1900-1945: Notions of 'intelligence'
As the state system of education developed and expanded, those who still objected to the idea of working class children being educated at all, and especially to the notion of children of different classes being educated together, looked around for other ways of segregating children. A number of developments came to their aid. First, psychologists, whose science was gaining in respect and influence, warned that having too wide an age span in one class was undesirable, and that the grouping of children by chronological age produced fewer learning problems. Second, Binet's work on intelligence and Burt's on backwardness 'encouraged the view that ability could be measured and used as a basis for grouping and that less able pupils in particular needed to be given special treatment' (Kelly 1978:7-8). And third, the supporters of 'eugenics' (a term coined by the explorer Francis Galton in the 1880s for the study of the use of selective breeding to improve the innate quality of the human race) warned of the dire consequences of 'the spread of a physically degenerate population in the cities' (Chitty 2007:45), especially immigrants and the working class. These three developments provided the excuse for segregating children on the basis of 'intelligence'.
The idea that each child had a fixed level of 'innate intelligence' which could be measured and presented as an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) score was widely promoted, most notably by psychologist Cyril Burt, who did more than anyone to advocate the widespread use of IQ tests 'for the purpose of pinning permanent labels on schoolchildren at the age of eleven' (Chitty 2007:66). Burt provided much of the theory on which the Hadow Reports were based and was to wield enormous influence over many years - through the 1938 Spens Report to the structure of the secondary education system in the wake of the 1944 Education Act.
Another influential eugenicist was Professor George Adami, who served on the Hadow committee for its Reports of 1923, 1924 and 1926. In an address to the International Eugenics Congress in New York in September 1921 and reprinted in The Eugenics Review in 1923, Adami emphasised the importance of selecting the most able pupils for entry to the country's best schools, so as to prepare them for leading positions in society. We must, he urged, identify 'the real aristocracy of the nation', especially as the prevailing social conditions favoured 'the preponderance of what are from every point of view the lower classes, the survival of the unfit and the inevitable deterioration of the race' (Adami 1923:176, quoted in Chitty 2007:72).
The Hadow Reports (1923-1933)
Four of the six Hadow Reports published between 1923 and 1933 are relevant here: Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity and their possible use in the public system of education (1924), The Education of the Adolescent (1926), The Primary School (1931) and Infant and Nursery Schools (1933).
The 1924 report began by reviewing the available tests, including 'the celebrated Binet-Simon Scale' which, with its various modifications, could be 'regarded as the model of all individual tests of "intelligence" which have been devised up to the present'. It was especially useful for identifying children who were 'definitely above or below the average' and had been used extensively since about 1910 'as an aid to the discovery and special treatment of mentally defective and subnormal children, and to a less degree of supernormal children'. It had also been used 'as an aid for internal classification in elementary and special schools, and to a very much smaller extent in secondary schools' (Hadow 1924:78).
Hadow warned of the limitations of such tests. 'The so-called "mental ratios" (intelligence quotients) of individual children obtained by the application of such tests represent a succinct and highly abstract method of presenting the results ... the mental ratio of any individual child should always be used with discretion and in association with the information available from other sources' (Hadow 1924:142).
In fact, the members of the Hadow committee were clearly not entirely impressed with the measurement of 'intelligence' for the purpose of selection at 11, the age at which they were proposing that all children would transfer from primary to secondary schools. In their 1926 report they warned that it was 'difficult to forecast how a child at the age of 11+ is likely to develop'. As a result, even when Free Place Examinations were conducted 'with the greatest care' some of the pupils who failed went on to show 'a real capacity for studies leading up to the First School Examination'. The committee therefore urged that 'every effort should be made to facilitate the transfer of such pupils to Secondary Schools' (Hadow 1926:139).
Neither were they convinced that intelligence was entirely a matter of heredity. In their 1931 report they noted 'a marked correspondence between the distribution of poverty and the distribution of educational retardation' (Hadow 1931:54). They concluded that: 'In the past, eugenic and biometric investigators have rightly emphasised the effects of heredity; but there is now an increasing tendency to believe that they have underestimated the effects of environment' (Hadow 1931:55).
On the issue of selection for secondary education, the committee declared that 'all children should enter some type of post-primary school at the age of 11+', that it would be necessary 'to discover in each case the type most suitable to a child's abilities and interests', and that for this purpose 'a written examination should be held, and also, wherever possible, an oral examination'. Psychological tests, they suggested, might be useful 'in dealing with borderline cases, or where a discrepancy between the result of the written examination and the teacher's estimate of proficiency has been observed' (Hadow 1926:139).
