No Newsom is good Newsom
PUBLIC SCHOOLS STUART MACLURE
Ai all the portents suggested it would be, the Newsom report is a dead duck. But there is no doubt about its ingenuity. Sir John Newsom has driven hard to get a scheme to which he could hold the great majority of his committee. He has struggled with long, complex and doctrinaire terms of reference which have pinned him down from the start. He has had to steer between the Scylla of the Headmasters' Conference and the Charybdis of the Compre- hensive Schools Committee, while at the same time trying to avoid political quicksands to right and left. The result is a clever but fundamentally unsatisfactory document which compromises where principle is demanded and yet contrives to be doctrinaire where the facts demand an honest pragmatism. The best part of it is Professor Vaizey's splendidly concise and forthright note of dissent.
For all the elaboration with which it outlines proposals for consortia of local educa- tion authorities and a mammoth Boarding Schools Corporation, the report is essentially simple. The aim laid down for the Commission by Mr Anthony Crosland in 1965 was to 'integrate' the public schools in the national education system—i.e. take away their separate,
highly prestigious status in order to make them less 'socially divisive.'
Mr Crosland also gave them a weapon with which to do this—'boarding need.' At any time thousands of boys and girls need to be at boarding school because their parents are abroad or dead or for some other reason. The whole of the Newsom exercise boils down to an attempt to use this notion of identifiable boarding need as an instrument with which to manipulate the public schools as social organisms.
In the proposed Boarding Schools Corpora- tion, the Commission have devised a formidable creature. Even if no more public money were spent at all, if you channelled the £6 million which is now handed out from rates and taxes to boarding 'need' cases only into schools pre- pared to 'integrate' on the Commission's terms you could start some pretty radical changes. It might not please Her Majesty's representative in Upper Volta to be told that he could only get a grant for his son at schools A, B or C when more than 50 per cent of the pupils were there because consortia of local education authorities had diagnosed them as 'needing' to board. But, if the Corporation could get a few well-known schools like Marlborough to take the plunge in the early stages, the financial inducement would be very strong indeed. Of course, the Newsom Commission are not pre- pared to confine themselves to what is now being spent. For another £6 million, they say, it would be possible to take over half the places at 170 schools. If this were to happen their hope would be that only those public schools which were financially impregnable and
very determined would be able to stay out. And for such schools the Commission hold out the ultimate threat of forcible integration.
In a remarkable and revelatory paragraph on the second page, the Commission point out the danger that, as schools become less socially and academically selective in the pupils they take from the Boarding Schools Corporation, they might also become more selective in the smaller number of fee-payers they could accept. The result would be a social and intellectual imbalance calculated to get the worst of all worlds. Either because they forgot, or because they couldn't think of an answer, the Com- mission were reluctant to tackle this key question. It remains unanswered in the 540 paragraphs which follow.
The Commission's biggest task was to fit the evidence to their preconceived pattern. It must be almost unprecedented for a man who received £35,000 from a Departmental Com- mittee to do research on a central aspect of its terms bf reference, to issue a broadside attack- ing the report the day it appears. Dr Royston Lambert's attack on the Commission's sanguine hope that boarding need will conveniently absorb 50 per cent of the public school places was a direct challenge to the way the Com- mission misused his findings. Dr Lambert is not everybody's favourite sociologist but he probably knows more about this than anybody else. It certainly undermines confidence in the Commission's judgment to be told by Dr Lambert (but not by the Commission) that 'the large majority of children with "need" are significantly less well-adjusted socially than their classmates who do not have such need. In .
fact about 45 per cent of the boys and girls with "need" seem to be within the clinical definition of "maladjustment." ' Public schools already cope with a fair number of misfits of one sort or another. There is clearly a limit to the proportion of such cases any ordinary school can deal with. Dr Lambert maintains that it simply won't do to claim that by slightly broadening the academic entry—making them semi-comprehensive and eliminating fagging, beating by boys, and a few other anachronisms—these schools can be made suitable therapeutic institutions for many of the boys and girls he identified as 'needing' boarding education. If they were changed as radically as they would need to be, they would cease to appeal to the fee-payers at all.
One of the weaknesses of the boarding need argument has always been that the need for boarding does not necessarily go with a desire for it. Desire for boarding seems very much a class matter. Need is likely to be much less so. Not even the Newsom Commission are pre- pared to advocate drafting pupils to boarding school against the wishes of their parents. At the press conference on Monday, Sir John Newsom disarmingly accepted that, for some years, the places would be taken up by middle- class devotees of boarding education—including • many who would otherwise pay for themselves —but that only with luck, slowly but surely, would the social and academic mix become wider and the idea of boarding education as a function of need, not of prestige, be accepted.
This, if nothing else, highlights the political difficulty of any Minister of Education who • wanted to push the scheme through. It would be highly controversial. The abolitionists would hate it. The gradualists wouldn't care for it because it would look like propping up the public schools. The local authorities—apart from the fact that they have too little money to do other things which have a higher priority —will dislike the mechanism for pooling -the costs and the creation of yet more bureaucracy. Those who believe in comprehensive schools will oppose giving public money to preserve semi-grammar schools in the independent sector. The public will still have to be con- vinced why one child should receive aid to go to Marlborough while his neighbour has to make do with the local comprehensive school. Parents who now pay fees and recognise the investment value of top-quality sixth-form teaching will resent the deliberate dilution of high-powered schools for the purpose of integration. The public schools themselves dislike integration at the expense of their social and academic prestige.
A determined minister might take on all or any of these groups—but only if he had some- thing real and dramatic to show for the political fight which it would involve. But what would there be? Only the unheroic prospect of slow change over twenty years, and an initial period in which little happened except that rather more public money would go to sub- sidising the education of middle-class children.
Mr Edward Short is unlikely to lose much sleep over Newsom Mark H. It can gather dust with the other educational reports. In the mean- time Professor David Donnison is preparing to get down to the independent day schools and the direct grant schools. At least this time there won't be 'boarding need' to confuse the issue and the Commission will have to face the basic question of private choice in an open society.
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