, the problems of secondary education are not the problems of selection, but the problems of the provision of adequate teachers—that is to say, teachers adequate in quality as well as in quantity—adequate buildings and equipment, and suitable courses of instruction. If these are provided I profoundly believe, and am completely convinced, that there is no problem of selection which need give rise to any anxiety of any insuperable difficulty whatsoever.

If, on the other hand, these essential shortfalls are not provided, no alteration in the method of selection, and no fancy ideas about types of school, in one direction or the other, will do anything whatever to mitigate the problems which exist. All the problems of selection are made difficult, and sometimes heartrending, not by anything inherent in selection itself but because of deficiencies, past or present, in teacher provision or school provision. Remove these deficiencies and there is no sting in selection. Fail to remove them and you will have continuing injustice to children, whether you select or not, or whatever method or principle or age you choose as your basis of selection. If I may turn now to what I mean by that, and why I have come to hold that view—although I will return shortly afterwards as I promised faithfully to do to the main burden of the noble Lord's speech—I must ask the House to bear with me while I deal with these difficulties of shortfall; because my own belief is that until they have been discussed frankly any talk about selection or the principle or pattern of school is almost a waste of time.

I will deal first with the question of teachers and class sizes. The House will, of course, be aware that for quite a number of years past the regulations have provided for a maximum class size of forty for juniors and infants, and then, with a greater measure of flexibility, for thirty at the secondary stage. As a matter of comparison I cannot help recalling that the mediæval rabbis regarded twenty-five at any age as a convenient maximum; and for another point of comparison I cannot avoid pointing out that the cost of reducing and enforcing a maximum of forty or thirty to a universal maximum of thirty throughout the educational system would be of the order of £200 million a year. As the House will be aware, however, the problem before Ministers of Education since the war has not been one of reducing the maximum permissible size of the classes but of reducing the classes to the maximum permissible size. Here there has been a gratifying advance on the primary front. The average-sized class is now only 33.9, or well below the maximum; and the percentage of over-sized classes has fallen on that front from 31.1 to 22.9 between the years 1950 and 1958.

In the secondary field the position has been no more than held. The teacher-pupil ratio has marginally improved; the percentage of over-sized classes, while substantially the same, has marginally deteriorated, although so marginally that it was only by one-half of 1 per cent. This is due, of course, to the movement through the secondary schools of the so-called population "bulge". From several points of view, since I was Minister the situation as regards teacher provision, at least in secondary schools, has been more acute. When I was Minister I was working on official figures supplied by the National Advisory Council for the Training and Supply of Teachers, which indicated that there would be a substantial fall in the birth-rate—although even then I could not help asking how the Government Actuary discovered what the birth-rate was going to be. At any rate, I was working on a projection which indicated an actual decline in the school population. Had that in fact happened, there might even have been slight unemployment in some branches of the teaching profession by the middle 1960s.

It is already clear that these figures, which were operative only two years ago, were based on two false assumptions. The anticipated fall in the birth-rate has not taken place—and I personally rejoice that it has not; and, equally fortunate, but equally disconcerting for the forecasters, the proportion of those voluntarily remaining at school has once again exceeded expectations. In terms of the rather meaningless totals that one has to use for the sake of brevity, the estimate of teachers required by 1968 has in consequence been increased by no fewer than 27,000—from 299,000 when I was Minister, to 326,000 as calculated to-day.

Secondly, when I was Minister I decided to accept the recommendation of the National Advisory Council for the Training and Supply of Teachers to increase the training course for non-graduate teachers from two to three years in 1960 I am sure that this was the right decision for me to take; in point of fact, we are almost the only developed country with a two-year course. At the time my decision was criticised as unduly cautious. There were those who would have wished me to introduce the three-year course in 1959. I decided not to do so, owing to the greater priority of improving the pupil-teacher ratio. My successor, faced with far less favourable population figures, has been criticised from exactly the opposite point of view, for adhering at all to my decision, or at least for not postponing it until 1961; since, whenever the three-year course is introduced, the effect will be to reduce the yearly output, two years after the introduction of non-graduate teachers, to a very small figure indeed. I am sure that my right honourable friend was right to stick to his guns.

The result of these considerations has been to increase his difficulties and to leave him to put forward an ambitious increase in his teacher-training facilities. This increase aims at a 50 per cent. expansion to be completed by the autumn of 1962. I would agree that, on paper, a larger increase still might have been desirable; indeed, the National Advisory Council suggested a programme aimed at an annual figure of 16,000, as against 12,000. My right honourable friend, however, had to be guided by practical considerations, such as the strain that rapid expansion puts on technical resources, the present limited size of the college system, the major uncertainties of the future birth-rate and the rate of wastage among teachers. Nevertheless, he has said that he will keep an open mind on this subject, and that if further forecasts make it clear that a 50 per cent. expansion is not enough he will look at the matter again.

The effect of all this is that our belief continues to be that over-sized classes in primary schools will have been virtually eliminated by the 1960s, and that the situation in secondary schools will certainly continue difficult for a year or two, as the number of pupils continues to rise. We may hope for a decisive improvement in the next five years, however. In the meantime, I ought to add, for the sake of completeness, that the number of graduates entering the leaching profession continues to be maintained. In assisted schools it continues to rise satisfactorily, with 4,600 in 1957, as against 3,600 in 1955. With the expansion in the university programme one can look forward without undue optimism to an increase comparable to the increase in the number of graduates. In particular, in the vital field of mathematics and science, the output of scientists and technologists should double in the next decade.

To give the background to this subject, without which it is really unintelligible, I should look again at the question of school provision—by which I mean the provision of school buildings. Despite an extraordinary and sustained burst of school building, and some, to me at least, amazing improvements, both in economy and in quality of design, we have still a great deal of leeway to make up. During the time that I was Minister, building was primarily designed for the elementary task of providing some kind of a roof over the head of every child. In the course of this building there was, of course, a great deal of much-needed reorganisation going on. For instance, to take the grammar schools alone, 120 have been built since the war; 150 others have had major extensions completed, and about 100 more are under construction or have been approved, as have 150 major extensions. This will result, before the new five-year drive begins to bite, in about two-fifths of the grammar schools of the country being housed either in new buildings or in buildings that have been substantially improved since 1948. We must now look again, however, at school buildings of all types of school, to see what buildings are due for replacement under the new plan.

By far the most urgent of our building problems, however, lies in the reorganisation of all-age schools. Between 1951 and 1958 the number of all-age schools fell from 5.600 to 2,300, and the proportion of 13-year old children accommodated in them from 17 per cent. to 7 per cent. In 1957 alone, the number of all-age schools fell by more than 500 and the number of senior children in them by 25,000. But even by last year there were still 140,000 senior children in all-age schools, and that is why local education authorities were asked to submit to the Ministry by February 1, 1959, a statement showing what reorganisation remains to be done. The intention is to make a good start on the urban reorganisation in the first two years of the five-year period and within that period at least to start on secondary schools required to complete urban reorganisation. Two-thirds of the 400 secondary schools required for rural reorganisation in 1954 have now either been constructed or approved. Within the first two years of the five-year plan it is proposed to include all, or nearly all, of the 120 remaining schools.

In connection with the building programme I ought to add a word about the improvement of facilities for teaching science. Between 1947 and 1957 the number of advanced level passes in the General Certificate of Education rose from 10,000 to 14,000 in mathematics, from 8,000 to 15,000 in physics, and from 7,000 to 13,000 in chemistry. These figures explain why so much of the expansion of the universities which the Government are planning will be devoted to the enlargement of science facilities.

Since the war more than £20 million has been spent on the provision and equipment of science laboratories at new and enlarged maintained secondary schools of all kinds. This compares with the £3 million spent in three years on independent and direct-grant schools by the Industrial Fund. In both the last programmes, those for 1958–59 and 1959–60, there were included projects to the value of about £2 million designed to improve science facilities in the maintained secondary school. This, I think, is absolutely necessary to see, for reasons which I will try to elaborate as the context in which and the background against which discussion has to take place on the problems of selection and the comprehensive school to which the noble Lord has drawn attention.

I return now with that, I think, absolutely necessary background to the discussion. As the noble Lord has said, since the war we have been engaging in a vast and vital new experiment: the provision of secondary education for all children. This is the wood which accounts for all, or virtually all, of the trees; that is, the issues raised this afternoon; and it is, I would say, the vital clue which, if it is pertinaciously followed, will in the end unravel all the educational problems we have this afternoon to discuss. In this case, I may be forgiven for my historical introduction.

It is important, although I would say probably to your Lordships elementary, to remember that before the war secondary education was available, broadly speaking, to only two classes of pupil: the pupil whose parents could afford to pay a fee representing the whole or part of the cost of tuition and, in the case of boarding pupils, maintenance as well, and the exceptional pupil who was taught free or nearly free at the cost of the public. The latter was of course the most familiar type of education within the reach of the masses, and even of those who qualified for this type of education there must, I should think, have been many who were unable to avail themselves of it owing to the necessity, which bore hardly on parents in the days of under-employment, especially when there were no children's allowances, to maintain their children at school, after others had begun to work and contribute to the family resources.

A place at a grammar school, as the noble Lord has reminded us, was often called—I think I might even say miscalled, but still often called—a scholarship; and as the result a grammar school education remains in the eyes of many parents to this day the only type of education worth having. I am bound to tell the noble Lord, without any element of reproach in my voice, that I thought I caught a trace of that outlook in his own speech this afternoon. But whether I did or whether I did not, I hope to persuade him that this is completely and utterly mistaken. Whether this is so or not, a grammar school education was before the war, for slightly different reasons, the only type of education available for both types of pupil which I have been trying to describe.

To-day I regard the situation as basically altered. A grammar school course—and for the moment I do not beg the question whether such a course of adequate quality is available or not at the comprehensive school—remains, I think beyond question, by far the most beneficial secondary education for the academically exceptional boy or girl. But I would add at once that it has certain serious limitations—limitations which I do not think were wholly present in the noble Lord's mind as he spoke this afternoon. The course, for good or evil, humanistic or scientific, is highly academic. It remains much too highly academic, I would say, for those not over-gifted academically; and a very large number of teenagers do not benefit from, and in fact do not enjoy, such highly academic courses. It is, of course, extremely exacting, even for those who can benefit from it. I would say, again, speaking personally but speaking from some experience, that it is far too exacting for any except those whose talents enable them to enjoy the course.

At the higher levels—and here again I speak from very considerable experience—no one who visits a grammar school can avoid the dominant impression that it is a place of hard self-discipline in the pursuit of knowledge. For those who fail, having started it, or for the marginal type who can just benefit from it but barely do so, I would say, with complete conviction, that it is hardly the most beneficial course for them to take. I would go further and say that its greatest benefit is generally reaped only by the pupils who go beyond it into the university or other further education. However, for all these limitations, it remains the true gateway to the higher learning.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Viscount. What he is saying is very interesting. But would he apply this argument to the average boy who goes to our great public schools, or to the boy who is perhaps slightly less than average?

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, I think that that would lead me too far outside the ambit of what I propose to say. It is a very interesting question, but the answer is neither absolutely "Yes" nor absolutely "No." If we start talking about different kinds of courses available at the public schools it would require much more detailed examination than I am prepared to give it. But in the main I refer to grammar school courses. And I must add this. Although, of course, I have experience of one public school, I could not claim the same breadth of experience of the other system as could as a result of holding the office I did two years ago.

It would not, I think, be too much to say that on the minority of children able to benefit from grammar-school courses in one sense the whole future of Britain in science, technology and the arts really depends. To threaten to abolish grammar schools or their courses in order to achieve a benefit to those who would not profit by them would be a crime. The crime would not only be a crime against the gifted child, although it would be a crime against him; it would not only be a crime against the nation, although it would be a crime against the nation; it would also be a crime against the normal child, because the whole burden of my argument this afternoon is that the normal child requires a different kind of course, and the inevitable result of grouping him with a number of academically gifted children may be—I repeat, may be—to mutilate the course in favour of the academic slant and against the kind of course the normal child may well require. That is a view very widely held, at any rate in the educational profession; and I shall perhaps return, if I have time, to a number of expressions of opinion to that effect.

My Lords, the provision of secondary education for all inevitably, therefore, involves something more than the replenishment of the shortfalls which I began by describing; something more than the provision of fresh teachers, more classrooms and new books. It inevitably involves the emergence of a new type of course of secondary education; and that must be the implication of the Butler Act, although the curriculum has never been, and I hope never will be, an affair for the local education authorities, or, for that matter, for the Ministry, but is a matter for the teaching profession. Whether you have a system of selection or whether you do not, and whether you adopt the principle of comprehensive schools or whether you reject it, a new type of secondary course was certain to emerge from the proposition that secondary education had to be provided for all. For universal secondary education a new conception was required: a course which would be as long potentially as the grammar school course in point of time—that is to say, for five years—but tailor-made to the need, to the taste, and to the requirement of the ordinary teen-age child. It will be observed—and I repeat—that such a course would be required quite irrespective of the school attended. Incidentally, I must say that such a course would probably benefit most of all the kind of marginal child who has hitherto been compelled either to break his spirit on the Procrustes bed of grammar school learning or to have no secondary school education at all.

Perhaps it would be convenient at this stage for me to remove what I thought was a misunderstanding on the part of the noble Lord, who referred to the original conception of the Norwood Report of the tripartite division of the secondary education system into grammar, technical, and secondary modern, each forming one vertical layer of an imaginary three-decker cake. My Lords, I would regard that conception as obsolete. I do not wish to divert your Lordships from the main current of this discussion to give a detailed reason why, but I would say that the future of the technical school does not lie at all in the realm of being a second-best to a grammar school, or in being an imitation of a secondary modern school. The hope for the future of the technical schools (most of which require re-housing rather more than any other type, because they have largely been housed in buildings belonging to an older and less successful type of school altogether) lies in the provision of a course of grammar school quality but without the accepted grammar school tradition limiting its size and shape. I developed these ideas at much greater length in a speech which I made at a secondary technical school when I was Minister; but I would personally regard the old tripartite category as something which, if not obsolete, was at least obsolescent.

My Lords, experience has shown that the new type of course required is not found either in the old grammar school course itself or—and it is of great importance to appreciate this, I think—in any truncated or mutilated version of the grammar school course. I believe that no competent educationist would endorse Mr. Gaitskell's remark "grammar school education for all". If that were done, I believe that the whole benefit of the new secondary education for a great majority of pupils would be largely lost. Experience in the last ten years has taught us that a totally new approach to secondary education is required if we are to carry out the spirit and reap the benefit of the 1944 Act. I would say that the best modern teaching is already providing the reality of such courses. I wish I could describe the feeling of exhilaration to be found in the best secondary modern courses. In practice, they produce the latent talent wherever it is.

The noble Lord, Lord Silkin, recounted an experience of his own in relation to a particular pupil who was selected first for a secondary modern school and ultimately, owing to the noble Lord's intervention, was transferred to a grammar school. Of course, it is not for me to dilate upon the merits or demerits of any individual case, but I would say this. First of all, I would ask the noble Lord to put entirely out of this mind the idea that the pupils of the grammar schools of this country are selected from a different social class than the secondary modern school pupils. They do, in fact, provide the avenue to a university degree enjoyed by all classes of the community, and he must be wrong in thinking that the girl in whom he had a friendly interest was not transferred for that reason. But, from my experience in this matter, I would say that the very fact of having been for a year or two at a secondary modern school, with its more flexible type of course, catering for the normal child and giving him or her special attention, may have been the very circumstance which enabled her to do so well at the grammar school when she went there.

I should like to cite an example of my own. One of the many schools that I visited when I was Minister was a girls' secondary modern school in the West Riding of Yorkshire. That was a secondary modern school where much of what I have been trying to describe is already in effect. I was told, and believed, that this school, which did not, in fact, itself provide a sixth form, was sending a regular stream of pupils to the sixth form of a neighbouring grammar school. The headmaster of the grammar school told me that when they got there they were among his most promising and successful pupils in the sixth form. I was also told, and believed, having studied the matter and having seen the school, that the reason for their success lay in the fact that in the earlier years of their secondary education they had been given a course which was suitable for them, which brought out the best in them, and enabled them to graduate to the G.C.E., through the sixth form of the grammar school. I believe that, if they had been unfortunate enough to be selected or forced into a grammar school mould at earlier stages, they would inevitably have been unhappy and would, in fact, have not done so well.

