A curriculum in its place: English teaching in one school 1946–1963

Abstract

Contrary to what has usually been asserted, the ‘New English’ that became a near‐orthodoxy in the later 1960s and ‘70s had its essential origins in the apparently less promising setting of the later 1950s. Current research into English teaching in three postwar London secondary schools is revealing that in at least one working‐class school in Southwark the pupils’ experience of their urban environment came in a quite new way to constitute the matter for talking and writing in English lessons. The vigorous reconstruction of English that took place in Walworth School was one fruit of the London County Council’s idealistic creation in 1946 of five ‘experimental comprehensive schools’. The article argues for the historic significance of the local and environmental focus of English at Walworth between 1956 and 1963.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• environment
• teaching of English

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the research grant from the Leverhulme Trust that has made this study possible, and also the earlier ‘seedcorn’ money from the University of London Institute of Education and King’s College London that supported a pilot study. They also wish to thank the following for permission to quote their testimony, material and ideas: Roy Boardman, Simon Clements, John Dixon, Jennifer Fraser and Simon Gibbons.

Notes

¹A first version of this was presented at the History of Education Society Conference ‘Putting Education in its Place: Space, place and materialities in the history of education’, University of Sheffield, 4–6 December 2009.

²A.B. Clegg, ed., The Excitement of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965).

³The three‐year project, based at the University of London Institute of Education and King’s College London, is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and directed by Dr John Hardcastle at the IOE. The other researchers are, from IOE, Richard Andrews, David Crook and Mary Irwin and, from King’s, Peter Medway. Patrick Kingwell has been associated with the project and has participated extensively in the thinking, data collection and analysis.

⁴Stephen J. Ball, ‘Competition and Conflict in the Teaching of English: A Socio‐Cultural Analysis’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 14, no. 1 (1982): 1–28; ‘A Subject of Privilege: English and the School Curriculum 1906–1935’, in Curriculum Practice, ed. M. Hammersley and A. Hargreaves (Lewes: Falmer Press, 1983); ‘English for the English Since 1906’, in Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum: Subjects for Study, ed. Ivor Goodson (London: Falmer Press, 1985); Margaret Mathieson, The Preachers of Culture: A Study of English and Its Teachers (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975); David Shayer, The Teaching of English in Schools 1900–1970 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).

⁵Ian Grosvenor, and Martin Lawn, ‘Ways of Seeing in Education and Schooling: Emerging Historiographies’, History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 105–08.

⁶In the system that obtained after the 1944 Education Act those children who at age 10 passed an examination called the ‘11+’ (some 25% overall) were admitted to grammar schools which offered a highly academic education; the rest went to secondary modern schools for a more general and vocational curriculum. In some places, however, comprehensive schools were intended to take all the children in the area. For various reasons we decided against including the secondary modern sector in our study.

⁷For locating online maps, postcode is SE1 5UJ.

⁸On London’s ‘council estates’, as UK public housing developments are called, see Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 53–7.

¹⁰Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 1940–1980 (London: Allen Lane, 1981), 45.

⁹For a vivid picture of life in the area, see Tommy Steele’s autobiography, Bermondsey Boy: Memories of a Forgotten World (London: Michael Joseph, 2006).

¹¹The reference is not to some county called Walworth but to a ‘county secondary school’, that is, a school run by a local authority classed as a county, as London was.

¹²‘Organisation of Secondary Education and the Possibility of Early Experiment’, London County Council Education Staff Sub‐Committee Papers, Jan–July 1946. London Metropolitan Archives LCC/MIN/4037; London County Council, The London School Plan: A Development Plan for Primary and Secondary Education (London: London County Council, 1947). A useful history of the post‐1946 school is Patricia Jones, ‘Walworth School: Changing Aims and Organization (1946–76)’ (Sussex, 1976).

¹³See note 6 above.

¹⁴John Dixon interview with Peter Medway, 21 June 2004.

¹⁵See note 44 below.

¹⁶Tracks in USA.

¹⁷We are working to correct the likely bias in our contacts towards individuals whose school experience was meaningful and happy.

¹⁸In addition, Patricia Jones’s 1974 research (note 12) has been invaluable.

¹⁹Ian Grosvenor and Martin Lawn, ‘Days Out of School: Secondary Education, Citizenship and Public Space in 1950s England’, History of Education 33, no. 4 (2004): 377–89, 377.

²⁰We are indebted to many emails from Roy Boardman, a pupil at the school from 1948 to 1953, for much of what we know about Harvey.

²³Harold Rosen, interview with John Hardcastle and Peter Medway, November 30, 2004.

²¹See note 37 on the ‘New English’.

²²The informing principles had, however, been discussed in part and in general terms in some of the more advanced books of the period such as Philip J. Hartog, Words in Action: The Teaching of the Mother Tongue for the Training of Citizens in a Democracy (London: University of London Press, 1947); Percival Gurrey, The Teaching of Written English (London: Longmans, Green, 1954); DES (Department of Education and Science), Language: Some Suggestions for Teachers of English and Others (London: HMSO, 1954).

²⁴Simon Gibbons, ‘How L.A.T.E. It Was, How L.A.T.E’, English in Education 42, no. 2 (2008): 118–31.

²⁷Harold Rosen, interview with John Hardcastle and Peter Medway, May 5, 2004.

²⁵John Hardcastle and Peter Medway, ‘In His Own Words: Harold Rosen on His Formative Years, With Speculations on Working‐Class Language’, Changing English 16, no. 1 (2009): 5–14. For biographical information about Harold Rosen, see particularly Tony Burgess, ‘Harold At the Institute’, pages 39–49 in the same special issue.

