In the first half of 2020, following the closure of schools across England and Wales in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government, professional bodies and the media focused on the impact of these closures on children’s welfare. While concerns were frequently expressed about students’ loss of access to formal education, the framing of these debates often emphasized that their social and emotional welfare was equally, if not more, important. Writing in the Guardian in June 2020, the educational psychologist Gavin Morgan stated that ‘Schools give much more to our children than merely opportunities to learn. They also promote the development of a child’s social emotional and mental health needs’.² A letter signed by 1,500 members of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in the same month, pressing the government to focus on the reopening of schools, echoed Morgan’s priorities, stating that ‘school is about much more than learning’ and outlining schools’ expected responsibilities as a ‘safety net’ for child safeguarding, identifying children in need and referring them on to the correct services.³

From a historical perspective, this is not always how schools’ welfare functions have been understood or prioritized. English and Welsh schools were first reframed as an institution of the welfare state and education as a ‘universal benefit’ by the 1944 Education Act, which established the right to separate secondary education after the age of eleven, promoting the abolition of all-age elementary schools.⁴ While this principle was not enshrined by the act itself, this led to the creation of a tripartite system of secondary school provision: state-educated students should attend either a grammar school, technical school or secondary modern. In practice, the limited provision of technical schools by most local authorities led to a bipartite split, with approximately seventy per cent of the school-age population, largely from working-class backgrounds, attending secondary modern schools in the 1950s, while approximately twenty per cent, largely from middle-class backgrounds, attended grammar schools.⁵ In Wales, the proportion of grammar schools was higher, and so the split was different: forty-five per cent of students attended grammar schools and forty-eight per cent attended secondary moderns in 1951.⁶ The introduction of comprehensive schools led to the gradual decline, although not the absolute extinction, of the tripartite system; in 1961, less than ten per cent of students were in comprehensives, but by the end of the 1960s, this had risen to a third and, by the end of the 1970s, to eighty per cent.⁷ Welsh schools went comprehensive even earlier, with eighty-five per cent of state-educated adolescents in comprehensives by 1980.⁸

Within this reconstructed system, the connection between schools and welfare was fundamentally transformed in two ways. First, schools and teachers took on a far greater range of formally defined welfare responsibilities. English and Welsh schools were compelled to provide free school meals and medical inspections from the early twentieth century onwards, but these statutory obligations focused on their students’ physical health. As Martin Lawn has argued, during the Second World War teachers became part of a social welfare administration, reluctantly accepting new duties such as the supervision of school meals, and this fundamentally reshaped their relationships with both the state and their pupils.⁹ Teachers also came into increased contact with welfare professionals such as educational psychologists, a service that was virtually non-existent before 1945, but rapidly expanded thereafter; there were 140 full-time educational psychologists in England and Wales by 1955 and 640 in 1972.¹⁰

Second, and more importantly, however, the idea that the welfare function of the school could be reduced to a specific set of subsidiary duties was challenged after 1945. The actual experience of attending school was now positioned as crucial to the promotion of children’s and adolescents’ welfare. The increasing popularity of child-centred education in primary and secondary modern schools in England and Wales, spearheaded by the national inspectorate, emphasized the importance of students’ emotional and social development in the classroom, alongside their physical and intellectual needs. Moreover, the school was reconfigured as the ideal space for healthy development to take place, because it was now organized strictly by chronological age, and regular interactions with one’s peer group were viewed as essential for psychological health.¹¹ School curricula were designed to meet the perceived requirements of the student’s present developmental psychological stage, linking lessons with the child or adolescent’s ‘natural interests’.¹² But although mainstream pedagogy now emphasized that education must have the interests of the student at its heart, children and adolescents were rarely consulted about what they wanted from their schools.

Histories of education in twentieth-century Britain have almost never engaged with the contemporary voices of school students.¹³ However, considering what students wrote about school while they were still enrolled is crucially important in understanding how schools affected children’s and adolescents’ welfare. As one fifteen year old wrote in 1962, addressing their imagined adult self:

This teenage writer recognized that adults could not straightforwardly speak ‘for’ their child or adolescent selves, and when they did, they tended to resort to cliché. Drawing from the epistemological insights of, for instance, black feminist ‘standpoint’ theory, it has been recognized that a group systematically oppressed by a particular institution or set of power relationships possesses a particular set of insights into the workings of their own oppression.¹⁵ This insightful subjectivity was precisely what children and adolescents lost when they left their primary or secondary school days behind them. Writing students’ voices back into histories of education compels us to write different histories.