My Lords, I could give many examples of this, because I have a great deal of material here, but I will content myself with drawing the attention of noble Lords opposite to the most remarkable and worthy document by the headmaster of. I think, a grammar school which appears in this week's New Statesman. He says: Too little is known about the amazing progress by the Modern schools in the past ten years. All over the country they are increasingly becoming communities with a genuine sense of purpose; where young people of normal ability strive on an equal basis for excellence in a wide variety of fields; where skilled and enthusiastic teachers, who know what they are aiming at, train children to do what they want to do and to do it well. It is not surprising that much of the opposition to the Labour education policy comes from the staffs of good secondary Modern schools". He goes on to say that it might well be that the destruction of the existing pattern might well have a depressing effect upon the secondary modern pupils, because, he says: …there is one disadvantage which seems to be insurmountable in the Comprehensive school; in the upper reaches of the school in particular, the responsible positions go to the academics; indeed throughout the school, it is the less intellectual who are forced out of the limelight and who fail to benefit from much which the school can offer. In this connection it is worth quoting from a teacher who has been for 12 years in an established Comprehensive school: 'All our prefects have come from the academic streams…that is true also of the house captains…as do the majority of the teams. Violin classes, and consequently the orchestra, are attended mainly by academic children. The choirs contain few non-academics; although great efforts are made to include them in plays (as in all school and house activities) it is rare for even one to be willing to take a part. I…recognise in my present school many who, in a different setting, would have been responsible and successful leaders. It is not the attack on the Grammar school which can do most harm, but the abolition of the Modern school.' I would not go the whole way with that experienced teacher. He is a man of strong opinions on educational subjects not accepted by all other teachers. At the same time I think we should be aware of the strength of feeling that these subjects excite. Those who try to do away with the secondary modern school are really destroying or threatening to destroy perhaps the most important and significant development of modern secondary education. A secondary modern course is not an inferior type of education to that of a grammar school, but a new, stimulating and infinitely superior course tailor-made for those who can benefit from it. To deny it to children who can benefit by it is to deny them justice. It is also to deny justice to an exceptional child to deny him the traditional academic course available in a grammar school. The danger in the indiscriminate advocacy of the comprehensive school principle is that in the interests of imagined equality injustice will be done to both classes of pupils.

I should be the first to admit that the reality differs greatly from the ideal. The secondary modern course has hitherto usually been planned for only four years. Many schools are still unreorganised. Many buildings are totally unsuitable. Some teachers are sail perhaps not fully capable of giving the best of the newer courses. Much equipment is still lacking. Above all, many classes and teaching groups are too unwieldy. It is these facts that give substance to the fears of parents who entertain the belief, born very largely of the false impression derived from their image of an obsolete and half-forgotten pattern of education, that if their child performs the manœuvre known as "failing the 11-plus" the child is somehow handicapped for life. I was sorry that the noble Lord this afternoon gave further currency to this belief. The effect on a child is not final and is not handicapping. A child who goes to a modern course in a modern building with a go-ahead teacher, by the age of 18 is normally more advanced than if he had scraped into a grammar school and been a lame duck for six years—and succeeded in addition in handicapping both his teachers and the more gifted pupils with whom he was associated.

The reality is different. Whatever may handicap a child selected for a modern school it is not the absence of a comprehensive school or his failure to enter the grammar school but the presence of an obsolete building, an oversize class, an inadequate teacher, poor equipment, or old fashioned courses when he gets to the secondary modern school, in place of the kind of building, the kind of teacher and the kind of course that he requires. The remedy is to provide what is lacking. Anything else is mere double talk, and whether you provide it in one form or another is, from one point of view, of quite secondary importance. I would question the figures given by the noble Lord to illustrate what he described as the fortuitous chance of selection between one part of the country and another. Of course different areas have different conditions in this matter. To quote Welsh figures in comparison with those of the London boroughs is not to compare like with like. These figures may include bilateral schools in what they call grammar school figures.

This enables me to discuss the proposed abolition of the 11-plus examination. If this means that there is to be no sorting of pupils at the phase between primary and secondary education—and I do not beg the question as to what age the children should be—I say the proposition is a fraud. If it means that some administrative device can give children something that they have not got, but still leave the old buildings in existence, the same size classes and the same equipment, it is worse than a fraud; it is a dangerous and criminal conspiracy to deceive. If it means that the gifted child must somehow be penalised in order to preserve the facade of a spurious equality with the less gifted, or compelled to follow the same course of instruction, or refused the opportunity to sharpen his wits on similarly gifted children, it is a wicked injustice both to the ordinary child and to the exceptional child.

On the other hand, there is a very great deal to be said for abolishing the examination if by that is meant the elimination of the false degree of terror that lies in the breasts of a generation of parents who in their youth knew only the choice between grammar school education and none at all, and a generation of pupils who are terrorised by such parents. If by that is meant the abolition for all children of secondary age of the all-age school, the over-size class, the slum building, the second-rate teacher, and the course slanted unduly on academic lines, there would be a very great deal to be said for it. If it means recognition that 11 is not an age at which every child's future can be decided conclusively and that transferability in one direction is no slur and in another is an event which is to be encouraged, there is a great deal to be said for it. There are certainly no statistics available on this point, but in the course of my wanderings from one school to another I was not seldom introduced to such pupils and I was particularly anxious to talk to them and their teachers as to the effect it had, and it was not at all in accordance with what the noble Lord told the House. There is a very great deal to be said for abolition if undue emphasis on trick questions and psychological tests is subordinated to simple and well-understood procedures which engender neither apprehension nor ridicule.

All this is in the White Paper and there is no room for Party politics in it, nor would I seek to speak on Party lines. I would also say that when, in the long run, we have settled down and the immediate crisis of shortfall in quality as well as quantity has been overcome, I doubt whether 11 would be a suitable age at which to move from primary to secondary education. But I can imagine no more disastrous step in the present context than to give effect to this conviction in England and Wales in advance of other and more pressing problems.

I have not mentioned in detail the much-publicised comprehensive school. I rave not done so for the very good reason that I would say that what matters is not doctrinaire approach to the organisation of schools, but an imaginative and progressive approach to courses, teacher-provision, school building, interchangeability, and equipment. So long as we Lave grammar school courses, by all means let us have comprehensive schools in some areas. What would be wrong is their imposition on all areas, and the implied condemnation, which is wholly unjustified, of schools of the traditional pattern. What is wrong is the belief that the comprehensive school is an instrument of social justice and not an experiment in educational expedience.

I am not, I hope, doctrinaire in this matter. Nor, I think, have other Conservative Ministers of Education been. This is shown by the figures. I do not think anybody would have realised from the noble Lord's figures and his description of the comprehensive school how very experimental in this country the comprehensive conception is. In all the schools in this country there are at the moment fewer than fifty comprehensive schools. But as the school cannot be judged until it has developed a sixth form, it cannot be judged until it is at least five years old. There are, I believe, only thirteen comprehensive schools to which this particular rubric applies. I think that the noble Lord should have mentioned this.

Incidentally, it means—and I emphasise this point—that all the comprehensive schools in this country except a tiny minority have been opened at a time when the central Government has been Conservative in political Party complexion. The only times, so far as I know, when Conservative Ministers of Education have intervened against local authorities in the matter have been when, a is sometimes the case, a doctrinaire authority has wantonly interfered with an existing pattern of good secondary schooling in order to impress its pre- conceived notions in a situation to which it has no proper application. The only thing that we on this side of the House should object to—and I must say we should be prepared to resist it, as a matter of conscience, tooth and nail—would be the enforcement of the proposal, to which the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, did not refer at all, in the Labour Party pamphlet, to require local education authorities to provide secondary education plans designed with all reasonable speed to adopt the comprehensive principle. That is what we should object to, and that is what we should fight. We regard this policy as arbitrary, tyrannical, retrograde and doctrinaire, and we should oppose it on those grounds.

Moreover, if the English language is to have any meaning at all, I must tell the noble Lord bluntly that it is foolish to pretend that it is not a death sentence on grammar schools, as we know them, and the murder of all the promising experiments all over the country in modern schooling. When the noble Lord says that he would not tolerate the abolition of the grammar school he is modifying the threat which now overhangs the secondary schooling of the country as a result of his Party's policy pamphlet. If any other noble Lord is to speak from those Benches, I shall be glad to hear which of the two we are now to believe is Labour policy: the policy of requirement imposed on local authorities contained in this document, or the totally different policy enunciated by the noble Lord, Lord Silkin.

The policy of the document is arbitrary and tyrannical because it substitutes the judgment of the politician at Westminster for the wish of the local community. That is the essence of the matter. It is doctrinaire because in place of a pattern which conforms to local tradition and requirement, and which fits the layout of existing building, it imposes an overall principle, irrespective of whether it is appropriate of not; and it is retrograde because it will tend to reimpose the false snobbery of the academic course on all, just at the moment when advanced thought has begun to escape from it.

If we oppose the policy set out in the document this is not because we would deny to the comprehensive or bilateral school an honoured place in our system. There will be many areas where it is best; some where it is at least equally good, and others where it is quite legitimate—country areas, to which the noble Lord referred, where the population is comparatively sparse; new housing areas where schools of the existing pattern do not exist; areas where the availability of sites really demands schools of a very large size, 1,000 or upwards, as the common type. In many other areas this type of school will be quite unsuitable. I must say that many local education authorities prefer smaller schools (even the London County Council are moving away from the gigantic schools that they were planning a few years ago), and many have established grammar schools or will wish to establish them in future. Many will wish to establish new secondary modern schools more in line with current educational trends. There ought to be no overriding of Conservative local education authorities by a Socialist Minister or of Socialist local education authorities by a Conservative Minister unless it can be shown that a local authority has forgotten the interests of the children and teachers in its care for the interest of some political dogma, or some general theory applied without regard to local circumstances or traditions.

It is here that I would end with a sincere plea to the Party of noble Lords opposite. The educational world is sincerely and deeply divided on this topic, for reasons to which I have already referred, and only lack of time has led me to forbear to quote further from the remarkable article by Mr. Harry Rée in the current number of the New Statesman. My only plea is that we should avoid any attempt at political gleichschaltung on the national level, and it is this gleichschaltung that the present form of the Labour policy pamphlet threatens to impose. Left to themselves there will be ample scope for local authorities, with their communities behind them to adopt the comprehensive principle if they believe in it and if it can be shown to make in that community some kind of educational sense. But let any suggestion of a national requirement be dropped. And let the arguments at the local authority level be educational arguments, such as the noble Lord advanced, and not doctrinaire.

I am sure that the Party opposite have nothing to fear from the step which I ask them to take. The arguments against the comprehensive principle are not, believe me, based either on ignorance or on political grounds. They are held sincerely by educationists with every right to speak on purely professional considerations. At least one of the teaching trade unions has declared against it. The denominations—and I am glad to see that the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, is to speak—would find it tolerable only if they were allowed to contract out of it, and at least one arguable opinion seems to be that, in practice, the comprehensive school tends to do the very thing which it is designed to avoid—namely, depress the status of the academically normal child and exalt the academically gifted.

My Lords, in making this plea to noble Lords opposite to take this matter out of the realm of Party politics on the national level, I am not asking them to sacrifice a single one of their convictions. They have majorities on a local basis in a very large number of local education authorities throughout the country, including I am sorry to say, the Metropolis. Presumably if they secured power at a General Election none of these would fare any worse at the hands of the Central Government than they do now. In this respect, however, they could hardly expect to fare better, because, so far as I am aware, the only complaint on this front against Conservative Ministers is that we have fallen over backwards in not obstructing the wishes of Labour local authorities. All that is asked is that local communities should determine their own future, and that when they do local authorities should allow themselves to be guided by educational rather than political arguments. I am conscious that if this course were followed, the Party of which I am Chairman would be deprived of an extremely powerful, and, as matters stand, entirely legitimate political weapon. All the same, it is a political weapon that I would far rather be without. I can imagine no greater misfortune to the true interests of education and human beings that it serves than that it should be returned to the cockpit of Party politics.

My Lords, since I was Minister two years ago, I have often had cause to reflect on the singular service rendered by my right honourable friend Mr. R. A. Butler to the cause of education in 1944. But I would say that, more than any other service that he rendered, was his service to the atmosphere in which from that time onward education has been administered. That, I think, has been generally recognised, both in the religious and in the political sphere. I have noticed in the last two years a tendency, perhaps on both sides, to restore the element of rancour which unfortunately disfigured the treatment of this subject before the war. I was deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, for the appeal he made to limit our debate to-day to educational arguments, and for my part I would sincerely ask noble Lords to refrain from adhering to the policy of requirement imposed on local authorities who do not happen to share their convictions on general political grounds.

5.10 p.m.

THE LORD BISHOP OF RIPON

My Lords, it is obviously suitable that something should be said from these Benches in this House. I am only sorry that the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Chichester, who had intended to come here to speak (he being Chairman of the Schools Council of the Church Assembly Board of Education), has fallen a victim to the disease of influenza and at the last moment sent an S.O.S. asking me to speak for him. I confess that when that request came I had seen the original form of the Motion, and until I came into the House this afternoon I did not know that it was limited in the way it is. The notes I had made were about the wider subject, and therefore I am the more grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, for opening up the wider subject, because I am perfectly sure that this particular limited problem cannot be tackled or understood unless it is seen in the light of the whole problem of secondary education and the problem of education as a whole.

Secondary education is not something completely independent of primary education. Primary education leads up to secondary education, and if the primary education is unsatisfactory, inevitably the secondary education that follows it will suffer. Education is one continual process, in which the earlier years are of the most fundamental importance—not perhaps in the actual learning; that a child receives then, but in the attitude he learns to adopt towards learning as such. New techniques which have appeared in the primary schools are something quite wonderful. It is true that it is extraordinarily difficult to apply them in some of our primary schools, because the surroundings are so unsatisfactory—the buildings and the size of classes. How some teachers manage to keep order and instruct children in classes of the size they have to tackle beats me every time. I take my hat off to them as doing a wonderful job. I welcome the Government White Paper very much indeed, with its promise of expenditure on primary education in the way of buildings.

In the past, primary education has been essentially the interest of the Churches, though that is not confined, of course, to primary education. I think that the Church of England—and I can speak with knowledge only from the point of view of the Church of England—has suffered from the fact that it has been a pioneer in this education, because that means that many of its buildings are out of date. They are unsatisfactory, and we admit it. We want to replace them. We are often blamed for not doing so, but we have not been allowed to replace them, owing to building restrictions and so on. Even when we have had the money and the will, and everything ready to go ahead, we have been prevented. It is rather annoying to be blamed for it when it is not our fault. Therefore, we welcome this new opportunity coming our way, even at great expense to—I was going to say to the Church; but it is really an expense not to the Church, but to the Church people. After all, it is they who have to find the money, in addition to meeting the many other claims upon them, not excluding those for rates and taxes. But they are facing the demands for money gladly and willingly; and that is an earnest of their interest and care for education.

Our concern today is principally about secondary education, and that is the main subject of the debate, even apart from this particular limitation. There, too, I would stress as strongly as I can the need for dealing with the problem of reorganisation of schools which include children of all ages up to 15. I am thankful to say that in the Church schools this reorganisation has gone ahead more quickly, I believe, than in any other group of schools—more quickly even than the county schools—because we have determined that in the interests of the children themselves we must not stand out against reorganisation, even though it means that the children are taken away from Church schools and have to go to county schools. The value of the Churches in the world of education is recognised, and I think fully recognised, in the White Paper, and we gladly accept that responsibility and the cost which it involves.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to suppose (again I speak only for the Church of England, because it is here alone that I can speak with knowledge) that the Church of England is concerned only with its own schools. There are Church schools, and obviously we are keen on them and take a lot of trouble and care about them. But we are not concerned only with our own Church schools: we are interested in the education of all children in all schools. The special contribution which the Churches can make may very likely be along the line of what is called religious education, which the country has decided should be the basis of all our national education. But true religious education is not just one subject alongside a whole lot of others: it is something which should provide the background of all learning and of all living in the schools.

