Episode 2 The Grammar School: A Secret History

This is the story of the golden age of Britain's grammar schools

in the decades following the Second World War,

and their sudden, dramatic demise.

That demise is at the heart of an educational debate that still rages today.

Grammar schools offered talented children from the poorest backgrounds

the chance to go to some of the best schools in the country.

It gave me the confidence to know

that I could do whatever I set out to do.

And being female didn't make any difference,

being educated DID make a difference.

The grammar schools created a generation of upwardly mobile high-flyers,

who helped transform Britain.

They owed much to their inspirational teachers,

whose memory some still hold dear.

The first major book I wrote,

I dedicated to her.

That was me, saying, "Thank you.

"Thank you from the bottom of my heart."

HE SOBS

Make me cry!

By 1964, there were 1,300 grammar schools in Britain.

They educated a quarter of all secondary school pupils,

and were at the height of their success.

But in the '60s and '70s,

a cultural revolution that aimed to create a more open and equal society

swept away the grammar schools

and the ladder to success they'd provided.

To some, it seemed like an act of educational sabotage.

The school was no longer able to deliver to future generations of boys

the amazing opportunities that had been offered to us,

and that seemed both stupid,

and it seemed like vandalism, and it seemed like a tragedy.

The grammar school was on the way out.

# ..For the times they are a-changing... #

The 1944 Education Act

set out to create educational opportunities for all.

There was to be a three-tiered state education system,

with technical, secondary modern, and grammar schools,

all geared to the different abilities of pupils.

Gaining a place at grammar school, the most academic of the three,

depended on passing the 11+ exam.

For many working class families,

a grammar school education offered a ladder of escape

from the daily grind and struggle of manual labour,

to the more secure world of the professions.

This ambition held a special appeal for Neil Kinnock's family in south Wales.

My family were coalminers and steelworkers.

And they had as a glowing purpose,

the ambition for success of the next generation.

That was central to just about everything they thought of and did,

the reason why they worked ridiculous hours.

Parents' ambitions for their children often hinged on whether they passed or failed their 11+.

Neil did so well,

he won a free place at the top grammar school in Wales, Pengam,

dubbed the Eton of the Valleys.

My father got home from work at around 5:30.

When he came through the door, I told him.

And he and my mother were so evidently ready to burst with pride

at the fact that...

I'd made it, in terms that EVERYBODY could understand.

For the first generation of children to benefit from the educational reforms of the 1944 Act,

the exclusion of less able fee-paying pupils from the grammar schools

meant that the proportion of working-class pupils attending them

increased dramatically.

Roy Strong went to Edmonton County Grammar in 1946.

I came from a lower middle-class, white-collar district,

and that was really the upper end of Edmonton County Grammar school,

because it was on the Great Cambridge Road,

and then you crossed to the other side, which was Edmonton, which was solidly working class.

And those boys were often incredibly impoverished,

and one would see teachers

really go out of their way to help those people.

I actually saw one or two teachers

actually slip money to some of those impoverished bright people,

and there was a sense of heroism,

I think most of those teachers were committed socialists,

seeing a golden dawn of opportunity for people who had been

completely denied this way of ascending with their intellect,

so, in a way, it was an heroic period.

Jan Garbutt, the daughter of a bus conductor in Coventry,

grew up in poverty.

But in 1956, she did so well in her 11+ that she won a place at Barr's Hill grammar,

the city's top grammar school for girls.

I had never seen anything so beautiful

as going through these gates and seeing this glorious school

and to think that was where I was going to go, every day,

to do things that I knew that I was going to enjoy, it was fantastic.

And inside the building, the smell of the oak floors

and the wood panelling of this beautiful, beautiful building,

and the smell...

I still retain that to this day.

They say smells evoke memories, don't they,

and the smell of the oak panelling

and the wood of that glorious building

evokes the strongest memories of my school days.

Barbara Jones came from an impoverished mining family in Nottinghamshire.

In 1949, she won a place as a boarder

at the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Grammar School for Girls in Mansfield.

With its emphasis on impeccable behaviour at all times,

it was a world apart from her home life.

Being a boarder was special.

Manners had to be perfect, and we had to behave with decorum.

Very Victorian values, and so, we would sit at the table,

eating properly,

with the correct knife and fork, with our mouths closed.

If we needed something passing,

other people on the table had to be aware of your needs, and pass it.

You weren't allowed to say, "Will you pass me the salt, please?"

They had to look after you, and we each had to do that.

Grammar schools placed great importance on the wearing of school uniform.

It created a sense of pride and belonging,

as well as a new identity, rooted in the school.

But poor families struggled to meet the costs.

When Vincent Calder won a place at St Brendan's College in Bristol

in 1954, his mother went to her local pawnbroker

to help pay for his uniform.

