it was the Taunton Commission of 1867, describing its own proposals for the three-tiered division of education, which commented: “It is obvious that these divisions correspond roughly, but by no means exactly, to the gradations of society”. Today, the correspondence is less exact, but it remains true that the education system both reflects and helps to perpetuate the existing class structure.

Has the education system, then, been impervious to change? There has in fact been persisrent pressure from many quarters. There has been the real and continuing pressure for an extension of education, which culminated in the provision of secondary education for all in the 1944 Act. Parallel with this, there has been a genuine, if confused, growth in the idea of educational equality—but this has been all too easily reconciled with the “tripartite system” which the Act offered. Changing social patterns have placed the system under considerable stress —and here it has yielded most ground. There is the simple and stark pressure of numbers: the “bulge” has become a step in the general population structure, steadily increasing proportionally the number of children and young people. The peak of this trend will not occur until 1965—the worst is still to come and, with the swing towards younger marriages, will continue in some form throughout this half of the century. There has also been the distinctive “trend” towards staying on longer at school.

By far the most direct force of change has been the social and technical consequences of modern industrial society. There has been the steady rise in the general importance of being properly qualified for the job. Not only are there now more jobs for which some qualification is required, but there are many more jobs where no specific expertise is asked for, but where a higher general standard of education is necessary. The same requirements for “general education” have been spreading rapidly over a much broader occupational field. People of good intelligence who used to spend their lives in middling occupations because of poor education now rise more rapidly, via the grammar school and further education, into the professional classes. There has been a general upgrading of the sort of post that is filled by any given level of intelligence. Generally, the proportion of technical and professional people in the labour force has expanded, and the social intake, through the grammar schools, widened. The growing complexity of administration and technology has quickly increased the importance, status and esteem of educational qualifications. Selective education is still, of course, the education of a minority—an elite. The assumption in maintained schools, the Crowther Report comments, is “that all boys and girls alike go to undiffrentiated primary schools, and that from the age of eleven onwards all go to a modern school unless they can show cause to the contrary.” But the elite is more broadly based, socially, and the openings to rise in the social-occupational structure more numerous. Even according to its own standards—intelligence testing at eleven—working class children are still heavily underrepresented in grammar schools, and middle class children under-represented in secondary moderns. Nevertheless, two-thirds of the children in maintained grammar schools are from families where both parents left school at fourteen, and nearly half of the pupils in the Sixth Forms of direct grant and maintained grammar schools are the children of manual workers. Less class bound than in previous times, the education system is still the creator of new social divisions, increasingly based on educational grounds. Thus there are more working class children in grammar schools than previously—but the gap between the grammar school boy who goes on to university or technical college and the secondary modern boy who leaves school at fifteen is wider than it has ever been.

In spite of all the changes, the British system of education is much more accurately adjusted to the new class-and-occupational structure than any comparable system. It is to the continuity of this “correspondence” that we owe the crippling division, denied in different ways in the American, Soviet and Scandinavian systems, between the “academic” and “non-academic” child, and hence the system of apartheid in schools between grammar and modern, and hence the emphasis upon streaming and selection at eleven. It is true that the intention of the 1944 Act was to “afford for all pupils opportunities for education, offering such a variety of institutions and training as may be desirable in view of their differing ages, abilities and aptitudes” (our italics). No question of superiority or inferiority was involved here, though the Act did accept the questionable principle of different schools for different aptitudes. But selection was justified as a convenient—if questionable—way of sorting the “aptitudes” between the “institutions”. In practice, however, inferiority or superiority is implied—failing the eleven plus is a lesson which a majority of our children learn before adolescence.

This division is primarily a social one—not an educational one. Dr. Halsey has shown (in “Intelligence and Ideology”) that selection at eleven is as much a test of class, income and environment as it is of natural intelligence, if indeed such a thing exists. The process is selfconfirming. It actively adjusts the child to his pre-determined occupational-class status. The child judged “dumb” at eleven stands a good chance of really being so by fifteen. The school will shape his estimation of what he is worth to himself and to society: the tragic falling away of competence and confidence in the secondary moderns—sometimes referred to as the process of “de-education”—is a tragic testimony to the success of the system in making people what it first judges them to be. Even the demand for a longer education is as much due to the school as to the pupil. A higher proportion of grammar school children who left school at fifteen go on to further education than the fifteen-year-old leavers from the secondary moderns. And many children who would leave school without question at fifteen, stay on and do very well indeed if they have the good fortune to be in a comprehensive. Selection at eleven is, educationally, highly suspect.

Not only is there no place for slow or unexpected development: there is no faith in the process of education itself to make real by fifteen what may be only potential at eleven. At eleven, “aptitudes” (potential lines of growth, certainly no more) are scaled as “abilities” (skills already formed and developed), and these differences in ability are equated with the whole child. The judgment is not that the child may become good at certain skills in the course of his education, but that he is not good at certain socially-approved skills (the negative is important) and therefore deficient as a human being. To this is added the extraordinary rider that the more deficient deserve less education—which is like arguing that the man who is most ill deserves least hospitalisation. The whole system is based upon a philosophy of scarcity. The only equality which operates is the equal right of the child to present himself at eleven to be graded into a manifestly unequal system.