The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, referred to the change from the old vituperation between the political Parties about education. I am glad to be able to say much the same about the old religious controversies. I think they have now practically disappeared. The old partisanship between the denominations has given place to co-operation. We work together in the interests of education, and the same is true of co-operation with the teachers and with the education authorities. I can speak from experience of the close co-operation between our Diocesan Education Committee and with the National Union of Teachers, and also with the local education authorities. During the twelve years which I have been a Bishop, the whole tone and form has changed, and for that we are profoundly thankful.

I think the greatest contribution the Churches can make in all this is in the domain of teachers. After all, teachers are the most essential part of education. You may have excellent buildings and all sorts of material, but if you have not got good teachers, buildings and material are worthless. On the other hand, you may have poor buildings and poor materials, but a good teacher will make something of them. A good teacher is the real essential of education. I think the Churches have a tremendous opportunity to make a contribution in this respect, first of all, by looking out for good boys and girls who can be encouraged to find a vocation in teaching. We do not want them to come in because it affords them a living but because they have a real vocation for teaching. Again I can speak only from knowledge of the Church of England. We are trying to foster these vocations in boys and girls, to try to get our best boys and girls to see in education an opportunity for service not only to the Church but also to the community, and I believe that that is a contribution to education which the Churches can make and which is of the greatest value.

That brings me to the Church training colleges. Again we are interested in them from the point of view of the provision of teachers. We believe that teachers gain something from a Church training college which inevitably they lack if they are trained not in the atmosphere of the Church training college—I am not speaking only of Church of England training colleges, but any church training college which has quite deliberately and by set purpose a religious background. I believe that, because the teachers training there get that opportunity to see their future work in the light of a vocation, which perhaps could not be provided in any other way. So the Church of England, at any rate, welcomes the invitation that has been extended to it to take its full share in the extension of training colleges.

It is going to cost us a lot of money. Only at the beginning of this month the matter came before the Church Assembly. I confess that I expected a rather acrimonious debate with a lot of division of opinion and people saying, "You cannot do it; it costs too much". Only one speaker was against the proposition that we must go ahead, and only one person voted against the motion that we should go ahead. It was passed not with acclamation but rather with a steady determination that here is a job which we are asked to do and which we cannot avoid doing, because we have that responsibility to the children and to the nation. So we are planning to increase our training of teachers so that something not much short of 8,000 teachers will be trained in the Church training colleges.

In connection with training colleges, I think that even more important than teachers in schools are the teachers in training colleges. After all, they have to train the teachers. We ought to have the best people we can get to staff the training colleges. I am interested in one of the Church training colleges, and we set ourselves to try to get the best people to undertake this task and see it as a vocation of training teachers. The Church is doing its best to win teachers and to find the best people to train these teachers, because it regards it as an essential contribution to the work of education and of bringing up children, in the interests of the children themselves, of the nation and ultimately of the whole Christian community. Again I should like at the end to say how wholeheartedly the Church welcomes this opportunity to go ahead in this great work of education. It faces the costly demands in good heart, with the determination to play its part to the full as a partner of the State in the whole field of education.

I do not think it is for me to say much, if anything, about the particular points that were specially stressed in connection with this Motion—comprehensive schools and the 11-plus examination. So far as I know, the Church of England, as such, has expressed no opinion on either subject; certainly I have not been informed of it. I can therefore speak only as an individual. I have always been very unhappy about the 11-plus examination. I spend most of my life dealing with undergraduates and I have learned that even then some of them have not developed. I can tell stories of undergraduates who came up completely undeveloped and who in their three years at the university have completely changed round. There is one of them, a Member of another place, who started by general consent as the biggest "dud" of his year. He is now knighted.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

Has he improved or gone down?

THE LORD BISHOP OF RIPON

He has improved, even been knighted. The age of 11 is far too early to try to assess the future of the child. Personally, I am very doubtful about examinations at that stage. I believe a system could be found in which most children could, so to speak, settle themselves straight away. It is obvious that 25 per cent. belong to one stream and 25 per cent. to another. In between are the 50 per cent. about whom some decision has to be reached. I believe that some decision can be reached, without examination, by the combined efforts of teachers, parents and, I should say, vicars or ministers of religion who know the children. Without examination, I believe the decision could be made as to which, at that stage, was probably the best line of development for that particular child.

As for the comprehensive school, I have an open mind about it. I do not think we know enough yet. Certainly I do not feel I could commit myself to saying that the comprehensive school was the only solution. I am sure it is not. But until it has gone through a full period and has reached the stage where it has a considerable sixth form and we can see how they get on at university, I doubt whether we are in a position to say whether it meets the needs or not. I am perfectly sure that the modern school is, in the eyes of people generally and in itself, rising fast to a higher status. I know a number of modern schools which started with the feeling that they were very much second best but which now are proud of themselves. The pupils are proud of belonging to the school. It has taken ten years. Of course it takes a considerable time to develop that state of mind, but it is growing, and the last thing I should want to do would be to pull up these modern schools by their roots and put something in their place, just when they are beginning to grow. Therefore on that particular point my personal opinion is, let the comprehensive school be one of a number of experiments—they are all experiments for quite a number of years yet—but go on searching for something to take the place of the 11-plus examination.

5.28 p.m.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate. He speaks in a spirit of thankfulness about the prospect before the Churches. He excels me, of course, in faith and hope and charity. I have an open mind as to what the prospect at the present time is for the Churches. Negotiations are in progress. I have no reason to think that they are doing particularly well or particularly badly. I am not going to pursue that topic far this afternoon. I would only say that those who believe—of course the right reverend Prelate does; certainly the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Hailsham, does, and most noble Lords do—in religious education would agree that parents should have the right to decide on the religious character of the school to which their children should go. That cannot be carried past a certain point. I live, for example, in a village which is not within six miles of a Church of my own community. It is obviously impossible for me to say I must have a school on my doorstep. There must be exceptions. But, by and large, I think the House would agree that parents are entitled to send their children to schools of their own religious choosing.

The question of course arises: who are going to pay and how much are they going to pay? I believe it was Sir Michael Sadleir who once said: "Denominational education is not something unhealthy which merits a fine". You either agree or disagree. In England it is subject to a fine, as it is not subject in Scotland or Southern Ireland, to name two neighbouring communities. As I say, I am not going to pursue that subject this afternoon, except to say that I hope that far more justice will be obtained from these negotiations for the Churches, and particularly for denominational education than has ever come our way in the past.

Turning to the debate, I think we all must have been impressed with the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, who always speaks very well, and deeply interested in all that the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, had to say. We respect the courage with which he struggled against what was once termed in my own case "post-influenzal debility and depression." I felt that he was struggling against this with his usual heroism, and far be it from me to add to any difficulties of that character. We know that he was a very promising Minister of Education. We cannot say more, because he was swept away to what was, in my opinion, a less exalted task, although in a political sense it was promotion; but I know that the educational profession regretted his going very widely and very deeply. Perhaps in the fullness of time the noble Viscount will become so powerful in his Party that he will be able to insist on returning. There may not be very long before the next Election, and after that it is possible that there will be no position available for him. However, we salute him as a man with his heart in education.

I should like to try to look at this matter in a slightly different manner. I would outline, in the first place, what is the long-term goal; secondly, the speed at which we should achieve or proceed towards that long-term goal; and thirdly, the problems of the interim which will be the problems that most of us who are speaking will have to deal with, at any rate during our working lives in politics. As regards the long-term goal, since the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, invited us to think afresh—Lord Ogmore, who will wind up for us, will no doubt answer his appeal in a cogent way—I would ask him to think a little more about that problem with which I ventured to interrupt him while he was speaking. I do not believe we can discuss education without asking ourselves what is the kind of education which we think is the best available or likely to become available.

Almost all Members of this House, if they have the opportunity, send their sons to public schools and their daughters to the equivalent. That is simply a fact. I think it odd therefore, when we are discussing what is the ideal education for the whole community, to fail to ask or avoid asking what children would do at a public school. I am not going to divert the debate very far, but I interrupted and I put that kind of point to the noble Viscount. He said that he had been to only one public school, and that as he had been Minister of Education for eight months he knew far more about the schools of the country than he knew about public schools. That seems to me strange, because most of us have had dealings in various ways with various public schools. Be that as it may, when I talk about an ideal and practical education for the children of this country, looking a long way ahead, I must say that I should start by assuming that we were going to try to provide for the great masses of the children the kind of education that we now seek for our own children when we can afford it.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, does that mean (a) a boarding education, and (b) an education in which Latin and Greek form the principal items in the curriculum? If the noble Lord does not mean that, I am not quite sure what he does mean.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, I hope to approach my point rather more rapidly and briefly than the noble Viscount, who spent more than twenty minutes remarking upon his experiences as Minister of Education—an opportunity which I hope he will be able to take up again many times in the future. But I hope to speak rather more clearly and sharply than the noble Viscount and to give art answer in rather less than an hour. I hope that we should provide an education for the masses of this country as good as is provided in public schools. That ideal is not going to be realised to-morrow. Whether the noble Viscount thinks that Greek should play a large part in it is something which we must learn from him. As to Latin, I should like to see the vast majority of children in this country learn Latin. I will not pursue this topic at any length. As regards boarding schools, I should think the answer is "No". But there are many leading public schools which are day schools. I do not think that that issue need cause anybody very much trouble.

I ask the noble Viscount seriously this question—I have asked it more than once. He says that normal children are best educated away from the academically gifted. That is what I understood him to say. That is certainly not the case in public: schools. Is he going to separate them in the schools, or what is going to be done about normal children? I look opposite and around me. The noble Viscount is academically gifted. He was the most gifted boy at Eton. But he would have had me separated from him at school. I should not be anxious to be separated from the noble Viscount. I should probably have had to do carpentry or something at the age of 11, which would have been monstrous to me.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

The noble Lord was separated from me at Eton. He did not have the advantage of sharing my company in college, and if he had been taught carpentry I think it would have given him something which would have improved him a good deal.

LORD PAKENHAM

I think that the use of the saw should not be contemplated in a debate of this kind. I would rather rely on the dialectics of our old school or college. But I would say seriously that what I have said makes nonsense of the whole idea of separating the normal from the academically gifted. Our own experience reveals that as an absurdity. One reason why the noble Viscount rather welcomed this idea is that he has been taught by the Ministry of Education that there is no hope of giving most children an education of this quality. We on this side believe that we can achieve this object for the great mass of children, although it will take a long time.

Let me look at the principles of what I would call an ideal solution. It is going to take time. First of all we here postulate as the first principle that there must be equality of educational opportunity. That is the alpha and omega of the educational policy of the Labour Party. The noble Viscount has put all sorts of questions to us, and when he winds up perhaps he will tell us whether his plan is equality of educational opportunity. Every child who comes into this world—and there are limits to what local authorities can do—should have as good an opportunity as those who go to Eton to-day. The Party opposite either hold those aspirations or they do not. This will not happen tomorrow, and it will not be achieved if you do not hold it. There should be compulsory education for all up to the age of 17 or 18. In the United States education is compulsory to 17. I do not know whether the noble Viscount is going to provide compulsory education to that age eventually—it will not come in the next year or two; it will not come in five years; it may take more than ten. But if you seriously believe that all children should be given opportunities equal to the best, you must make education compulsory up to that age.

Then, finally, there should be no segregation according to income or class or, broadly speaking, ability. I bring in the public schools as an example. Noble Lords' children are not segregated there. They all go to the public school and there would be uproar if some noble Lords' children were adjudged too ignorant to go to Eton—I leave out the Common Entrance Examination, which we know is the test which all noble Lords' sons would pass most readily.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

That is very much harder than the 11-plus. The noble Lord says that the Common Entrance Examination is taken on entry to the principal public schools. It is much more difficult to get through than the 11-plus examination.

LORD PAKENHAM

I must say that I think that that is quite the most nonsensical answer I have heard from the noble Viscount. Unlike most noble Lords, I have taught in an elementary school. I taught pupils from the age of eleven. The great majority of children in this country from the age of eleven do not learn Latin or French, so you cannot compare an examination in which Latin and French are included with one in which most of the children would not have studied the subjects. And there is no comparison, as he says, between 11 and 13; so that his intervention was hardly what one would expect an ex-Minister to use.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

If I may interrupt the noble Lord—

LORD PAKENHAM

My I just finish the sentence? I think I give way as readily as anyone, but the noble Viscount is so quick on his feet to-day.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, I certainly do not wish to interrupt the noble Lord, but when he calls remarks "nonsensical" he must expect an intervention to be made. The fact of the matter is, of course, that whatever may be said—and one can draw what inference one likes—the standard of entrance into the principal public schools which the noble Lord has mentioned by name is at least as high and difficult to attain as that to the most selective of the grammar schools; and any statement to the contrary bears no relation whatever to the fact.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, I am sorry to contradict the noble and learned Viscount, but I suppose I am temporarily in possession of the House—at any rate, until his next intervention—and I know he will speak for an hour or so later to-night, when I am afraid I shall have departed. But I must put it plainly to the noble Viscount that while the average child of a professional man can easily get into a public school to-day, the average child of a working man cannot get into a grammar school. If that is not putting it plainly, then I am really short of words and I had better stick to carpentry. That is the simple fact which I believe most of the House has mastered by this time.

When, therefore, we look to the future, whether we call it ten years ahead or the future generally, of educational equality for all, I am sure that we shall see a system of comprehensive schools—comprehensive in the sense that public schools are comprehensive; and I believe we shall all agree that the public schools are comprehensive—which will cater for keen people of all kinds of ability, except the very bottom, the abnormal, in whom, as it happens, I am very much interested.

As regards size, I do not think one should be dogmatic. Eton used to have 1,000 and now has more than 1,100. Winchester has 520, and Ampleforth, with a junior school, more than 600. I have been recently to the school of the noble Lord. Lord Ogmore, a particularly fine public school, Mill Hill, with 450, where they are doing very good work. I do not think we can say that the figure for any of those particular schools or that for Manchester Grammar School or any other, is the ideal figure. Equally, one cannot say necessarily that the figure of a famous comprehensive school which I visited, with the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, and which has 2,000, is necessarily wrong, although I should think that on educational grounds it is becoming very large.

I do not believe, however, that it is the size of the school that is important, or at any rate is of prime importance, although of course there must be a limit. What matters is the size of the classes, and naturally I follow what was said by the noble and learned Viscount. He is as keen as anybody on reducing classes, and on getting now buildings and the right number of teachers. That is the second question: bow fast do we move towards the ideal? That, in turn, is a question of what resources we use and how much of our national income we are prepared to set apart. I hope that I was not impertinent to the noble and learned Viscount just now, but I must give him credit in that he was most anxious to proceed as fast as possible; but in fact we have not, as a country, proceeded very fast towards the ideal. After ninety years of elementary education we have made very slow progress. I am net one of those who spend time saying hew wonderful our system is: I prefer to take the other view, and to say how little progress we have really made in relation to what might have been done, and how much remains to be done.

I am not saying which Party would move faster. I should have thought the Liberal Party might have moved fast, but, in fact, they have nobody here to take part in this debate. I sympathise with the Liberals; I feel that they have suffered a great injustice in having no Life Peers. I do not know why that injustice was inflicted upon them, but they must not be too discouraged, and I hope that perhaps in time Lady Violet Bonham-Carter or someone else will come and that we shall be able to hear from them on some other occasion. I shall not say that one Party is keener on education than another. I have my opinion but I will not say. However, I will offer this opinion—and the noble Viscount is entitled to disagree with me, though I do not think one would find any average man outside politics who would disagree about this. I believe that the Labour Party in office would always spend more money on education than a Conservative Party would. Whether or not the noble and learned Viscount agrees with that I am afraid I do not know; and whether we should spend more wisely is, of course, a matter which could be long debated. But no noble Lord will seriously deny that that is how most people would think of it. It might he thought that a Conservative Government would be more prudent and less economical—

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Lord—

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, perhaps I may finish the sentence. I am simply offering an opinion and leaving it there. I will not speak for half as long a time as the noble and learned Viscount spoke, unless, of course, he interrupts me many more times. It is my opinion that the Labour Party would spend a good deal more money a good deal faster.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, will the noble Lord forgive me for interrupting? If he expects to continue his forensic activities in such a way, he must expect to be interrupted. I am not seeking to make any Party point here, although he was. The fact is that we are now spending on education more than twice the sum that the Labour Party spent in its last term of office, and there has never been a period of time, so far as I know, in which a Conservative Government has not spent more than its predecessors.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, the noble and learned Viscount is not the only person who has these figures in mind, although he has not mentioned them. At the end of our time we were spending £279 million nationally, and now the figure is £613 million, so I am keeping abreast of the noble and learned Lord's thoughts. But if he will look at the figures he will see that that is due to well-known facts which have occurred in the meantime and have nothing to do with Party politics. He is the first person to make a Party point of that.