She suddenly arrives with the ring,

she opened up her little purse, took out her ring,

and it was her wedding ring.

She must have done some research into the cost of the uniform,

cos she said, "I need so much". I don't know how much.

"Can you give it to me on this?"

"That's your wedding ring", he said.

"Yes, I know."

He said, "I don't want to take your wedding ring. Is there anything else?"

"It's all I have."

With the money she borrowed on her wedding ring,

Vincent's mother fitted him out with a full school uniform.

When I put on the school uniform, first time...

..God, you should have seen her face. It was amazing.

I didn't even recognise myself, I'd never had new clothes, never.

It was the first time I'd ever had new clothes.

I'd always had hand-me-downs.

And so I put on my school cap - the first one went over there.

Can't do it now. But I mean...

..her face was a picture then.

School colours were important in encouraging children to feel proud

and identify with their school.

In 1948, Bob McCartney, who lived on the Shankill Road in Belfast,

started at the new Grosvenor High School.

It took a while for us to get ourselves sorted out,

and for the staff to equip us all with the same rugby jersey.

And for a while, we were known,

I suppose a bit patronisingly,

as the Liquorice Allsorts, because of our multi-coloured gear.

But that soon changed.

The greater ambition for me was to play for the school team,

so the first year I played for the under 13s,

the second year the under 14s, the next year the under 15s,

and then I played for two years in the first XV.

There was a sense of "play up, play up and play the game".

You know, of being straight,

and fair, and honourable in your dealings.

There was a spirit of optimism in the face of hardship

during the decade after the Second World War.

But despite the pride the new working-class pupils

felt in their school, they could experience divided loyalties.

This often triggered rebellion against the rules.

Like many other grammar schools, Pengam played rugby as opposed to soccer,

a game that was frowned upon.

If you were caught playing soccer with a tennis ball at lunchtime,

you automatically went into detention.

I loved both sports.

I loved soccer because it was my father's sport,

and he was a very, very accomplished footballer -

he was a great all-round sportsman, actually -

but rugby had caught my imagination as well, so I loved both sports.

But I did, from the second and third form,

play football with a tennis ball in the yard during lunchtime,

in order to say "to hell with you" to authority.

Working-class children were often pulled one way by the grammar school world,

with its promise of success and upward mobility,

and pulled another by loyalty to family and friends

who had no such pretensions, as Vincent Calder discovered, to his cost.

We had elocution lessons, and I'd never seen anybody like this,

and he was making progress, it must have, because I came round,

and I was with somebody once, and I was talking,

and they said, "Oh, la-de-da!"

And that really cut me to the quick,

because I didn't want to be la-de-da.

Enough was enough, I don't want to be separated from my brothers any more than I am, and my family.

And I don't want to be la-de-da.

And so, I immediately thought...

..I'm not changing.

They're not going to change me, I am not changing. I am who I am.

But many working-class pupils did change.

Praise from teachers and the promise of a better future

were hard to resist, even if it did mean being cut off from your family.

When Barbara Jones went home behaving very differently from her parents, they reprimanded her.

I think it was worse because I was a boarder,

had I have been an ordinary grammar school, day girl,

I would have been going home to the normal home situation,

and I wouldn't have known any different.

But it was very hard, and I wouldn't take it.

But this was a conflict that there was.

Here was somebody who was disobedient,

and superior in their view,

and they felt threatened by this,

because I'd gone out of their comfort zone.

And they treated it in the only way they thought was necessary,

and that was to force me to comply.

It didn't work!

However, an even bigger problem was fitting in at school.

Some were terrified of being exposed as inferior, like Jan Garbutt.

Because I'd had such a narrow home background,

I hadn't realised how restricted my vocabulary actually was,

and I remember feeling very embarrassed in one lesson,

I don't remember what they were talking about,

but the aspect of pharmacy came up, and in my ignorance,

I assumed that pharmacy was to do with agriculture.

A comment was made about my ignorance of the fact.

And...

I was absolutely mortified,

mortified to the point that this day, I can still remember

where I sat in class at that time, which girl I sat behind,

and the feeling that I had

when I became aware that I'd made a faux pas in assuming that

pharmacy was to do with agriculture, and not another word for a chemist.

But for those with a special artistic or academic gift,

the whole atmosphere of grammar school could be liberating

and a welcome refuge from the cultural impoverishment of home.

It enabled the young Roy Strong to flourish. Nevertheless,

his father was keen for him to leave school at the earliest opportunity.

My father attempted to take me from school when I was 14.

Both my parents had left school when they were 14.

And he... By 14, it was clear that I had quite a high graphic skill,

and he'd found a cartoonist on a newspaper who wanted an apprentice,

but it was very heavily resisted by the school, I'm glad to say.