The gradual but inexorable reframing of the connection between schools and welfare provision in England and Wales after 1945 assumed that attending school was an unquestionable social and emotional good.¹⁶ While not denying that individual students’ welfare may have been enhanced by their experience of schooling over this period, this chapter suggests that, when we look at what students themselves had to say about their schools, we can see that the nature of institutional education itself was in tension with its ability to deliver on such assumptions. Precisely because post-war schools were organized hierarchically by chronological age and operated compulsory attendance policies, they became the location where dominant conceptions of childhood and adolescence were most clearly established and enacted.¹⁷ Students were acutely aware of their lack of power in their relationships with adults, especially when they experienced intersectional oppression through identities such as, but not confined to, class, race and gender. These power imbalances were evident not solely through teachers’ control over the curriculum, but via the physical spaces students occupied during school hours and the ways in which they were tagged as institutionalized bodies, for example, in the enforcement of school uniform policies. Because of this, some students, far from being grateful for the benefits bestowed upon them, challenged the idea that schooling, in its institutional manifestation, could ever have a positive impact on their personal welfare.

The largest single study of children’s and adolescents’ views on schooling in the 1960s and 1970s was the competition run by former secondary modern school teacher and writer Edward Blishen in 1967, when, through The Observer, he invited over-elevens to describe ‘the school that I’d like’, and received over a thousand entries. The individual submissions, unfortunately, do not survive, but Blishen published a selection of what he thought were the most ‘intelligent, interesting, amusing, well-expressed’ excerpts in The School That I’d Like in 1969.¹⁸ This study has significant limitations. First, as this quotation suggests, it was filtered through Blishen’s own sensibilities; as a self-defined ‘progressive’, he was primed to find adolescents arguing for innovations that already formed part of the child-centred curriculum.¹⁹ Second, it seems evident that private and grammar school students were disproportionately represented in the entries that Blishen received and perhaps especially in those that he chose to quote in his book. Third, arguments with which he disagreed are not always included in the text; for example, Blishen noted that a ‘minority of girls … would cling to’ single-sex schools, but did not publish a single excerpt that made this argument, stating that he personally felt that single-sex schools were unnatural.²⁰

Alongside Blishen’s book, children’s and adolescents’ views on school can be found in numerous sociological and psychological studies from the 1960s and 1970s, and in other collections of essays written by young people. This chapter will draw principally from three such collections. The Multiple Marking of English Compositions (MMEC) and Development of Writing Abilities (DWA) projects were run by the Institute of Education (IoE) from 1962 to 1970. In the MMEC (1962–4), English adolescents attending the full range of secondary school types were asked to write essays on a variety of topics; in the DWA (1966–71), schoolwork completed in ordinary lessons was collected.²¹ This chapter will also use the 1969 sweep of the British National Child Development Survey (NCDS), which asked its more than 13,000 eleven-year-old participants to write an essay on ‘My life at 25’. Most of Blishen’s respondents and all of the MMEC and DWA participants were in secondary school; however, ninety-six per cent of the NCDS essays were completed while the cohort members were still in their last year of primary school.²² Alongside some scattered evidence from seven- to ten-year-olds, this allows us to consider students’ views on primary as well as secondary education throughout this chapter. Although the NCDS represented English and Welsh eleven year olds, and some of Blishen’s respondents were from Wales, place has not emerged as a significant variable in these writers’ accounts of their schooling.

All three of the archival collections were mediated by adults. MMEC and DWA participants were compelled to take part in these studies by the schools that they attended, and appear to have been told very little about their aims. The NCDS tracked a cohort born in a single week in 1958; this meant that, as the essay was often written in school, cohort members were strongly encouraged to engage with a piece of work that their peers were not required to complete. These sources, therefore, should not be taken as unmediated expressions of what students really thought about the schools they attended. Adolescent writers, in particular, were often keen to emphasize their maturity by reflecting back what they perceived to be hegemonic adult discourses about topics such as public demonstrations, juvenile delinquency and tabloid newspapers.²³ Nevertheless, writers who chose to write about schooling in the MMEC, DWA and NCDS studies – none of which ever solicited their participants’ views on education – often wrote more directly and critically about school than about other issues, perhaps encouraged by the new emphasis on the importance of personal experience in post-war creative writing assignments.²⁴ This recognition that they were writing from an ‘expert’ perspective that was not available to them when they wrote on other subjects was also evident in the responses of students who chose to enter Blishen’s competition.

