Creating gender difference in the secondary modern school

Teachers upheld gender differences in Dovecot schools, and received local council support in doing so. The curriculum was different for boys and girls, and woodwork stations in the boys’ school were swapped out for cookery rooms in the girls’ school. Post-school destinations diverged, with housework training institutes widely attended by girls, and jobs in the printing trade for boys. Whole school projects and extracurricular trips were built around the assumption of gender roles. In England such restrictions on choice for boys and girls were significantly reduced after the National Curriculum in 1988, and would now be illegal under the terms of the 2010 Equality Act. One result of these more recent changes is that at secondary school, disadvantaged girls outperform boys from the same background in all areas except advanced maths at age ten (Key Stage 2). However, disadvantaged females are still under-represented in STEM subjects in higher education with twenty-four per cent choosing this route in 2013, as compared to forty-seven per cent of boys.¹³ Such statistics are accompanied by lower levels of self-belief among girls, even in those many subjects where they outperform boys, but also particularly, it seems, in maths.¹⁴

Evidence of the rigid and multifaceted strategies used by teachers to impose separate identities on girls and boys suggests that some of the roots of gender differences today may be in the passing of cultural attitudes around what is ‘boys’ work’ and ‘girls’ work’, and capabilities, between the two or three generations since then, even though the curriculum is no longer intentionally gender-divided.

The creation of gender difference in secondary modern schooling is no surprise. Before 1944, teachers educating most children up to the compulsory leaving age were advised by government to teach geography to girls in terms of fashion and food, and in terms of science for boys.¹⁵ Lynn Cook writes of female secondary modern students sewing sails and pennants, and males creating a boat’s hull, for a school boat building project in a school in 1949.¹⁶ Gary McCulloch emphasises the endorsement of such gendered approaches in the education of the ‘ordinary’ female that prepared them for ‘their lives in their homes in the future’ in the 1963 Newsom Report.¹⁷

While curricula in the grammar school were intentionally gender-neutral on the whole, gender affected education across all levels of English education including here.¹⁸ Some parents chose to support their sons’, but not daughters’, entry to the state grammar in the 1950s as they expected this to enhance boys’ future earning power, whereas daughters’ future successes were tied to whom they married.¹⁹ Men and women who did progress to university from grammar schools in England from the 1920s to the 1960s could have very different experiences. Women could not graduate from Cambridge until 1948, and female graduates from Birmingham in the 1960s went into teaching in far greater numbers than men.²⁰ Even as early-career academics in philosophy, women experienced nudging from male superiors who assumed their interest would be in moral and emotions-based, rather than the seemingly more technical analytic, variants. This was particularly the case at Oxford, where women academics such as Iris Murdoch and Mary Warnock were, on account of their gender, also often seen as curiosities in the 1950s.²¹

The construction of masculinity and femininity in some schools in the 1950s, and different experiences for men and women in education, is no surprise, then. Social-scientific texts of the time, often written by middle-class and female authors in the USA, France and England, acknowledged such constraining cultural assumptions, as well as challenging them.²² However, examples of secondary modern schools in Dovecot in the late 1940s and 1950s show that oppression of working-class women was intensifying just as middle-class women appeared to be experiencing more freedoms. Judith Hubback’s 1957 work, Wives Who Went to College, on the disappointments of the university-educated woman who was expected to return home rather than to the workplace, reflects a different experience of gender oppression than was experienced by most working-class secondary modern girls. The majority of such girls, as Val Brooks has shown, were not even offered the opportunity to take external examinations that might lead to university in 1960.²³ Laura Carter has indicated that many secondary modern schoolgirls were specifically let down by education because they wanted to enter hairdressing, but were not offered relevant qualifications, or pathways, through their schools.²⁴ The examples of gender-specific schooling at Dovecot illuminate the powerful currents that women’s rights advocates were fighting against from the 1950s onwards. Feminist social-scientific texts reassured activists of the validity of their mission by providing concrete, rational arguments and powerful concepts to challenge the gendered status quo strengthened by education after the war.

Educators at Dovecot Girls shaped students according to gender assumptions in various ways. Girls and boys learnt different things, and were encouraged to behave differently. Teaching of housecraft and household management was prioritised in Dovecot Girls. In April 1955, girls were taken to a department store to practise effective household planning, something routine across many secondary moderns.²⁵ At Dovecot the event was recorded in the log book:

A group of fourteen girls visited G.H. Lee’s store with Mrs. Palmer. They were shown furniture, china and glass. The visit was planned to help them make a wise selection when buying these items.²⁶

In the July 1955 Speech Day special prizes were also awarded for girls’ performance in ‘Housecraft’ and ‘Household Management’, thus incentivising hard work and commitment in these areas. On a tour of the school a few months later during a parents’ evening, parents were also shown around the Housecraft rooms, with current female students serving them ‘afternoon tea’.²⁷ This sent a message to parents that secondary education for girls should prepare them for future life in the home. Most parents in the 1950s would not have experienced secondary education themselves.²⁸ Thus educational authorities were tasked with first defining, then often explaining, the purpose of secondary schools to parents who may have trusted educators’ decisions to varying degrees.