One of Roy's principal allies was his history teacher, Joan Henderson.

Roy responded with true devotion.

When I was at school, I used to send her Christmas cards.

Here's one of an 18th-century dandy, signed "R Strong, 3A".

This must be a bit further on, it's...

Again, always costumed figures, always retreat to the past.

The vital role teachers played at that grammar school, for me,

was that they gave me what my family couldn't give me.

Because they couldn't, because they hadn't got it,

they had not the education,

they had not the inclination towards the arts,

or any of the sort of things I was interested in,

at all, really.

And therefore, one suddenly came into contact with people

who were, to use that word, cultured.

But the skilled working classes had their own culture,

and were very proud of it.

For children who grew up in craft-based communities,

like those which served the shipbuilding industry in Northern Ireland,

the apprentice's skills had equal status to any academic knowledge learned at grammar school.

There was absolutely no feeling -

none whatever - that the grammar school boys

were in any way superior to their contemporaries who were in work.

And I can remember a chap who was an apprentice joiner

in the shipyard,

and there, after their third year of their apprenticeship,

they had to produce a work piece.

His work piece - almost medieval,

which he had to offer to the man he was apprentice to, was a jawbox.

And everybody thought it was so terrific,

and he was so evidently proud of it.

And... But you know, people like me admired him

for what he could do.

Just as he might have admired us, who knows, for being smart,

or having access to a bit of knowledge which he didn't share.

In the '50s, the biggest threat to grammar schools and their values

was the rise of the new and rebellious working-class teenage culture.

Originating with the Teddy boys, and driven by rock'n'roll music,

this promised a much more exciting world than book learning.

Most of all, it offered freedom from the rigid school rules

for boys like Vince Calder.

We were alive with a vibrancy,

which, when you sit in the class...

..hands on the desk,

or like this - you see me still do this, time and time again, fold arms.

That was how you'd spend your day.

Just imagine then, when you got out and you heard this music,

that burst you out, and you came alive.

# Well since my baby left me

# Well I found a new place to dwell

# Well it's down at the end of Lonely Street

# At Heartbreak Hotel... #

Heartbreak Hotel was the first record I ever bought,

and that described how I was feeling.

"Heartbreak Hotel". He sang that amazingly.

And that was... The rhythms and sounds were there,

this wonderful slow, drawn-out, agonising thing.

It was describing my teens.

I wanted to be somewhere else,

and I didn't know where I wanted to be.

The high ambitions of grammar schools for their pupils' future careers

were becoming out of step with the real lives of the new working-class teenagers.

Some simply could not afford to continue into the sixth form,

especially teenagers from poor families, like Jan Garbutt.

We all had to traipse into the headmistress' office, and discuss

hopes for further education, and what we intended to do.

When I told her that I'd been accepted on a hairdressing course,

she was really quite dismissive of the whole situation,

and sort of...didn't give me any encouragement.

She knew my home situation, she must have done,

known the type of situation that I was in at home,

and that further education,

certainly to university, was out of the question.

Jan became a hairdresser, and later manageress of a salon.

Very few of the first generation of post-war working-class pupils

who passed their 11+ and got to grammar school

progressed to the sixth form, especially the girls.

Barbara Jones's father was in no doubt that she had to start work.

There was no argument about it, no discussion.

That was it. So I had to get a job.

But I didn't work in a factory, like all the other girls of my era did.

One of the girls at school said that she'd applied for a job

as a GPO telephonist, and I thought, "That sounds really posh!"

"I don't know what a GPO telephonist is, but it sounds good!"

So I applied, too, to become a GPO telephonist.

By this time, I did know what it was,

and I did become a GPO telephonist.

But inspired by her grammar school education,

Barbara later became a civil servant, and a feminist,

committed to giving more opportunities to young people.

The temptation of teenage independence

prompted many working-class grammar school boys to leave,

and start a job soon as they could.

To buy into the lifestyle they wanted, they needed money.

In 1960, Vince Calder left school,

after deciding not to stay on in the sixth form.

It was my chance to be who I wanted to be,

not who somebody else wanted me to be.

I was going to dress, I was going to go, do what I wanted to do,

and all the discipline and all the restrictions that had been on me...

..couldn't take it any more.

The feeling of letting down his mother's grammar school

hopes and ambitions continues to haunt Vince to this day.

She wanted something special for me,

and I know, I...

Not when she was alive,

it had to be after she was dead,

that...what she wanted for me came through.

After a string of casual jobs,

Vince worked his way up to become an engineering designer.

But for less well-off working-class children

who overcame their initial resistance to the grammar school ethos of strict discipline,

the sixth form opened up a very different world,

with much more individual responsibility and opportunity.

As Neil Kinnock discovered.

