Cri de coeur

PUBLIC SCHOOLS ANGUS MAUDE

(The provenance of the document reproduced below is uncertain. lf, however, it really was recovered. from a waste-paper basket in the lounge of a South Coast hotel, it might indeed be a discarded draft of the introduction to the report of the Newsom Commission on the Public Schools.)

To the Rt Hon Edward Short, MP.

Dear Secretary of State, Your predecessor (the Rt Hon Anthony Crosland, mP) appointed us in December 1965 with the terms of reference set out overleaf.

We hope you will start by reading these terms of reference carefully, since you yourself were Chief Whip at the time they were drafted and may have had other things on your mind. They will make it easier for you to under- stand much in our report that might otherwise appear incomprehensible, if not actually insane.

Next, we suggest that you study the list of members of our commission, which should make some more of our difficulties plain to you. If it does not, the officials of your depart- ment will no doubt enlighten you as to the irre- concilable views held by those of us who have been around for some time in the educational world. It will then become apparent to you that what your predecessor described as our 'main function' was to produce a plan for doing something which several of us suspected was impossible and some of us were determined at all costs to prevent. Others among us, of course, have long held as an article of faith the belief that the public schools are the root of all social evils; they therefore prepared to address themselves with enthusiasm to a thoroughly congenial task.

In the event, as you will see from our report, the thing became something of a shambles. We tried cheating a bit with the terms of reference, but this did not get us very far. It was soon obvious that what your predecessor instructed us to do, which was to bung the public schools lock, stock and barrel into the maintained sec- tor, could not be done without completely wrecking not only the public schools but the maintained system as well. We therefore re- jected the idea, although most of us hoped we could find a formula that would not make this too obvious. Unfortunately, three of our mem- bers have insisted on blowing the gaff in a note of dissent.

All that was really left to us, apart from fiddling about with inessentials, was to concen- trate on two subjects that were vaguely men- tioned in our terms of reference : the need for more boarding places, and the possibility of turning the public schools into comprehensive schools.

The trouble about boarding is that the boys who least need to go to boarding schools have parents who are determined to send them there, while there is no real demand from those who are supposed to need it. We think we have devised a scheme which will ensure that far more boys than at present go to schools to which neither they, their parents, the schools nor the local authorities want them to be sent, and some of us arc quite pleased with this. We hope you will be, too, since it is unlikely that anyone else will be.

Now about this comprehensive lark. It is terribly difficult to draft anything about this that even two of our members would sign jointly, so you must forgive us if our recom- mendations appear to contradict themselves from time to time. Three of our members are against the whole business. Four more have somehow been persuaded to sign the report, while maintaining firmly that some of the public schools should not only not go comprehensive but should become in some ways even more selective than they are now; two of them have actually insisted on inserting a passage about 'the pursuit of academic excellence,' which the rest of us thought was a bit much in all the circumstances. So you see, we are split pretty well fifty-fifty about comprehensiveness, and the result is a bit of a dog's breakfast.

In effect, we have scrapped this part of our terms of reference, too. The whole point of the great public schools is that they are in- tensely selective and maintain very high academic standards indeed. This is why so many parents want to send their children to them. It wouldn't be very difficult to wreck their academic standards, and we realise that there are people who would like to; but we can't see why anyone should want to send his boys to the sort of school that would result. Wouldn't it be simpler and cheaper just to abolish them? However, we know you wouldn't be able to get away with this, so we have fudged up a few recommendations for the look of the thing, qualified them almost out of existence and in- serted a note of reservation pointing out that the whole thing is nonsense anyway. We hope you will be able to make something of it.

Well, that disposes of integration, boarding need and comprehensiveness, which comprise pretty well the whole of our terms of reference.

We are sorry to say that we can do little about any of them, and absolutely nothing about all three together. It is obvious that the trouble lies in the original terms of reference, and the whole business has been a great shock to those of us who started by believing implicitly in all of them. Some of us even suspect that the whole exercise was just a trick to stall the decisions off until it was too late for a Labour government to make any.

We did consider pepping the report up and trying for the best-seller market by including a roaring chapter about all the awful things that are popularly supposed to go on in public schools, together with some searing stuff about aristocratic privilege and outmoded empire- building. Unfortunately we failed to see the pit- fall in time and actually went to look at some of the schools, which scuppered that one. You would be surprised how some of them have changed. As a matter of form, we have in- cluded a few fussy paragraphs about beating and fagging and so on, but there isn't much you can do about that.

It is difficult, isn't it? Some of us feel we have let you down rather badly. The rest just laugh. What makes it all the more painful is that the schools are going to feel that we have let them down, too. You see, they were confidently relying on our coming up with a scheme which

would leave them pretty well unchanged but get the fees of their middle-class pupils paid for out of rates and taxes instead of by the parents. And the hell of it is that this is exactly what would happen if we went flat out for integration, which is why we haven't. It is bound to happen to some extent if you adopt our own proposals, which is why you won't.

The truth is that most of these are jolly good schools, and you can't muck about with them without making them worse. Lots of people don't like very good schools, but in the last resort none of us can honestly say he feels they do much harm. They may even, for all we know, do less harm than bad schools. There ought to be a moral here, somewhere.