This chapter will explore how students in post-war England and Wales responded to the physical spaces they occupied during school hours, the content of the curriculum and their unequal power relationships with teachers. It will recognize that not all children and adolescents were able to voice their views about school, although a minority of these silenced students may have made themselves ‘heard’ by refusing to attend school altogether. Students’ interventions, while perhaps understood and adopted in individual schools, had a limited long-term impact on the development of the education system in England and Wales, with the exception of the Schools Action Union’s school strikes opposing corporal punishment (1968–74).²⁵ Nevertheless, these narratives emphasize that the school has always exercised a fundamental influence on children’s and adolescents’ welfare, and that this influence has not been as universally benign as post-war and contemporary policymakers and welfare professionals have imagined.

Child-centred buildings

The use of space, both within the individual classroom and across the school building/s, was important for English and Welsh progressive educationalists from the inter-war period onwards.²⁶ The ideal model of the ‘child-centred’ school, however, changed over time. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, innovators such as Mary Bews, who was an adviser for Oxfordshire primary schools, promoted brightly painted classrooms with large windows that let in the light, and suggested that moveable tables and chairs should replace heavy fixed double desks. When considering the design of the school as a whole, the provision of a school hall and library was seen as desirable for communal school dinners, sports and private study.²⁷ Other Local Education Authorities (LEAs) were slower to change, as logbook records indicate; Cambridgeshire schools gradually modernized over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.²⁸ But even as LEAs caught up, radical, purpose-built schools shaped a new ideal, relying on moveable partitions to create an entirely flexible space. Finmere, designed by David and Mary Medd, was unveiled in Oxfordshire in 1959 and became the model for later primary schools such as Eveline Lowe in Camberwell, which opened in 1966.²⁹ However, the vast majority of students in England and Wales would not have been educated in this kind of building.

While redesigning classroom and school layouts to facilitate child-centred learning, post-war progressives did not prioritize the aspects of schools that drew most criticism from the students themselves. Children’s and adolescents’ concerns, as recorded in Blishen’s study, were often very practical. Schools were too hot or too cold; the toilets were badly kept, with broken locks, and too far away from classrooms; furniture was uncomfortable and too small; noise was a persistent issue, from both within and without the school.³⁰ While Blishen’s respondents were virtually all of secondary school age, research conducted by John and Elizabeth Newson with seven-year-old children in Nottingham in the mid-1960s revealed a similar set of worries.³¹ Primary school children hated having to get changed for physical exercise in front of the whole class because there were no separate changing rooms, with working-class children experiencing this as a particular ordeal due to the different norms of bodily modesty they had been taught.³² Outdoor play space was also important, especially for children; this topic cannot be dealt with adequately here, but it is worth noting that, as with school buildings, the most elaborate child-centred recommendations for playgrounds were not adopted by the majority of schools, who were still dealing with practical problems like resurfacing outdoor areas to avoid injuries.³³

The location of the school building could also be a persistent irritant to students, especially those attending secondary modern schools, which tended to be sited in more deprived industrial urban areas. The Newsom Report of 1963, which focused on secondary modern and comprehensive education, illustrated a number of especially egregious examples, including a school in the Midlands which was ‘situated alongside a large sauce and pickle factory, and there is also a large brewery just behind it. The odours of vinegar and beer are constantly present and the air is full of soot particles’.³⁴ The practical impact of these kinds of noisy, smelly locations is indicated, unintentionally, by a group of essays collected in 1966 from a grammar school in Chiswick by the DWA project. Asked by the teacher to describe their immediate surroundings, this group of eleven year olds, who were in their first week at their new school, focused upon the distractions. The school sat at the intersection of a number of plane routes, so ‘every now and then an aeroplane flies over head making so much noise that the teacher has to stop talking to us until the aeroplane has passed over’, wrote Harry, while Jack, like a number of his classmates, was watching the busy Chertsey Road outside the window: ‘A “Watney’s” beer lorry has just passed … A motor bike has just passed by. “What a racket! I bet it couldnt make any more noise if it tried.” ’³⁵ This problem related to the age of the school buildings; this school occupied premises built in 1916 and 1926, when the weight of traffic was presumably lower and flight paths were not an issue.³⁶

The promotion of ‘hands-on’ learning by child-centred educationalists often required expensive new facilities, especially for science and maths, but students pointed out that it made no sense to invest in technology without first ensuring that the basic provisions of the school building were up to scratch. As fourteen-year-old Elen wrote to Blishen:

Even the minority of children and adolescents who occupied more ‘modern’ buildings might have found that, despite the efforts of the designers, they did not suit their priorities and needs. One particular point of conflict was the focus on the flow of the teaching situation rather than the students’ own physical comfort. In 1970, Tom was a fourth-form student at the direct grant boys’ grammar school Haberdashers’ Aske’s in London, which had moved site in 1961 because the facilities at its previous site had been deemed unsuitable by the Ministry of Education.³⁸ In a collection of young people’s essays published by the IoE in 1970, he criticized the rationale behind its separate subject blocks, indicating a sharp grasp of the principles underlying its construction:

Open-plan buildings also often denied young people another of their consistently expressed wishes: they wanted a private space of their own where they could retreat during the school day to socialize with peers or simply be by themselves. The lack of space could be a particular issue for girls, who were more likely to prefer to stay indoors during break-time for private chats with their peers. As fourteen-year-old Janet wrote to Blishen, ‘We would not be thrown out at lunchtime but would be allowed to go somewhere to sit and talk.’⁴⁰ A group of girls writing in Spare Rib in 1980 pointed out that ‘In an average comprehensive school, younger students are particularly discriminated against … They are virtually locked out of rooms except for lesson time, and have nowhere to go except crowded, cold, noisy places’.⁴¹ Being forced out into the playground rather than having space, like the teachers, to socialize privately – the majority of schools had staffrooms by the 1960s – further underlined the inferior status of children and adolescents.⁴²

Teachers and power relationships

While buildings and facilities were a key concern for children and adolescents who attended post-war English and Welsh schools, the way they were treated by their teachers, and the power they possessed within the school’s hierarchical structure, was an equal priority. Some respondents to Blishen’s 1967 competition explicitly emphasized that power relationships were more significant than the space within which they were taught. ‘S’, a fifteen-year-old boy, wrote:

These, however, were not the views held by post-war child-centred educationalists. Unlike some inter-war progressives and the radical minority of ‘deschoolers’ who arose in Britain and the US in the 1970s, they had little interest in giving students more formal power within the school.⁴⁴

Power imbalances in schools weighed especially heavily upon students of colour, who experienced institutional racism within the school setting. Students of West Indian or African origin tended to be stereotyped as ‘loud’ and troublesome.⁴⁵ South Asian students were pigeonholed as unrealistically ambitious, if they were boys, or passive and oppressed, if they were girls. In an autobiography he wrote in 1971, fourteen-year-old Intiaz described his London secondary school experience so far, remembering how he had had to prove his intelligence. Initially, he was confined to a lower set, but he was saved by writing a poem which ‘proved itself imagative [imaginative] to the teachers … That poem expressed full force of my Brain and transford [transferred] to a better line of class … But I know I will not stop their, I will move on to better things which will make this place look like trase [trash] from the Dustbins.’⁴⁶ South Asian girls encountered stereotypes about their own limited horizons and familial expectations, as Pratibha Parmar and Nadira Mirza wrote in Spare Rib in 1981, quoting a range of female South Asian students. They noted that English as a Second Language (ESL) lessons were compulsory for Asian students in some schools, even those who were born in Britain, and when Muslim girls campaigned to wear shalwar [traditional trousers] in school, the schools refused their demands by claiming they were being pressured by their parents, ‘so that the school then takes on the role of the girls’ saviour against their religion and tyrannical parents’.⁴⁷ Societal racism already weighted the scales against young people of colour, so it was unsurprising that schools reproduced and reinforced these hierarchies.

In secondary modern schools, frequent changes of teacher cemented the impression that working-class students were being passed off with poor staff who were not invested in their jobs and could not be bothered to see out the school year. The Newsom Report noted that ‘Of the teachers who were on the staff when the students entered the schools in 1958, only half the women were still there in 1961, and about two thirds of the men’, and quoted some observations from the students themselves: ‘teachers came and went like water’; ‘There was always a change of teachers in my form. That’s the reason most of us were uninterested and glad to leave.’⁴⁸ This was backed up by the essays submitted to Blishen, with sixteen-year-old Janet writing that in her ideal school ‘the staff would have to be prepared not to leave in the middle of the year, as they seem to – at least, in my present school’.⁴⁹ Again, these concerns weighed especially heavily upon black and ethnic minority students, who suspected that classes with a large proportion of students of colour were assigned to the most incompetent or junior members of the teaching staff.⁵⁰ One black student at a secondary modern school, interviewed by the sociological researchers Derek Humphrey and Gus John in the late 1960s, said ‘The teachers in my school need to be sitting in with the class and being taught. We seem to be landed with a load of teachers who have just got through their teacher training. Sometimes I wonder how some of them did it.’⁵¹