I went into the sixth form, and my world changed.

Teachers started treating me as a 16, 17-year-old,

um, the whole tone of activity changed,

um...

There was...hardly any emphasis on discipline,

and the head pulled a masterstroke.

Instead of making me a sub-prefect,

which was usual in the first year of the sixth form,

he made me a full prefect immediately.

On the basis that awarding me responsibility would produce a positive result.

Neil Kinnock never looked back.

One of the leading political figures of his generation

in Britain and Europe, he's been called the greatest Prime Minister we ever had.

Had I succeeded in my various efforts to leave school after the age of 15 -

and they were repeated efforts! -

I would have...so dismayed my parents,

that they would have felt...betrayed, almost.

Because of the investment of hope, as well as material support,

that they'd made in me.

By the time I got to the sixth form, I was trying to paint Elizabethan miniatures.

They're all of the Virgin Queen, looking like a mobile Christmas tree, covered in jewels.

Roy Strong's interest in Elizabethan portraiture was guided by his dedicated history teacher,

Joan Henderson.

There was only one printed catalogue, 1898,

and it was in what is now the British library.

And she'd copied that in longhand.

In longhand, so that I could have it.

That is something incredible for a teacher to have done for a 16, 17-year-old.

Roy Strong's career quickly blossomed,

and after completing an art history PhD,

in 1967, he became the youngest director of the National Portrait Gallery, at the age of 31.

But Roy never forgot the huge debt he owed to his most inspirational teacher.

I always remember the first major book I wrote

on Elizabeth painting, The English Icon, I dedicated to her.

And she came up and had lunch with me,

then I was director of the Portrait Gallery.

And that was her book, that was me saying "Thank you".

"Thank you from the bottom of my heart."

Make me cry.

She gave me so much.

By the early 1960s, the grammar schools, despite their problems,

were helping to revitalise post-war Britain.

Just a minute, please.

Could we make those quavers a little more clear?

One, two.

Children from less privileged backgrounds were given the opportunities

that their parents could only have dreamt of.

Upward social mobility was in full swing.

Much of it was subconscious.

There was a conscious level

when you had to be familiar with this material in order to sit an exam.

But at a subconscious level, you were absorbing feelings,

and a taste for this subject,

which was going to remain with you all your life.

Bob McCartney went on to study law at Queens University Belfast.

He later became a barrister, and leader of the UK Unionist party.

There's that hackneyed phrase about, "What is education for?"

Is it to enable you to earn a living, or is it to teach you how to live?

Well, I think, in effect, it's both,

but if you can earn your living

doing something that you really love to do,

and appreciating all the smells and senses and feelings, it's marvellous.

Like a holiday!

I enjoyed every moment of my legal career.

For that reason.

But by the early '60s, the fate of the majority of schoolchildren

who didn't go to grammar school could no longer be ignored.

They went to secondary modern schools,

which became the only option after the technical schools

imagined by the 1944 Education Act never really took off.

Often underfunded, in dilapidated buildings,

the schools were seen to be second class.

I'm going to ask you some questions which are going to be similar

to those which you will have in your examination.

I want you to...

The 11+, always seen as a major hurdle,

now became ever more important.

Question number one...

Not passing, and not getting into grammar school,

meant being consigned to an inferior education.

The system appeared more and more unfair.

Sue Elliott was well aware of the importance of passing the 11+ exam

she took in 1962.

When that horrible

little thin envelope arrived at our house,

I knew that I'd failed, because that was how you knew.

If you had a nice big fat envelope, it meant you'd passed,

because that offered you all sorts of choices of local grammar schools,

and told you all about lovely uniforms,

and all the equipment you wanted.

And if you had a little thin envelope,

that meant that you were just told

which local secondary mod you were going to, no choice. That was it.

-Well, Janet, you're 11 years of age now, aren't you?

-Yes.

And therefore, you've left the primary school,

and you've come to the secondary school.

Secondary modern school, you know that is what it is called, don't you?

Yes. We're rather sorry Janet failed the 11+.

Well, I hardly think that "failed" is the right word, Mrs Kitchen.

Despite trying to convince parents and pupils to the contrary,

everybody knew that failing the 11+

meant failure on a much bigger scale.

My mum and dad were devastated.

They were very, very disappointed, I think, and upset.

They'd always said to me, "You can only do your best,

"and of course we'll still love you if you fail."

But I knew in my heart of hearts

that I had failed a very significant hurdle in life.

And that one way or another this was going to

affect my chances for the rest of my life.

The winners amongst the new '60s generation

would experience the final heyday of the grammar school system,

which was graded from top to bottom on the basis of ability.

Children who did well in their 11+ could win a scholarship to

one of the best schools in the country if they also did

exceptionally well in the school's entrance examination.

