by Arthur French, MA Oxon
In 1949 I was invited to go and work on the
headquarters staff of the West Riding of Yorkshire Education Committee, under A
B Clegg (later ‘Sir Alec’). My task was
to set up and run a loan collection of all kinds of teaching materials, but the
question of how best to use them was much in our minds, and I found myself a
member of a team offering courses on the content and methods of schooling. It was an exciting time.
I still have a report on “Ten Years of Change”
in West Riding Education – an illustrated book of 180 pages covering
1944-1954. One of Clegg’s key ideas was
that education should be less “imposed on the child”, and more “drawn from the
child”. If you take this seriously you
have to give more attention to the nature and development of the child’s inner
life – thoughts, feelings, values – and relationships with other
pupils and with teachers.
A new subject, called “Movement”, had a profound
effect. It was an exploration of the
range of available body-language, its links with inner life, and its effects on
others. It gave opportunities for
enriching the children’s vocabulary for feelings and behaviour. It led to a radical renewal of the content
of Physical Education, and to a more important place for Drama and Dance in the
curriculum. The rhythms of some
movement led to experiments in aspects of Art, and to a widespread interest in
italic handwriting!
Children were encouraged to evaluate their own
work. “What do you feel about what
you’ve done? Is there another way you
could try? What’s the best work you
have seen in the class? Does that
suggest anything you could do? ………”
They often learned to work together.
These ideas were spreading systematically from
school to school. When one school had
made considerable progress, the advisory team would invite other interested
teachers to come and watch, and to work alongside teachers more experienced in
the new methods and content. In more
substantial courses, advisers would ‘borrow’ a class of experienced
children! Primary Schools responded
first, but the ideas began to spread in Secondary Modern Schools.
It wasn’t just the curriculum that changed. There was a different atmosphere in many of
these schools. Children worked more
willingly on their “Three Rs”. I
remember one primary school where I photographed and filmed some of the
excellent Drama. They were also getting
the best results in the area in the “Eleven-Plus”. In one of my favourite secondary modern schools, the headmaster
wouldn’t have a school uniform ‘imposed on the child’, because he thought that
the way children dressed should be a part of the curriculum. Relationships between staff and pupils were
personal and influential.
Alas! About
that time people started setting up ‘comprehensive schools’. I was much in favour of ‘mixed ability’
groups; but I remember an HMI speaking to a group of us: “Grammar schools need
a few hundred pupils to maintain a viable Sixth Form, and they only take about
15% of the age-group – comprehensive schools will need to be about six times as
big.” The new schools had well over
1000 pupils, and often well over 100 staff.
It took teachers all their time to get to know their colleagues:
personal relationships with pupils became more and more tenuous. Moreover, for the first few years at least,
the head teachers and subject specialists inherited from the grammar schools
wielded a disproportionate influence.
Nobody realised what was being lost by failing to work on a ‘human’
scale. I believe that the cultural gulf
between generations which surfaced in the 1960s can be traced, in large part,
to this.
In 1955 I was invited to work in teacher education
in East Africa, where social and school conditions were very different: but
that’s another story. I came back to
south-east England in 1969, and the following year I began work for an LEA in
the in-service training of teachers there.
It seemed at first as if Clegg’s work in the West
Riding had never been heard of. A
newly-appointed HMI from ‘up north’ came into my office, and said (rather
unprofessionally, perhaps) “How complacent schools are around
here!” Yet there were interesting and
hopeful things going on in the neglected ‘affective’ side of education. The National Marriage Guidance Council
(later called “Relate”) had some brilliant people, offering to teachers
excellent courses on personal relationships (not just on sex!) using methods
which could be used with pupils too.
TACADE (an organisation concerned with tobacco, alcohol, and drug
addiction) had a man who did similar courses of wide application. Other bodies (including the Church of
England) were exploring new techniques of group work which could have been used
by teachers to help develop the ‘personal relationship’ aspects of teaching.
Some of us were encouraged by the proposal to
appoint extra teachers to schools as ‘professional tutors’. We hoped they might be trained to develop
team-work in the staff and group-work among the pupils, showing the importance
of feelings and relationships. In 1973
I was helping to run a course at Sussex University on “The Role of the
Professional Tutor”, when the oil crisis blew up, and government money for the
professional tutor project vanished.
Back in schools, we did our best to carry on the work. At the secondary school level, Lancashire County Education Committee (up north again!) had sponsored and published a scheme, “Active Tutorial Work”, for dealing with the personal side of life in tutor group time. I heard a report from Derbyshire of form tutors there who, after successfully using ‘ATW’, chortled and said: “I could use these methods in my subject teaching!” A few teachers down south took it up, but adults really need time to work together on their own relationship problems before they can use the methods with children. Enough time was rarely available.
At the other end of the school age-range, I
remember the deputy head of a First (5 – 8) School, who had been working on
feelings with their older children, and wanted to see whether it was worth
trying it with 5-year-olds. She spent
some time getting them to talk about pleasant feelings, and eventually asked:
“Are you ever frightened?” She told me
how the atmosphere of the class changed when one small boy said: “I’m
frightened when I wet my bed!” The
children almost visibly and audibly relaxed and opened up, as they realised
that they could trust this teacher to listen to their personal
problems. Work on feelings can free
children to do their more ‘academic’ work, even at age five.
As we went on with our efforts, bureaucratic
pressures, stemming from political attempts at ‘top-down’ reforms (so-called),
bore increasingly on us. In 1983 I was
told that my in-service training centre was being closed down, to be replaced
by something which would be “more of an instrument of central policy”! I took early retirement. A few months later I called in to my old
office, where there was an exhibition of children’s work done under the
initiative of a ‘peripatetic advisory teacher’. It was very impressive, and I asked the secretary to congratulate
the teacher for me. “Oh,” she said,
“she’s having to give up her advisory role, because it doesn’t fit the new
bureaucratic structures!”
This wasn’t quite the end of my hopes. In 1990 I moved to Devon. Through a friend, I found a primary school
which was taking relationships seriously.
They used a technique called “Circle Time”. The children achieved self-discipline. When a student teacher was so impressed by the atmosphere of the
place that he asked if he could bring colleagues for a visit, the Head asked
the top class to organise the event.
They did so, brilliantly, and were surprised that anyone should
congratulate them on it. Eventually,
the Head retired, ill. I suspect that
the tensions of running a school like that, in times like this, must have
played a part.
I am still convinced that many of our current
problems with young people could be relieved by education which took the inner
life and relationships more creatively.
Truancy; vandalism; unhealthy peer-group pressures; attitudes to sex,
drugs, money; racial prejudice ………… all could be influenced by one programme,
instead of pouring public funds into rules and regulations and their
enforcement (“imposed on the child”), and publicity campaigns.
Aged 83 now, I can do little except challenge
younger adults to take this more seriously.