Passing from the question of the speed at which we shall progress, we are left with the problem of transition, which is really the practical issue which my noble friend, Lord Silkin, has raised to-day in such a sage fashion. In the period of ten years, or longer, we are faced with the fact that some schools are very much better, according to public esteem, than others. There is no parity of esteem whatsoever. To mention one point, the teacher—pupil ratio tends to be different between different classes of school, but everyone knows that if one has money, one usually sends one's son to a public school. If one cannot do that, one finds a school which approximates as nearly as possible to a public school; and if one can get the child to a grammar school, one sends him there. That may, to some extent, be snobbery but not entirely, because the facilities in expensive schools tend to be better and more extensive than in the schools which the majority of children have to attend.

The problem therefore arises: how are we to select the children from the poorer classes to be given the better facilities? That is the problem to which my noble friend Lord Silkin has addressed himself. He has come down unhesitatingly against the 11-plus. I would summarise my own views which are identical with those of my noble friend. I would say that the 11-plus is now utterly discredited, because of, first, the strain that it imposes on children as they approach the examination; second, the fallibility of the test in regard to a child's capacity at that age, and still more later; and third, the social evils of separating the "sheep and the goats." My noble friend developed that aspect more fully, but that really puts the three major objections.

The noble and learned Viscount became very hot at this point in his speech and began using the word "fraud" and then something else which was worse than fraud. I could not follow all the crimes, and I am not quite certain whether they were attributed to my Party or to the noble Lord, Lord Silkin; or whether they were hypothetical offences which people on these Benches might have felt like committing unless warned. I am not really sure into which category they fell. At any rate, we are not, I hope, committing those particular offences. I share the view of my noble friend—and surely it was his view—that the 11-plus is utterly discredited.

Then the question arises: how are we to ensure, while so many children—in fact the majority—are going to schools which are not the best in the county, and while the majority will leave at the age of 15, that a proper opportunity is given to the abler children who are brought up among the masses? The comprehensive school is obviously the simple answer; I am not going to say it is the only answer; I am not going to say that any particular size is dictated. Obviously to-day when so many children leave school at the age of 15 we need a larger school in order to get adequate sixth forms that will be needed later on. So I do not think there is any sealed pattern. As regards that point, as regards the sealed pattern and how much opportunity we are going to offer, my noble friend Lord Ogmore will, I am sure, answer the noble Viscount satisfactorily.

I will not deal with other methods of getting round the problem. I have said that the comprehensive school is the simple answer, but I should like to say finally one word from a specifically Roman Catholic angle. I have previously spoken as I do not know what—as someone whom the noble Viscount referred to as an old friend the other day, and I should like to speak most timidly in that capacity, but also as someone who has had a varied experience of education in all sorts of different ways. As I say, I should like to say finally one word specifically from the Roman Catholic angle. As the Lord Bishop said just now, the Church of England have not, I gather, taken up any definite black and white attitude to comprehensive schools; and the same is true as far as concerns the Catholic body. The Roman Catholic body has not intervened in this discussion, because there is nothing in the proposals for comprehensive schools which is in principle opposed to Catholic thought. There is, indeed, one Roman Catholic comprehensive school already, and it is hoped soon to establish another; and this is not an issue where the Roman Catholic Church offers positive guidance to the members of its Communion.

There are, from a Roman Catholic point of view, certain advantages in comprehensive schools and certain disadvantages. On the credit side there is the fact that the foundation of a comprehensive school may be the only practicable way of giving Catholic children of the necessary ability and aptitude the opportunity of a grammar school or technical education in a Catholic school, as their numbers in any area may be too small to justify the building of a separate Catholic technical or grammar school. That is important. As the law stands or as it is administered to-day there is a feature of the issue which may not give Catholics absolute justice. To-day it is possible that where the 11-plus selection test is abolished new Catholic comprehensive schools will qualify for displaced pupils' grant under the Education Acts as they now stand, while a separate grammar or technical school would not do so. That is as the law stands at present. That advantage would disappear if there were a settlement on the lines which would be completely welcome to the Catholic community.

On the other hand, if the comprehensive school were made the only form of secondary education, nationally or in any particular locality, the existence of those Catholic voluntary grammar schools, which are already in being and doing good work would be inevitably jeopardised. Since comprehensive schools must, in order to be efficient, be fairly large, it will happen in many areas that there will not be sufficient Catholic children for a Catholic comprehensive school, though there may well be enough for a satisfactory modern school. The result would be, if none other than comprehensive schools are allowed in such areas, that the Catholic children would be deprived of a secondary education in a Catholic school. Those are the dangers, as the others are the advantages, and I am putting on record those aspects of the matter from a specifically Roman Catholic point of view.

By and large I am sympathetic to comprehensive schools. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Silkin met what I think was the feeling of the noble Viscount in many important respects. My noble friend Lord Silkin made it plain that there was going to be very little coercion in this matter. I think there are very important educational values which are embodied in existing grammar schools and those simply cannot be cast aside as though they were of no worth. By and large I would say that a comprehensive school offers a large part of the answer. The subject bristles with all sorts of complications when you try to apply it in any particular area. But I hope and believe that the programme set out by the Labour Party will be pursued, not with political fanaticism but with flexibility and educational devotion; and I certainly echo the hope of the noble Viscount—to whom I may have been less than courteous, for which I apologise—that this great question will be settled on educational grounds.

5.55 p.m.

LORD ROCHESTER

My Lords, I hope I shall be forgiven and that the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, in particular will forgive me if I, whilst adhering to the general subject in the debate, do not follow him in confining my remarks to the question of selection at 11-plus and to the comprehensive system of education. I did not know until I heard his opening remarks that he wished to make his Motion quite so exclusive; and it seems to me that we have spread a little, certainly, from that Motion already.

LORD SILKIN

My Lords, may I, in fairness to myself, explain that I altered the terms of the Motion to its present form about three weeks ago.

LORD ROCHESTER

My Lords, I understood that, but, at the same time, I did not realise that in changing the Motion the noble Lord wished to exclude other aspects of the matter. My position is simply this. I have one point to make and it need not detain your Lordships for long. I spent some time in preparing what I hoped to say and I should like to unburden myself of it. I shall take it, in the absence of cries of "Order!", "Withdraw!" or "Sit down!" or whatever noble Lords say on these occasions, that your Lordships indicate consent and I shall proceed accordingly.

I should apologise for daring to speak. I do not speak as an educationalist, but as one in the front line of industry; and my contribution, therefore, to your Lordships' discussion concerns the point at which secondary education ends and employment begins—namely, the school-leaving age. From a study of the Government's White Paper and the Labour Party's policy document on education, it is apparent that on this point of the school-leaving age both Parties are agreed upon the need to encourage children to stay longer at school. So far, so good. But beyond that point there are differences. As a comparative newcomer to your Lordships' House I have not yet felt able to identify myself with any Party. Maybe it is for this reason that I do not have the same degree of confidence in the next Election that noble Lords on each side of the House appear to share in equal measure. As Cross Benchers we must reckon with the possibility that any one of three political Parties may be returned to power and, for all I know, it may be the Labour Party.

As I understand it, what the Labour Party say is that, since it will not be practicable immediately to raise the school-leaving age to 16, if they regain power they will make it compulsory for a child to stay at school until the end of the academic year instead, as at present, of the school term in which the child reaches the age of 15. If I apprehend the position correctly, they say that in the matter of apprentices they have consulted the trade unions and that if industry objects it should understand that it is in the best interests of industry that the children do get or should get the best possible education. Speaking on these facts and in no partisan spirit, I suggest that this is not the best way in which to approach the matter. In the first place, the employment of these young people, and particularly their training as apprentices, should surely be regarded just as much a part of their education as that which they receive at school. Secondly, I should have thought that before prescribing such a radical change in the arrangements under which children now leave school the first step would have been to see whether in practice industry could absorb them all at any one time each year instead of three times, as at present.

If your Lordships will allow me to do so, I should like to show how, if the Labour Party insist on effecting this change, it may in some cases be not in the best interests of industry or, indeed, of the children themselves. In the debate in this House on the Address in reply to the gracious Speech at the beginning of the present Session, the noble Lord, Lord McCorquodale of Newton, spoke as chairman of the Industrial Training Council. Your Lordships will recall that this Council was set up in response to a recommendation of the Carr Committee, which was itself appointed in 1956: to consider the arrangements for the training of young workers in industry, with particular reference to the adequacy of intake into apprenticeship and other forms of training, in the light of the expected increase in the number of young persons entering employment and the need to ensure an adequate supply of trained workers for future needs. The Industrial Training Council includes representatives of employers, trade unions, and the nationalised industries, and on the occasion to which I have referred Lord McCorquodale of Newton appealed to industry to take advantage of the so-called bulge in the number of school-leavers by taking on 50 per cent. more apprentices whilst that period lasted. In the particular part of industry in which I myself am engaged we had already determined to do just that. In our case, it means that within a few years, in a unit where some 1,000 engineering craftsmen are employed, there will have to be one apprentice for every two craftsmen, instead of the present maximum figure of one apprentice for every three craftsmen.

In tackling this problem we have sought—and, what is more important, we have already obtained—the co-operation of two of the largest engineering unions in this country. If I may do so respectfully, I should like to take this opportunity of paying tribute in your Lordships' House to these unions for having responded in this way, particularly in circumstances where there is more unemployment than at almost any time in the last twenty years. Those of your Lordships who read the leading article in The Times on, I think, Monday of last week may well have drawn the conclusion that industry was doing nothing at all in this field; and I do not pretend that the example I have quoted is in any way representative of what is happening in the country as a whole. Indeed, one of my purposes in mentioning it is to show what can be done in industry, in the hope that it may encourage others to do the same. There may be an opportunity for further discussion of this problem in the debate on unemployment which is, I believe, to take place in this House in two weeks' time. It is a difficult question, and I notice that some reference was made to it in another place only yesterday. For the moment, I am concerned mainly with a particular aspect of the matter.

Without wearying your Lordships with detail, I would say that the means by which we hope to employ these additional apprentices in such a way that there will be no deterioration in the quality of their training is by taking school-leavers into our training establishments three times each year instead of twice as at present. If, at the very moment when we are ready, with the backing of the trade unions, to embark on this project, we find that, instead of being able to add to the number of occasions we can take on these boys, we have actually to reduce them to only one occasion each year, then, far from the boys' technical education being furthered, the very serious problem with which we are going to be confronted in the next few years, of finding suitable employment for them all, will become even more difficult to solve. To some extent, presumably, the same situation will arise in what may prove the even bigger problem of finding suitable jobs for children who cannot be trained for these skilled operations. Already it is apparent that there are substantial numbers of children who left school at the end of last year who have not yet been able to start work—and there will surely be general agreement that there Is no section of the population for whom prolonged unemployment would be more demoralising than the young people.

Now, I think that there may be ways in which the Labour Party, without departing from the underlying aim they have in mind, could meet the requirements of industry in this respect. For example, it might be possible to devise means whereby, if a firm has adequate facilities to offer, boys accepted for employment by that firm could still be permitted to leave school at any time after they reach the age of 15. I know, of course, that, from the comparatively narrow point of view of secondary education alone, there is a great deal to be said for the early introduction of what is called the four-year course. It may even be that there are so many things to be said in its favour that they outweigh everything else, including the practical considerations I have mentioned. I would certainly not have the impertinence to assert the contrary view. What I will say is this: the problem of finding suitable employment for young people in the next few years—and this concerns industry at least as much as secondary schools—is much too important to this country to be handled without the closest consultation not only with trade unions, but also with employers.

I had hoped that, when the noble Lord who is to wind up for the Opposition came to speak, he might have been able to reassure us, at least to the extent of indicating that his Party recognise the need for prior consultation on this point with employers. It may be that, in deference to the remarks with which the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, opened this debate, and to the general course which it has taken, that is too much for me to expect on this occasion. If that is so, then I would ask noble Lords on the Opposition Front Bench if they would consider this matter carefully within, perhaps, the next few days, and I hope that they will be able to give that reassurance when the time comes for us to debate un- employment in two weeks' time. I hope also that your Lordships will understand that, in deliberately shifting the emphasis of this debate for a few minutes from the particular matters of selection at the age of 11-plus and from the comprehensive system of education, I have done so because it seems to me that the point I have tried to make is of considerable consequence in discussing secondary education as a whole, and that this is the time to say so.

6.9 p.m.

BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER

My Lords, as I listened to the rosy picture, drawn by the noble Viscount opposite, of the opportunities that are afforded in secondary modern schools, I could not help regretting for a new reason my present advanced age and looking with envy at those Members of your Lordships' House who, if they are not themselves able to enjoy these advantages, may at least hope that, with great economy to themselves, their children may enjoy them rather than the similar opportunities of comprehensive education provided in the institution which has been referred to to-day that lies under the shadow of Windsor Castle.

This view, that the varying kinds of secondary education that are provided in our present system are different but, nevertheless, of equal value and should be held in equal esteem, has run right through the development of our present structure. May I ask noble Lords to cast their minds back to the Hadow Report of 1926 which first initiated at a quasi-official level the remarkable doctrine not only that children at the age of 11 have different interests and abilities—indeed these are apparent long before 11—but that the differences by that age are sufficient to make it possible and desirable, and I quote from the Report, to cater for them by means of schools of varying types but which nevertheless have a common foundation. I think it is significant that the Hadow Committee did not argue at all the case on which this remarkable conclusion is founded, although they did make reference in the preceding sentence to what they described as the psychologists' argument.

It is also significant that in the whole development of this subject emphasis has continually been laid, as it has by the noble Lord this evening, on the fact that though the facilities in different types of schools are different they must be regarded as though set in the horizontal and not the vertical frame. The Hadow Committee, for instance, spoke of the secondary stage providing a hopeful and critical stage in the educational life of the child in a school environment specially organised to assist it. It spoke, too, of the educational system being an organic whole. It dropped the word "elementary" and substituted "primary" because "elementary" was a term social in origin and referred to education of a particular class of child rather than to a particular stage of education. It spoke hopefully of the forces of unification and of the anticipated breakdown of artificial barriers in the educational system. I think it is also of some importance that the Hadow Committee emphasised that if different types of education provided in different schools were to be effective, there must be reasonable probability that the majority of those starting will go forward to complete it. The relating of the age to the curriculum is simply a matter of educational convenience". These were the views in 1926.

Twelve years later the Spens Report, concerned primarily with grammar schools, reported on much the same theme. The Spens Report observed that the operations of the past twelve years had shown a fundamental need for parity—and the word appears here for the first time—among all schools of the secondary stage. They repeated, too, the view expressed by their predecessors, that parity would not be achieved unless the same minimum leaving age obtained in all the different types of schools. The Norwood Committee in 1943 were chiefly responsible for translating the notion of multilateral education into the notion of tripartite education. I, for one, am very glad to hear this evening that although it was said by many education authorities at the time that the Norwood Committee lifted tripartism from a proposal into a doctrine, the noble Viscount opposite has hastened to extricate himself from the shackles of that doctrine.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

I hope that I was never shackled at all.

BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER

I am delighted to hear it. No psychological evidence was given in support. Perhaps doctrine and psychology are not compatible. It was stated that the nature of tripartite education of children at 11 was observation based on general educational experience. Similarly, at the passing of the Butler Act the then Minister of Education spoke again of equal opportunities in all forms of education. It is, I think, significant that the Act itself, although it provides for secondary education for all, indicated neither a tripartite nor a bipartite nor a quadripartite division: it left the field completely open. And what has happened since?

Before we consider what has happened since, I should like to call your Lordships' attention to one warning which followed very quickly after the passing of the Butler Act. It came from The Times Educational Supplement, which does not in general associate itself with the views of the noble Lords on this side of the House. On December 15, 1945, The Times Educational Supplement said: No greater mistake could overcome a new order in English education than that there should be established within it different grades of secondary schools, and that is inevitably what different types of schools with different leaving ages would become; different grades of schools with different exit ramps leading to different exclusive levels of adult society. That is exactly what has happened. Clearly, something has gone wrong.