In addition to an education that ensured girls identified personal success with mastery of housework, they were also encouraged to place great personal value on appearances, with a further special prize in successive prize days in the 1950s being offered for ‘Posture’.²⁹ Women’s value was also equated with their appearance as they entered universities in greater number in the first half of the twentieth century. One student at Birmingham remembered male students’ encouragement of the chancellor to ‘kiss’ the female graduates.³⁰

Teachers’ autonomy was perhaps at its greatest in the twentieth century in the secondary modern in the 1950s. Yet, the specific type of girls’ education delivered was endorsed and shaped by the wider environment that the school existed in. For instance, Liverpool City had the F.L. Calder School of Domestic Science (named after one of the founders of Domestic Science, Fanny Calder) which was one of the foundation colleges of John Moores University. Scores of school leavers went to the F.L. Calder College after completing their studies at Dovecot. At the college in the 1940s and 1950s, girls could and did study housework, dressmaking and first aid, among other topics. Afterwards, some went on to be housework teachers themselves.³¹ Domestic Science training and qualifications were held in such esteem that in 1952 the Liverpool Education Committee footed the bill for it in cases of need, as when they agreed ‘the fees for a two-years’ course in Institutional Management at the F.L. Calder College of Domestic Science (including a charge for dinners) be remitted in the case of Miss. [Bloggs]’.³² The Committee also subsidised all F.L. Calder students’ travel across the city for their classes.³³

Expectations of male students at Dovecot Boys were different than for the girls. Half a day of every week in all year levels was devoted to woodwork, where students would make a variety of things including violin stands.³⁴ Boys also applied their woodwork in the school play in 1948, praised for making ‘moving scenery’, where ‘the girls have handmade superb costumes’.³⁵ Boys were taught how to use the printing machine, most likely in the ‘Craft’ sessions that were separate from woodwork. The printing teacher, Mr D.M. Thomas, commented in 1947 that fifty per cent of the boys who had been trained to use the machine over the past decade had entered the printing trade.³⁶ No printing was taught in the girls’ school, as indicated in a credit on their 1954 Prize Day leaflet that stated it was ‘Printed by the boys of Dovecot Secondary Modern School’.³⁷ An education tailored for boys was supported by the local Liverpool community. The local press reported on the print-making skills learnt by boys at Dovecot and celebrated both the employment prospects of boys that resulted, and the skills of the teacher. There was further praise in the press for boys’ work in making their own cameras, and the quality of photographs they went on to develop in an afterschool club, and that were celebrated in a public exhibition in 1949. Thus we read that:

Thirty-eight certificates of merit were presented to pupils by Liverpool City Councillor Sydney Smart who congratulated the boys and their parents on the excellent work of the club evidenced by the display of prints.³⁸

Adulatory press coverage of Dovecot did not stop with boys’ printing expertise and excellence in photography. Boys from the school were also recorded as triumphing in a boxing match against a school in Leeds in 1947, and as drawing with boys from Roberts’ School Bootle the same year.³⁹

Contemporary evaluations by inspectors and in the press point to a varied education in the boys’ school, delivered by committed teachers. English, History, Geography, Arithmetic, Science, Art, Craft, Woodwork, Music and Physical Education were all taught, and by the school inspector’s estimation in 1952, taught well. The encouragement of independent reading was particularly praised, along with the library that the headmaster’s wife had built up.⁴⁰ The devotion of the printing teacher, Mr D.M. Thomas, who taught boys during the Craft lessons, was evident in interviews with the press in which he said that

The idea as in most of our school work, is to develop a sense of self-reliance in that a boy, when he leaves, knows he can do this, that and the other; to bring about in his mind a sense of craftsmanship, for accuracy and fineness of finish, and I find that printing does all these things.⁴¹

An investment in using education to instil a sense of accomplishment, confidence and care over future work was clearly a key goal of the classes this teacher delivered.