One of the top girls' schools in the North-West

was the Liverpool Institute High School for Girls.

Edwina Currie won a scholarship there in 1958.

The atmosphere was to encourage you to do your best.

One of the tasks of these very good teachers, totally dedicated teachers,

was to find out what was your best and push you in that direction,

push you further than you might naturally perhaps want to go.

So I arrived at the school with the other Margaret Bryce scholars

to find we were skipping the first year, straight into the second year.

From the word go, the brightest scholarship girls had to be high achievers.

THEY GREET THE TEACHER

That little group of special scholarship kids

were made to feel special, and pushed much harder.

Bien, Janet. Un port couteau.

Coming fifth or sixth was not good enough.

It may be good enough for the others, but you're a scholarship girl,

now you keep doing it.

It was a privilege, but it was a responsibility.

And words like duty just flowed, "You have a duty to do this.

"You can't let anyone down, you can't let yourself down,

"you're not going to let us down as teachers."

I think I've changed my mind a bit.

I think the poem isn't really statements of fact...

The top boys grammar school in the country was Manchester Grammar.

There was fierce competition to win a scholarship to MGS

but that was just the beginning of a relentless system of testing

and class positions, designed to push every pupil to the limit.

Michael Wood started there in 1959.

It was incredibly exciting,

because Manchester Grammar School changed everything.

The beginning was scary, and they had fortnightly tests.

Known as fortnightlies!

And you sit in the class according to where you did

in the exam for each fortnight.

And the first fortnightly was just sheer terror to me.

I had never done any languages, for example.

And I came, not bottom, but well into the 20s in a 32-person class.

There was some...

I definitely detected a kind of attitude on the part of the teacher

that "You should do better, Wood."

At Harrow County,

the school film, Makers Of Men, spelled out the school's message.

The new boys, as first formers, enter the school on their very first day,

feeling perhaps more than a little overawed by the occasion

and acutely aware that in this school

only the best will satisfy the demand.

The school measured its success by the number of pupils

who went on to Oxbridge, and by a long list of illustrious alumni.

When Michael Portillo won a scholarship there in 1964,

he knew what he was up against.

Competition was the very essence of the school, it's what drove it.

We all wanted to succeed so much.

The glittering prize was ahead of us.

The glittering prize particularly was to go to university

and to go to Oxford and Cambridge.

As though to rub it home, in the hall where we assembled every morning,

there was a thing called the honours board which recorded all the boys

over the generations who had managed to get to Oxford and Cambridge.

Each term we would see the names of boys that we knew

added in gold paint on to this beautiful wooden board.

Harrow County school was so successful,

its results were beginning to match

those of its famous public school neighbour.

Public schools like Harrow continued to educate

the children of Britain's wealthiest families.

In these exclusive fee-paying schools, privilege was entrenched.

But by the early '60s,

grammar school pupils were winning half of all Oxbridge places.

The aura of the public schools, however, persisted.

The school was set up in the shadow, literally, of Harrow School.

Despite all that our grammar schools did for us,

I don't think they ever made us quite as effortlessly confident

or even as effortlessly charming as those public schoolboys.

Grammar schools also developed their own pecking order.

The highest achieving schools recruited from children

who got the best results in their 11+.

-Good morning.

-Good morning, sir!

But all grammar schools went out of their way to encourage

the virtue of excellence in every aspect of school life.

Roy Greenslade went to Dagenham County High.

The implications of not being in

the premier league of grammar schools was not lost on Roy

or his contemporaries.

We were being educated on the understanding

that we could do useful jobs and we wouldn't do jobs like our parents.

But at the same time there was an understanding

that we weren't a first-rank grammar school

that could look to getting many people to university,

and there weren't as many universities.

Dagenham County High wasn't the best grammar school in Essex,

but they knew what they were good at.

One of the things about Dagenham was that football was the great leveller.

There was this enormous pride around County High - "OK, we are very aware

"that we are not quite up with Romford Royal Liberty,

"or Hornchurch Grammar, or Ilford County High -

"they seem to be a class apart.

"But, my goodness, we can play football

"and we can do it elegantly and brilliantly."

School sports were used not only to promote a spirit of achievement

within the school but also in interschool competitions.

This gave Bob Miller, Roy Greenslade's friend

from Dagenham High, a chance for his place in the sun.

My saving grace at that grammar school was that I was good at sport.

Sports, if you was not academically bright and therefore

when you got streamed they put you into, in my case, the D stream,

where you had to work at all the academic subjects,

some of which I liked, some of which I didn't,

there was always the fallback onto sport.

Of course, sport gave me the opportunity to represent Dagenham

at a district level and, in some cases, later on,

Essex at county level.

And all of this actually raised your status in the school

and for yourself, it raised your own self-esteem.

