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NOTES FROMTWO PRIMARY

SCHOOLSby Brian Jackson

AT THE education offices they showed me a map,and pointed out the schools where there werevacancies. That was the first time Id heard ofAbbeyford. I liked the idea at once: a small

fenland village with only a hundred children atthe school. Not that the officials at County Hallapproved of my choice: they didnt. What abouta secondary school? they said; We need menthere, and if youve got any qualifications youllhave a graded post and allowance in no timein some of these primary schools you might justdisappear. But no, in a rather unclear way, I hadcome for a primary school post, and nothing else.Very well then, what about Hixton school?You could probably have the top A stream nextyear if Mr. Ashby leaves, and youd certainlyget the first XI for either cricket or football.

Again I demurred: that wasnt what I wasattracted by in the primary school at all. Somefurther talk of the first XI (small 10 year oldboys being coached in the rudiments and pro-prieties of cricket) seemed of relevance to everyonethere except me. Of course that was merely myinnocencea couple of later interviews witheducation officers who ruthlessly questioned meon my Army record and my ability to play rugger,as prime qualifications for teaching seven yearold children, have now left me a little wiser. Well,I dont remember these conversations verbatim,

but odd phrases stick in the mind, and this wasthe kind of reception I met. I expect it goes on allthe time. I imagine that graduates in particularcan have a genuinely hard time getting intoprimary schools.

Anyway, they abandoned me to the Abbeyfordjob, and I was glad to have it. I was glad to beaway from O level, A level, school corpsand first elevens. I was starry-eyed and excitedabout education, very contemptuous of its merelysocial glamours; and my head was full of Mill andArnold and Newman and Lawrencea whirl of

unsorted, indeed disparate insights that I hopedwould clarify and precipitate as I learned to workwith children. As it happened I was lucky:Abbeyford turned out to be a very good school,though the authorities didnt know it. It didntgain more than the odd one or two 11 plus places,it didnt have a gilt Honours Board, or a firsteleven, or a Speech Day at which All WhoShould were invited to sit on the platform. Itdidnt even have printed Reports, to be signedand counter-signed and filled with a vast amountof arithmetical data. Abbeyford was a school ofno importance. It concerned itself with educationin a delightfully furtive way all of its own, andbegan teaching me from my very first week. Forinstance; instead of those Reports headed by theschool telephone number and followed by a long

list of subjects, each with a big box for the scoreand a little line for a three word comment(Vocabulary77.8 per centFairly Good), wegave some basic information about progress inEnglish and number work, followed by a pageor two of comment explaining what it all meant.This was highly inconvenient, very time-con-suming, quite untranslatable into graph form,and extremely helpful.

Naturally enough we were found out now andagain. School hours, for example, were from9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but the headmistress looked on

this as intelligent suggestion rather than bureau-cratic dogma. On warm sunny afternoons theschool would break up, class by class (naturewalks), and wander off to watch Michael Pottercatch grass snakes in his fathers field, or TommyCrowther fish for sticklebacks in the shadowedpools where the tree roots reached, slender andgreen, far out into the water. If it got really hotone of those July days when the children nolonger gaze longingly out of the windows, butmerely gasp upon the desksthen shed closeschool soon after lunch-time. Once, unfortunately,

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an Important Personage arrived when all thechildren had gone, and more unfortunately stillthe Important Personage had also brought alonga Very Important Personage with a double-

barrelled name. I never made out how the head-mistress persuaded them to accept the totalabsence of children in the school (I presume theynoticed). Perhaps they were still glowing aftertheir call at a very good and much-visited schoola few miles away where, class by class, the pupilsleaped to attention and in perfect time boomed orsqueaked Good afternoon Miss Coleman, Goodafternoon Mr. Farquahson-Dick.

But Abbeyford was out of that mainstream ofacademic life; and it was a sufficiently secludedand stimulating school to prevent me from goingback and teaching others the way I had alwaysbeen taughtbecoming one of the new spareparts that the educational machine generouslymanufactures for itself. I was very soon drawninto a kind of teaching that as a boy I had neverexperienced. It was teaching which was notobsessed with the drills designed to extend thecognitive surface of the mind: grammar, verymechanical arithmetic, put in the missing wordhere, add another to this list there. I began todiscover for myself what was gained if I cut outthe speed tests in mental arithmetic and insteadlet the children paint freely to music. Or if theyrelaxed in the cleared room whilst we had moremusic, and then gingerly, experimentally, built upa danced mime to it. I began to learn what aclassroom was, and to discover that it wassometimes better to transfer altogether to thesurrounding fields and woods. I began to exploremodes of physical education that were completelyalien to Swedish drill, and to follow others intechniques of free writing that accomplished themost strange and rewarding release of creativeprose. And then there were new ways withnumbers, a concern with concepts and relation-

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ships rather than that mere accountancy whichhad almost choked my own mathematical interestat school. All this was new to me, and veryexciting; and even now when I find myself

working in more troubling areas of education,concerning myself with the analysis of wasterather than the impetus of growth, memories ofAbbeyford come back as refreshing positives.