If parents hoped for their children to go on to higher education, or jobs that were different in nature from their own, though, these ambitions were less likely to be achieved at Dovecot. Printing was a common leavers’ job. Other destinations listed by the 1952 inspector included engineering and building trades, shop, factory and garden work. The inspector also noted that the boys’ parents had performed jobs that ranged from mining, to trawler fishing, to being a ship’s steward.⁴² Therefore, just as the boys that Laura Carter has considered in Coleridge School Cambridgeshire at this time, the destinations of most boys at Dovecot were manual and skilled labour work in line with the types of work conducted by their parents. At Dovecot, as at Coleridge, boys were also taken on trips to coal mines.⁴³ In the log book we see that in 1949 boys were taken to Old Boston Colliery in Lancashire – a trip that was ‘planned right to the coal face’.⁴⁴ Even though Mr Thomas claimed printing classes were non-vocational he took boys to Printing and Boundary Works at Prescot the year before the coal mine trip, in 1948.⁴⁵ The consistency of experiences between boys in this secondary modern in Liverpool and in Coleridge school indicates the uniformity of secondary modern experiences despite the absence of a national curriculum to standardise education up to age fourteen, as was the case in England after 1988. Inspectors, extension of pedagogical practices from the elementary schools in the pre-war system, and government reports fed into such uniformity.⁴⁶

The restricted curriculum in secondary moderns across England in the 1950s correlated with limited university access for most children attending these schools, with access rates to higher education in England in general standing at eight per cent in 1960.⁴⁷ Higher education refers to post-eighteen education that included universities, teacher training colleges, art and technical colleges.⁴⁸ Six boys were transferred from Dovecot to grammar schools between 1949 and 1952, where the curriculum placed less emphasis on craft.⁴⁹ However, the evidence of curriculum, school trips and destinations of leavers demonstrate that parents’ sense, as identified by Mandler, that secondary moderns offered limited access to higher education and associated professions was founded in reality.

There can be little doubt from these examples that part of a teacher’s expertise was in shaping working-class men and women for different social roles. The construction of gender identities in these schools was totalising – stretching from the curricula designed for the world of manual work for men, and housework for women, through to extracurricular trips geared to heighten women’s interest in shopping, and prescribed roles for boys and girls in supporting amateur dramatics. Finally, there were different expectations based on physicality – for girls the emphasis was good posture, and for boys it was on developing an imposing physicality with bodily power great enough to knock someone out.

Despite the straitjackets of the female and male curricula, not all aspects of schooling involved coercion into a pre-conceived gender identity. The personal qualities the printing teacher sought to develop in boys – independence of judgment, precision and care for instance – were not particularly gendered. Likewise, religious aspects of the school life for the girls celebrated characteristics that were universally desirable. Quoting the Ephesians in a 1955 School Assembly, teachers called on the female students to be ‘helping others in trouble or ill-health’, ‘to speak only that which is true, and to behave loyally to one another – may we never be afraid to admit our faults and to accept the blame’.⁵⁰ The different school ‘houses’ also venerated strong female role models who went against the grain. In the same assembly where the Ephesians were quoted, ‘Grace Darling’ House, for instance, celebrated their namesake. Darling was said to have ‘had physical courage and faith’ and, ‘persuaded her father’ who was a lighthouse keeper to go with her to save some shipwrecked men with the result that ‘Grace Darling went out and managed to rescue nine people from the wreck’. Darling’s act of heroism was deemed even more impressive as the male ‘crew of the life-boat refused to go out because of the fierceness of the storm and said that … Grace and her father would never reach the wreck’.⁵¹ Darling was therefore celebrated for her agency, critical judgment and willingness to challenge male wisdom – both of her father and the life-boat crew – to act in line with her conscience. Some female graduates of Dovecot were also able to go against the evident grain of the school, with one or two students attending the University of Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s.⁵²

Opportunities for boys who wished to subvert the gender norms constructed and sustained through their limited curriculum were limited. Any existing interest in needlework, cooking, or housecraft, or a potential to develop an interest, was thwarted for boys who would have no opportunity to study these subjects. Similarly, no opportunities were offered to girls to discover or pursue interests in photography, woodwork, metalwork or printing. There were therefore lost opportunities for society to benefit from individuals who may have excelled in these areas but whose access to them had been restricted. This system also normalised rigid and stereotypical thinking based on biological sex, as well as socio-economic background, as most children in secondary moderns were from the least affluent backgrounds in society. Despite this, there were contradictions inherent in gender ideology. Restriction of children’s subject choices were justified by an appeal to differences between the sexes, but moral life lessons and assemblies could hold up gender-neutral qualities for girls to aspire to, and indeed carried the message that women could be as physically and emotionally strong as men.