Sporting achievement helped many grammar schools create

a strong sense of pride and identity,

wherever they were in the academic league table.

When Paul Boateng arrived at Apsley Grammar School in 1966,

he was the only black boy in the school.

The headmaster was keen for him to do well.

I will never forget my first day.

I had a brilliant headmaster called VJ Wrigley.

So he takes me by the shoulder, gets me into some borrowed whites,

and then we go over to the cricket team and he says,

"This is the school's great hope.

"We are now going to sort out the county in cricket."

Unfortunately, he hadn't discussed this with me,

because I'm from Ghana, not Guyana,

and we don't do cricket in Ghana, we do football!

So I'm afraid I wasn't the great black hope of Hertfordshire cricket.

But what I was good at, and the headmaster soon cottoned on to this,

because he encouraged dissent and debate within his class,

the general knowledge class which he insisted on teaching himself,

I became captain of the school debating team,

and we won all sorts of trophies.

-ALL:

-And lead us not into temptation...

There was no debate, however,

as to which schools were at the bottom of the educational league table in the 1960s.

# A-a-a-aah-men. #

The secondary moderns taught around two-thirds of all Britain's children.

-Good morning, girls.

-Good morning, Miss May.

These children lived in a totally different world

to the grammar schools.

We all, at this school, which was actually a pretty big school,

we just felt we were different.

We didn't have anything to do with the grammar school kids -

we didn't play them at games, we didn't have joint productions,

we didn't meet them in any social or educational context at all.

But not all secondary modern schools failed their children.

Many aspired to give the best possible education to their pupils.

I suspected that the standard of teaching that we got

wasn't as good as that that the pupils at grammar school got.

But the head teacher at my secondary mod was ambitious -

he was ambitious for the school, he was ambitious for us.

He encouraged people to take exams.

It was a pretty good school of its type, really.

Could you give those out for me, Brenda, please?

Despite the brave attempts of some secondary modern schools

to escape from the stigma of failure,

the segregation of children was becoming a major political issue.

The 11+ selection process

and its consequences were becoming unacceptable.

May I have your attention, please?

Early experiments with large, modern comprehensive schools

which accepted all pupils in their area, whatever their ability,

were proving successful.

The Labour party led by Harold Wilson,

the first grammar school boy to achieve high office,

wanted the whole country to go comprehensive

and made it an election issue in 1964.

When I first went to my grammar school it was at exactly the time

of the October 1964 general election.

So, as soon as I got there, we were thrown into a mock election in the school

and I became the first year assistant to the Labour Party candidate.

And I remember I gave him the first piece of political advice I ever gave.

I said, "I've been talking to all the boys and you are going to lose,

"you're going to be crucified on this policy of comprehensivisation of the schools.

"In this grammar school this goes down so badly."

The dream of a new and fairer education system appealed to many parents,

including middle-class parents who had suffered

the indignity of their children failing the 11+.

We understood that there were two powerful criticisms

of the grammar schools.

One was that you had to pass an 11+

so your fate hung on your performance on a single day.

And the other problem was that those who went to secondary modern school

did not have the opportunities that we had,

didn't even have proper opportunities.

This was an issue the new Secretary of State for Education, Anthony Crosland,

made a priority after Labour's 1964 election victory.

The first thing we are doing, we're trying to get rid of something

that's become an absolute curse to children in this country.

We're getting rid of the 11+.

I think today almost all parents agree with us

that selection is bad, it's a chancy business, and it's unjust.

You can't divide children up at the age of 11

into 20% going to a superior education

and 80% to whom we say, "We're sorry, you're not up to it."

The new cultural icons of the '60s, like the Beatles,

three of whom were Liverpool grammar school boys, embraced a vision

of a different world that questioned the old conventional values.

# Shake it up baby now

# Shake it up baby

# Twist and shout

# Twist and shout... #

The grammar school was in danger of becoming out of touch

and irrelevant for the young generation.

But some schools rose to the challenge.

Somehow, in that particular time in the '60s,

the grammar school that I went to, anyway, was able to open up

and accommodate the excitement and the passion,

and the dissension of the times,

in ways that were very, very constructive.

# Your sons and your daughters... #

Grammar school boys like Paul were swept along with

the tide of student protest in the late' 60s,

adopting the new political heroes with their promises of revolutionary change.

# ..the times they are a changing. #

One of the most unlikely heroes was Chairman Mao,

whose Little Red Book sold more than a billion copies around the world.

We had gone down to London and we had brought 100 Little Red Books,

Chairman Mao's lexicon.

And the following Monday, we came to school.

Immediately after assembly, started selling them.

And during the lunch break, and waving them. I'll never forget that!

And the headmaster sort of looked at us, raised an eyebrow,

and passed on.