Notwithstanding this continued reiteration of the parity of opportunity in the detailed discussion given by the noble Viscount this afternoon, neither the parents nor the children are convinced. Eleven-plus now broods like a monster over every home in England in which there is a child aged from 10 to 11 or between the ages of 7 and 11. It has come to such a pass that even the Ministry of Education, in a Committee on Maladjusted Children, have commented on the nervous exhaustion and tension caused by the 11-plus examination, and have indicated that this is to be reckoned among the causes of maladjustment, in the technical sense, in children. Something clearly has gone wrong. It is odd that in fifteen years it has been impossible to convince the parents and the children of this country that the arrangement of our educational system is not a vertical hierarchy but a series of horizontal choices.

The parents and children of this country have a certain amount of horse sense. They invariably think secondary modern education is inferior, although primarily because grammar school is demonstrably he avenue that leads to the better paid jobs; an avenue that leads to the universities, and from the universities to the various professional callings and, possibly, higher salaries than those for which no academic qualification is required. They think that it is an inferior education because they observe that the pupil—teacher ratio is perceptibly higher, nearly 20 per cent., in the secondary modern than in the grammar school, let alone in the independent public school.

If the varied education was to achieve its object—namely, different leaving ages in different schools—that one condition has been consistently realised. In secondary modern schools 90 per cent. of children leave at the earliest possible moment, at the age 15—that is what they think of these opportunities. In the grammar schools something of the order of 40 per cent. more remain after the age of 16, and the common leaving age, the year at which most children leave the grammar school, is 16. If, after all this, the secondary modern products are in any doubt that they are second-class citizens they will occasionally be forcibly reminded of it, as when a few years ago (I do not know if the practice still continues) the Council for World Education and Citizenship, in announcing its annual meeting at the Central Hall, Westminster, for schoolchildren, put into the notice that the meetings were for grammar school children and that applications from secondary modern school children could not be entertained. If they are second-class citizens, clearly they must remain so, since they were precluded from taking part in the discussions of the Council for World Education and Citizenship. So I think we might agree that there is something to be said for the view of the parents of children in this country.

A few directors of education, brought up on the pure milk of the doctrine, hold up their hands in horror if one speaks of "passing" the 11-plus examination, since where an examination offers equal opportunities in all directions there can be no difference between passing and failure. It is significant that that has now become firmly established in the idiom of this country; in fact, I think I heard the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, fall into—is it the heresy of speaking of passing (I do not mean in his own career) the 11-plus examination?

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

I think the noble Baroness is wrong. I spoke in quotation marks, I hope, at least, in my voice, and said that I deplored the use of it by the noble Lord, Lord Silkin.

BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER

I am delighted to recognise the quotation marks.

Much has been said this evening about the educational selection, and I do not want to elaborate on it further, except to make one or two points. From the report on early leaving that was made two or three years ago it appeared that something like 40 per cent. of the children who get to the grammar school on the 11-plus examination leave or fail to obtain General Certificate of Education in as many as three subjects. These, I suppose, are the teenagers to whom the noble Viscount referred, and who do not take kindly to academic education; and for that indeed I do not blame them—it may be that they show their wisdom and judgment in departing. But it does seem a very odd thing that, in a state of affairs where, as the noble Viscount has said, there are such terrible shortfalls in all directions—shortfalls of buildings and shortfalls of teachers—we should continue with a selection which causes our most highly qualified teachers to waste their labours at schools at which 40 per cent. of the children will not complete the course for which they have entered. It is a matter of regret to me that an engagement which preceded the change of date of this debate will prevent my hearing in person the noble Viscount's reply, but I hope that he w ill deal with this, to the layman, astonishingly wasteful view of scarce resources.

The selection seems to be wrong all the way round: it fills the grammar schools with children who cannot take it, and at the same time it has been repeatedly shown in Bournemouth, Halifax, Essex and Southampton that at least the cream of the secondary moderns is able to do as well, judged by the normal tests, as the products of the grammar schools. In fact, I think it has been shown that, of those who succeed in passing the G.C.E. in at least three subjects, almost as many successes are scored by candidates who come from the secondary modern schools as by those who come from grammar schools. The figures are about 59 per cent. from the secondary moderns and 61 per cent. from the grammar schools. The selection, therefore, if there must be selection, seems to be very much of a hit and miss—and I would say a wasteful affair.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

The noble Baroness will, I hope, forgive me for interrupting, but she has quoted a statistic to which I attach great importance. I should have thought that the correct inference to be drawn from it is that secondary modern schools are providing a course which procures these passes, and therefore a course which is to be welcomed and praised, and not condemned and destroyed.

BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER

I am grateful to the noble Viscount for the gymnastic exercise he has given me in rising and sitting. I should have thought that the answer to that was that it is only a small proportion of the children in secondary modern schools, in view of the nature of their courses, who are able to take advantage of these opportunities. I do not say that discrimination is not necessary; discrimination obviously is necessary. But I do suggest that this theory that life either begins or ends, or both, at the age of 11 is an extraordinary bed of Procrustes on which to fix all the children of our nation.

I think that what underlies the mistake that has happened is a common error. It is to confuse discrimination with segregation. It is a mistake that has been made in other contexts. It is perhaps not without significance that about three years ago the medical officer of the Ministry of Education pleaded strongly that educationally sub-normal children should be educated in the same schools with those who are educationally normal, on the ground that they could take part in out-of-school activities and feel themselves to be members of the same community, even though they must have special teaching. What is true at one end of the scale is true also at the other end. It is alt extraordinary educational theory that the gifted child must be segregated from contact with others less well endowed. Later in life he will have perhaps to lead them, and all through life he will certainly have to mix with them. He will, I think, be seriously handicapped if in his school years he has been carefully sheltered from contact with any schoolmate of a lower educational calibre than his own.

Undoubtedly there must be discrimination, but do not let us confuse discrimination with segregation. Segregation appears to underlie the White Paper in almost every paragraph. I think we should note that the White Paper speaks not of "varying types of capacity" but of "varying ranges of capacity", thus paying some tribute to the hierarchical conception of our educational structure. It appears, too, from the White Paper, quite frankly, that there must be a substantial element of selection; and the children of England will be cheered when they read that this does not mean that a child's performance at the age of 11 should determine the remainder of his school career once and for all. But alas! when one turns the page one reads that, though there will be transfers from one type of school to another, such transfers can never be anything but exceptions to the normal rule. If I may borrow a phrase from the noble Viscount, if the English language has any meaning surely that means that, for the great majority of children, perhaps, a selection which takes place in the course of their school careers, if not at the age of 11, will determine the remainder of their school careers once and for all.

May I conclude by calling attention to the one exception—and I hope the noble Viscount will deal with this also in his reply: it is a rather half-hearted exception—that the White Paper allows for the comprehensive school. It says: A wide range of possibilities is, in fact, open. The Government do not wish to rule out"— damned with faint praise!— experiments with comprehensive or similar schools proposed on genuine educational grounds. Surprisingly, the two instances in which they are prepared to contemplate these experiments are instances in which no genuine educational reasons are given. Nothing is said about the content of the education, about the quality of the education, or about its suitability to the children who are to receive it, but merely about the facilities which are available or not available in the area in which it is to be given. So it seems (and I hope the noble Viscount will correct me if I am wrong) that we are committed by the White Paper to a further definite period of segregation, and it is extraordinarily hard not to read into the phrases that I have quoted that this is segregation viewed not in the terms in which it has been described on the Benches opposite, but in the terms in which it is seen by the parents of this country and by the children, who I know cry all night the night before they take the 11-plus because, as they would say, and I think with a better appreciation of reality, they are afraid of failing it.

6.32 p.m.

THE EARL OF CRAVEN

My Lords, I shall not keep you very long, but I hope I may take the opportunity, if it is in order, to congratulate the noble Baroness on an excellent speech. I can see straight away that she is extremely well educated, far better than I shall ever be. I once remember somebody saying that one can get far more with a pot of honey than a barrel of vinegar. This may be true or it may not. All I can say is that they must have forgotten to feed me on the right sort of stuff when I was young. I think they tried "Cow and Gate" and found that it failed, and what they substituted for it afterwards I do not know.

The whole matter of education, so far as I am concerned, is a complicated one, because I am not, an educationalist and do not profess to be. I might add that some time ago I had a conversation with the noble Viscount in the Library of your Lordships' House. I would not have had that conversation with him had I realised that he was about to go to bed with influenza.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

I can assure the noble Lord that it was not cause and effect.

THE EARL OF CRAVEN

I did not have to go to bed anyway. I am a Catholic, like the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham opposite. To-day I am not representing Catholic opinion, and I am putting forward a purely personal point of view in anything that I may say. I should not like this House to think that any remarks of mine would in any way embarrass the Roman Catholic hierarchy The first point I should like to make is that I am a father, a parent. Now there ate many people who have a great deal of anxiety about block grants. They are not at all sure how the block grant is going to work, or the amount of trouble it may cause in the future. For instance, in a county which is purely rural, or nearly so, the situation can arise whereby an injustice can be caused because the grant is very low per capita of the population, whereas the rateable value in the county is extremely high. The next point is that with the block grant it may be possible that the denominations are going to get the thin end of the wedge, because in many instances local education authorities naturally will turn more towards the State school and State education than they will towards an independent form of education. This is quite natural and something which is bound to come about. There is a possibility of nothing but injustice in that direction.

There are those who have said that the Government have bitten off a little more than they can chew in this White Paper. Whether that be so or not I do not really know. I am only repeating the problems that the people have raised with me so that we can have some rendering of how it will work out. They say that the expenses involved have not been recognised, and that they will be considerably more than Her Majesty's Government understood or realised.

The next point I want to raise is with regard to the 11-plus problem, but I want to take it up in rather a different way. Many parents have come to me, as a county councillor in East Sussex, whose children have been in a certain catchment area and there is a State school which can receive those children. The parents are told that the children will have to go into that school regardless of whether they pass the 11-plus examination, whereas I believe that the parents should have parental choice. They should be able to send those children wherever they like. That is surely what parental choice means. The travelling fares and a grant to send them there have been withheld because there are places within that catchment area. The whole matter comes down to one fundamental point. One has to consider what one means by "fundamental", and I took the trouble of looking it up in the Oxford Dictionary—I suppose most noble Lords have no need to do anything like that. It says: Going to the root of the matter; serving as a base or foundation, It goes on to say: Applied to the lowest or root note of a chord. That is the lowest common denominator. If that is so then, surely, the one thing that really matters in the matter of education is parental choice, because this immediately becomes a fundamental. I think the parents are in danger of becoming confused and not knowing where it is going to lead them—whether they are always going to send their children to the sort of schools to which they would wish to send them.

I should like to read one small passage on parental choice that was written by Pope Plus XII shortly before his death. He said: The mission assigned by God to parents of providing for the material and spiritual welfare of their offspring and of giving them a harmonious upbringing animated by a true religious spirit cannot be taken away from them without a great violation of their rights. It comes back again to the question whether this is going to be taken as a fundamental or not. If it is, you cannot cut any of it out; you have to allow that parent to send his child to wherever he wants to send him. I am not a lawyer, but that is the way I see it as a parent. The loyalties, for instance, that one gets in a school are undivided, because if the parent has the choice to send the child to a certain school then the child's loyalty is not split in any way. All the loyalities are one and there is no difference in religion or in denomination or way of life or anything else. The Englishman's spirit of fair play is well known, and I hope that this point will receive consideration from your Lordships. It is quality and not quantity that we want from our schools, and we should try to foster the British genius of improvisation rather than make it difficult for people to do as they want to do. I will say no more on that. I hope I have given your Lordships something to think about and that you will be able to reach some conclusions on it.

6.42 p.m.

LORD SOM̃ERS

My Lords, I will not keep you long at this time of night, but I should like to say that I, for one, am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, for having brought up the question which is the subject of his Motion, though I must confess that I cannot agree with a great deal that he said about it. The 11-plus examination has been a subject of great discussion in the teaching world for a long time. I certainly agree that it needs a good deal of revision, and the examination itself probably needs to be presented in a different form; but to look upon it as a crucial point in a child's career, which, if he fails it, may lead to his having a chip on his shoulder for the rest of his life, is in my opinion a grave exaggeration. We have all failed our exams in our times, and I do not think that many of us have borne very heavy chips; we seem to have survived it. I remember that when I was a young music student, when I was an organist, I was going to be obviously one of the foremost organists of the country. But that idea was soon exploded. When I took to composition instead, I was going to be a worthy successor to my revered master, Dr. Vaughan Williams. That idea was also exploded even more quickly. But I do not really think that I bear any great chip on my shoulder because I failed in those things.

I think this question of segregation is a necessary thing. The Almighty, when he created man, certainly did not use mass-production methods. Whether that is a question for regret or thankfulness I think is open to argument, but personally I feel very thankful for it. There is no doubt that some children are very intelligent, some are not, and some are moderately so. Each one is an individual who needs individual treatment. It is no use trying to force a higher type of examination on a child who is by nature not fitted to take it. It is surely going to give the child—to go into the world of psychology once more—a far greater inferiority complex to feel that he is the least progressive in a grammar school than to feel that he is one of the best in a secondary modern. I do not think those who go to secondary moderns and do well in them feel any sense of inferiority complex whatsoever.

I think possibly one of the greatest problems facing our schools to-day is this question of overloaded classes. As I know only too well, from my own experience as a schoolmaster, having to deal with too large a form makes it absolutely impossible to give the individual child the attention which he needs. The question is whether we can do this by getting more teachers or, possibly, by eliminating same of those children who are not really mentally fitted to go on to an advanced education. I am all in favour of absolutely equal opportunity for all, but equal opportunity does not necessarily mean equal reward. Everybody should have equal opportunity; and they have it today. My son, if I had one, would have the same chance of getting into a grammar school as the son of our local road-man in our village, if he had one. There is nothing social about it whatsoever, and that, I think, is the paint which has been, if I may say so, exploited rather by those who wish to abolish this segregation.

I should like to read to your Lordships, a couple of paragraphs from an article which came out in the Teachers' World recently by a writer who writes under the name of "Onlooker." It is apropos of segregation. He says: A couple of pieces of recent evidence support the point I have made before. In Hampshire the parents of 40 per cent. of children this year decided not to enter their children for the 11-plus at all. This figure is the same as that which has been attained in Birmingham. In other areas as many as half the children's parents have opted out. Taking the lower figure, that gives 40 per cent. of parents who are not worried about the 11-plus. Presumably the parents of the 20 per cent. of children who gain grammar school places are satisfied too. Dissatisfaction must be confined to 40 per cent. of parents at most. Of that 40 per cent. at least half enter their children in an attitude of 'He hasn't got a hope but let him have a go'. They also are not disappointed when the result of having a go proves that he did not have a hope. That reduces the disappointed ones to 20 per cent. at the most. I will not go on to quote what the writer says about the exploitation of that very small minority, because that would perhaps lead the discussion into Party realms, which I think are quite unsuitable for a discussion on education. But I do think that we must explode this theory that segregation or selection, whatever you like to call it—of children going into different types of school and having an education which best fits their mentality—is a bad thing. It is a good thing. Personally would far rather do well at a subject I was capable of attacking than do badly at one that I was incapable of attacking.

Apropos of comprehensive schools, I admit that here I cannot speak with a great deal of authority because I have not had very much contact with them. I happen to know one member of the staff of Kidbrooke School, but I cannot honestly say what the conditions are like, except that my general impression has not been that the lower ones are raised by the higher ones, but rather the reverse. Of course that was also very much my own experience as a schoolmaster. I always found in a class that the instruction went not at the pace of the most intelligent but at the pace of the least intelligent, because one had to get that less intelligent one to do it somehow, and the most intelligent simply had to wait until he had got it. So I do not think that merely having more intelligent children round them will have a very great influence on those who are less intelligent. It may possibly in some cases—I am not at all making a sweeping assertion—but I do not think it will do so in the majority of cases.

LORD OGMORE

My Lords, as a matter of interest, may I ask the noble Lord whether he has visited a comprehensive school and sought to find how they run their curriculum?

LORD SOM̃ERS

No. I said that I had had no personal contact with them at all, but was speaking merely from what I had heard from those who have been working in them. As I say, I cannot speak with any great authority, but only generally from the experience that I have had in my own teaching work.