Gender stereotyping extended to some of the education of girls registered with special educational needs (SEN) at Dovecot in 1952. The criteria for SEN at Dovecot was to have an IQ of below seventy-eight, as measured on the Terman-Merrill scale. These children, of whom there were seventeen in total, were educated in a special school separate from the rest of the children. Nevertheless, four out of thirteen girls who were in the special school joined the girls in the mainstream school for housecraft lessons. On the whole, however, children in the special school were released from some aspects of gender segregation, as this part of the school was co-educational. In general, these co-educated children were regarded as having classes that effectively supported them to be ‘lively and responsive’ and also to ‘take some pride in their appearance’.⁵³ However, for the boys and most of the girls there was no engagement with the rest of the school, and limited specialist support. This example indicates that a commitment to the construction of gender difference was present in most facets of secondary modern schooling in Dovecot. However, in the hierarchy of priorities, gender construction took a back seat in favour of teaching basic social skills to children with SEN.

This evidence from Dovecot shows humans’ ability to subscribe to two contradictory goals at the same time – such as directing women to domesticity while also raising aspirations for their heroic leadership outside of the home. Secondly, it indicates an awareness that the gender divisions were artificially created but also an overriding belief among educators at this time that this narrowing of options was necessary in order for society to function. Finally, the inconsistencies in school cultures provided resources for potential activists to challenge the state-sanctioned oppression of men and women. Restrictions continued to be placed on girls when comprehensivisation started in Liverpool in 1967. As the Liverpool Education Committee reflected, there is ‘substantially greater provision of comprehensive places for boys than girls’. A cap on comprehensive school places was set at 1,950 for boys, and 1,500 for girls, even though there were only 215 fewer girls than boys to be placed that year.⁵⁴ Laura Carter has shown that this trend in LEAs awarding more places to boys than to girls persisted into the 1970s.⁵⁵ Parental attitudes in 1967 were in line with the council’s, with far more parents of boys (2,403 boys) than of girls (1,782 girls) placing the comprehensive as their first choice.⁵⁶ The next section will consider the relationship between parenting and secondary moderns in more detail.

Teacher expertise on ‘parenting’

In the 1940s and 1950s, teachers believed their social role extended to influence over parenting. Gendered assumptions continued when teachers believed that mothers were responsible for day-to-day childcare, and fathers were responsible for their sons’ job prospects at Dovecot Boys. Teachers were very direct, inviting mothers to talks on good parenting, and writing to fathers to encourage interest in their sons’ future employment, and communicating – in block letters on official communications – that parents should show an interest in what their children were learning. Teachers’ efforts to influence parenting also fit into a well-documented context of ‘moral panic’ about ‘juvenile delinquency’, and reflect their desire to communicate the expectations around a form of schooling – secondary – that most parents would not have experienced themselves.

There was a national ‘moral panic’ about juvenile delinquency after the Second World War that the government felt obliged to offer responses to and that culminated in a national conference in March 1949. Much of the perceived increase in youth crime after the war was, as government ministers themselves believed, down to changes in the way youth crime was counted, rather than any real increases.⁵⁷ At Dovecot, just as elsewhere, however, attempts to reduce youth crime were not just about appearances. Between 1949 and 1952, four students were transferred to approved schools because the school could no longer control them.⁵⁸ Specific criminal behaviour mentioned in the boys’ log book between 1947 and 1954 ranged from stealing apples from an orchard close to the school, to several counts of breaking and entering, one of larceny, and throwing fireworks into the adjoining girls’ school and causing physical harm to one of the students there as a result.⁵⁹ The last incident was reported in the girls’ school log book:

During playtime … a number of boys from St. Edwards School and one ex-pupil of the Boys Department made a nuisance by throwing lighted fire-works into the girl’s playground … a girl in Upper II … was burnt on the chest and the dress singed on the lapel. The police were informed and the group scattered.⁶⁰

There was, therefore, some criminal behaviour among boys at Dovecot. However, it was not above the national average, with four transfers to approved schools in a three-year period in line with rates recorded in some parts of the Midlands in the 1950s, one town in which had four per cent of fourteen-year-olds cautioned or convicted at the end of that decade. The criminologist John Barron Mays also reported that delinquency declined in Liverpool between 1951 and 1957.⁶¹ Some of the crimes that boys were accused of were also common among young people testing boundaries. In 1949, an East End vicar, for instance, when talking about delinquency there, confessed that ‘when I was a boy I would have jumped over a wall into an orchard and stolen apples’.⁶²