The committee recommended that children below the age of 11 should be 'classified' according to their 'natural gifts and abilities' (Hadow 1931:77) and they argued that one great advantage of the new 'self-contained' primary schools which they were proposing was that teachers would have special opportunities for making a suitable classification of the children on this basis. 'On the one hand, immediate treatment of an appropriate character can be provided for retarded children, and on the other hand, suitable arrangements may be made for specially bright children' (Hadow 1931:77). They recommended that in large primary schools there should be a 'triple track system of organisation, viz. a series of "A" classes or groups for the bright children, and a series of smaller "C" classes or groups to include retarded children, both series being parallel to the ordinary series of "B" classes or groups for the average children' (Hadow 1931:78). This policy was endorsed by the Board of Education in its Handbook of suggestions for teachers and was recommended for the 'multilateral' (i.e. comprehensive) school in the Spens Report on Secondary education in 1938. 'The ideology behind this was, of course, the ideology of the day which led to the organisation of secondary education itself as well as the grouping of pupils in classes along selective lines' (Kelly 1978:8).
Hadow did, however, warn against 'a rigid classification of the entrants from the infant school' and urged 'the desirability of classifying by capacity rather than by attainments'. Simple tests in reading and calculation might yield misleading results because 'retardation at the end of the infant stage is frequently due, not to any inherent defect in the individual child, but to prolonged absence through illness, or to unfavourable home conditions' (Hadow 1931:78). The committee also stressed the importance of easy transfer of children between the A, B and C classes. Unfortunately, as Plowden would later note, 'These reservations tended to be forgotten. Grading by ability, in one form or another, became almost universal in all but the smallest schools' (Plowden 1967:283).
The Hadow committee bemoaned the fact that teachers 'still fail sometimes to make appropriate provision for the specially gifted children' but deprecated 'the opposite practice, which to judge from our evidence still obtains in many schools, of devoting over much attention to the clever children who give promise of winning free places and scholarships, with the result that insufficient care and thought are given to the problem of making adequate provision for the average and retarded children in the school' (Hadow 1931:79).
They stressed the importance of group and individual work, especially in small schools, quoting a memorandum from the Education Section of the British Psychological Society: 'The diversity in age and attainment, together with lack of opportunity for group classification, makes flexible and individual methods essential, if good work is to be done. A well-organised arrangement of individual work in definite study together with abundant opportunities for group activity in the directions where such activity is really fruitful is particularly important in the rural school' (Hadow 1931:80).
And they noted that setting (though they didn't use that term) and individual work was being practised in some small rural schools. 'Teachers in schools which have been converted into primary schools for pupils between the ages of five and eleven are developing a technique and a type of organisation which are yielding good results' (Hadow 1931:81).
They gave two examples:
In a small country school in the north with an average attendance of 12 children under one teacher, the pupils are grouped for the different branches of the curriculum. The teacher makes the fullest possible use of individual effort on the part of the children by training them from the very beginning to work for themselves, and by allowing them all to make their own pace. ... By encouraging individual work within reasonable limits, the teacher is able to give her attention to different groups of children in turn.
The head teacher of a primary school in the midlands, containing 21 pupils, stated that she placed her pupils in sections according to their ability. As soon as a child could do the work of a subject in one section it passed on to the next. It did not follow, however, that a child would be in the same section for every subject or for a whole year, e.g. a pupil might be in section F, i.e. the top section, for reading, and in section C (equivalent to standard II) for arithmetic (Hadow 1931:81-2).
The committee concluded by reiterating their support for streaming. 'Older children differ far more widely in intellectual capacity than younger children. It would, therefore, seem that while at the infant stage children may be grouped together without much regard to varying degrees of mental endowment, by the age of ten pupils in a single age group should be classified in several sections, though there is not the same need for elaborate gradations before the age of eleven as after that age' (Hadow 1931:137).
The Committee's final report (1933) dealt with Infant and nursery schools. It noted that classification in these schools was usually by age, a tradition which could be justified because 'differences in intelligence are not so wide as they become in later stages' (Hadow 1933:138), but that many schools had experimented with vertical classification. 'Here each class contains children of all ages from five to seven or eight, each occupied with work appropriate to his powers, and they remain throughout the infant stage in the care of the same teacher' (Hadow 1933:138-9). There were advantages in this system for both teachers and children. It 'obviously calls for special gifts in the teacher, but it "works"' (Hadow 1933:139).
To sum up, then, the 1924 Hadow Report considered the applicability of psychological tests of intelligence in schools, decided that they could be useful in some circumstances but had reservations about their widespread use. The 1926 Report recommended that schooling for all children should be divided into two phases, primary and secondary, with the break at the age of 11. Written (and, where possible, oral) tests should be used to select children for different types of secondary education, with the use of psychological tests restricted to deciding borderline cases. The 1931 Report urged the creation of A, B and C streams in primary schools, especially the larger ones. And the 1933 Report supported the practice of most infant schools in allocating children to classes on the basis of age, but felt there was value in experiments involving vertical classification.