Students also emphasized that they wanted to be treated as adults by their teachers, especially once they had entered adolescence. A consistent complaint in the quotations from fifteen-year-old students in the Newsom Report was that they were ‘treated like children’.⁵² This was also a frequent refrain in the essays submitted to Blishen. Judith, who was thirteen, wrote that in her ideal school ‘The relationship between teacher and student would be changed … both teacher and student would learn together’, while fourteen-year-old Eveline thought that ‘The students should be treated as people, and not as if they had no right to breathe in the same air as the staff.’⁵³ Symbols of subordination, such as uniform, were consistently resisted, especially by girls, although a minority of students preferred wearing a uniform because they felt it led to greater equality among the student body.⁵⁴ Such complaints were voiced by students at the time but were not taken seriously. The Newsom Report, despite being at least partially sympathetic to adolescents’ concerns when they fitted the report’s priorities, suggested that: ‘They [the students] are not necessarily grown-up or logical in the reasons which weigh heavily with them: “I left school at fifteen because of all this discipline and because the school uniform was navy blue” is a not untypical statement.’⁵⁵

Primary-aged children were less likely to make explicit bids for equality, but they also recognized their relative lack of power in relation to their teachers and how it affected their time at school, asking instead that teachers exercise this power fairly and transparently, without resorting to physical or emotional violence.⁵⁶ Seven-year-old Kirsty wrote to Blishen that she ‘would like a school that did not tell you off much and when it did tell you off theyd only tell you what youd done wrong and not to do it again. They only say your nauty you shouldn’t have done it but quite often we dont know what weve done wrong.’⁵⁷ In the NCDS essays, a number of the respondents imagined becoming better schoolteachers themselves when they were twenty-five. One girl wrote that ‘I would not pick one girl out of the class as she would be called the teacher pet, I would give everyone a chance to go messagges for me … I would be fair and only put work on the wall if it was good not because I like the girl.’⁵⁸ The other option was to imagine oneself on the other end of this unequal power relationship and to revel in it: ‘I think it would be nice to be a teacher so I could boss children about’; ‘I enjoy being a teacher. There is hardly a few days that pass without I spanking some child.’⁵⁹

As these scenarios revealed, some primary-aged children viewed their teachers as distant, frightening figures. John and Elizabeth Newson’s study of seven-year-old children in Nottingham in 1965 did not directly question children about their school experiences, but by interviewing their mothers, they found that the single biggest complaint against teachers was shouting, especially when it formed part of a collective punishment. A soap processor’s wife recalled her daughter’s distress at the behaviour of her teacher: ‘He had them all in the hall, he was telling them all off, and yet she’d done nothing wrong.’⁶⁰ Especially for younger children, this kind of emotional violence could be as upsetting as corporal punishment, which they were less likely to experience in school at such a young age. Existing histories of education rarely consider teachers’ relationship with their pupils beyond the contested question of physical punishment, but both children’s and adolescents’ narratives demonstrate how significant these relationships were.⁶¹

The curriculum, age and child psychology

Child-centred educationalists placed the curriculum front and centre in the school reforms they promoted.⁶² Simplified and popularized rules drawn from developmental psychology about when students acquired certain cognitive capacities helped to shape their recommendations for the curriculum. Most significant among these was that both children and ‘non-academic’ adolescents were only able to engage with topics that were immediately relevant to their own lives.⁶³ Like school buildings, curricular fashions changed over the course of this period, but the focus on an education that would be practical, realistic and – for adolescents – vocational remained constant across these decades. Vocational education attracted adolescent supporters among both Blishen’s predominantly middle-class sample and the working-class adolescents questioned in the research for the Newsom Report.⁶⁴ Angela, thirteen, said that in her ideal school, she would ‘go around asking the students what they would like to be when they grow up’ and tailor their curriculum accordingly, whereas Stephen, also thirteen, suggested that ‘When boys came to the school they would be asked what they were particularly interested in’ and that subjects would be designed around that interest.⁶⁵ However, the students’ versions of this kind of vocational education were centred on individual choice; in reality, vocational education in secondary modern and comprehensive schools could confirm class and gender stereotypes by directing students towards unskilled and gendered occupations.⁶⁶