Consonant with trends at the time, H.V. Clark, the headmaster of Dovecot, in 1945 cited working mothers as one driver for juvenile delinquency. Writing in a local newspaper, The Prescot Reporter, Clark argued that ‘mothers with families should be discouraged from taking full employment’.⁶³ In the absence of concrete reasons for the causes of youth crime, cultural hostility to working mothers meant they were deemed culpable. Working women supplemented the family income, and so could have aided children’s education given that, as I will show Clark himself said elsewhere, delinquency in the form of bad attendance could stem from insufficient funds to buy adequate clothing. Nevertheless, the 1949 Home Office and Education Department conference on juvenile delinquency similarly laid the blame for this on the home and, as Bradley has argued, ‘a lack of knowledge of mothercraft’.⁶⁴ In 1950, the National Association of Headteachers concluded that working mothers caused youth crime.⁶⁵ The perception of failing mothers was no less entrenched at Dovecot School. A new headmaster joined the school in October 1947, Mr Ernest Winter, and he was committed to sharing expertise on parenting. In August 1948 Winter set up a talk to mothers from a famous Liverpool teacher, Miss Jessie Reid Crosbie, who by then had received an OBE for her services to education. Speaking to mothers at Dovecot in 1948, Crosbie called on them to see themselves as teachers, and to impose discipline in line with that identity. Crosbie referred to ‘that school called home’, and said that ‘mother is headmistress’. Teachers noted that Crosbie’s speech was ‘well received’.⁶⁶ However, a second talk by Crosbie in 1949, focused on the ‘Curfew and Delinquency’, was reported as poorly attended and ‘would have done good had the right parents attended. As it was it was preaching to the converted’.⁶⁷

If mothers were expected to lead home-based discipline, teachers aimed to strengthen fathers’ role in their children’s post-school employment. In 1948, letters were sent out by the school to fathers inviting them to attend a jobs evening. Members of the Juvenile Employment Bureau and school teachers would be present. The letter was clearly worded to set down norms that fathers should be adhering to in terms of their sons’ post-school prospects. Headmaster Winter wrote:

Your son will be leaving this school very shortly. No doubt you are anxious that he should be placed into suitable and congenial work in which he will have opportunity for promotion. You may also wish to consult the teachers of the school and you should certainly be aware of the types of employment now available … we are confident that fathers are already worrying this matter out for themselves and would welcome an opportunity to discuss it.⁶⁸

The response to these letters was ‘poor’ and in the end twelve out of a possible twenty-six fathers attended the employment event for school leavers.⁶⁹ Teachers continued to invest energy into influencing fathering practices, holding a ‘Father’s Night’ in December, the pamphlet for which had a statement in block capitals at its end urging parents to ‘WALK ROUND AND SPEAK TO ANY OF THE MASTERS … THEY WANT TO KNOW THE FATHERS AND MOTHERS OF THE BOYS THEY TEACH. PLEASE INTRODUCE YOURSELVES TO THEM SO THAT THEY CAN CONNECT YOU WITH YOUR OFFSPRING.’⁷⁰

Attendance at the Father’s Night was not recorded, but it is possible that the disappointing audience for the jobs night, and teachers’ impression that they had to literally shout at fathers (in capital letters) to show an interest in their children’s education may be due to a variety of factors. Firstly, some fathers’ seemingly hands-off approach to their children’s education may actually have been a rejection of the condescending tone of the invitations sent by the headmaster. Low turn-out at jobs night may have been because the boy already had a job set up for him, or the father was working late. Fathers’ scepticism about the value of education, and authority of teachers, may also have played a part. Certainly, in Jackson and Marsden’s study of grammar schools in Huddersfield in the 1950s, they locate a range of responses among working-class parents whose sons were at secondary school, and thus, oftentimes, were experiencing something they had not. One father was reported as entering his son’s study room repeatedly, disturbing him from studies, sometimes forcing conversations about Rugby League.⁷¹ While some fathers discussed their sons’ career choices in the 1950s, mothers also guided their children through school and into the job market. Thus teachers may have effectively targeted their employment evenings to mothers as much as to fathers at this time.⁷²

Dovecot teachers’ sense that their expertise was about parenting as much as about curriculum and pedagogy is clearly evident in the 1940s and 1950s. This fits into a long tradition of educators disciplining parents for not engaging with the obligatory schooling provided to school children by the state, and that dates back to 1880 when compulsory schooling up to ten was first introduced.⁷³ While teachers were quick to outline parents’ duties in supporting their children’s advancements, however, they were less quick at Dovecot, it would seem, to identify their own role as teachers in creating, as Tisdall has stated, the ‘artificially limited working class students’ horizons’.⁷⁴ Nevertheless, the transition to universal and free state secondary education after 1944 was, in itself, an advance. Teachers also acknowledged the limitations that social structures imposed on them and parents, regardless of what they saw as their own expertise. Thus, in 1944 Headmaster Clark was just as vocal about the need for basic quality standards for children’s shoes as he would be a year later about his view of the failings of the working mother. In pursuit of protections around school uniforms, Clark offered ‘three samples of children’s shoes’ to the press which had ‘been worn through in fourteen days’, noting that ‘both school attendance and the children’s health suffered from poor footwear.’⁷⁵