There is only one other point with which I should like to conclude. I think it is a pity that there is so much discrepancy between the educational standards of different counties. I think that probably that is the cause of what is to me a far greater nuisance—namely, these very watertight county boundaries which prevent a man from sending his boy to a school which is only two miles away, because it is over the county boundary, and force him to send the boy to a school about sixteen miles away. I live in a rather remote part of the country where there is no public transport whatsoever, but because we happen to be just over the county boundary, the children cannot go to a school that is reasonably near but have to go a much longer distance to one which is in their own county. I think that if there could be less discrepancy between county standards and a less rigid adherence to county boundaries, it would be a good thing.

Before resuming my seat, I should like to say that I most heartily agree with what the right reverend Prelate said about obtaining the right kind of staff, because that is the basis of all proper teaching, and particularly with what he said about the religions being the basis of all teaching, whether it be religious instruction or anything else. Unfortunately, to-day, that seems a little distant with a good many of the teachers with whom I have come in contact. How we are going to obtain the right type of teacher is, I confess, a problem to which I have no solution. I do not think that one can do it merely by raising their salaries, because then one would get the type of teacher who will come simply for the loaves and fishes, so to speak. There is no doubt that the teaching profession needs to be made financially sound, although it also needs to have a call that will attract the type of teacher who is taking it up not just as a profession but rather as a vocation.

6.55 p.m.

LORD DARWEN

My Lords, I am afraid and I am sorry that I cannot toe the Party line on this issue. I feel rather strongly about this matter, and therefore I have put my name down to speak. In the first place, I think it is undesirable that education should be regulated by Party policies. It is partly for this reason that I find myself very much in agreement with the noble Viscount the Lord President of the Council rather than with my noble friend Lord Silkin. I speak as one who has day after day stood in front of a secondary school class of more than one sort—that is to say, a grammar school and a secondary modern school class. I have not taught in a comprehensive school. I have seen over one, but of course a visit does not give one a very profound impression. I am not opposed to comprehensive schools. I think that without experiment education would be in a very poor way, and it is extremely desirable that this type of experiment should continue, but I should not like the comprehensive school to be thought of as a politically-labelled school.

The impression that I have gained from listening to this debate is that the speakers on this side of the House have, either wittingly or unwittingly, done a good deal to discredit the secondary modern school. That is a most unfortunate outcome of this debate, because, whether noble Lords like it or not, there are going to be secondary modern schools for a considerable time to come; comprehensive schools cannot be built overnight. Moreover, there are some very fine people working in the secondary modern schools. These people have a job of work to do; they are doing it as best they can, and it seems a pity to me that some of the remarks that have been made should have been made. From my own experience, I know of a number of excellent secondary modern schools and, so high is my opinion of one of them, at any rate, that I should be glad to send a child of mine—and I have children—to that school if the educational rating of the child seemed appropriate. I think that the best secondary modern schools are fully equal in their own way to a really good grammar school. The trouble is that there are a great many more poor secondary modern schools than there are poor grammar schools.

I look at this matter in this way. Half a century ago the Tory Party was a Party of class and the infant Labour Party was a very class-conscious Party, and was rightly seeking to do away with class privilege. The Labour Party has largely achieved this aim, but the legacy of the past has stayed with it. That is a pity, because much of the activity of the Party is affected in a way which I consider undesirable. The battle of social equality and all that goes with it—wealth, power, living standards—has produced an attitude of mind which, although it is achieved fairly, is not easily dispelled. Education is a case in point. It is agreed by both Parties that every child shall have equal opportunities according to aptitude and ability. Nevertheless, the grammar school continues to be associated with privilege. We see how speakers continue to build up the idea of the superiority of the grammar school, and it is hardly to be wondered at, in those circumstances, that the general public feel that the grammar school is the only thing for their child.

Yet the Labour Party recognise that all children cannot adequately cope with an academic curriculum. It requires a fairly high degree of intelligence to deal with a subject like Latin, and the possession of a high degree of intelligence is a certain kind of privilege, as one must admit, in the same way that good health, good looks or a sunny temperament are a certain kind of privilege. But it is not the kind of privilege we can sweep away. It is one that we have to accept. It is in the nature of things.

I recognise that parents in the country are very worried about the 11-plus examination. There is no gainsaying that. All the same, I was sorry to hear the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, say that the 11-plus examination had been "utterly discredited". Here, again, for a long time children are going to pass through this process, and if parents are to feel that their children are taking an examination which is utterly discredited it is not really encouraging. Speaking as one who has had something to do with selection tests, I can say that at ally rate so far as the selectivity of the tests is concerned, they are far from discredited.

I would draw attention to something that has been mentioned already, namely, the great variation in the grammar school intake as between one county and another, which was referred to, to some extent, by the noble and learned Viscount. I quote from List 69 of the Ministry of Education, which shows that (in percentages) Nottinghamshire has an intake of 13.4, and Staffordshire, 14.9, which are to be compared with Dorset, for example, with 27.2, Cornwall with 28.9 and Westmorland with 41.2. If we take the boroughs, the figures are, Sunderland 12 and Dudley 9.9; and, on the other hand, for the sake of comparison, Gloucester 31.4, Bradford 30.9 and Southport 28.2. I think your Lordships will agree that the need for a greater degree of standardisation of intake is really a more pressing problem than going on with the idea of comprehensive schools as though that would answer all these difficulties.

Selection for comprehensive schools still remains as far as the London County Council are concerned. The 11-plus examination still exists, although they have their comprehensive schools; and, although there are great variations in many of them, the first year is devoted very largely to a battery of tests and to the general shuffling about and sorting out of the children into streams. Therefore, by having comprehensive schools we are not getting away from the need of separation of the children. This differentiation in the comprehensive school is, very naturally, marked when a modern language is attempted, and still further so if Latin is attempted.

We heard the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, say earlier that he would like to see practically every child take Latin; but this is an ideal which seems to me far removed from reality. The effect of selection on the child is certainly rather disturbing. I know that myself because I have four children. Two of them have already taken the 11-plus and another is just about to take it. And I fully admit that it is worrying for the parents. I am not suggesting that we have found the best way of dealing with this question of selection, but I believe that there has to be some form of selection and I welcome the comprehensive school as a possible means, though I do not think it can, with justice, be pushed to the extent to which my Party is pushing it.

One of the difficulties about the comprehensive school is that it has to be very large and in this sense it is by no means suitable for every kind of locality. Where there is a scattered locality children would be travelling great distances in order to get to the school. So in any case we are hound to have, especially in rural localities, this double, or as it is called tripartite system; but it really boils down to the grammar school and the secondary modern school. To sum up, I am not opposed to this solution but I feel that we must look around for others and not put all our eggs in one basket.

7.9 p.m.

LORD STONHAM

My Lords, I was very sorry to hear my noble friend Lord Darwen suggest that anything that had been said from these Benches constituted an attack on the secondary schools. I cannot personally see how advocacy of the development of comprehensive schools must necessarily be regarded as an attack on modern schools. So far as I can see, certainly in my interpretation of the proposals, the comprehensive schools are in fact an extension of, or can and will contain, the modern schools. I entirely agree with my noble friend in deploring any class-conscious attitude to education, but so far as I am concerned one of the attractions of the comprehensive schools is that they promote parity of esteem which is the beginning of the end of class consciousness. I hope that he will look at it, in particular, from that point of view. My noble friend agreed with what had been said about the unsatisfactory nature of the 11-plus.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Silkin for having concentrated his Motion on these two points of the 11-plus examination and the development of the comprehensive school, because, although I agree with the noble Viscount the Lord President of the Council that many of the difficulties will disappear if we have an adequate supply of good teachers, and the proper buildings and equipment—and many of the other things of which I complain will then vanish—nevertheless, they will not remove what I regard as the gross injustice of the 11-plus examination. I feel that at this stage, when we are having a big upsurge of building and great effort to train more teachers, it is most important that the misunderstandings and prejudices which so obviously exist with regard to the comprehensive school should, if possible, be resolved, so that a lot of the money which is being spent could be allowed to flow into the comprehensive school plan.

On the question of the 11-plus examination, I always regret that it is not called by its true name, which is "10-plus". Every child takes the examination at the tender age of 10 years and a few months, and I think that it ought to be admitted that this is really a disastrous thing. We have had fourteen years' experience of it now, and it is a bad way of separating out children, as I agree with my noble friend they must be separated—indeed, the comprehensive school system separates them, but in a different way. I will call in aid one authority, an authority very much greater than I or most noble Lords here; I refer to Professor H. C. Dent, former editor of The Times Educational Supplement, who in his report on the Secondary Modern School said this: No other single feature in the English educational system caused between 1945 and 1957 a tithe of the trouble, anxiety, heartache, discouragement and downright misery as did the 11-plus. There, my Lords, is an authority who cannot be said to have any political affiliations or implication. I do feel that this 10-plus method is a hopelessly "hit and miss" method of selection.

I will recall two examples from my own experience. The first is when I myself, at the age of 10 years, was given an opportunity to compete for what the noble Viscount correctly called a "free place". I was a very small 10, very under-sized. I lived in an outer London suburb, and when my father took me up for the examination it necessitated a journey by Underground railway. It was the first time I had ever been on a Tube train in my life, and when we got to Piccadilly I was violently sick. My father cleaned me up and took me for a brisk training spin up Regent Street. I arrived, somewhat recovered, and mounted a tall flight of marble stairs; then my father's heart changed, and he called me back. Apparently I misunderstood what he said, because I got my free place and stayed at the school for eight years. It is an indication that a minor illness, or a more serious illness, on the day of the examination can stop a child from taking it.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, surely it is an indication that nothing can stop the noble Lord. That is the only inference to be drawn.

LORD STONHAM

That is an inference which I could not draw myself. But the noble Viscount should admit that every year many children who may have the necessary ability lose their opportunities through no fault of their own, and chances as slight as the toss of a coin can decide a child's future.

The second example—a much more large-scale one—occurred to me almost immediately after I became a Member of another place in 1945. I had the duty of meeting a deputation of distressed and angry parents whose daughters—they were all daughters—had all passed (if that is the correct expression) the written county examination but had been denied grammar school places; whereas, they said to me, many other girls who had failed in a county examination had been granted grammar school places. They alleged that this discrimination was on the ground of the social standing of the parents. I said that that was nonsense and could not possibly happen in the year 1945. But, on investigation, the facts, whatever the reason, proved to be true.

The local authority refused my invitation to grant extra scholarships for these deprived children, so I submitted the fact to the then Minister of Education, the late Miss Ellen Wilkinson, who, after investigation, instructed the local education authority to create additional scholarships for these deprived children. More than eighty girls from all parts of Somerset were concerned. That, I think, is a concrete example of the extremely bad working of this system. I did not, of course, know the girls myself, but in recent years many of them have written to me, some on the occasion when I came to your Lordships' House, and it has been quite extraordinary how many of them have taken up the teaching profession and how well they have done. I could mention many other examples of that kind. If one person can say this from personal experience, it gives some idea of how many tens of thousands of children are arbitrarily deprived of the chance of an education from which they and the country would benefit.

I believe that this 10-plus examination is disgracefully unfair from the viewpoint of individuals, and from the national viewpoint it is wasteful of the genius of our people. If at the age of 11 children are put into separate schools, each with a limited curriculum, it must prejudge and limit the child's capacity, because there is a limit to the extent to which in two years' time a child can be "yanked" out of one school and put in another. I know that it can be truthfully argued that this system of selection has been improved and tightened up. In fact, a few days ago Sir Ronald Gould, the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers—incidentally speaking in favour of this method of segregation—said: I do not believe it possible to improve it much more than has been done. I am quite sure that he is right. And I am equally sure that it is useless to attempt to improve it, because it is attempting the impossible to devise any system which will safely, fairly and effectively determine what should be the future proper course of education for a child of 10. I believe that it can be done only with a constantly continuing selective process—it must go on—and that constantly continuing selective process is possible only in comprehensive schools.

Of course, it is not the case, as my noble friend suggested, that we want to stop selection. It must go on. But it must be a vastly different form of selection from the one we have now, and it is not possible in the modern-school and grammar-school method of division. Some of these comprehensive schools have a ten or twelve-stream entry, which is already enough to cater satisfactorily for the varying intelligence and aptitudes of all children. I have been at some pains to look into the opposition to comprehensive schools, and it seems to me that it could be not unfairly classified under three heads: political, which I think is unworthy of consideration and to be dismissed at once; misunderstanding, or perhaps ignorance of the facts; and, thirdly, vested interests.

People say that comprehensive schools will destroy the grammar schools, and that they aim at a flat level—a sort of common denominator of education—for all children. In my view, nothing could be further from the truth. Local education authorities are free to adapt the comprehensive idea in any way they wish. In Leicestershire, for example, as I think has been mentioned, the grammar school is associated with a number of secondary schools to form a single education unit. The various units of a comprehensive school need not, in my view (although here I know that I am in opposition to my noble friend), be in the same precincts. If it is a case of a new building or a new school, it will obviously be most convenient to house what I call the grammar school element, or its equivalent, with the other units; but it can be done in many ways.

The essential thing is to ensure that any good existing school is used to the fullest extent and to the utmost advantage. It is the syllabus and the quality of the teaching that make a grammar school, not the buildings and the blazer. With regard to the dull uniformity which is alleged in comprehensive schools, I think we have only to reflect on their ten or twelve streams, compared with the three with which most grammar schools are content, to find the answer to that criticism. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a system with greater variety and less uniformity.

With regard to the opposition from vested interests, some quotations have already been given in this debate. I myself came across one example in a newspaper account of a debate in a county education authority on a motion that a committee be appointed to study the comprehensive school system. The only opposition came from a councillor who was headmaster of a grammar school. I am glad to say that the council—which, incidentally, was a strongly Conservative one—agreed to consider the matter with an "open mind". My Lords, I submit that that is what we badly need on this subject—an open mind.

Another account, which appeared in the News Chronicle a few days ago, was of a grammar school headmaster who, at his school's speech day, attacked the Labour Party's educational policy which, he said, means effectively one thing—the complete dissolution of the grammar schools. He said: In my opinion, and in the opinion of 1,400 other headmasters of these schools, it would not only be disastrous for the able pupils of junior schools but even more so for the nation itself". And he went on: …only madmen would be so foolish as to stop what is being accomplished in the grammar schools". I would suggest, my Lords, that only madmen could believe that we want to stop what is being done in the grammar schools. In any event, I think that it does a general disservice when anyone, whether connected with education or not, uses extravagant language of that kind and attributes to the supporters of the comprehensive system that kind of motive.

I would say that, next to the fact that the comprehensive school is, perhaps, the only way of providing education suited to the capacity of every child, to my mind its great advantage is that it can also give us equality of esteem in education. I have had the opportunity of seeing in quite a number of schools the same class before and after the 10-plus, and to me the difference between the 10-plus class and the 13-year old secondary modern class is quite startling and depressing. Until recently I represented in another place a London constituency, and most of the schools in that constituency regarded it as an essential part of their education that their classes should pay a visit to the Houses of Parliament one a year. Once or twice a week during term time, therefore, I found myself conducting these classes round the Houses of Parliament. The difference was quite remarkable.

First, I had the top class in the primary school (that was the youngest class I had; they were the 10-plus children), and the class was alert, lively, and intelligent. Unhappily, when they went back they wrote, and sent to me, thirty-two essays; and very often I used to read them. Then, two years later, I would have, except for the few bright ones that had been taken out, the same children in the secondary modern. The difference was quite remarkable; they were, comparatively speaking, dull, and insipid: they asked very few questions, and they did not write any essays at all.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

Does the noble Lord not think that perhaps that was because they had seen it all two years before?

LORD STONHAM

I should not have thought so, because when they were ten the interest was such that I should have thought that, like most children, they would have tried to air some of the knowledge they had gained two years earlier. But, to my mind, it was not the fact that a few bright ones had been taken out of the class: it was the consciousness of being in what was the same old school slum—which, indeed, they were: of being an inferior order. That is what took the life out of them. The grammar school kids had gone to a new school, a new life; they wore a new blazer, and they had a new outlook. They were different. Now, in comprehensive schools they all do different work, but they have the same new outlook. It is one school; not two nations. They have equality of esteem; and the dullards do not despair because there is, demonstrably, something which even they can do well: and, above all, they "belong".

