Past holds lessons in how to make British education great

JACK Blanchard’s report on Ed Miliband’s speech to the Sutton Trust (on social mobility) got me thinking about my own experiences (Yorkshire Post, May 19). I passed the 11-plus in 1940. My father was a poorly paid steelworker. Our home was a council house on an estate in Sheffield. We were poor but we never thought of ourselves as “poverty stricken” because my parents were proud people. Neither of them smoked or drank. They preferred to spend their money on taking us to the theatre every week: to the Little Regent, Grimesthorpe, the Palace, Aftercliffe and the Empire, Lyceum and Hippodrome in Sheffield town centre. They also took us on annual camping holidays to Skegness. My mother made clothes for herself and for my sister and I. My father created a lovely garden with a vegetable plot and a green house. His other hobbies were ‘old time dancing’ and building wireless sets. Friends at primary school who also passed the 11-plus and went to grammar school had home backgrounds similar to mine. After leaving school in 1947 and completing National Service we went in different directions. Some went straight into industry and ended up as works managers and directors. Others went to university and became doctors, scientists and engineers. I became a teacher. One close friend whose father was a train driver became a university vice chancellor. One (Derek Dooley) became a famous footballer. My old primary school friends who didn’t pass the 11 plus also did well – taking up apprenticeships and becoming electricians, carpenters and builders. Some of them became successful business people – owning shops for instance. One built up a large haulage business and another – by the age of 30 – owned his own tool making factory. The point about all this is that we were all successful in different ways. We all achieved our ambitions. Upward social mobility was not denied to us because we had poor family backgrounds. If anything, being poor made us more determined to make a success of our lives. Now, according to our political leaders, being poor has the opposite effect. Poverty, they keep informing us, is preventing children from getting good jobs and from getting into university. Furthermore, our political leaders also tell us the reason why children and grandchildren of people such as myself are getting on in life and getting into university is because they came from privileged backgrounds and have an unfair advantage over children from poor backgrounds. It is absolute nonsense! The children of today are just as able and as motivated as my generation. If they are failing it is perhaps the narrow school curriculum which is failing them. It has nothing to do with poverty. From: Ian R Bloomer, East Hardwick, Pontefract. I SERVED on the West Riding Education Committee from 1967-74, the chairman being Laura Fitzpatrick, a true lady, and Sir Alec Gregg, the chief education officer. No doubt he had great influence on education. However he could be blind and deaf. He was deaf to any suggestions that might differ from his views. He was blind to the existence of dyslexia, and simply took the stance that any child with learning difficulties of any kind was backward. I had the most bitter disagreement of my life with him – dyslexia simply did not exist in his opinion. He condemned children to poor education in inadequate schools. Finally, if you supported the grammar schools, he was no friend of yours. From: David W Wright, Uppleby, Easingwold. THE admirable Comment column by Father Neil McNicholas (Yorkshire Post, May 19) and your Comment column (Yorkshire Post, May 21) highlighting the continuing problems with our failing educational system emphasise the decline in standards of education and behaviour, plus the deliberate dumbing-down and attempts to wreck the successful grammar school system. The problems began in the 1960s onwards, when Labour governments aided and abetted by wet Conservative administrations to build an egalitarian state and to oppose anything that remotely smacked of elitism and retention and improvement of standards in education. Neil McNicholas has admirably hit the nail on the head when he states “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. For we have an excellent system of grammar schools, plus the new academies, which hopefully will produce pupils with worthwhile and meaningful qualifications to lead the UK commerce and industry to put GB Ltd back in the forefront of European and world activities.