Many of Hadow's recommendations were implemented, though some - nationwide provision of primary schools, for example - took many years. Undoubtedly, two of the most significant outcomes were the introduction and widespread use of streaming within schools and a much greater emphasis on selection procedures at the age of eleven, both based on measurements of attainment or 'intelligence'.
There was an apparent contradiction in the committee's recommendations. On the one hand, Hadow promoted a 'progressive' child-centred and activity-based style of primary education. On the other, its recommendation that pupils should be selected for different types of secondary school resulted in primary education becoming 'a sorting, classifying, selective mechanism' which necessitated streaming as 'the basic form of internal school organisation for all primary schools large enough to form parallel classes in each age group' (Galton, Simon and Croll 1980:36).
How could the committee reconcile a 'child-centred' approach to education with streaming on the basis of intelligence? Galton, Simon and Croll have argued that child-centred approaches, particularly Froebelian, were 'based fundamentally on the notion that the child's inborn characteristics must be allowed to flower ... the school's role is to provide optimum conditions for such development'. Since, according to the dominant school of psychology in the inter-war years (psychometry), a child's 'intelligence' was fixed, inborn, and not subject to change, 'what was necessary was to provide an education appropriate to the child's inborn, and measurable, intelligence level' (Galton, Simon and Croll 1980:37).
The Spens Report (1938)
The theory which underpinned the Hadow Reports also informed the Spens Report on Secondary Education with Special Reference to Grammar Schools and Technical High Schools. This recommended that there should be three types of secondary school - modern schools, grammar schools and technical high schools - for which children would be selected at the age of 11.
The committee did argue that 'many benefits might accrue if children above the age of 11 were educated together in multilateral [i.e. comprehensive] schools, since the transfer of pupils at various ages to courses of teaching appropriate for their abilities and interests would be facilitated, and children differing in background and objective would be working in close association within the same school' (Spens 1938:375-6). But they decided they could not advocate the adoption of multilateralism as a general policy in England and Wales because it would be 'too subversive a change' (Spens 1938:291). They did, however, support the establishment of multilateral schools, 'especially in areas of new population' (Spens 1938:376). They were right to think that the notion of children from different backgrounds working together was a subversive one, but it's a pity they didn't pursue the idea: it might have changed the whole nature of English education in the post-war years.
The Norwood Report (1943)
The Norwood Report on Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools endorsed the Spens committee's view that there were 'three broad groups of pupils', i.e. the academic, the technical and the practical. 'Accordingly we would advocate that there should be three types of education, which we think of as the secondary grammar, the secondary technical, the secondary modem, that each type should have such parity as amenities and conditions can bestow' (Norwood 1943:14).
The 1944 Education Act
Regrettably, these two reports, based on the still unquestioned belief that a test at the age of eleven could accurately predict what a child might go on to achieve, underpinned the divided education system which emerged in the wake of the 1944 Education Act. Few technical schools were ever built, so the vast majority of children either 'passed' the eleven plus and gained access to the grammar schools; or 'failed' and went to one of the new secondary moderns, which many saw as 'merely the old elementary schools writ large' (Chitty 2007:20). Thus England's post-war system of education was based on old ideas. The new primary schools streamed their pupils because that made it easier to prepare the more able children to pass the eleven plus, and the new secondary schools divided children into the academic (about a fifth) and the less able (about four fifths). And even within these secondary schools, the pupils were streamed. There was now 'education for all' but it was an education based on division and segregation at every level.
Facilitating the selection of pupils for secondary education had always been part of the role of elementary schools. Before the 1944 Act roughly ten per cent of pupils were selected for secondary schools, while the rest remained in the elementary system either in the same school (if it was 'all-age') or in the senior school. After the 1944 Act, the increased importance of the 11 plus examination put greater pressure on the new primary schools to stream their pupils, since a school's success was now measured largely by the number of its pupils who gained grammar school places. As Galton, Simon and Croll put it:
It is difficult now to reconstruct the intense pressure on schools and teachers that built up in the 1940s and 1950s relating to the selection examination; the league tables that parents drew up for local schools, the telephoning round to find out who had done well and the sense of failure that some teachers experienced when their pupils won fewer places than others, or than expected; not to speak of the effects on the children (Galton, Simon and Croll 1980:37-8).
(Galton, Simon and Croll could not, of course, have foreseen that within a decade of the publication of their book, politicians would have recreated - and intensified - that pressure through SATs and league tables.)