Parents’ support of their children’s education is evident in the comments made by teachers regarding parental attendance at school events which was often registered as reasonable, even if the teachers’ usual emphasis was on those parents who fell short of their expectations. Evidence of significant parental interest and concern with their children’s education in Liverpool comes out strongly in the 1960s, as elsewhere across the country, when parents came out against secondary modern schools and restricted educational opportunities for the least affluent in society.⁷⁶ In 1967, parental complaints about the allocation system used for comprehensives in their first year in the city were reported by the Education Committee. The first process of comprehensive selection forced parents to choose selection or a comprehensive school. If parents chose the selection test and their child failed, they would have to send their child to the secondary modern and could not then send them to the comprehensive school unless there were still places available after allocating those who put it as their first choice. The Liverpool Education Committee reported that

it has been suggested that this was a form of blackmail in that some parents felt obliged to choose comprehensive schools for fear of their children failing the selective examination and being obliged to take a place in a secondary modern school.⁷⁷

While teachers at secondary moderns such as Dovecot were quick to blame parents for a lack of interest in their children’s education, many parents were particularly sceptical about teachers’ own offerings to their children in these schools.

Inequality, inclusion and state intervention in early years parenting in English education today

Today, the role of state educators in enhancing equality of opportunity, and thus democracy, has expanded. Attempts to influence parenting now extend back to pregnancy. As in the 1950s, limited education of parents prompts educators’ action. For instance, the Family Nurse Partnership that was established with some success in 2007 offers parenting advice in the form of weekly nurse visits to first-time mums under the age of twenty-four, and with limited GCSE passes.⁷⁸ The Early Years Foundation Stage, launched in 2008, obliges early years practitioners to inform parents of strategies to support children’s learning at home in a bid to close performance gaps.⁷⁹ However, the current success in achieving such equality of opportunity continues to be constrained even with the bi-partite system dismantled and these early years interventions. One reason for this is because the best schools are often in the most affluent areas. Proximity-based school acceptance criteria mean that children in the nearby affluent homes have priority in attending these schools and poorer students are overlooked.⁸⁰ Children allocated to some of the alternative schools consider the possibility of knife crime and limited career opportunities and, at the ages of ten and eleven, express fear at this prospect.⁸¹ Finally, contrary to the almost total separation of students with SEN at Dovecot in the 1950s, since the 1994 Salamanca Statement mainstream schools in England have been committed to the principle of inclusion of students with SEN in mainstream classes. This notion of inclusion emphasises helping every child to feel ‘happy’, ‘calm’, and ‘able to build social relationships’. Teachers agree that this creation of belonging is a virtue. However, many question their ability to deliver this for all students amidst the countervailing pressure of limited teacher resources, school measurement and examination performance.⁸²

Since 1944, state secondary schools have been sites of democracy, and as such will always be imperfect in achieving this goal, which requires constant struggle to maintain and enhance it. Looking at the current profile of secondary education, with perspective from the 1950s, its democratic functioning can be strengthened by supporting feelings of belonging in schools, increasing equality of access to good schools, and educational organisations’ continued communication with parents about strategies to support children’s progress and development.

Notes

1. 1.  UK Parliament, 1928 Equal Franchise Act.

2. 2.  A.H. Halsey, A.F. Heath and J.M. Ridge, Origins and Destinations: Family, Class, and Education in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 27.

3. 3.  P. Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 7.

4. 4.  Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy, pp. 4–7.

5. 5.  J. Roberts and C. Turner, ‘Labour’s Education Policy: What Schools Can Expect’, TES Magazine, 20 September, 2024.

6. 6.  P. Mandler, ‘Educating the Nation I: Schools’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 24, (2014), pp. 5–28 at p. 10.

7. 7.  P. Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy, p. 7.

8. 8.  S. Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class (London: John Murray, 2014), p. 219.

9. 9.  Logbook entry 1967, Liverpool City Council Archives, 352 EDU 1/149/5 Dovecot Secondary Modern School for Girls, p. 231.

10. 10.  W.H.G. Armytage, ‘The 1870 Education Act’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 18.2 (1970), p. 128.

11. 11.  J.S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes 1860–1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 80, 81.

12. 12.  Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy, p. 44.

13. 13.  C. Cavaglia, S. Machin, S. McNally and J. Ruiz-Valenzuela, ‘Gender, Achievement, and Subject Choice in English Education’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36.4 (2020), p. 832.