Grammar school students who wrote to Blishen reflected child-centred recommendations by being highly critical of the formal education that they frequently received. Thirteen-year-old Stephen described a dull maths lesson in his grammar school: ‘“Right then, get on with pages seventy-two to seventy-six”. The heads bow down and pens begin to scratch. A few poor boys, still not understanding, sit waiting anxiously for the bell’.⁶⁷ Sixteen-year-old Nicola imagined being taught by a succession of lecturers who made the lessons engaging and treated the students as equals, with one, Chris, overseeing ‘an animated political argument’ about Georgian history, but at the end of her account, ‘I walk along the road in a daze, my dream fading, slowly coming back to reality and my grim, Gothic-fronted grammar school.’⁶⁸

Nevertheless, the recipients of a more child-centred education, who tended to be working-class students in secondary modern or comprehensive schools, were not always especially enthused by it. Primary-aged children, who experienced more educational change on average than their secondary-aged counterparts across this period, were more likely to take no interest in curricular changes at all or to fall back on more traditional educational preferences. Child-centred shibboleths about the natural interests and abilities of seven- to eleven-year-olds promoted practical and active methods such as project work. However, this approach was not always received positively by primary school students. Eleven-year-old Isabel, another of Blishen’s respondents, wanted an ‘old-fashioned’ school, stipulating that:

This ‘hands-on’ approach also did not suit eleven-year-old Lalage, who argued that ‘This school would only have people like me who like writing stories and poetry ... There would be no handwork and we’d have maths without the problems.’⁷⁰ Nine-year-old Gaye had clearly experienced a more practically orientated form of primary education, but it still did not fit what she was actually interested in. In her ideal school, she wrote ‘We wouldn’t make silly stuffed animals for babies we would make mod clothes for our dollies. We would be taught how to drive a car and sensible things like that, how to cook nice things not fish.’⁷¹

Specific child-centred innovations were often explicitly resented by secondary modern or comprehensive school students, even when they were the kinds of innovations that grammar school students had longed for. The Newsom Report noted multiple complaints about debates from working-class students who were not confident in articulating their ideas in a school setting: ‘But when they say to you “What do you think?” well, there’s nothing to say and you begin to dread discussion lesson in case he asks you for your opinion and you don’t know anything about the subject.’⁷² Girls could feel especially challenged by this kind of discussion-orientated approach, because they were less likely to speak up in class than boys.⁷³ The HMI Survey Girls and Science (1980) highlighted that ‘hands-on’ approaches in science that relied on the students asking questions and working out things for themselves could disadvantage girls, who lacked the practical knowledge that boys acquired at home; one female student wanted ‘all-girls [science] classes’ because ‘you tend to feel overshadowed in a class, especially by boys who tend to have a better flair for the subject. This makes you feel embarrassed or stupid about asking for something to be explained.’⁷⁴ Co-educational secondary schools became the norm by the 1970s, with less than a third of state secondaries remaining single-sex, but as this statement indicates, this did not necessarily break down gender stereotypes. Indeed, social scientist Rosemary Deem argued that girls were less likely to take maths and science subjects in co-educational schools, which might suggest why a minority of Blishen’s female respondents – but none of his male respondents – preferred single-sex education.⁷⁵

In terms of curriculum content, students could be explicitly wary of being presented with lessons that were supposed to be relevant to their own lives. This was evident as early as the 1950s, when the secondary modern school girls interviewed in later life by Stephanie Spencer remembered the pointlessness of their domestic science lessons.⁷⁶ However, another version of this critique emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, when schools tried to tackle the ‘problem’ of their supposedly underachieving West Indian students by introducing West Indian culture into the curriculum, bolstered by the introduction of CSEs in 1962, which allowed teachers to design Mode 3 syllabuses.⁷⁷ These innovations were backed by sociological work that suggested that black and ethnic minority students felt alienated from the school environment because it was not connected to their actual lives.⁷⁸

Black students did not always take kindly to having their own heritage served up to them by white staff. Four West Indian adolescents, all born in England to Jamaican parents, spoke about their frustrations to a white interviewer from the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in the late 1970s. One particular complaint centred on a cookery lesson where they had been tasked with making Jamaican patties:

For these reasons, young people of colour might resist the use of their culture and heritage in the classroom, preferring to keep school and home life separate. However, it was not only the misuse of culture that students disliked; while students still held so little power in the school, token gestures of inclusion meant very little, even if they were respectful.⁸⁰ A white teacher who was in charge of a majority black class in London reflected in 1978 that, when he had tried to introduce ‘relevant’ material such as poems by Linton Kwesi Johnson, a black Brixton poet, ‘On two occasions I was quietly warned off by students – “This is ours, not for school.” ’⁸¹ These warnings reflected black students’ resistance to being culturally assimilated into the school system during a period when the desirability as well as the feasibility of being both ‘black and British’ was still contested, but they also allowed the students to exercise agency within a system that did not usually offer them genuine choice about what they were taught.⁸²

Truancy and school refusal

One methodological difficulty when looking at what kind of school post-war children and adolescents wanted is that certain voices tend to be historically privileged over others. Some contemporary sociological studies focused on uncovering the voices of working-class students and students of colour, but the larger archival collections used in this chapter tend to over-represent white middle-class students.⁸³ In this context, it is worth considering one particular strategy for rejecting school that did not require the student to explain his or her reasons: refusing to go. While we cannot assume that all students who skipped school did so because they were primarily motivated by a hatred of the institution, it is worth highlighting this physical resistance to a system that had supposedly been designed to promote the welfare of its attendees.

In the inter-war period, as Nicola Sheldon has argued, school attendance officers, originally employed by LEAs to identify and punish truants, rethought their role in the context of the growth of educational psychology, social work and child guidance, emphasizing support and help for the family rather than punitive measures. By 1939, they had renamed themselves ‘education welfare officers’, or EWOs.⁸⁴ Recognizing that working-class children from what had now been christened ‘problem families’ were most likely to be persistently absent from school, a range of professional bodies now situated truancy in a sociological context. Analyses of the phenomenon took less interest in the individual behaviour of the offenders, preferring instead to investigate their family background and immediate environment – what a 1947 Ministry of Health survey termed ‘the neighbourhood problem’.⁸⁵ Studies of truancy, such as Maurice Tyerman’s 1958 examination of 137 truants who had been charged in court, often explicitly refused to even consider that the school itself could be a factor that motivated the truant.⁸⁶

From the late 1950s onwards, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists started to take an interest in a particular subset of truants which, they argued, called upon their specific professional expertise. These ‘school phobics’ or ‘school refusers’ usually had strong academic and behaviour records, unlike ‘typical’ truants, and came from a wide range of class backgrounds. They were further distinguished by their somatic symptoms, which could lead them to appear genuinely ill at the thought of going to school, and by the sudden onset of their absences. Nevertheless, it was argued that school itself remained completely irrelevant in these cases. The psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature focused on the child’s relationship with their family, arguing that these children were often neurotic and over-protected, unable to confidently separate from their mothers.⁸⁷

Discussions of individual school refusers cited by psychodynamic therapists across this period indicate that children often voiced criticisms of school when discussing school refusal, but these were dismissed by adult observers as being insufficient to explain their persistent and lengthy periods of absence.⁸⁸ Their behaviour continued to be ascribed to abnormal personality development rather than concrete worries, despite recurrent complaints emerging among sufferers. Susannah Davidson, who had treated thirty cases at child guidance centres in London and Ilford, thought that school refusal was ‘a manifestation of family disturbance’. Nevertheless, she recorded concerns about the transfer to grammar school among her patients in an article published in 1960, as well as bullying and, in the case of one eight-year-old girl, ‘sexual interference at school’.⁸⁹ L. A. Hersov noted in the same year that some recurring worries among the fifty cases he had treated at the Maudsley were ‘fear of a strict, sarcastic teacher’, ‘fear of ridicule, bullying, or harm from other children’ and ‘fear of academic failure’.⁹⁰ In a later article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 1972, he argued that these fears were ‘irrational’ and ‘inexplicable’ because ‘the average child’ stops being afraid once ‘a threatened beating from the class bully’ or ‘an impending examination’ is over. He recommended that referral to a child psychiatric service should be considered if school refusal persisted.⁹¹

As school refusal became a more prominent clinical category by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the desire of different professional groups to defend their territory meant that children’s concerns continued to be viewed solely through the lens of familial or psychological problems. Diana Leigh, a social worker, wrote in to the BMJ in 1972 to criticize Hersov’s article because he had made no mention of the role of social services, whom she thought were key in dealing with school refusers because of the long waiting list to be seen by a psychiatrist.⁹² Three child guidance workers in Berkshire objected to this, arguing that it was important that these children came under their remit because the ‘true “school phobe” is an emotionally disturbed child’ who did not ‘suffer from social problems’.⁹³ Finally, an EWO retorted that they were most likely to be involved with such cases because the child would often not interact with social workers or child guidance workers at all; ‘they are not only school refusers but “clinic refusers” ’.⁹⁴ As these relatively new professional groupings used the school refuser as way of staking a claim, there was little space for any critique of the school itself, as that would indicate that the solution lay beyond the remit of these professions.

