§ Mr. Swinglerasked the Minister of Education if he will take steps to encourage the establishment of more comprehensive schools so as to enable more local authorities to abolish the eleven-plus examination.
§ Sir E. BoyleIt is for local education authorities in the first place to consider the organisation of their secondary schools. But I would draw the hon. Member's attention to what I said on this subject last week at the annual conference of the Association of Education Committees:
"Neither I nor my colleagues in the Government are wedded to any particular pattern of secondary school organisation; none of us believes that children can be sharply differentiated into various types or levels of ability; and I certainly would not wish to advance the view that the bipartite system, as it is often called, should be regarded as the right and usual way of organising secondary education, compared with which everything else 162W must be stigmatisedas experimental. Indeed, a system of completely separate schools is unlikely to be the best answer either in a new housing area where one can plan from the beginning, or in a very scattered country district. All I have said on the other side is that, like my predecessors, I must continue to exercise the right to resist any proposal which seems likely to level down academic standards without any compensating degree of advantage in other ways.
I personally think it is still too early to reach any sweeping conclusions as to what kind of pattern will be the best for the future. I think we may be in a much better position to reach something like definitive conclusions about the optimum future pattern of secondary school organisation in two or three years time than we can hope to do at this moment.
Meanwhile, where there are separate schools, we need always to remember that wherever the line is drawn, children just on either side of it will be in distinguishable from each other both in ability and potentiality. And it follows that they are likely to need the same kind of education. Opportunities for transfer, though essential, are not of themselves enough. It is important for secondary schools of all kinds to recognise the varying abilities of their pupils—for the modern schools to stretch the abilities of their brighter children, and for the grammar schools not to concentrate only on their high fliers."