14. 14.  E. Renold, ‘ “Square-girls”, Femininity and the Negotiation of Academic Success in the Primary School’, British Educational Research Journal, 27.5 (2001), pp. 580, 581; C. Cavaglia et al., ‘Gender, Achievement, and Subject Choice’, p. 830.

15. 15.  R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 219.

16. 16.  L. Cook, ‘The 1944 Education Act and Outdoor Education: From Policy to Practice’, History of Education, 28.2 (2010), p. 168.

17. 17.  G. McCulloch, ‘Towards a Social History of Secondary Modern Schools’, History of Education, 23.3 (1994), p. 286.

18. 18.  McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, p. 215.

19. 19.  S. Todd, Young Women, Work and Family in England, 1918–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 67, 68; Todd, The People, p. 221.

20. 20.  L. Schwarz, ‘In an Unyielding Hinterland: The Student Body 1900–1945’, in E.W. Ives, L.D. Schwarz and D. Drummond (eds.), The First Civic University: Birmingham, 1880–1990 (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2000), p. 263; C. Dyhouse, ‘Education’, in I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (ed.), Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Longman, 2001), pp. 119–33.

21. 21.  R. Germain, ‘A Philosophy to Fit “The Character of This Historical Period”? Responses to Jean-Paul Sartre in Some British and U.S. Philosophy Departments, c. 1945–1970’, Intellectual History Review, 30.4 (2019), pp. 693–735.

22. 22.  P. Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); R. Germain, ‘Reading The Second Sex in 1950s America’, Historical Journal, 56.4 (2013), pp. 1041–62; H. McCarthy, ‘Social Science and Married Women’s Employment in Post-War Britain’, Past and Present, 233.1 (2016), pp. 269–305; S. Tarrant, When Sex Became Gender (London: Routledge, 2013).

23. 23.  V. Brooks, ‘The Role of External Examinations in the Making of Secondary Modern Schools in England 1945–65’, History of Education, 37.3 (2008), pp. 447–67.

24. 24.  L. Carter ‘The Hairdresser Blues: British Women and the Secondary Modern School, 1946–72’, Twentieth Century British History, 34.4 (2023), pp. 728, 740.

25. 25.  Carter, ‘The Hairdresser Blues’, p. 736.

26. 26.  1 April, 1955, Liverpool Record Office, 352 EDU 1/149/5 Log book, Senior Girls, Dovecot, 7 Jan 1954–22 Aug 1967.

27. 27.  30 October 1955, 352 EDU 1/149/5.

28. 28.  Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy, pp. 1, 2.

29. 29.  12 July 1955, Speech Day, 352 EDU 1/149/5.

30. 30.  Dyhouse, ‘Education’, p. 121.

31. 31.  Front pages of the log book where destinations of school leavers are listed, 352 EDU 1/149/5.

32. 32.  21 July 1952 Liverpool Education Committee Minutes, Liverpool Record Office, 352 MIN/EDU II/21.

33. 33.  29 December 1952, 352 MIN/EDU II/1/21, p. 98.

34. 34.  1952 Report by H.M. Inspectors on Dovecot County Secondary School (Boys’ Department), Liverpool in Log Book, Senior Boys, Dovecot 18 October 1943–20 July 1967, 352 EDU1/149/2.

35. 35.  1 May, 1948, 352 EDU1/149/2.

36. 36.  Local press cutting filed on 28 November 1947, 352 EDU1/149/2.

37. 37.  Prize Day Leaflet 13 July 1954, 352 EDU 1/149/5.

38. 38.  Local Press cutting filed on March 1949, 352 EDU1/149/2.

39. 39.  Local Press cutting from The Reporter, filed in December 1947, 352 EDU1/149/2.

40. 40.  1952 Report by H.M. Inspectors on Dovecot County Secondary School (Boys’ Department) Liverpool, p. 3, 352 EDU1/149/2.

41. 41.  Local Press Cutting filed on 28 November 1947, 352 EDU1/149/2.

42. 42.  1952 Report by H. M. Inspectors on Dovecot County Secondary School (Boys’ Department) Liverpool, p. 2, 352 EDU1/149/2.

43. 43.  L. Carter, ‘ “Experimental” Secondary Modern Education in Britain, 1948–1958’, Cultural and Social History, 13.1 (2016), pp. 23–42 at pp. 28, 32.

44. 44.  15 February 1949, 352 EDU1/149/2.

45. 45.  11 February 1948, 352 EDU1/149/2.

46. 46.  G. McCulloch, ‘Towards a Social History’, pp. 278, 280, 281, 285.

