Newsom (1963)

(page numbers in brackets)

Preliminary pages (i-xviii)
Membership, Contents, Introduction, Principal Recommendations

Part 1 Findings
Chapter 1 (1-9)
Education for All
Chapter 2 (10-16)
The Pupils, the Schools, the Problems
Chapter 3 (17-26)
Education in the Slums
Chapter 4 (27-31)
Objectives
Chapter 5 (32-40)
Finding Approaches
Chapter 6 (41-51)
The School Day, Homework, Extra-Curricular Activities
Chapter 7 (52-59)
Spiritual and Moral Development
Chapter 8 (60-71)
The School Community
Chapter 9 (72-79)
Going Out into the World
Chapter 10 (80-86)
Examinations and Assessments
Chapter 11 (87-97)
Building for the Future
Chapter 12 (98-108)
The Teachers Needed

Part 2 The Teaching Situation
Chapter 13 (109-113)
What Should Secondary Imply?
Chapter 14 (114-118)
An Education that Makes Sense
Chapter 15 (119-123)
Attainments and Achievement
Chapter 16 (124-127)
The Subjects and the Curriculum
Chapter 17 (128-141)
The Practical Subjects
Chapter 18 (142-151)
Science and Mathematics
Chapter 19 (152-169)
The Humanities
Chapter 20 (170-179)
School Organisation and Staff Deployment

Part 3 What the Survey Shows
Chapter 21 (183-188)
The 1961 Survey
Chapter 22 (194-232)
The Boys and Girls
Chapter 23 (234-244)
The Work They Do
Chapter 24 (245-249)
The Men and Women Who Teach Them
Chapter 25 (250-259)
The Schools They Go To

Acknowledgements (260-262)

Appendix I (263-267)
List of Witnesses
Appendix II (268-271)
Sex Education
Appendix III (272-276)
Deployment of Teachers
Appendix IV (277-278)
Letter to Minister on Teacher Training
Appendix V (279-295)
Statistical Detail

Index (296-299)

A report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1963
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Notes on the text

Background

The Central Advisory Council for Education (England) (CACE) was established as a result of the 1944 Education Act. It lasted just twenty years - from School and Life, published in 1947, to Children and their Primary Schools, published in 1967.

Following the 1944 Act (but not required by it), the provision of secondary education in England was divided between grammar schools (for the minority of children who passed the eleven plus selection test) and secondary modern schools (for the majority who didn't). (There were also supposed to be technical schools but few of these were ever opened, so the 'tripartite system' was in reality a bipartite one).

By the end of the 1950s it was clear that the eleven plus failures were getting a poor deal and it was concern about this which led Conservative education secretary David Eccles to ask CACE:

To consider the education between the ages of 13 and 16 of pupils of average or less than average ability who are or will be following full-time courses either at schools or in establishments of further education. The term education shall be understood to include extra-curricular activities.

Eccles was replaced as education secretary by Edward Boyle in July 1962, so it was Boyle who received the Council's report in August 1963.

The report online

The full text of the report (including the Appendices) is online.

I have retained the original paragraphing and capitalisation, and the (few) footnotes are displayed with their original (inconsistent!) numbering. I've amended a few spelling inconsistencies (e.g. timetable and time-table) and corrected a dozen or so misprints. I've added explanations to a few archaic words which are no longer in common use, and given metric equivalents of imperial measures. Anything added by way of explanation is shown [in square brackets].

The formatting of the text (bold, italics, centred etc) is a reasonably accurate representation of the printed version, but the pages presented here are not exact facsimiles of the original: the font (Times, Arial etc) and size of print - and therefore the number of words to a line and lines to a page - are determined by the settings you have chosen for your web browser. However, the page breaks are correct. In other words, if something is shown here as being on, say, page 103, you can be sure it appeared on page 103 in the original.

The page headers (part titles on the left hand pages, chapter titles on the right) have been omitted, as have blank pages.

The Newsom report contained 8 photographic plates, 16 diagrams and more than 40 tables. The photographs can be found at the end of chapter 12 (which is where they appeared in the print version). The smaller diagrams and tables are embedded in the text, the larger ones are shown as links: clicking on one opens a new window displaying the relevant table.

Summary of the report's main recommendations

• the school leaving age should be raised to sixteen for all pupils entering the secondary schools from September 1965 (the school leaving age was raised to 16 in 1973 - two years later than Newsom recommended);
• teaching techniques to help pupils whose abilities are artificially depressed by environmental and linguistic handicaps should be researched;
• a working party should be set up to deal with the general social problems, including education, in slum areas;
• all schools should provide a range of courses, with attention paid to the arts and to the personal and social development of the pupils;
• excessive use of ability grouping should be avoided, and efforts should be made to emphasise the status of older pupils;
• extension of the school day should be encouraged;
• the Ministry and local education authorities should jointly consider the provision of some residential experience for all pupils;
• local education authorities should review the relevance of their Agreed Syllabuses for religious instruction for older pupils;
• sex education is essential for adolescent boys and girls;
• the school programme in the final year ought to be an initiation into the adult world of work and leisure;
• links with the youth employment service, further education, the youth service and adult organisations need strengthening;
• all sixteen year old leavers should receive some form of internal leaving certificate, irrespective of any external examinations they may take;
• schools should resist external pressures to extend public examinations to pupils for whom they are inappropriate;
• no pupils should be entered for any external examination before the fifth year (now year 10);
• the Ministry and local education authorities should begin an experimental building programme, and action should be accelerated to remedy the existing functional deficiencies of schools;
• provision for all practical subjects should be reappraised and extended workshop and technical facilities provided;
• all secondary schools should be adequately provided with modern audio-visual aids including television;
• teacher training should be reviewed to ensure that a substantial proportion of teachers in the secondary schools receive a training of the 'concurrent' type (in which the personal higher education of the student is combined with pedagogical studies);
• training colleges should be staffed and equipped to enable students to teach one main subject and at least one other subject;
• the training of teachers should include preparation now for the new demands which will be made on them by the raising of the school leaving age;
• a training requirement for graduates should be introduced at the earliest practicable moment, and as an interim measure there should be an emergency programme of in-service courses to help graduates and other teachers who have attained qualified status without training to deal with the problems they encounter in the schools.

The 1963 Newsom Report and the above notes were prepared for the web by Derek Gillard. The report was uploaded on 24 June 2007; the revised notes on 11 November 2012.