I think it is impossible to over-emphasise the importance of this fact, and the Government have a wonderful opportunity to put it to the test. New secondary schools are building all over the country, and in most cases they are better, brighter, and more spacious than many of the grammar schools which have so long held pride of place in local esteem. If the new schools can be united with the old favourites in a sensible comprehensive system, then the whole education outlook can be changed within five years.

The noble Viscount opposite had a good deal to say about the secondary modern school, and he said words to the effect that there was a sort of new life flowing through the best ones. As an example, he referred to the fact (I am not quoting his exact words, but I hope I am paraphrasing him correctly) that an 18-year-old in a secondary modern school might be very much better off (or certainly better off) than if he had just scraped into a grammar school. I am not arguing whether that would be so or not; and I do not know whether the noble Viscount bothered to look up and see how many 18-year-olds there are in secondary modern schools before he trade that remark. I did; I looked it up in the 1957 Report, and I found that there are precisely 177 18-year-olds in secondary modern schools, out of 360,000 children. So, whether or not the 18-year-old is better off in the windswept, new modern school, there are not many of them better off.

Compare that with what we already know of some of the comprehensive schools. Recently, we had the evidence given to us in a document called Inside the Comprehensive School which contained one quotation from the headmaster of a comprehensive school in Middlesex. He said: Of this year's intake less than 14 per cent. were of proven grammar school ability, and yet the forecast is that well over 50 per cent. will sit for some qualifying external examination in the year 1962 or before. Another comment, from a comprehensive school in London, reads: As we begin our third year more than 80 per cent. of the children from last year's ten fourth year forms are continuing their education past the statutory school leaving age, each taking one of the wide variety of academic or practical courses available for a further one, two, three or four years, and this from a group 70 per cent. of which left primary school with a 'modern' selection and therefore might be expected to leave secondary school at 15 years of age. My Lords, is it not fair to suggest, in the light of these facts, that the comprehensive school can provide not 16 or 20 per cent. who achieve that level—which is what we get from the grammar schools—but 45 to 50 per cent.? It means a half perhaps instead of one-sixth.

I would ask your Lordships to consider how much has to be done and how important it is that we do the right things, and spend money and effort in the right way. More than perhaps in any other civilised country in the world, we are still suffering from class consciousness and social snobbery, and I believe that it begins in our school system. Here alone do we segregate children in the way we do. It is only here that it is the mark of respectability not to send children to the State school. We can kill this idea only if we build up equality of esteem in our educational system and make it something to be proud of.

At present, most of our children are herded together in overcrowded classes. We spend different sums on them—in primary schools the amount is £27 a year in modern schools, £45 a year; and in grammar schools, £75 a year. We divide them arbitrarily, and often distressingly, at the age of 11, and every year the future prospects of thousands of youngsters are permanently damaged. Justice and decency demand that we end these practices and adopt a system which, whilst properly fitting the educational content to the ability of different children, involves no difference in social status. This can be done only by a wide extension of the comprehensive schools. Such schools may never be in the same precincts. That wilt not matter, so long as we see that there is equality of status and esteem and, in the end, equality of opportunity—and this not only in name, but in fact. I believe that if, as parents, taxpayers and Government, we are all determined to play a full part, there can be in this system such a flowering of the talents of our young people that we need not fear comparison with any nation in the world.

7.33 p.m.

LORD AUCKLAND

My Lords, before making my brief contribution to the discussion I should like to apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, for being unable to be present at the inception of this debate, through pressure of business at my own place of work. I hope for noble Lords' indulgence on this account. After we have heard a number of speeches from ex-teachers, and an ex-Minister of Education, what I contribute will certainly not be from expert practical knowledge of this particular subject; but sometimes an objective view can be of use.

I was educated at one of the smaller public schools not many miles away from the constituency for which the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, sat in another place, in the very Charming Devon town of Tiverton. There, during the war, we had an intake of boys from Tiverton Grammar School. At first there was a certain amount of scepticism as to how they would fit in, but in a short time it was quite apparent that not only did they fit in extremely well but their educational ability and physical ability were, to say the least of it, most impressive. They were the type of boys who would go far in ordinary life.

Only the other day I visited a secondary modern school in North London which has a total of, I think, 1,045 boys and girls and 42 teachers. I had a long talk with the headmaster and a comprehensive tour of the school. Unfortunately, being Saturday, I was not able to see many of the children themselves, but I did see some of the results, particularly from the art class, which had been produced. They really were very surprising indeed. I also saw the domestic economy section where the older girls were taught cooking, ironing, sewing, machine work and other activities which would fit them for life in later years. The school itself was constructed only three years ago and tremendous strides have been made under a most active headmaster and what must obviously be a very co-operative and efficient staff.

Of course, one of the problems which he faces, as does every school, whether private school or State school, is the shortage of teachers. Now, as has been mentioned already to-day, the solution to the shortage of teachers does not always resolve itself in the realm of finance. As has been pointed out, if "the sky's the limit" attitude were to apply to teachers' salaries one might well get opportunists, just in for the money and not for the welfare of the children. I should like to make this point very emphatically: that it is on the shoulders of the headmaster or headmistress of a school—public, preparatory, grammar, comprehensive or any type of school—that the ability of the school itself rests. A headmaster or headmistress with a willing and talented staff can produce results. At one stage, in the school I attended, we had a headmaster who, academically, was brilliant, but who had little or no idea how to control boys, let alone staff; and several of the staff walked out. It took a very long time, and the ultimate removal of the headmaster concerned, to get that school back on its feet. I stress that point to emphasise the importance of good teachers.

I would extend from your Lordships' House a vote of praise for those in the teaching profession to-day. They are having to cope with tremendous odds, over-spill classes and inadequate buildings. I think the present Government has done a great deal towards improving the remuneration of teachers and in school building, although, I say, without apology, that what has been done is not enough. A lot remains to be done. Until we get adequate teachers and adequate buildings we cannot hope to have any real solution of this education problem.

Reading my local paper the other week I was interested in an article about education in Surrey. It said: Secondary education in Surrey is constantly undergoing reorganisation and review. Nearly all schools are providing specialist courses, in addition to general education, varying from home craft to building and engineering courses. Reverting again to Middlesex, because this is the only secondary modern school I have seen, I was particularly impressed by the workshops there—the lathes, the carpentry section and the laboratories. In this forthcoming scientific age it is vital that children should have an adequate scientific education, and particularly those who have a tendency towards that field.

I believe it was the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, who stressed the importance of Latin in schools. I was never a scientist myself, and never shall be, but I was always greatly attached to languages and the classics. It is all very well to say that Latin is a dead language, but doctors, biologists, and scientists must all have a working knowledge of that language, and I feel that Latin should be in the curriculum of schools of all types.

I would say only this on the subject of comprehensive schools. The Government's White Paper does not bedevil the idea of comprehensive schools. What it says, in paragraph 17, is: … and furthermore the Government have serious doubts about the wisdom of establishing very large comprehensive schools. I think there can be little room for disagreement there, because, in view of the shortage of teachers, if you are going to establish schools with perhaps 2,500 pupils, you are not going to get any individual attention for the children. I believe that in some areas, especially in the new towns where populations are, or will be, dense, comprehensive schools can play a great part. But obviously the geography and siting must be an important element in the planning of any type of comprehensive school, just as it must in any type of large school.

A great deal has been said about the fear of parents and of children regarding the 11-plus examination. I talked to the headmaster of this particular secondary school on the subject, and he said that, for his part, he found the children had had very little fear, but that the parents were in some cases apprehensive. I saw a specimen test paper, and it seemed to me—and I am a father with a child who is not yet of school age but who has a brain which is equivalent probably to that of a child of seven or eight years old—that, even allowing for the fact that there is a time limit, it was, if anything, too easy. But many of the questions were set in a rather slick manner, and I think that on that ground the 11-plus examination can be criticised.

I do not agree that 11 is too young an age at which to get an idea of a child's capabilities; but whether or not the 11-plus in its present form is the best way of doing it is another matter. I do not think it is. It is all very well to criticise a system which has been started, but it is by no means easy to find an alternative. Possibly the noble Viscount who is to wind up the debate will elaborate on alternatives which the Government have. The White Paper offers a partial solution, but the ordinary man in the street is concerned as to what will ensue. I think that possibly more could be said of the Leicestershire experiment which has been quoted to-day. Possibly other counties, if the experiment meets with success, would want to follow suit. I would conclude by saying that I believe the White Paper we are debating to-day is a praiseworthy attempt to find some kind of a solution to secondary education. Personally, I believe that the secondary schools do a first rate job and that no praise could be too high for the teaching profession as a whole.

7.48 p.m.

LORD OGMORE

My Lords, we have had an interesting debate and I hope that a good deal of the misconception which it seems to me is inherent in this particular subject will have been cleared up in the course of it. My noble friend Lord Silkin, my noble friend Lord Pakenham, the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, and my noble friend Lord Stonham have between them, I think, given such a comprehensive review of the policy of the Labour Party and of the whole system of comprehensive schools that there is no need for me to speak at any great length, and I certainly do not propose to do so. We listened with great interest to the speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, who, as my noble friend Lord Pakenham so rightly said, during his comparatively short period as Minister of Education certainly aroused the interest of the teaching profession; and I gather that many of them were sorry when he was removed to other spheres.

But it seems to me that the noble Viscount, in, at any rate, the first hour of his speech, was somewhat in the condition of the generals in mediæval Italy, who, as the House will remember, conducted without bloodshed and without any close approach to the enemy a series of manœuvres which did not really get them or anyone else much further. It was only in the last quarter of an hour or so that the noble Viscount abandoned that pose and came out with a whoop, as it were, took a battle axe and laid about him at the unfortunate noble Lords on these Benches. Having exhorted us to keep education out of the Party political sphere, he in the last quarter of an hour threw his exhortations to the wind and laid about him with a good political will.

As I understood him, the noble Viscount's main contentions were two. First of all, he discounted the problems of selection. He said that if the difficulties in the shortfall of teachers were overcome, all other problems would be solved. I have no doubt that in the highly unlikely event of the teacher difficulties being overcome, a great many problems would be solved. But it is a gross oversimplification to say all would be solved, or that it is at all likely for years to come, so far as one can see, that these difficulties of the shortfall in teachers will be overcome. If that is the solution, what have the Government done to provide an adequate number of teachers? As the noble Viscount readily admitted, they have done little. He told us that the problem has become more acute since he was Minister of Education, and that nothing he did then really grappled with it. Certainly it has gone very little way to its solution, because it is worse than it was before he became a Minister. Of course, I am not blaming him for that, but the fact is that we are losing in this sphere instead of gaining.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, that is not true.

LORD OGMORE

That is what I gathered.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

What I said to the noble Lord was that, first, the teachers have never increased so much as during the office of the present Government, and, secondly, the problem had in fact been greatly eased. I stated a number of statistics to show that by the middle 1960's it would have disappeared in one branch of the schools, and that in five years a decided improvement would have taken place in the secondary schools. If the noble Lord reads what I said in Hansard, he will find that it is directly the opposite of what he is attributing to me.

LORD OGMORE

I listened to the noble Viscount with great attention and. of course, I shall read what he said to-morrow in Hansard. But I would draw the attention of the House to the fact that the noble Viscount not only said that the situation had got worse since he was Minister, but ascribed it to some extent, as I understood him, to the fact that those who advise the Government had made two serious miscalculations in the probable result of the birth rate.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, the noble Lord has got it wrong. I never said that the situation had got worse. I said that in two respects the situation was acute. One is the increase in the birth rate which has subsequently taken place, and the second is the welcome increase in the number of those who stay on at school. I never said that the situation has got worse. In fact, I quoted statistics to show that the contrary was the case.

LORD OGMORE

Then I think a good deal of the noble Viscount's case went by the board. It is not everybody who agrees with him even on that. Just recently 400 South Wales schoolmasters met at Cardiff, and they passed a resolution recommending that a Royal Commission to investigate teachers' salaries and recruitment into the teaching profession should be instituted instantly. They gave a most gloomy view of the situation. I was going to quote what they said in support of what I understood the noble Viscount to say but which I understand I got wrong. But certainly they gave a most gloomy account. They said that to attract more men to the profession, salaries had to be revised. The General Secretary told them that if you go into a typical staff room, it is not the schoolmistress who does not know where next month's rates are coming from, it is the schoolmaster who is harassed in that way. They also said that the Burnham Committee was a sham, and, as I say, they went to the length of recommending the appointment of a Royal Commission, so serious did they feel the position to be.

My honourable friend in another place, Councillor Percy Morris, the Member for Swansea, West, gave recently a very gloomy picture with regard to the teaching profession and the position in the schools. He said that the Act of 1944 prescribed regulations by which children should not exceed 40 in a primary school class and 30 in a secondary school class. Fifteen years later, two-thirds of the classes in secondary schools have over 30 pupils, and about half a million children are being taught in schools built before 1870. That is what Mr. Percy Morris said, and no one can say far one moment that those facts are other than serious for the country to face.

May I add from my own experience in the London Welsh Association, of which I am President, where we have literally hundreds of teachers in London schools. Recently I was talking to a young lady who was a teacher in a secondary modern school in London. I asked her about the conditions there, and she said: "What people do not understand is that when another teacher falls ill or goes on a course, or anything of that kind, we have to take her class. In my school I am frequently trying to teach about 60 or 70 children, and it is quite impossible to do so." Those are the actual facts that come out. Of course, if you took the actual statistics of that school, it would assume that all the teachers are there and are teaching all the time; but in fact they are not all there. They may be ill, especially in a season like this when there has been so much influenza about. Those are the conditions present in the schools of the State, and it is not good enough.

The second objection the noble Viscount had to my noble friend's case was that in comprehensive schools the academic children and the academic slant (if I may call it so) would act to the detriment of the non-academic. The noble Viscount quoted a letter in support from a rather unusual source for him, the New Statesman. My noble friend Lord Pakenham countered this by saying that the public schools are basically comprehensive, as indeed they are.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

Certainly not.

LORD OGMORE

The noble Viscount shakes his head and says, "Certainly not", but in fact they are basically comprehensive, in so far as the boys who go there are chosen from a fairly wide intellectual segment and are allocated to various academic streams. I have some experience of this, because I am a governor of a public school and on the education committee of the court of governors. I know that that is in fact the position.

When I went to a comprehensive school with my noble friend, Lord Pakenham, I found that, broadly speaking, they were running on much the same lines as a public school except, of course, that in a public school there is not the fourth stream, as it were, that they get in the comprehensive school. Otherwise, they are organised on much the same lines, with various periods for mathematics, French and so on. They have houses, and they have games and competitions between the houses. They have societies and the like. The noble Lord, Lord Darwen, criticised my predecessors in the debate for discrediting the secondary modern school as a result of our criticising the present system. But, of course, this argument would mean that one could not suggest improvements or advocate reforms because one must, to some extent, criticise the existing state of affairs. We cannot expect to be prohibited in this House from suggesting reforms because some might think that that throws a certain amount of cold water on the existing system.

What are the virtues of the comprehensive school? I believe that they have come out pretty clearly in the debate. First of all, it helps to solve the difficulties of the 11-plus test and its consequences, which have been brought out so clearly by my noble friend Lord Stonham, and which I need not repeat. It also deals with the late developer arid the early retarder, both of whom were referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Silk in. It caters for the boy who wishes to stay on after 15. It also does something else which has to some extent been brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, though it has not been developed by any speaker to-day, so far as I remember, and that is that it plays a great part in the social integration of the boys or girls at the school.

The boys, although in different streams and in different forms, all meet, of course, whichever particular stream they are in, in the houses; the school is divided up into houses, as a public school is. They meet on the playing field, play games together, irrespective of what stream they are in; and they also, of course, belong to the various societies, cultural and arts societies and so on. It often happens that a boy who is not particularly gifted academically is a big figure in his house, far more important in his house than the academic figures, because he is a very good sportsman, cricketer or footballer. We all remember from our own schooldays that it was not always those who could win university scholarships who were looked up to; it was the captain of the first XV or the first XI who was the real power in the land. That is the fact in the comprehensive school, and it is a very important fact. You also get boys who may not be at all gifted academically but who are gifted as artists, sculptors, painters and that sort of thing; and they, through the various societies, can be made to feel that they are playing an important part in the life of the school.