47. 47.  P. Mandler, ‘Educating the Nation II: Universities’, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 25 (2015), pp. 1–26 at p. 4.

48. 48.  Mandler, ‘Educating the Nation II: Universities’, p. 4.

49. 49.  1952 Report by H.M. Inspectors on Dovecot County Secondary School (Boys’ Department) Liverpool, p. 2, 352 EDU1/149/2.

50. 50.  16 July 1955, School Service, 352 EDU 1/149/5.

51. 51.  16 July 1955, School Service, 352 EDU 1/149/5.

52. 52.  Front pages of the log book where destinations of school leavers are listed, 352 EDU 1/149/5.

53. 53.  1952 Report by H. M. Inspectors on Dovecot County Secondary School (Boys’ Department), Liverpool, 352 EDU1/149/2.

54. 54.  Pamphlet, ‘Transfer to Secondary Schools 1967’, 352 MIN/EDU II/1/30.

55. 55.  L. Carter, Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 202, 203.

56. 56.  Pamphlet, ‘Transfer to Secondary Schools 1967’, p. 2, 352 MIN/EDU II/1/30.

57. 57.  K. Bradley, ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the Public Sphere: Exploring Local and National Discourse in England, c. 1940–69’, Social History, 37.1 (2012), p. 24.

58. 58.  1952 Report by H.M. Inspectors on Dovecot County Secondary School (Boys’ Department), 352 EDU1/149/2.

59. 59.  2 September 1947 (apples); 30 January 1948 and 2 February 1949 (breaking and entering); 22 March 1949 (larceny), 352 EDU1/149/2.

60. 60.  27 October 1954, 352 EDU 1/149/5.

61. 61.  L. Tisdall, ‘Inside the “Blackboard Jungle”: Male Teachers and Male Pupils at English Secondary Modern Schools in Fact and Fiction, 1950 to 1959’, Cultural and Social History, 12.4 (2015), pp. 493, 494.

62. 62.  Bradley, ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the Public Sphere’, p. 31.

63. 63.  ‘The Anti-Social Child: More Data from Mr. Clark’, The Prescot Reporter, 2 February 1945, 352 EDU1/149/2.

64. 64.  Bradley, ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the Public Sphere’, p. 24.

65. 65.  Bradley, ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the Public Sphere’, p. 24.

66. 66.  31 August 1948, 352 EDU1/149/2.

67. 67.  22 March 1949, 352 EDU1/149/2.

68. 68.  12 February 1948, 352 EDU1/149/2.

69. 69.  19 February 1948, 352 EDU1/149/2.

70. 70.  20 December 1948, 352 EDU1/149/2.

71. 71.  B. Jackson and D. Marsden, Education and the Working Class (London: Pelican, 1962), p. 118.

72. 72.  S. Todd, The People, pp. 217, 220; Carter, ‘Hairdresser Blues’, p. 740.

73. 73.  G. McCulloch, ‘Compulsory School Attendance and the Elementary Education Act of 1870: 150 Years on’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 68.5 (2020), p. 532.

74. 74.  Tisdall, ‘Inside the “Blackboard Jungle”’, p. 489.

75. 75.  Express, 24 April, 1944, 352 EDU1/149/2.

76. 76.  Mandler, ‘Educating the Nation I’, pp. 15–19.

77. 77.  Pamphlet, ‘Secondary Schools Admissions 1968’, 352 MIN/EDU II/1/30.

78. 78.  J. Barnes, B. Howden, L. Niven and M. Ball, Eligibility for the Family Nurse Partnership Programme: Testing New Criteria (Birkbeck: University of London, 2012), p. 4.

79. 79.  G. Forrester, J. Pugh, R. Hudson and J. Rowley, ‘Understanding the World in the Early Years Foundation Stage: Practitioners’ Perspectives of Best Practice and Effective Provision’, Education 3–13, 50.8 (2022), pp. 1072–84.

80. 80.  S. Burgess, E. Greaves and A. Vignoles, School Places: A Fair Choice? School Choice, Inequality and Options for Reform of School Admissions in England (The Sutton Trust: London, Feb 2020), p. 2.

81. 81.  D. Reay, Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2017), pp. 86, 93.

82. 82.  Z. Williams-Brown and A. Hodkinson (eds.), International Issues in SEND and Inclusion: Perspectives Across Six Continents (Oxford: Routledge, 2023), pp. 82, 87, 90; E. Warnes, E.J. Done and H. Knowler, ‘Mainstream Teachers’ Concerns about Inclusive Education for Children with Special Educational Needs and Disability in England Under Pre-Pandemic Conditions’, Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs, 22.1 (2022), pp. 34–40.

References