That was his way of dealing with rebellion.

And actually, it was very clever.

Because if he had tried to seize them

or had in some way indicated disapproval,

that would have made us even more rebellious

and given us a cause.

He knew how to deal with it, but, in a way,

he was much more pleased that we were taking an interest.

The passion for history Michael Wood developed

at Manchester Grammar School created its own controversies.

It was a passion he continued to explore

as a successful TV historian and writer.

1066 was the last occasion

on which England was conquered by a foreign invader.

And the Normans took over not a provincial backwater

but an older and in some respects a superior civilisation.

The real inspiration for Michael

was his history teacher at MGS - Cuthbert Seton.

We had a real point of disagreement -

he was really into Norman history and he loved the Normans,

and I was into Anglo-Saxon history

and I thought the Norman conquest was a catastrophe.

We'd sometimes argue about this.

In my last year, which was the anniversary of the Norman Conquest,

1966, 1066, there was a big magazine Sunday Times colour thing

by Field Marshal Montgomery, who was a great national hero in those days,

arguing that the Norman conquest had been a good thing

and the Anglo-Saxons were provincial, boorish long-haired drunkards

and only got civilisation through the Normans.

And I, sitting in Cuthbert Seton's history class,

wrote a reply from King Harold himself, you see.

And I sent this to the Sunday Times and they published it that week.

The long and short of it was he invited me

to the House of Lords to debate these things,

and I met Clement Attlee and it was an absolutely fantastic day.

You can imagine, for a northern grammar school kid

whose only trip to London had been to see United in a football match.

Grammar schools lower down the pecking order

also had high ambitions for their pupils.

Even the most difficult ones.

Rebellious sixth former Roy Greenslade had got into trouble

for a money-making scam he operated in the school library.

The headmaster called me in and he said,

"Look, what do you want? What do you really want?"

And I said, "Well, actually, I'd like to be a journalist."

And he scoffed in that really annoying way

and said, "You'll never be on The Times."

And I thought, "I don't want to be on The Times, really!"

But Roy's headmaster had no intention of writing him off.

What Mr Granger, God bless him, did,

was that he went to the local careers officer,

asked if anything was around and smoothed my path on to the local paper,

literally found me a job so that he could get rid of me,

which I am eternally grateful for.

Roy went on to become a journalist, media commentator and author.

He's now professor of journalism at City University, London.

Bob Miller left Dagenham County High without passing any of his O-levels.

He came from a traveller background

and started working on the markets with his family.

I was working at a shellfish barrow with my grandfather on a Sunday morning

and there was this queue, I remember,

on this particular Sunday, waiting for their shrimps and winkles

and in it was my careers officer,

and everyone was coming out worse the wear for drinks

and he said, "I've got an interview for you."

I said "Oh, good, lovely. Where's that?"

He said, "Grays Police Station, they're looking for police cadets."

Well, you could have heard a pin drop on the queue

and my grandfather said, "Police force?"

"You've got to be effing joking, in't ya?".

"Yeah, I think it would be good for you, Robert.

"They play lots of sport. Right up your street. I'm sure you'll do well.

"I'll give you the details if you pop in the office on Monday."

Well, that was it. Monday, I went in,

and the following Saturday, I took the exam

and joined the Essex Police as a police cadet.

Bob became a detective chief inspector.

In later life, he studied for a degree at the Open University

and in 2006, became founder and chairman of the TS Eliot Society.

New horizons were opening up for grammar school pupils

but even in a city like Liverpool, which was at the forefront of change,

the opportunities were far more limited for girls than boys.

At the Liverpool Institute for Girls,

one of the brightest students was Edwina Currie.

She felt suffocated by her background

and her only hope of escape was to go to university.

To go on to uni was a big ambition for a girl,

and I found myself constantly having to dream up reasons

why I wanted to do it.

The real reason I wanted to go to university was to get away from home

and to do it in a way that would not disgrace my parents

so it was very parallel to those girlfriends that got pregnant

to get away from home, to have their own home,

but I wasn't going to do that.

And I had to justify myself.

Edwina sat the Oxbridge entrance exam and interview.

She was confident of passing but needed to make a big impression

to win the scholarship she needed to pay her way.

It was just amazing. The whole experience is seared into my brain.

When I got home, the phone was ringing.

"Liverpool Telegram Office here.

"It says, 'St Anne's College, scholarship offered, reply immediately.' "

"Do I congratulate you?"

God, it's all those years ago.

I had my ticket to ride.

Never looked back.

After her career as a Conservative politician ended,

Edwina became a novelist and television personality.

By the late '60s, grammar schools were on the way out.

The Labour government persuaded and pressured them to go comprehensive.

More than half amalgamated with local secondary modern schools.