What are the drawbacks of this system? I think that one drawback may be, unless we are careful, in size. I make no claims to be an expert of any kind, but I do not believe that any school can usefully be over 1,800 in numbers. I think even that number is too many. I believe that one will need to look at the size very carefully, otherwise it gets rather unwieldy, and there is no possibility of the headmaster knowing more than a small percentage of the boys: the houses get too big; there can be only a certain number of houses, and if they get too big it will destroy the idea of the house. I should have thought that a school ought not to have more than 1,500 pupils. That is only a personal opinion; and I think that even that number is on the large side.

Another matter we should have to look at is the question of the denominational schools, in view of the rider that the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, made in his speech. I think that if one were starting afresh, and had no ground to build upon, a country would go in for the comprehensive school system. I am quite satisfied that it does, by and large, give the best form of education. But we in this country, of course, do not start afresh. We have to build on many old traditions, many fine traditions, in the grammar schools, and just recently, as the noble Lord, Lord Darwen, said, in the secondary modern schools as well. The Labour Party have recognised this fact.

The noble and learned Viscount, Lord Hailsham, challenged us on this side to produce our policy in this respect, and I would direct his attention to the brochure that he described as the glossiest of the glossy, The Future Labour Offers You. If he will turn to the portion marked "Education", he will see there what the Labour Party policy is, and this is the policy on which the Labour Party will be fighting the next Election. It says: The far-reaching reorganization of secondary education will therefore become essential. The comprehensive schools that already exist in London, Coventry and elsewhere are an outstanding example of how this can be tackled. We do not say, however, that all secondary schools should conform to one single rigid pattern. There are other ways of overcoming the evils of segregation at 11, and these will be encouraged. We nail the lie that our aim is to abolish Grammar school education. On the contrary, we shall open it up to every child who can benefit by it and extend the tradition and standards of the Grammar school throughout secondary education. In another place on the 22nd of last month the Minister of Education quoted my right honourable friend Mr. Gaitskell, the Leader of the Party, as referring in a broadcast to a new secondary school which he had opened and saying that he was pleased to find that there were opportunities for the boys there after the age of 16 to qualify to go on to a grammar school sixth form. Here was another example of greater flexibility. It is the principle that matters and the principle is that opportunity must be open and that children must not be finally segregated at 11. That principle has been running through all the speeches from this side—our objection to the fact that so often a child's whole life is directed by this examination on a certain day. And, of course, it may be a very bad day for the child, as it was, happily without those consequences, for my noble friend Lord Stonham.

I think my noble friend Lord Silkin was quite right when he said that, if possible, the comprehensive school must he in one curtilage. It will not always be possible to have that situation, of course, because sometimes the local authority will be unable to get enough land to build a school to contain all the boys, and there may be quite modern schools nearby that they would be sorry to have to give up. But wherever it is possible to have it, we should regard that as a very important matter. My Lords, I do not think there is any need for me to labour the point any further. This question of the 11-plus examination and the comprehensive school has had an exhaustive and very thorough examination. I would add just this. I am sure we are all very grateful to my noble friend Lord Silkin who opened the debate and who dealt with the subject in such a masterly fashion. I hope that from the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Hailsham, the Lord President of the Council, when he comes to reply we shall have an answer to the various points that have been put to him during the course of the debate, and that he will not ride off into polemics but will give us facts, because those are what we require.

8.8 p.m.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, I think at this late hour it would be wrong for me to respond in any detail to the last invitation, as so many of those who have asked the questions have not waited to hear the answers. It would, I think, be to add a penalty to the courtesy which the few noble Lords have paid me by remaining to the end if I were to answer the other noble Lords' questions.

LORD OGMORE

Answer those who remain.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

I must say, too, that I think it was a little disappointing in the noble Lord who has just sat down to suggest that I do not provide facts. I did in fact go out of my way, even to the extent of worrying the noble Lord, Lork Pakenham, to distraction, by introducing a great deal of factual material in my speech—factual material which I considered to be of very considerable relevance and importance to the debate. At this stage I will try only to pick out some of the salient points which have been mentioned.

It seems to me that there is a political and moral issue and that there is an educational issue. The two are connected but they are really quite separate. The political and moral issue is this. The Labour Party have said, not in their compendious pamphlet of all policy but in that which deals with education, that they will, if they are returned to power, on a national scale require—and I use that word because it is used in the pamphlet—local education authorities to prepare secondary education development plans designed, with all reasonable speed, to adopt the comprehensive principle. That is what they have said they are going to do, or what they would do if they got the chance. That statement has caused deep resentment and widespread anxiety in the educational world. The reason why it has caused deep resentment and widespread anxiety is that, whatever one may say, the educationalists are deeply divided on both the issues which the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, raised; and whatever else may be said about the situation, to require local education authorities who are hostile to the principles to adopt them is a piece of arbitrary tyranny, at least in the opinion of those noble Lords who agree with me politically.

The thing which I had hoped to get from noble Lords opposite was a clear cut statement that that was not going to happen. On the contrary, they have declined that issue. They have not told us whether or not they adhere to that statement of policy contained in Learning to Live. It is true that the noble Lord opposite has quoted a statement from the other pamphlet to the effect that that nailed the lie that it is intended to destroy the grammar school. On the other hand, if you require local authorities to adopt the comprehensive principle with all reasonable speed you must impose sentence of death with a stay of execution; but it still is sentence of death. The fact that some noble Lords opposite, though apparently not all, still intend to impose sentence of death, was, despite his disclaimer, quite clearly brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, who in a particularly eloquent peroration made it plain that what he wanted to do was to go forward against segregation, with one set of schools in each locality, with everybody playing his part, so lone as they accept this principle, and that social integration would be put through in this way. That was the burden of his song.

The question which we have to ask ourselves, morally and politically, and which noble Lords opposite have refused to face is: can you justify, morally or politically, a national requirement on local education authorities, hostile or friendly to this hotly disputed principle, to adopt it whether or not their local inhabitants support it? My view and that of the Government is that you could not possibly justify that course. The noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, twitted me with introducing Party politics after having made an appeal to avoid it. If that is so, he failed utterly to understand the nature of the appeal. My appeal was this: that the Party opposite should drop this national requirement; and I pointed out to them that we in the Government over a period of more than seven years of power have, despite our convictions to the contrary, sponsored almost all of the fifty existing comprehensive schools—in other words, we have not adopted the principle of requiring local authorities to go against their consciences on this highly disputable matter.

Do the Labour Party intend to adhere to this policy, which is sentence of death upon the system of education which those who do not happen to accept the comprehensive principle believe in? Do they intend to require local authorities, as this document says they will, to adopt a policy contrary to their convictions? That is the political and moral question. If they abandon this and proceed on the non-doctrinaire basis, as Conservative Ministers of Education have done, then it is possible to remove this issue out of the sphere of Party politics, as I would desire; because although there may be differences of opinion, it seems to me to be lamentable, as the noble Lord, Lord Darwen, said, that those differences of opinion should necessarily have Party labels. But if the Labour Party as a Party propose to make this national requirement on local education authorities, then it is inevitable that we who have conscientious objection to it should fight them in the political cockpit and use this powerful electoral weapon. I am quite sure that it will be in our favour. Until we have an unequivocal withdrawal of this threat it is inevitable that we should fight it and we shall get a great deal of educational support for what we have to do. That is the political and moral issue.

Then there is the educational issue which is, as I say, connected but really quite separate. The educational issue appears to me to be this. Everybody would agree that, as matters stand at the moment, there is a certain amount of anxiety when a child is entered for what is called, quite wrongly, the 11-plus examination. The question educationally, however, is whether that is due to the persistent social memories of the past to which the noble Lord, Lord Darwen, to my mind absolutely rightly, drew attention—the kind of persistent snobbery which has long outlived its educational reality. Is it due in part, as I have tried to show that at any rate in my opinion it is, to the fact that a great number of the secondary modern schools are under-staffed, held in old buildings, and with inadequate courses? Or is it due to something else intrinsically wrong with selection as such? That is the educational issue. Believe me, you do not advance the case for the comprehensive school by pointing, as several noble Lords have done, to conditions in which the present secondary modern school fails to live up to the kind of standard which I was seeking to describe in my opening speech.

I was glad that the right reverend Prelate intervened in this debate, because he said something which I think he was able, from his position, to say much more convincingly than somebody from the purely lay political Benches could do. He said that he really did not see why, in a sense, you could not select most children without examination at all. Of course, that is quite correct, as the noble Lord, Lord Som̃ers, in a most interesting and valuable contribution pointed out. In Hampshire 40 per cent. of the parents, in Birmingham I think 50 per cent., and in other places the same sort of proportion, have such confidence in the secondary modern education available to their children, and such confidence that it provides them with what their children need and want, that they do not bother to send their children in for the selective test (because they know quite well that the children get justice and what they want) unless they regard the child as exceedingly gifted. This makes nonsense, I say with respect, of all the lamentations which were uttered by the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, and the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, when they described children as sobbing themselves to sleep and staying awake all night, made miserable because of the 11-plus examination. Believe me, the growing generation of parents, parents of 20 and 30, know something about modern systems of education, and they are not worried about their children unless they have had this misery put into their minds by old fogies who still live a life in the past.

I would agree with the noble Lord, Lord Darwen, that noble Lords opposite, quite unwittingly and unintentionally, have done a real disservice to the cause of education by encouraging parents to have these anxieties about the 11-plus examination and about the kind of education which is available to their children in secondary modern schools, without attaching them, as they should be attached, to such shortcomings as we are trying to get rid of by the kind of policy which I was seeking to describe in my opening remarks. I would agree wholeheartedly with the right reverend Prelate that the comprehensive school, which, after all, we have sponsored as to the great majority of existing schools, has its part to play in a pattern of great variety in education.

The noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, who, I thought, was not at his admirable best in this debate to-day, asked me whether I would deny to other children the best available education. I would say quite candidly that during my brief period as Minister I spent a very long time visiting schools, and there is no such thing as the "best available education." There are good schools which are public schools, and I could mention a very bad series of schools which are public schools, but I will not. There are good schools which are comprehensive schools and good schools which are grammar schools; and there are good schools which are the best type of secondary modern schools. The idea that there is laid up in heaven something like a platonic idea of a perfect available system of education is one utterly foreign to any kind of really constructive thought upon this extremely complicated subject.

Since the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, has come back, I want to say one or two relatively severe things to him. He said that he wanted all children to have an education comparable to that of Eton. Exactly what he meant by that I do not know. The main features of Eton are, first, boarding school education, second, a very high academic selective and segregated standard of entry, and third, denominational religious teaching. The noble Lord volunteered the theory that at any rate the majority of children in this country should learn Latin; and he told us that he had actually taught in a primary school. I should like him when he goes—as I hope he will avoid going—to Purgatory in the end, to be sentenced to teach "C" and "D" streams in a secondary modern school the compulsory Latin that he would like to force down their throats. Then there would be something like natural justice.

But for the noble Lord to get up in this House and say he is against segregation and that it is nonsense for those who believe in segregation to do so, and then to confess that he sends his own child to Ampleforth, which is one of the most highly segregated schools in the country, with a highly selective academic standard of entrance and denominational religious teaching, seems to me to reach a level of inconsistency which borders on the incomprehensible to those of us who try to apply any kind of logical reasoning to this process.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, I have made a very great effort to come back so as to give the noble and learned Viscount a chance to blow off a little steam in the right direction. I would only say this: I made perfectly plain in my opening remarks that I was in favour of parents of particular denominations being able to choose a denominational education. I did not just say "segregated"; I said segregation on the grounds of class or ability should be ruled out; but I specifically exempted religion. Perhaps when the noble and learned Viscount looks at Hansard he will study that point a little more carefully.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, I am quite aware of what the noble Lord said, but what he does not seem to have gat into his head is that when he says that education for the multitude ought to be of the quality that is given by Eton and Ampleforth, he is opting against integration and in favour of academic selection, because that is the principle on which those two schools, in fact, operate. He simply cannot get away with saying that Ampleforth segregated simply on the basis of being a Roman Catholic school. It has a higher entrance which would debar a great number of people from entering because they would not reach the academic standard; and if the noble Lord says that the children of the masses ought to have a school as good as Eton or Ampleforth, he is in fact saying that they ought to have a grammar school education arrived at by a selective test of entry.

I must add, too, since the noble Lord has raised the religious point—and I think it is fair to say this to him—that it is no doubt true that from every theological point of view, it is possible to reconcile with his own faith a comprehensive school; and I have no doubt at all, as he says, that there are one or two Roman Catholic comprehensive schools in contemplation. But it would be utterly impossible to give Roman Catholics what they, rightly or wrongly, demand of the State over the whole area of the country if they were not allowed to contract out of the policy which his Party is threatening to impose on the rest of the population—whether it be Protestant or any other denomination. There can be no way out of this. There is no virtue in religion in this respect. Parents either have a natural right to educate their children according to the system of education they prefer, within reason, or they have not.

Plenty of parents have a conscientious objection to submitting their children to the kind of integration which they think, rightly or wrongly—and it may be wrongly—will be imposed upon them by the comprehensive school. There are plenty of local authorities who would object to that in the name of the parents. The noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, was not here for the earlier part of my reply, but the moral and political issue he has to face is how he, as a Roman Catholic, can possibly defend the doctrine put here in the Labour Party pamphlet threatening to impose on parents and on local authorities all over the country, contrary to their consciences, a pattern of education in which they do not believe and of which the best that can be said is that some educationists believe in it and others do not. These are problems with which the noble Lord has not grappled.

LORD PAKENHAM

My Lords, perhaps the noble and learned Viscount, who interrupted me several times, will allow me to interrupt twice. I will then give him his chance to continue on these lines. So far as Roman Catholics are concerned, the proposals of the Labour Party are perfectly well known and are not objected to by the hierarchy, which is not taking sides on this issue. So the noble Viscount cannot say that the Roman Catholic hierarchy are incapable of making up their mind. They are not taking sides in this controversy. If the noble and learned Viscount wants it in plain terms, it is open to any Roman Catholic to use his discretion in choosing between the Parties.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

I was not talking of what was theologically possible in terms of the hierarchy, but, since the noble Lord has raised that point, I must say that it is utterly morally reprehensible to claim for parents of his own domination, a natural right to educate their children religiously in a segregated school of their own choosing and at the same time to adhere to a policy which threatens to impose on all other parents who do not happen to belong to his denomination a pattern of education in which they may not believe and to which the elected local education authority may be bitterly opposed. That has nothing to do with the hierarchy, but is something which the noble Lord must reconcile with his own conscience and sense of logic.

When he comes to read the various proposals to which he committed himself in his speech, he will find that he committed himself in favour of Eton education, which is segregational and selective, and against Eton education, because he said selection was nonsense and, I think, that segregation was utterly discredited. He said that almost every child in the country should be taught Latin and that he had sent his child to a highly selective and segregated school. I am the last person to accuse the noble Lord of talking nonsense, which is the charge he levelled against me; but when he comes to read in Hansard tomorrow morning what he said, he will find it very difficult to explain to his Labour Party friends, his old Etonian friends, or his Roman Catholic friends, exactly what he meant.

I turn from the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, and simply say, in conclusion, that the question of a selective system at the age of 11-plus, and this question of comprehensive schools have a long way to go before we arrive at a final solution. Many of the comprehensive schools in the country at the present time have not even a full complement. It is far too early to talk of imposing that principle on the rest of the country. If you decide to wait and see how the best secondary modern schools turn out—and they are turning out very well indeed—and how the best comprehensive schools and grammar schools turn out and not jettison these as something really "half-baked" and going off at half-cock, you can have some hope of reducing your educational policy to something which is both educationally sound and morally responsible.

8.29 p.m.

LORD SILKIN

My Lords, the debate is ending in a very different tone from that in which it started. The noble Viscount paid me the compliment of saying that I had addressed the House in a restrained and, I hope, reasoned manner. I wish that I could have said the same to him, because I have a great affection for him and I should have liked to repay the compliment. If only he had made at the beginning the speech he has just made we should have had the opportunity of replying to it in some form. However, I am going to exercise great restraint. I addressed the House for a considerable length of time at the outset, and in some measure of compensation I now merely beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.