²⁶Historians tend to name 1956 as the year when the country began to change from austerity to ‘affluence’ and when a different sort of culture, not least youth culture, began to emerge; e.g. Harry Hopkins, The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London: 1963); Peter Lewis, The Fifties (1978); Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen‐Fifties (London: Peter Owen, 1958); Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had it So Good: A History of Britain From Suez to the Beatles (London: Little, Brown, 2005).

²⁸Harold Rosen, ‘What Shall I Set?’, Use of English 10, no. 2 (1958), 92.

²⁹Simon Clements and John Dixon, ‘Harold and Walworth’, Changing English 16, no. 1 (2009): 15–23.

³⁰Like Rosen, Stratta, who has sadly died (February 13, 2010), was another London working‐class boy.

³¹Valerie Avery, London Morning (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1964).

³²Another favoured activity was improvised drama, often around the same themes and starting from the same instigations, conducted in the classroom or a hall.

³³In the system at the time the cohort of pupils entering secondary school at 11 were the ‘first year/form’ and so on up to the sixth form. Thus fourth‐year pupils were aged 15.

³⁵‘Themes of the third and fourth years’, Dixon collection, project archive.

³⁴This and other pieces of pupil writing are reproduced with their original spelling and punctuation.

³⁶John Dixon interview with Peter Medway, June 4, 2009.

³⁷For example David Shayer, The Teaching of English in Schools 1900–1970, Chapter 5. The term referred to the approach (never in fact as monolithic as he believed) favoured by official curriculum bodies and the National Association for the Teaching of English from the mid‐1960s and most fully articulated by the English Department of the London Institute of Education. It involved a focus on ‘language development’ rather than correct usage, the integration of language and literature studies and the elicitation of pupils’ own experience for their writing, talk and drama.

³⁸Alex McLeod, a New Zealander with degrees in physics and English, taught at Walworth twice, under Harold Rosen and then John Dixon, finally becoming head of department himself in 1964. In between he returned to New Zealand. He is spoken of by former pupils and teachers with respect and affection as a particularly informal and accessible teacher. He eventually moved to the Institute of Education as a lecturer, and died in 2006.

³⁹‘Raspberry’ is what is politely called ‘a rude noise’ while the unreconstructedly sexist and largely unwelcome ‘wolf whistle’ expresses approbation of passing females.

⁴⁰Construction of this huge estate had begun in 1963. Of all the London boroughs, ‘Southwark [i.e. the Metropolitan Borough], with an ambitious borough architect and going all out for numbers, signed the biggest single housing contract of all [the boroughs] for the giant Aylesbury estate in Peckham’. Not Peckham, in fact, but Walworth. Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 1940–1980, 134.

⁴¹Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962).

⁴²‘By the end of the sixties … slum clearance had begun to look like vandalism and the cry was for conservation. It was realized that what had been destroyed this time were not merely slums but communities’. Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 1940–1980, 75.

⁴³US ‘track’.

⁴⁴The Ordinary (O) and Advanced (A) level examinations of the General Certificate of Education, originally intended for grammar school pupils aged 16 and 18, were set and marked by boards of university examiners. LATE ran a protracted campaign against the London University version: Simon Gibbons, ‘“To Know the World of the School and Change it”: an Exploration of Harold Rosen’s Contribution to the Early Work of the London Association for the Teaching of English’, Changing English 16, no. 1 (2009): 93–101; ‘Back to the Future? A Case Study in Changing Curriculum and Assessment: The Story of the London Association for the Teaching of English’s Alternative ‘O’ Level English Language Paper’, English in Education 43, no. 1 (2009): 19–31; ‘Lessons From the Past?’, English Teaching: Practice and Critique 8, no. 1 (2009).

⁴⁵Dixon et al., 1963, Reflections: An English Course for Students aged 14–18 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).

⁴⁶On the photographs see John Hardcastle, ‘Four Photographs in an English Course Book: A Study in the Visual Archaeology of Urban Schooling’, Changing English 15, no. 1 (2008): 3–24.

⁴⁷Simon Clements, ‘Film Making and the English Lesson (Some Work At Walworth Comprehensive School)’, English in Education 1, no. 1 (1967): 53–56.

⁴⁸A familiar figure who did the rounds with a horse and cart buying discarded items from households.

⁴⁹Peter Medway, ‘Into the Sixties: English and English Society At a Time of Change’, in Bringing English to Order: The History and Politics of a School Subject, ed. Ivor Goodson and Peter Medway (London: Falmer, 1990), 10.

⁵⁰See for instance Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from Listening and Writing (London: Faber & Faber, 1967). Listening and Writing was a highly successful BBC schools broadcast.

⁵¹LATE (London Association for the Teaching of English), And When You Are Young: Prose and Verse By Young Writers, 5–18 (London: LATE/Joint Council for Education Through Art, 1960); Daily Mirror, Children as Writers: Award Winning Entries From the Fourth Daily Mirror Children’s Literary Competition (London: Daily Mirror, 1963).

⁵²In rural Yorkshire, where the head of the boys’ grammar school wrote that, such was the rigidity of the curriculum, ‘if the school were transported to Manchester to‐morrow, it would be unnecessary to change a single lesson’. Harry A. Davies, The Boys’ Grammar School (London: Methuen, 1945), 32.

⁵³See note 44 above.

⁵⁴Philip J. Hartog, Words in Action: The Teaching of the Mother Tongue for the Training of Citizens in a Democracy, 16.

⁵⁵Ibid., ix–x.

⁵⁶LATE (note 51) 11, 17.

⁵⁷In Art, incidentally, as well as English: pupils painted scenes such as the family at mealtime and the bombsite (Simon Clements, personal communication, 20 January 2010).

⁵⁸James Britton’s later (and less than ideal) term. For example, Language and Learning. 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).