It was hoped the large comprehensive schools would create

a grammar school education for all, but all too often,

they inherited the low ambitions of the secondary moderns.

One of these was Sue Elliott's secondary modern,

which became a comprehensive in her final year.

My higher education options were pretty constrained really.

Nobody mentioned university to me.

I loved drama and I desperately wanted to do drama.

"No, I don't think drama school, no.

"No. We don't send anybody to drama school.

"How about teacher training college?

"You could do a drama course at teacher training college? How about that?"

Despite this lack of encouragement and opportunity,

Sue went on to become a writer and television executive,

serving on the board of London Weekend Television,

but a residue of insecurity remained.

I feel disadvantaged and have felt disadvantaged on many occasions

when everybody else around me is joining in,

but I'm thinking, "Oh, God, I don't quite know what to say"

and "Will I say the right thing?" and "Will they think I'm stupid?"

The Conservatives came to power in 1970

under an ex-grammar school pupil, Edward Heath.

His Education Secretary, another ex-grammar school pupil,

was Margaret Thatcher.

She was determined to reverse the demise of the grammar school

but the move to comprehensives had acquired so much momentum,

it proved unstoppable.

Most middle-class Tory voters supported the change,

not wanting to risk their children failing the 11+.

However, grammar school boys like Michael Portillo

didn't like what they saw.

As I was reaching the end of my grammar school education,

the word was out that the school would become comprehensivised.

Pretty surprising. We had a Conservative government,

Margaret Thatcher was Education Secretary, the local authority was Conservative.

But it was going to be comprehensivised.

They did it in a brutal way,

cos we had this outstanding sixth form of 300 boys,

so they decided to chop off the sixth form

and leave it as a school just for 11 to 15, 16,

so all the masters who were used to teaching A-level

and people to go to Oxford and Cambridge

were scattered to the four winds.

Michael Portillo won a scholarship to Cambridge,

then switched allegiance from Labour to Conservative,

rising to be a Cabinet minister before turning to broadcasting.

He still deeply regrets the loss of his old school.

The school was no longer able to deliver to future generations

the amazing opportunities that had offered to us,

and that seemed both stupid and it seemed like vandalism

and it seemed like a tragedy.

The end of the grammar school was sealed by a new Labour government

in 1974, with a renewed commitment to comprehensivisation.

The 1976 Education Act compels local education authorities

to introduce comprehensive education.

Grammar school boys like Paul Boateng,

who was in his final year at Apsley Grammar School,

were unaware of the significance of these sweeping changes.

There was a sense that something was going to change very clearly

and there was a sense, which the teachers clearly felt, of loss,

but we were so full of the expectation of life to come,

so it was only later, frankly, that we realised

that we had been part of an end of an era.

Paul Boateng became a Labour MP

and Britain's first black Cabinet minister.

He is now a member of the House of Lords.

The legacy of my school stayed with me for many years,

and when I became a Privy Councillor

and a right honourable, quote unquote,

for me the most touching part of all of that

was the letter I received from my old headmaster.

And... I actually find it quite hard even now to talk about that.

With enforced comprehensivisation,

most of the direct grant grammar schools

like Manchester Grammar School

left the state sector and became fee-paying public schools.

For those like Michael Wood, who had benefited from a grammar school education,

reform seemed inevitable,

but getting rid of the grammar schools was the wrong solution.

I had very mixed feelings when Manchester Grammar ceased to be a direct grant

cos people of very ordinary backgrounds did achieve at Manchester Grammar School.

It was more meritocratic perhaps than egalitarian.

But when somewhere has been that good as an educational institution,

obviously you feel...

..sadness and a sort of disquiet at the dismantling of the system,

which is what I felt then, even though I thoroughly approved

of the idea that those opportunities should be available to everybody.

and I remember, cos all of my friends in Wythenshawe,

who I used to play football with, at the age of 11 they got cut off,

and they went to a secondary mod or a tech, you know.

And it wasn't fair.

Many comprehensive schools have provided Britain's children

with a better education than they would have received

in secondary moderns and some grammar schools in the past.

But the standards of excellence once achieved by the best grammar schools

have been hard to match, resulting in an ever-widening gap

between state education and the public schools.

The legacy of the grammar schools and their rise and fall

is still politically very divisive.

We benefited so much.

We almost took it for granted that we would benefit

because we were the clever ones.

But everybody has a contribution to make in a modern democratic society.

That was missing when all we had was grammar schools.

The tragedy of comprehensives is in many parts of the country, it's still missing.

And the only kids who are getting a decent education are the ones whose parents can pay for it.

I may be a Tory but I'm a Scouse Tory, and I feel that's deeply wrong.

To have a country in which only money buys a good education

is deeply, deeply wrong.

Subtitling by Red Bee Media Ltd

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