Odd scenes stick in the mind: a morning servicein the largest classroom with the children singingGeorge Herberts King of Glorie, King of Peace,and ending on that third verse:

Wherefore with my utmost artI will sing thee,

And the cream of all my heartI will bring thee.

and then closing their eyes for prayer, whilst my

attention wandered to the open door and thespring sunlight there and five black and whiteFriesians cropping close to the hedgerow. Andthen popping out from between them andclambering over the school wall came PeterStevens, very late and looking for an unobtrusiveway into school. At the door he stared con-fidently at the rows of little girls with screwed-upeyes and little boys contemplating their shoe-laces,and then as the Amen came in sight, he dis-appeared and was somehow with his class as theybegan the first lesson. Perhaps he did it everymorning? A touch of mischief in a small ruralschool, no more: but somehow triggering off awhole host of memories and feelings about therural strength on which Abbeyford drewstrandsof tradition, moments of community, the over-arching presence of the natural world. It would behard to draw out and define, but it was at Abbey-ford that I began to wonder if our educationsystem hadnt left behind in the unimportantschools, potencies that ought properly to becentral. But I only introduce the comment,without development, because we sometimes need

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reminding of the scattered resources and thequality of teaching available in infant and primaryschools. The superstructure that is built on thefoundations they prepare is not their fault; andthere is a ready basis here for a quite differenteducation system.

Abbeyford, because of its size, location and

staff, was a school out of the shadow of 11 plusall that pressure for fast selection and rejectionnecessary in order to choose from the statesschools that supplementary elite the economyneeds. We supplied few members for that ladder,and though everyone sat the perfectly openselection exam at 11, you might say that, by andlarge, the education system had rejected thechildren of Abbeyford from birth. They did notbegin with the social background that stateeducation endorses and heightens, and at schoolwe didnt offer them that constant training in thequick agilities of mind which is the way we eithermanufacture or pre-select the grammar schooltype. The natural pace of growth in the villageschool was slower, but I believe no poorer. Wewere not over concerned with that kind ofintelligence that is now the kingpin to 11 plusand future educational success. (That could be adistinguished movement of mind certainly, butit could also represent the merely crosswordpuzzle intellect, and its fast and forced develop-ment always demanded the neglect of otheraspects of the personality that to us were funda-mental). I dont think that in a cursory note like

this I could do justice to the quality of response,underlying quality of mind, that such a schoolnourished; but perhaps prose such as this froman eight year old girl helps quicken the thinkingwe need to do

It was half past six in the early morning, asummery scent came through the bedroom window.A pigeon was cooing softly from the Vicarsgarden. The soft breeze blew my hair over mypillow, and the half open window swayed gently toand fro. There was a crunching of gravel as dadout to the farm. He was quite late this morning Ithought.

The church clock struck half past which made

me jump. Pulling back the bed covers, I ran lightlyto the end of the bed and stared down to the watertank, which you could see quite plainly from mywindow as it was only a small bit of roof and thetank was only at the bottom.

There was a rippling movement on the water likea storm on the sea, but not half so rough. Then afaint pitter pat on the gravel as one of the catscrossed the yard. I wondered which one it was.

I lodged myself on the sill. I heard Susan rockingher cot, and yelling. She woke everyone up. I couldsmell the bacon being fried in the kitchen below.It was Saturday, so it didnt matter much whetherI got up early or late. But I knew that if I got uplate I wouldnt get any egg.

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The kind of human qualities pushing their wayinto language here (they seem to me to representthe school) neither make for or against 11 plussuccess. They are simply irrelevant.

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But the Abbeyfords, whether they are primaryor secondary schools, or merely classes withinschools radiating from a particular teacher, areuncharacteristic of our state education system.The main direction of education was betterrepresented by my next schoola large successfulcity school, where the children were streamedinto A, B, and C classes and where the head andthe A stream teachers knew the 11 plus successrate down to decimal places (when it was raisedfrom 21.2 per cent to 22.1 per cent, morningplaytime was doubled in celebration). The schoolwasnt only successful in the hunt for grammar

school places: its football, cricket, athletic andswimming teams won a shelf full of cups. Its choirand orchestra and school play were well known:its prefect system much admired. Every year alavish display of work was shown to parents inthe school hall. Its reputation was very high withthe local authority and with the parents of itssuccessful pupils.