This professional bias was further confirmed by work conducted by the child psychologists John and Elizabeth Newson in 1965 in Nottingham, where they noted that children under nine were twice as likely as children over nine to refuse school, and yet they had been ignored by psychiatrists and social workers because ‘they are less likely to be seen as in need of special psychiatric help because they refuse something they don’t like’.⁹⁵ Five per cent of the Newsons’ sample of seven-year-olds had refused school in the past year and eight per cent since they started school, although these children would not necessarily have been classified as long-term school refusers.⁹⁶ Again, primary-aged children’s concerns about school re-emerged in their reasons for school refusal, although these were rarely taken seriously by adults. A milkman’s wife recalled that ‘The other week he came home and said “I wish I could fall down and cut me.” I says “Why?”. He says, “I wouldn’t have to do PE this afternoon!” ’⁹⁷

Archival evidence from school refusers themselves is extremely limited, but in 1975, a group interview was filmed with eleven school refusers aged twelve to fifteen at the Intermediate Education Centre (IEC) in Stepney, which had been set up to cater for their needs.⁹⁸ Initially, this interview was stilted; it was conducted by the class teacher, who fed her students answers and did not give them much space to reply, which meant that their contributions were reluctant and brief. The IEC was about to be reviewed by ILEA at the time, so the teacher’s agenda may have been to present a positive image of the school to the local authority, rather than to elicit genuine responses. However, one question led to a sudden flurry of engagement:

Heavily prompted by the teacher, who clearly wanted to make the case for the distinctive contribution of the IEC, the students went on to discuss the creative activities they had been undertaking, which included tie-dyeing curtains, painting walls and making furniture. Nevertheless, the preceding discussion suggested that, like their counterparts attending traditional schools, they were less interested in curriculum content than feeling that they had control over their own time and were not being coerced by their teachers. Once again, concerns expressed by school refusers linked back to worries that a broader range of children had about school. However, because school attendance had become so firmly established as an indicator of children’s welfare, it was assumed by professionals that children could not possibly be refusing school because it was not good for them.

Conclusion

In Shoko Yoneyama’s research on school refusal, or tôkôkyohi, in Japan since the 1980s, she argued that Japanese school refusers surveyed by the ‘free school’ Tokyo Shure in 1989 found it difficult to explain what was wrong because they were ‘responding to the composite effects of school, i.e. not just study, not just student bullying, not just petty rules, not just corporal punishment, but the whole system constituting the social environment of school in which all of these are intertwined’.⁹⁹ While the Japanese school system placed exceptional pressures on its students from the 1980s onwards, conformity and discipline were also promoted in the post-war British education system, even in those schools that were deemed to be becoming more child-centred. One of the MMEC respondents reflected upon the experience of being part of this kind of institution in 1964, when they were aged fifteen, and how differently they were treated at their part-time job:

Primary and secondary school students’ writings on education in post-war England and Wales indicate that children and adolescents had different priorities from contemporary educational reformers, despite these educationalists’ claims to be ‘child-centred’. This disconnect was reflected elsewhere. As Jennifer Crane has shown, emerging concerns about ‘children’s experience’ among other welfare professionals, such as those involved in child protection, did not lead to a fundamental rethinking of how services were delivered.¹⁰¹ Mathew Thomson has argued that even more radical ‘children’s rights’ campaigns that promoted listening to children’s voices found it difficult to maintain their stance ‘when it clashed with adult interests and a powerful social belief that children were fundamentally different to adults’.¹⁰²

The failure of schools to take children’s views into account was not an omission that could be easily addressed, but an assumption that was inherent in the fabric of an institution that compelled people of a certain chronological age to attend. Post-war schools consistently returned to the assertion that children and adolescents, unlike adults, needed schools to address their emotional and social deficiencies – to promote their ‘welfare’ – and in this context, it was difficult to make the argument that children and adolescents had valuable insights to contribute. In the end, therefore, perhaps students’ particular problems with the schools that they attended were less significant than the multiple ways in which schools marked them as less important and less individual than their adult counterparts, as one boy famously articulated in the introduction to the Newsom Report when he was asked what he thought about his school’s new buildings. ‘“It could all be marble, sir,” he replied, “but it would still be a bloody school.” ’¹⁰³