But I spent my first year there with the C class,and soon began to realise that almost all theschools success was contained within the Astream. Not only were the best grammarians andarithmeticians there, in training for grammarschool entrance, but so were the best choirboys,violinists, football players, actors, cricketers. Nowthis seemed to me to be extraordinary, for it hadnot been true at Abbeyford that one-third of thechildren monopolised almost all the abilities ateverything. Yet here at Portland Primary Schoolwe already had, at the age of seven, three schoolswithin onean A school, a B school, and a Cschool.

Not everyone felt this problem. Most of mycolleagues were good and kindly people whoexplained all this simply in terms of divine

providence. It just so happened that every yearat Portland School there were about 30 or 40children of the A type, and of the B type, andof the C type. I certainly found myself teaching10 year old boys of the C type: dispirited,inattentive, careless of school and passionatelyfond of the life of the evenings. But the more I gotto know these boys, the more I felt the dis-crepancies between their school achievement andtheir human potential. I began to learn throughall the raw, direct incidents of the daily schoolround that these children (of the C type, of

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Photos on P7 and P22-23 by Henry Grant.

Cover photo and others by Roger Mayne.

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the grammar school type) had not been givento us in these neat categories: we had manufacturedthem. They were the product of the educationalsociety that we had established. A hard and uglyfact, and it needs to be put into hard and uglylanguage.

Society demanded that they be selected and

rejected at 11, therefore we pre-selected at 10,9, 8, 7, 6. The only parents we saw very muchof (A stream parents) endorsed this strongly, andthe whole activity of school life from the childrensself-esteem down to the quality and range of theirtext books, became bound up in it. I dont meaneveryone talked about 11 plusthey didnt. Butprofessional ambitions (A stream teacherdeputy head/headteacher), the desire to do aclear-cut job well (21.2 per cent to 22.1 per cent =results), the inevitable indolences of teaching(do your job, ask no questions of yourself), thevery idea of what was and what was not work

(arithmetic yes; art no), all were drawn into thedirections dictated by 11 plus. And as for thechildren in the B and C school, they felt them-selves, in a thousand and one tiny ways, judgedas inadequate. With perhaps only two years ofschool experience behind them, they acceptedthe assessments of their teachers, and like theirparents withdrew their energies from school life.By the time they reached me as the 10 year old Cs,they certainly were dull, no matter with whathopes and potentialities they had begun schoolfive years before. But the dullness, I began todiscover, was often enough only the glazed,protective surface, shielding the dormant childfrom the school society. The accelerated intellec-tual development of the A children had beengained at the expense of the diversion or thestunting of growth in others.

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I dont find it easy to prepare any balancednotes from the primary school. On the one handI want to communicate the existence of a traditionof teaching, not very articulate, but very different

from the dominant grammar school tradition.Of course youll find the grammar school traditionof teachinga whole network of classroommethods and valuesin public, comprehensive,grammar, primary and secondary modern schools.But I think its only in junior and infant schoolsthat youll find much of this other way of takingchildren. Its a style of teaching followed by manymen and women who have few academic quali-fications but a considerable openness to the richexperiment and advance that has taken place inthe last 40 years at the youngest levels of education.

What is so impressive about it is the way it drawsthe whole responsive child into education: theway it makes a total address to the personality.

And so I easily get very excited about primaryschools, and perhaps say oversharply thateducation sometimes turns into a narrower andmeaner thing as children get older. I may not

put it very well, but I think theres a truth here;and certainly when you find the glinting possibili-ties of primary education overshadowed by 11 plusand what that represents, when you see the subtleways in which selection strikes down to the infantschool, and when you learn what educationalwaste is in face-to-face human terms, then youhave some excuse for oversharpness. It needsspace to pull these tangled skeins apart, but as afinal note it is worth adding that an educationwhich is selective in the ways in which we nowknow itgrammar school and secondary modern,A class and B class in the primary schoolis in

the end selective in the parts of the personalitywhich it educates. That total address to the childwhich represents the primary school at its best isin the last analysis dependent upon its beingmade in a total society.

The plan for this supplement wasworked out with Brian Jackson, whoalso briefed contributors and gatheredthe material. Our thanks are due tohim, and to Alan Dawe, who providedan extensive first draft for the editorial

piece, and to Peter Theobalds whohelped in the selection of illustrations.

Douglas Brown has taught for 12 yearsin grammar schools. Author ofThomasHardy, A Book Of Modern Prose, SelectedPoems of George Herbert, etc.

Tony Crowe has taught English andDrama in both Grammar and Compre-hensive schools.

A. H. Halsey of the Faculty of Com-merce and Social Science, BirminghamUniversity, formerly visiting Professor

of Sociology, University of Chicago.Co-author of Social Class And EducationalOpportunity.

David Holbrook is an adult tutor ata Cambridgeshire village college. AuthorofEnglish For Maturity, Iron Honey, Gold,Childrens Games, etc.

Brian Jackson is a primary schoolteacher, who has just completed a studyof the scholarship boy.